Quit Acting Like A Grown-Up

"Quit Acting Like A Grown-Up!"

Romans 8:12-17

In the 17th century, children were regarded as little adults.  Children were made to dress like their parents, were given heavy responsibilities, and were forbidden anything that resembled a plaything.

A historian who has studied 330 portraits of children between the years of 1670 and 1810 discovered that the pictures "contain no distinctive childish artifacts such as toys, children's furniture, or school books.  The poses show no signs of play or playfulness.  The faces of the children are as solemn as the faces of other adults."

Until the 1800's children weren't even given books at their own reading levels.  Juvenile literature hadn't been invented.

Parents in the 17th and 18th centuries often kept their children at a long arms length, in order to keep from creating close relations with their children.  Puritan ministers specifically urged parents not to become too close to their children.  Many children were sent away to live with other families.

What is wrong with us?  What has happened to us?  What happens between childhood and adulthood that forces us to grow up too fast?  Maybe we've bought into a lie.  The lie says, This is an adult world for adults.  If that's so, look around you at the world.  Look around and see what the grown-ups have done with the world.

A little boy whispered to his father during church, "I have to go potty."  So the father took him by the hand and quietly led his boy down the aisle.  When they were almost to the back of the church, the little boy turned and shouted, "I'll be right back, God; I just have to go to the potty!"

Now we all laugh.  Isn't that cute.  How many of you adults would feel uninhibited enough to do that?  Why isn't it just as cute for an adult to do such a thing?  Well, an adult should know better.  It's just not proper.  Why is it proper, even cute, for a child to do such a thing?  Well, they don't know any better.  They haven't learned yet, so it's excusable.

Listen to those words:  "...haven't learned yet..."  Learned from who?  And, learned what?  Who gets to decide what's childish and what's adultish?  Who gets to decide what's proper and improper for how a grown-up is supposed to act?  Think about that.  There is no rule book out there that says, This is childish, and, This is not childish.  There is no person out there, whom we as society have given the power to decide what it is to act like a child and what it is to act like an adult.

Those messages are hammered into us by grown-ups when we were children.  Those grown-ups got those messages from their grown-ups when they were children.  And on and on down the line.  Apparently at least as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries.

When I was a child, my father would say, repeatedly, "Act like an adult!"  "Quit being so childish!"  I didn't have the wherewithal to say back to him, "Gee whiz, dad, I'm only 7 years old; can't acting like an adult wait for a few years?"

And when I was being punished, spanked with his belt, he'd say, "Suck it up.  Don't cry.  Take it like a man."  And if I cried I got more of it.  (I hope if any of you fathers did that, said that, to your sons, that you--if you haven't already--will go to them and apologize for doing and saying such a thing.)  Because I didn't, and your sons didn't have the wherewithal to say back, "Gee whiz, dad, I'm only 7 years old and this hurts like hell; why can't I cry?"

I was so busy trying to live up to my father's adultisms, I never really got to be a kid.  So now you can stop wondering why I act like a kid so much.  I'm making up for lost time.

When I was at the church up in Hickman, Nebraska, some kids were playing in the church.  Their moms were getting things set up for Vacation Bible School.  The kids were in and out of my office, grabbing root beer candies, drawing on my whiteboard, typing stuff on my computer while I was trying to write my sermon (I just left the stuff on there that they typed, so it would remind me of that day and what it means to be a kid).

They asked if I'd turn on the microphones in the sanctuary so they could sing.  I said, "Sure."  I didn't think twice.  After a few minutes of their singing, the secretary came storming into my office, and said with a smile on her face, "Why are you letting them do that!?  You know why?  Because you're just a kid like they are!"

It was one of the best compliments I've ever received.  I'm hoping she meant it as such.  I am a big kid.  I wanna be a big kid.  I wanna play and have fun in life.   Walt Disney said that he took it as a compliment that people said he had "not quite grown up."  So I'm in good company.

A store clerk in a department store saw a young boy standing by the escalator.  He seemed fascinated by it.  The clerk asked the boy, "Is anything the matter?"
"No," said the boy.  "I'm just waiting for my gum to come back."

That's the boy I want to be.  I want to see the world as wondrous, where a hand hold on an escalator isn't a hand hold, but an amazing transportation device for my gum.  Uninhibited.  Unafraid to try something, or do something that others would say is childish.

Look up inhibited in the dictionary.  Its definitions could double for the word, adult: restrain, forbid, hinder, suppress, arrest.  I don't want to live an inhibited life where I've got to worry about restraining my wonder, forbidding myself from actions that supposedly don't match my age, suppressing myself from taking risks because I'm afraid like an adult, arresting my emotions that God designed into me because someone else says that's the way an adult behaves.

I wanna mess with that adult world.  Like the two boys on an airline flight.  The two boys were sitting next to each other.  This was back in the days when they served meals on the flights, and the tickets were $200 cheaper.  The boys got soup for their meal.  One of them got an idea.  He poured his soup in the airline barf bag.  Then he started making noises like he was throwing up.  When the stewardess got to him, he was sitting there happily eating the contents of the barf bag with a spoon.

I want to mess with the adult world, and remind others God designed us to play and enjoy the world God gave us.  To remind others that we are children.

Alice Miller, a Swiss psychiatrist, who writes extensively about children, wrote in her book, Prisoners of Childhood:
As soon as the child is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over (the child), his vital growth will be violently interrupted.  It is a child's legitimate need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center--the central actor--in his own activity.

I would go on to say that not only do children need to be treated as the central actor in their own story, I think they need to be shown how they can be the hero of their own story.  But one of the things we do as adults is knock the heroic out of children, making them into the mediocre adults the rest of us have become.  It's what most adults need to reclaim--how to become the hero's of their own stories.

I wonder how old Adam and Eve were in the Garden.  Have you ever wondered that?  All the artwork shows them as full grown adults.  That God created a full grown man and woman.  But what if they were kids?  How does that change the story?  The temptation of the serpent then becomes, "You can grow up faster; become adults; know stuff like adults; you will be adults."  And in that moment, childhood was lost.  Entrance was gained into the adult world, and we weren't children of God anymore.  We were adults.  We were our own man, our own woman, and look what's happened ever since.

That's not what God intended.  I have scriptural proof.  It's right there in Paul's letter to the Romans, that was read a few moments ago:  "God's Spirit joins to our spirits to declare that we are God's children.  Since we are his children, we will possess the blessings he keeps for his people..."  Notice that word, children.  Not adults.  God wants us to be his children, not his adults.  Our relationship with God is one of child to parent.  That's part of the Holy Spirit's job--to keep us child-like, not adult-like.  If you want to become a truly spiritual person, in tune with God through the Holy Spirit, then you better hang around with children.  That's where the Holy Spirit is.

One time George Washington was invited to a special dinner at a home in a large northern city.  The meal was prepared and ready to be served, but there was no Mr. Washington.  The host had not seen him because he had been away from home and didn't arrive until the time when the guests were gathering.

One of the servants told their master that the general had arrived some time before and had been shown up to his room.  The master and servant went to the room that had been assigned to the general but he wasn't there.

As they were about to return downstairs to inform the guests, they heard a man's voice singing, "Ride a horse to Bambury Cross."  The sound was coming from the nursery.  They opened the door and found the general, still in his dust-covered uniform, sitting and playing with the children.  They were around him and over him and on him.  When the host saw this he was very confused, but waited until the song was over.

General Washington laughed when he was told the guests were waiting, saying that it had probably done them good to wait for a change.  He said that he would be down immediately, as soon as he had tucked the children into bed.

That's a man who knows what it means to be God's child in an adult world.  Not ruled by inhibitions.  Those kinds of people are peacefully and playfully free.  In their freedom from inhibitions--all the restraints and hindrances, and prohibitions, and forbiddances--of grown-ups, they know what life is all about.  What life is supposed to be like:  enjoyment; wonder; simple trust; intuitive knowing; fearless play; disarming openness; unafraid to let your emotions be seen; to speak freely.

"I sure am glad to see you," the little girl said to her grandmother on her mother's side.  "Now maybe Daddy will do the trick he's promising us."
The grandmother was curious.  "What trick is that?" she asked.
"I heard him tell mommy," the little girl answered, "that if you came to visit he'd climb the walls."

As children, we get to say stuff like that.  Be openly honest.

Why does God want us to be his children, and not his adults?  Roy Wilbur once said, "The potential of a child is the most intriguing thing in all creation."  That's what God sees in children--their amazing potential.  By the time we're adults we've had a lot of the potential beaten out of us by the adult world.  Somehow we buy into one of the other lies that it's all over for us.  Too late.  What potential we had as children has been dried up and disappeared once we became adults, with no second chances to get it back.

But then there's the story of the old teacher in Germany, long ago.  He used to take his hat off and bow to his class every time he came into the classroom in the morning.  When he was asked why, his answer was, "You never know what one of these children may become."  And he was right.  One little boy in the class was named Martin Luther.

That's the way God looks at all of us.  At the start of every day, God takes his hat off and bows to us wondering what all of us will become, endowed with all the childlike potential he has given us.

Here's one of the saddest stories I've read.  A man who was condemned to die in the electric chair was asked if he wished to make a final statement.  He looked at all the reporters, photographers, officials and observers who stood outside the glass staring at him and then said bitterly, "If I had been shown this much attention when I was a boy, I would not be here today."  So sad.  But happens so often.

I was having a conversation with some other parents in a different church.  We got to sharing stories about how children like to come into their parents room at night and cuddle and fall asleep.

One mother said her little daughter came into their bedroom in the middle of the night.  She woke them up and said, "In my room there aren't any good dreams.  May I sleep in bed with you and daddy?"

I've never forgotten that line.  What a wonderfully simple and yet profound thing for a child to say.  Somewhere along the line the man who was condemned to die in the electric chair had lost his place where he could dream some good dreams.  To be a child.  To be a child of God.  To snuggle with God and continue, all life long, to dream the good dreams of a child.  To dream about what we can become, no matter how old we are, because we are God's children.