LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1969, Page 70

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70 THE DOCTRINAL ESSAY

mental to all else in life. It’s where life starts, you say,
where the young life is protected and, for better or for
worse, the character gets its first formation. It’s where
people undergo the discipline of living for each other
rather than just feeding on each other.

In other words, this is the situation in which we get
our first and best lessons in Jesus’ saying, “Man does
not live by bread alone” (Matt. 4:4). A day nursery or
a baby sitter, a restaurant or a hospital do good things
for a child or an adult. But a family is where a child
gets care plus love, where an adult receives service plus
faithfulness. Parents and children fuss at the steady
burden, the unremitting toil; this fussing erupts some-
times in jangling nerves and outright rebellion. But
where the family really functions, there is more than
bread and work. In these days we are trying to tell one
another and provide for one another that plus. Our
Lord said it of all things to the devil, “Man shall not
live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds
from the mouth of God.” To Martha and Mary He
could have said: “That Word is I, and let nothing take
Me away from you.” For the Word which God speaks
to the world, the act by which He made and still sus-
tains the world and the way by which He returns way-
ward mankind to Himself, is His own Son Jesus Christ.

People get very uneasy about parents who neglect
their children. The biggest handicap of the underprivi-
leged minorities, even more disastrous than unemploy-
ment and bad housing and ignorance, is the disruption
of life in the family and parental care of the young.
What they are missing — and this is often true also of
the affluent suburb — is not just vitamins and playthings
but fathers who are responsible and mothers who can
give time and thought to love them and brothers and
sisters who fit into the family as members and not
parasites.

What people in families need is care for the total
man— not merely for his physical growth, not merely
for the nervous system, but man as he is directed by
God in his inner self. That is where the Word of God
takes hold. Somehow this seems to happen more easily
as young parents take care of their tiny children. It is
a great day when the baby is baptized, and it isn’t only
water that is doing great things there but the Word of
God which is in and with the water. It is a great day
when the youngster for the first time receives Holy
Communion, and it isn’t only eating and drinking that
works life and salvation with the forgiveness of sins but
the Word of God which brings that forgiveness through
the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

What happens to families when that Word begins to
fail in the package of care that the child is receiving?
Well, what is the package that the mother and father
are receiving? Is their life too deteriorating to groceries
and laundry, paychecks and escape? Are the great
moments of life worthy of family celebration only the
acquisition of a new car or TV set or the announcement
of a pay raise or promotion on the job? What do the
youngsters see their parents get excited about, what do
they celebrate day by day? We oldsters complain about

the young because they seem to get bored and sullen;
have we asked what our own faces look like at home?

The trouble often begins with those problems of dis-
cipline. A symptom is there when the parent says,
“Charlie, don’t do that, Jesus wouldn’t like it.” Or when
he says, “Of course you’re going to Sunday school, Char-
lie. I had to when I was small, and you’re going to too!”

The trouble goes on when the youngsters hear heart-
less gossip from the elders, or criticism of leadership in
the church or community with no apparent effort to
help with the improvement. The trouble increases when
angry words in the household are allowed to settle into
sullen silence through long days of resentment.

The teen-agers bear the brunt of special criticism
in our time. They talk language that we don’t under-
stand, keep company and enjoy pastimes that are quite
beyond us. We are indulgent and permissive toward
them, but we can’t seem to purchase their favor or re-
spect. We think they want to grow up and remain chil-
dren at the same time. Long ago we were probably just
as exasperating to our elders. But something has been
added today. At no time in the history of the world has
the word of anti-God competed so successfully with the
Word of God for the imagination and interest of hu-
manity young or old. At no time have more brains and
money been invested to edify the flesh instead of the
spirit. Recordings and television move right into our
homes, so that everyone will agree that sensation and
enjoyment are king and man lives by bread alone.

We don’t solve this problem by saying no. Youth is
magnificent in its potential for loyalty and growth;
there’s nothing like it in the world. The people who are
in best position to tap this rich potential and train it
for the uses of God and men are parents. But they
themselves have to keep up their training. They can’t
get by with tired ways and simple commands. It won’t
work for them to be merely grumbling spectators of life
from which they have been excluded.

What keeps parents and children members of each
other as long as they live is the edifying Word. The
Christ talk which was natural at baptism has to con-
tinue, now directed to the new needs and concerns of
the lives of both the parents and the children. Parents
have to work at it not just to enjoy some sort of old-age
benefits or retirement insurance. But they have to
work at it as God did in Christ, with simple love and
affection often for the unlovable. The Word by which
man lives has to seem to the youngster the most im-
portant commodity in the world, the one thing needful,
and that they must learn as they see their parents not
merely recommending it but living by it.

Cc

When I was a boy, I used to think to myself at the
story of Mary and Martha, “See, Mother oughtn’t to
spend so much time at housework — and I either.” By
hindsight I realize that the real lesson of the story was
not lost on my parents. In a parish only a few miles
from this room we shared the life of worship and all
that went with it as a matter of self-evident and con-

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