Ministry with Children

The boy Jesus in the Temple, Heinrich Hofmann, 1881

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh on Sunday 29th December 2024, the 1st Sunday of Christmas

Today’s readings are both about the presence of children in holy places.

In the OT reading (1 Samuel2:18-20,26) we heard about the child Samuel ministering before the Lord in the sanctuary at the pilgrimage shrine of Shiloh, where his parents had left him in the care of the priest Eli.

In the NT reading Luke (2:41-52) told us about the 12 year-old Jesus staying behind in the Temple at Jerusalem when his parents returned home to Nazareth. 

How did Samuel come to be with Eli in the shrine of Shiloh?

Shiloh was in what we now call the West Bank, about 30 km north of Jerusalem. After the Israelites conquered Canaan, it was one of the main centres of Israelite worship, until the Temple was built in Jerusalem. The Tabernacle which they had brought with them on their wanderings was kept there. At that time they were led by Judges, rather than Kings, and Eli was both a priest at Shiloh and a Judge.

Samuel’s parents Elkanah and Hannah made an annual trip to worship at the shrine at Shiloh. Hannah desperately wanted a child and prayed for one at the shrine, promising that if she had a boy, she would dedicate him to God. Her prayers were answered, she gave birth to Samuel, and when he was old enough, she brought him to Eli at Shiloh and left him there in his care. It is a very touching detail that when she came back on her annual trips to the shrine, she always brought him a little robe she had made.

It may seem strange to us that Hannah could give her child over to be fostered by Eli. But fostering of children was common among our ancient Irish ancestors, as it still is today among Nigerians, often causing real difficulties with immigration authorities. And posh folk still send their children off to boarding schools.

The fact is that by giving Samuel over to Eli, Hannah ensured he had a good education. He inherited Eli’s role as a Judge of Israel, the last one. And he would become a great prophet.

In today’s Gospel, Luke tells us the single thing we know about Jesus’s childhood from the canonical Gospels - we know nothing else from his birth until his baptism by John.

The boy Jesus goes AWOL - absent without leave, when his parents return home from his family’s annual Passover visit to the Temple in Jerusalem. ‘When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.’

When they found him, Mary chided him, saying ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ And Jesus replies, ‘Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’

Jesus was brought up as a Jew, in a devout Jewish family, attending the synagogue in Nazareth, where he would, no doubt, have become familiar with the Jewish scriptures, our OT. We believe Jesus to be the fully divine Son of God, the 2^nd person of the Trinity. But we also believe him to be fully human. 

Here we glimpse, I suggest, his humanity, as a 12 year old boy on the cusp of adolescence. He listens to and questions the teachers of his Jewish faith. He is slowly but surely feeling his way toward a mature understanding of the loving God he calls his Father. He is preparing himself for his adult ministry, in which he proclaims ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matthew 4:17).

As he matures, ‘Jesus increases in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour’, we are told. Mary treasures all these memories in her heart. Later she must have shared them with a disciple, so that Luke could pass her story on to us.

All this gets me thinking about the place of children in our Church today.

It is our corporate responsibility to raise them in a loving community of faith, so that they can, like Jesus, ‘increase in wisdom and years, and in divine and human favour’, to use Luke’s words. Our duty is to model for them what it means for the kingdom of heaven to come near.

We must never forget that our children, like ourselves, are spiritual beings. When they listen and question, as Jesus did among the teachers in the Temple, we must be attentive and answer them with complete honesty appropriate to their age. They are feeling their own way to understanding the God of love we believe in.

When the time is right, the church, with our support, offers them preparation for confirmation by wise priests and teachers. In this we can see a reflection of the 12 year-old Jesus among the teachers in the Temple.

We hope and pray that they will then feel able to affirm their faith publicly, before the bishop, in front of the congregation. But that must be their decision – no one has the right to force them to do so.

This is the ideal, but sadly we know that some children experience something quite different.

With great sorrow, we must recognise that within churches of all traditions, as in wider society, there are those who prey on and abuse children, causing them immense harm.

We all know about the child-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, which damaged so many children, and turned so many away from that Church. But none of our Christian traditions is immune. Our sister Anglican church, the Church of England, is now in turmoil about past child-abuse scandals. Senior churchmen have covered them up for years to protect themselves, their friends, or the reputation of the Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury has recently been forced to resign for not taking timely action, and there are now calls for the Archbishop of York and others to resign too.

We can only hope and pray that in our parishes, and in the wider Church of Ireland, our Safeguarding Trust processes are sufficiently robust to ensure that children and vulnerable adults are protected, and that appropriate, timely action is taken when incidents and risks are identified. Safeguarding is immensely important, and we must take it seriously. We owe a debt to those on our parish safeguarding panel, and to those working with children who undergo regular Safeguarding training. We should keep them in our prayers.

I shall finish in prayer with today’s Collect of the Word:

God of community,

whose call is more insistent

than ties of family or blood;

may we so respect and love

those whose lives are linked with ours

that we fail not in loyalty to you,

but make choices according to your will;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen