Third Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 18:1–15, 21:1–6; Psalm 116:1–7 (sung); Romans 5:1–8; Matthew 9:35–10:8
Auditoire de Calvin, June 14 2026
At the age of one, I was abandoned by my parents. I don’t think I suffered any permanent harm. But you, perhaps, may tell me different.
Blame it on the pope of the day, Pope Pius XII. I was born in 1949. Twelve days after my birth, Pius announced a Holy Year, to run from Christmas 1949 to Christmas the following year.
He called Catholics everywhere to pray that the world might turn to Christ and be governed by the spirit of the gospel. And he invited Catholics everywhere to pilgrim to Rome and to pray at the four major churches there: the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Saint John Lateran, St Paul outside the Walls, and St Peter’s – or, as we say in Geneva, the other St Peter’s.
My parents, good Irish Catholics, responded to the pope’s invitation. By ferry and car, they made their way to Rome in 1950, leaving me in the tender care of my father’s mother. A large, bubbly woman from French Huguenot stock, she had grown up Methodist in Ireland, but had turned Catholic in order to marry my grandfather. By all accounts, she looked after me extremely well – too well, in fact. She was so worried I might die of starvation that she overfed me outrageously. When my parents, on their return, came to pick me up, they found I was as round as a football; but my mother soon got me back into shape.
Why am I telling you this? A sermon, after all, is not supposed to be about the preacher!
*
I’m telling you this, because something else happened in 1949. The World Health Organization, which had begun work the previous year, commissioned John Bowlby to write a report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe. Bowlby was an English psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development. He wrote an academic report for WHO, published in 1951, and in an adapted popular form in 1953. The popular version was published by Pelican as Child Care and the Growth of Love – the title of my sermon.
Bowlby’s main conclusion, following from his brief, was that in the absence of warm, intimate, and secure relationships, young children would not grow as they should.
In post-war Europe, where child care in the early years was primarily provided by mothers, where children were lucky enough to have them.
Bowlby stated this conclusion in terms that may need amending in our own day, when families come in all shapes and sizes.
But his basic point is surely incontestable. Children who at a tender age are not loved find it hard to grow and hard, in their turn, to love. How, we wonder, will orphaned children of Gaza who have lost whole extended families, learn to grow and flourish?
We saw a positive illustration of Bowlby’s negative point, here in the Auditoire yesterday, in the celebration of the life of Douglas Murray-Jones. Through her tears, his daughter Iona told Dougie how proud she was to be his daughter. Her brother Ross told Dougie, “You gave me roots, and then you gave me wings.”
That, perhaps, puts Bowlby’s point more eloquently than he did: Those of us who care for children need to give them roots, firmly earthed in the soil of affection, and only then can we let them fly.
*
It’s difficult to be human. Certainly, it’s difficult to be fully human.
In the opening chapter of Genesis, God creates us in God’s own image and likeness, takes one look at us, and says, “Good job.”
But throughout scripture, we also see God calling us to be human, to become human. And from scripture, from our own experience, and from the whole of human history, we see how hard it is for us adequately to respond.
It would be hard even at the best of times. But we don’t live at the best of times, let alone in the best of all possible worlds. We’ve been praying and preaching and praying – it seems like forever – for Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and Ukraine and all the other places where our world is going to hell in a handcart. Tomorrow, in Evian, the Lords of Misrule – otherwise known at the G7 – will discuss how best to continue misruling our world. This afternoon, protesters, who would really rather that the G7 didn’t do that, will disrupt the traffic and disturb the peace of Geneva.
Christians have an old-fashioned word to describe the world and the times we live in. That word is “sin”. In a world of sin, it is hard for anyone to be human.
What is to be done?
*
Here we may give a Christian twist to my theme of child care. Some of us may have had troubled childhoods. Others may have had ideal upbringings. But we are all children of God.
Two Sundays ago, we set aside a day to focus on the Trinity. It wasn’t just a day for intellectual puzzles. It allowed us to focus on the essential structure of our relationship with God.
The God who creates us cares for us. The God who creates us loves us, with a love greater and more perfect than any of our parents or parent substitutes.
We see that love in Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God made flesh for us and our salvation. In the care and compassion that Jesus shows unfailingly throughout his life, we see the care and compassion of the one he calls Abba, Father. In the commitment to us that Jesus shows in going willingly to the cross, even to those who condemned him to this most horrible of deaths, we see the commitment of a God who will not let us go.
But wait! says Paul. There’s more.
God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given us, enabling us in turn to love: to love God, to love our neighbours, even the most annoying, to love our enemies, even the most wicked.
To know ourselves to be children of God, to see the love of God in the face of Jesus, to know in our hearts that the Father loves us just as the Father loves Jesus, to feel on our pulse that we are taken up into the family of God: This, above all, is what we need if we are to grow, and flourish, and love in our turn.
And it is enough.