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[SILENCE] Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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It is Christian Family Sunday, and that always poses something of a difficulty for me, because I am unmarried and have no family of my own. Yet my principal dependence in preaching must never be upon my own experience, but rather upon God, and upon God's Word, and upon what the Holy Spirit whispers in my heart.

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And under those guidances, today I ask you to come with me to a very remote corner of the Book of Judges, and there to meet three women. The first of these women is named Deborah. She is a judge of Israel. Israel is being persecuted by the Canaanites.

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They are led by a man named Jabin, who has a mighty army, the principal feature of which is 900 chariots of iron. These chariots are commanded by a man named Sisera. Now Deborah, this woman, receives a vision from God

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to lead the armies of Israel against this mechanized force. And she does so. And she meets the Canaanites at the river Kishon. And there, by the strength of God, the Canaanites are defeated, and all of them are killed or captured except one, the commander Sisera, who escapes.

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Which brings us to the second woman in our story. As he is escaping, he comes to the tent of a woman named Jael. He does not know it, but she is his enemy. She invites him in, suggests that he have some milk, and rest a while.

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She invites him to sleep, and says that she will keep watch while he sleeps. And then while he sleeps, she takes a tent peg and a mallet, and there just is no easy way to say this, she proceeded to nail his head to the earth. The Bible puts it this way, "She softly went into him and smote the peg into his temples

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and fastened it into the ground, and he died." That will do it every time. And having killed Sisera, she then went and told Deborah what she had done. And Deborah begins to sing a song of victory, and that song of victory is the scripture passage

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I read just a moment ago in your hearing. And in that song, we meet the third woman in the story, the mother of Sisera. Singing of her, Deborah says, "Out of the window she peered, the mother of Sisera gazed through the lattice.

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Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the hoofbeats of his chariots?" In other words, Deborah rejoices over the fact that here is this mother sitting at the window waiting for the return of her soldier son, and he does not come.

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She waits at the lattice for the one she loves, and he does not return. And Deborah rejoices in this. Now I cannot share that rejoicing, because when I look of the face of that parent there at the lattice, I find myself not filled with joy, but rather with great pity.

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That face represents to me the faces of all those parents who have sent their children out into the world and are waiting and hoping and praying for those children. And the children never come. For if they do come, they come hideously and terribly defeated by life.

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So I cannot rejoice when I see the face of a mother awaiting mother at the lattice. I see too many other things in that face. For example, I see in that face anxiety. When they excavated Pompeii, they found in the ruins of the city the body of a small,

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deformed boy. This body was protected by the body of the mother that was over the child, keeping from him the ashes and the poison. The body of the mother was covered with jewelry, indicating she had a lot of money, and most

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of the money class escaped from Pompeii before the death of that place. But this mother evidently, in her zeal to protect her little crippled son, went back and put her body over his. And they've been that way now for a long, long time.

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That picture is an image to me of the protecting zeal which is the mark of universal parenthood. Parents want to protect their children. It begins with pregnancy, when a woman moves into the most beautiful time of her life and is so protective of this precious one she carries, wanting nothing to go wrong, takes

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a great deal of faith to bring a child into the world, and all of this faithfulness is evidence at that time. And then there comes infancy, and the protecting grace of the parent is seen again, making sure about the formula, making sure there's enough sleep, protecting the child from the

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diseases of childhood, watching tearfully the confused countenance of the child when the child suffers from illness and does not know or understand why. And then's the first day at school. I watched a mother and a father take their little son to the bus stop on the first day

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of school. He was all dressed up, shiny as a new penny. I couldn't tell who was holding on tighter, the parents holding him or his holding their hands.

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They stood there at the bus stop, a lot of other youngsters around. Of course, they were old hands. They'd been to school three or four years, so they hardly noticed. And then the great big yellow school bus pulled up, and the doors opened, and the little boy

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got caught in the torrent of youngsters as they stumbled up onto the bus. And just as the door was about to close, the father leaned into the door and, looking at his son, said, "Don't forget to come home right away. We have to feed the elephants."

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And at that word "elephants," every child in the bus was immediately fascinated, and this new little boy, who was being ignored, suddenly became the center of attention. And he picked up the story and carried it I don't know where as the bus drove off. And in the face of the mother, you could see the glint of a tear.

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And in the face of the father, you could see a question, "How in the world am I going to explain those elephants when he gets home?" But both of those faces were faces at the lattice because the little one was going off in a new and different way.

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It's the same way at the first day of college. There's that long drive to school with all the luggage and equipment. Youngsters seem to need an incredible number of things to get educated. And then there's the long wait for the first letter.

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It's all part of being at the lattice. And then your little girl falls in love with a boy or your boy falls in love with a girl. And they don't come home, even at holidays. They go to the other one's house.

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And when they do come to your house, they stay up all night talking in the family room. And then there's that night when the telephone rings and she says, "Oh, Mother, he gave me the ring and it's absolutely gorgeous." And you think to yourself, "They're too young and it's too soon.

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And how are they going to get along anyway?" And then they walk down the aisle and they become one and they turn to walk out again. And as they do, you think to yourself, "They don't know it, but they've begun in the normal course of events, their journey to the window, their trip to the lattice, when they will

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watch their youngsters go out into the world, just as you now watch yours." They say that the principal difference between the love which exists between a man and a woman in marriage and parents and children is that the man and woman, throughout their loving, get closer and closer.

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But the parent and the child, throughout their loving, go farther and farther apart. And that's what creates the anxiety, this situation of mom and dad left sitting at the window. And there is reason for their concern.

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A few years ago, I was being entertained at the Union League Club in Chicago by a group of eight Chicagoans, and the one sitting immediately to my right was Dr. Helen Bizer, the Olympic champion. She's also a noted psychologist and academician on the faculty of the University of Chicago.

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And she told me in that conversation of how older people are much better able to deal with the difficulties and vicissitudes of life than younger people. And that, she says, is because older people have accumulated a system of values. They have won certain victories.

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They have certain accomplishments on which they can depend. Treasures are already theirs. But when younger people confront challenges and situations of contest, they don't have anything except their hopes.

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The victories they hope for, the treasuries they hope for, the things that they want to accumulate, the values they assume will someday be theirs. They're not as strong in the time of testing. So it's no wonder that parents worry.

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I know sometimes you young people get very tired of their worrying and the way they ask you things and require things of you, like the parents who gave their son two neckties for Christmas. And he went upstairs and came down a little later wearing one of them.

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And his mother looked at him and said, "Don't you like the other tie?" Well, I know they ask you a lot of things and they put a lot of pressure on you, but I think you ought to be able to understand this. They have good cause.

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This came very much to my mind two weeks ago when a family in this church was sitting in my study with me and they were sharing their great concern. There's so much talk of war and saber rattling coming out of Washington now. And their concern was that their son might have to go to war.

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That's Cicera's mother all over again. She sent her son off to the war. Yes, he was a general, but it's the same with any parent who sends off a private or a young airman or a sergeant or what have you.

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I wish we could take the whole torrent of parental anxiety over sending children to war and direct it against war itself. You know, there are two ways of looking at war. You can look at war as that occasion on which you overthrow your enemies.

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You can also look at war as the enemy itself which needs to be overthrown. And I wish that some of the energy that goes into weeping over the fallen could be directed in a time of peace to creating a circumstance in which no one again would have to so fall. But parents with faces at the lattice worry about these things.

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So there is concern. And I think, if I may say a word directly to you young people, that you need to remember that. If what is going on in the White House now continues, we soon will not have Amtrak.

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I don't suppose most of you young people have ever ridden on a train and maybe you'll never have that chance now. That's sad. It's a great thing to travel by train.

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And one of the things you notice on a train is, beside the railroad bed, there are signs. You'll see 150, 125, 100. Now that's not, those are not mileage signs. And they're not speed signs.

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Those are signs that indicate to the engineer how many car lengths there are between that sign and the last switch behind or the next switch ahead. You see, an engineer has to be concerned with his entire train. When you say to an engineer, "Where is your train?"

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He doesn't just look out the window and tell you what's beside him. He has to be concerned about those 150 cars that he's carrying. He has to know where his train is from the very beginning to the very end, from the engine to the caboose.

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Now, if he knows that his train, for example, is 110 cars long, when he comes to a sign that says 150, he knows there's 150 car lengths between where he is and that switch they passed over. But since his train is only 110 cars long, he's well past the switch.

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He understands where the end of the train is. What I'm saying to you young engineers as you power through life in your diesels is this. You've got to take some time not only to know where you are, but to look back and understand

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your beginnings. When you look back there, you're going to see a face of the lattice. It's your mother and your dad, and they're anxious about you. Another thing I see when I look at those faces is loneliness and sometimes despair.

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One of the most important books written in the last decade was Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. And in that book, he points out that this is the first time in America's history when we have lost what he calls generational continuity.

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And what he means by that is this. Always until this time, a mother or a father could talk to their youngsters, for example, about the educational experience because they had gone through a similar experience and they could share what they had learned.

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But that's no longer true. Schools today are so totally and utterly different from anything that parents have known that the parents' counsel about schools is largely inappropriate. And there's a serious generational discontinuity there.

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And at the same time that that is happening to parents, they're learning that their advice really doesn't fit so well anymore. They're also being rejected largely by corporations and businesses who retire people at earlier and earlier ages.

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And at the same time these two things are happening, we've had the very rapid growth of humanistic psychology in our society, which has taught us, among other things, that if anything goes wrong with somebody, you can almost invariably blame their parents. There's a kind of a parody of the parable of the prodigal son going around in which

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the son says, "Father, you have sinned and are no more worthy to be called my father." I've been in this pastoring business now for almost 30 years, and I can tell you that as many psychological atrocities have been committed by kids upon parents as parents upon kids. It's always been a wonderment to me that some youngster who is failing the psych course

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on campus still knows enough about mother fixation and the Oedipus complex to say to her mother one night, "Mother, do you remember that night that I came home and I wanted to tell you about my first date and you wouldn't listen?" And mother says, "Yes."

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And she says, "Mother, that night you destroyed me." That's nonsense. But some parents let themselves be intimidated by that and pick up a great load of guilt. And a lot of young people believe that and mortgage their future for the sake of their

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past. And another thing which complicates matters is the fact that we have so many youth specialists in our time, youth counselors and youth ministers and psychologists who specialize in youth and parachurch organizations that minister to youth.

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And they wait on the youth and provide all kinds of services for the youth which the church as a whole cannot continue. And many times these people who lead the youth become so popular with them they take the place of the parents.

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And so the parents are left again at the lattice. And it becomes a lonely place for waiting and longing. The fact of the matter is most parents love their children very much. Sure they'd like to see the Taj Mahal by moonlight, but the money they would have spent for that

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they spend on their kids instead. I hope you young people understand that before you're old enough to go to college you represent generally an investment of $35,000 on the part of your parents. Now I know you don't like to be told that.

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And some parents make a serious mistake about reminding their children how much they have given up for them and how much they've cost them. That's very demeaning and it's very patronizing, but it's also absolutely true. They have a saying in the Ozark Mountains, "If you find a turtle on a stump, you can

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be sure it didn't get there by itself." Well, just so, if you look where you are in your life, young men and women, you will understand that you have been lifted there by a lot of love and you did not get there by yourself. But most young people never pause to tell their parents they understand that.

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Instead they leave them sitting at the lattice. Dr. Erwin Lubbers was the president of Hope College in Pella, Iowa, distinguished president there. And on one occasion he was driving with his little boy, you know, they were driving to

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Pella, Iowa, Hope College is in Holland, Michigan, and they were driving to Iowa and the road was icy and they slid off the road and Dr. Lubbers was knocked unconscious. And when he revived, the cold sleet and the cold wind brought him to consciousness again. When he revived, he found his little boy holding him and saying, "Oh dear Jesus, don't let

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my daddy die. He's a good man and he loves us very much and he has done so much for us and we cannot get along without him. Oh dear Jesus, let him live."

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And Dr. Lubbers said he never understood until that moment how much he was loved by his own children. And he never forgot that. It influenced every day of his life from that time on, but a lot of parents have never heard

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that kind of word from their children. I don't want to be sentimental or maudlin about this, but on December the 6th, 1976, I headed out on a brief speaking tour to the Midwest. My father was ill at the time and I stopped off to see him before I went and as I was

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leaving the house, he said to me, "Now when you get back, call us from the airport to let us know how everything went." And so I went on the tour, which was very exhausting, and got back rather late in the evening and had a 70-mile drive to the college ahead of me.

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But I stopped in the airport and I called my dad and I reported on the trip. And he told me he was grateful that I had called. And then I drove off to the college. And the next morning I received the call that my father was gone.

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And I cannot tell you how much it means to me to know that I didn't leave him sitting at the window. That I called in as he asked me to call and that I told him how things had gone. I miss him very much in many ways, which I shall not detail, but I didn't leave him sitting

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at the window. So see the face at the lattice. Out of the window she peered, the mother or sister a gaze through the lattice. Why is his chariot so long in coming?

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Why tarry the hoofbeats of his chariot? Cicero disappointed his mother. He set himself against God. He set himself against the people of God.

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And he was done to death by a deceitful woman. So he never returned, and his mother's face never brightened when he walked into her chamber. And at long last the day was over and the night fell, and the shutters were closed on the lattice.

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May it never be so with us. May we always be worthy of our parents' hopes. May they never have to long for our coming. And may they know that we love them in their caring.

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In my first pastorate I had a boy who fell off the back of a toboggan and hit his head on a stone and was in a coma for three weeks. And one night walking into his hospital room I found his mother there and she was kissing him.

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She didn't see me. She kissed him again and again. But I was there and she was embarrassed. And she said something to me I'll never forget.

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She said, "You see, he won't let me love him when he's awake." See the face at the lattice? The face of Cicero's mother? Or at this moment does it become the face of your father or mother?

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Watching, fearing, hoping, praying, loving. If it's an earthly face then that is good. For some of us here gathered, those faces are already touched with heaven's glory. Let us pray.

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Oh God, bless our parents wherever they may be and bless us as daughters and sons. For Jesus' sake, amen. Amen. Amen.

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