Today’s Scripture Reading (February
1, 2015): Ephesians 6
In 1969, Johnny
Cash recorded “A Boy Named Sue.” Cash recorded the song at a concert that he
gave at San Quentin State Prison. At the time of the concert, Cash was still
very unfamiliar with the song lyrics and was often seen looking down at a sheet
of paper on which the lyrics had been written. The song was written by Shel
Silverstein and was thought to have been inspired by the life of humorist Jean
Shepherd, who was often made fun of during his youth because of his feminine
sounding name. Apparently the song went over well at that first concert, much
to the amazement of Cash.
The song
tells of a young boy named Sue. The boy is made fun of and in his anger he
learns to fight to maintain his honor. Then late in the song he comes face to
face with his father, although at the time he doesn’t know it. He fights the
man and wins, and is about to kill the man when his father admits that he is
the “son of a gun” (the original word was a little stronger) who named him Sue
– a name that dear old dad had chosen for him because he knew he would grow up
without a father, and he wanted to make sure that he grew up tough. At the end
of the song, father and son are reunited and the boy named Sue says that when
he has a son he will name him “anything but Sue.”
Sometimes I
wonder if we do not understand our responsibility with regard to our kids. The
whole idea of the years that they spend with us is that we will train them and
shape them so that when they do leave us they will be equipped to meet the
world that awaits them. And that is what we don’t seem to understand. Too often
we seem to want to take the easy way out. We want to be their friends and we
seem to give in way too easily to what they want. Or we seem to make life
impossible for them, provoking them to anger. We belittle them and drive them
toward resentment. In the Cash song, dad seemed to have straddled the line.
While it was his intention to get his son ready for the world, for most of his
life what he had succeeded at was the task of exasperating his son. But the
story of the song that we maybe sometimes miss is that it is really about an
absentee father. And it could be argued that the father exasperated his son
because he could, and because it was the easy thing to do.
And our
reality is that this is the real truth. Whenever we find ourselves exasperating
our children it is because it is the easy out. Paul tells the Ephesians that
they are to bring up their children, a phrase that originally meant the giving
of physical nourishment but had come to mean that they are to be cherished by
us, by our presence, and not exasperated by either our presence or our absence.
And we are to bring them up with the ability to live in this world in a way
that honors themselves, and our God.
Paul’s words
here are revolutionary. In his world, a child could be brought up in any way
that dad saw fit. They had no rights. But Paul seeks to change that. Father’s,
don’t exasperate your children. Don’t drive them into anger. Cherish them and
get them ready to live in our world.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading:
Philippians 1
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