Show Your Childfree Friends the Love

I sometimes listen to the podcast "Mom and Dad are Fighting" in which listeners write in to the show's three hosts to answer parenting questions. I subscribe to a few different advice podcasts, though I usually gravitate more toward the comedic. In this case, though, while the hosts Zac, Elizabeth and Jamilah don't take themselves too seriously, (especially when sharing their parenting fails), they do take their listeners seriously. They often agree and support each other but come at parenting with different experiences and perspectives.
In a recent episode, they heard from a person who does not have kids but who wants to support their friends who do. The writer reflected with disappointment and grief their experience of feeling uncared for and unsupported by their friends with children after a big accomplishment in their life. This hurt in a particular way because of the care they have always tried to show their friends and their friends' children. (I mean, this person without kids listens to a parenting podcast!) They wanted to know: is this just their friends? How should they talk to their friends about it?

I immediately thought about the church's history of either wringing out or hanging out to dry people in the church who don't have children. Weird how these two laundry metaphors both get at the way we take our childfree folk for granted, either assuming that because they don't have kids they have all the time and energy in the world for all the church tasks and roles OR planning events and activities only with children and their nuclear families in mind.

I think we do okay in our congregation at not making assumptions about people based on their age and/or life stage. I think we try to be inclusive. But I have had conversations with people in our church who feel like they have not been celebrated in the same way as their peers who are having babies or left out of conversations about aging when their peers are entering empty nest phase. I feel personally implicated. It's too easy to get busy with all the kid stuff and to gravitate to other parent-friends because our paths cross at kids' activities or in the school drop-off line.

If you are a parent, I hope you reach out to someone in your life who doesn't have children to ask what's been up with them lately, celebrate a milestone or offer encouragement. Having people in my own family's life and in our church who do not have kids, whether by choice or by circumstance, is a gift! Beyond the ways these child-free folks share themselves in love and care for us, they model for our children multiple ways of living full, connected, meaningful lives as adults that have nothing to do with raising children. It is so important to name their belovedness.

Elizabeth, Zac and Jamilah of "Mom and Dad" encouraged the letter writer to share their disappointment and hurt directly with their friends. But I hope that our friends and siblings in the church won't have to say something before we let them know how beloved they are in God's eyes and in ours.

Jesus Came to Live, Not to Die

I made my child cry this Easter when I acknowledged that the Easter Bunny does not exist. I'm not sure where he got the idea that the Easter Bunny would bring him Easter goodies. It has always been pretty clear that I am the one who prepares the Easter baskets, write the treasure hunt clues and hides the eggs in the back yard. But there we were, a crying kid who's asking me, if Easter isn't about the bunny and candy and baby chicks, what is it about?? I did scramble a little to explain.

I've been in conversations with a few people recently who have been confounded about how to explain what Easter means to the young children in their lives. They haven't wanted to replicate the harmful and violent stories of God making Jesus die sacrificially or even as an example of Jesus' great love for humanity. So many of us had it drilled into us: you're a sinner and Jesus died for your sins! But if it's not about that, then what is the death of Jesus about?

The most succinct way of responding is by reframing the idea altogether: Jesus didn't come to die, he came to live!

I've been impressed by the work of Traci Smith and her approach to faith formation with children and families, so I really appreciated her conversation with two other folks who have been reconsidering how we frame Jesus' death. She, Daneen Akers and Herb Montgomery talk about the cross in way that both rejects the violent and harmful understandings we may have been taught and distills it in a way can be understood by children.

My own distillation of their conversation is this:

• Stick to the story - Find a good children's book or bible that sticks to what the bible says or use the Bible itself. There's not much need to extemporize if you say: "This is the story that Easter celebrates," and then read or tell it. (I'll include some suggestions below)
• Acknowledge Jesus' death as execution - God didn't kill Jesus, people did; scared, angry people who were worried that his power might mean they wouldn't be powerful any more. God is never please when a person is harmed or killed.
• Speak the good news of new life - the power of the Gospel story is that God raised Jesus from the dead. That doesn't mean that those who we love who have died will live again, but it does mean that Jesus' story wasn't over. Jesus lived again to keep preaching about God's love and to send his disciples to share God's message of love, forgiveness and new beginnings.

The reason for the eggs and bunnies and flowers, I told my distraught child, is that all of those things show us about new life. Plants and the earth around us have been cold and dark and dead all winter. In spring, when plants are growing, and animals are being born, we remember the new life that Jesus experienced and that God's love brings us new life and new beginnings too. (I actually wasn't quite as eloquent as that, that's the gist.)

I think that an Easter that celebrates the newness of life, the power of God's love over the violence of the world can engender empathy for the pain and suffering of the world in a way that believing God required suffering does not. May we all understand ourselves to be loved and blessed by this God who brings life.

Books for telling the Easter story:

• Children of God Storybook Bible - Desmond Tutu
• Growing in God’s Love: A Storybook Bible - edited by Elizabeth Caldwell
• Jesus is Risen - Augostino Traini
• Miracle Man - John Hendrix
• This is the Mystery of Easter - Amelia Dress Richardson

For a more middle/high grade look at the theology of atonement through a non-violent lens, the profile of Herb Montgomery in Holy Troublemakers and Unconventional Saints sums up Herb's approach. (There are several other free profiles there as well, including Bayard Rustin and Gustavo Gutierrez.) And if you want to go even further down that rabbit hole, check out his talks on nonviolence and the cross, where he draws heavily on liberation and womanist theologians.