Because I grew up with the Hymnal 1940, I was familiar with a section of that Hymnal called, “Hymns for Children.” That section includes eighteen hymns, set to nineteen tunes (one hymn is set to two tunes), and a list of 17 hymns found elsewhere in the Hymnal deemed to be somehow good for children.
Only two of the Hymns for Children became real keepers: “Once in Royal David’s City,” and “I sing a song of the saints of God.” Only one other of the Hymns for Children has had staying power.
A lot of them strongly emphasize God’s fatherly identity:
“Father of mercy,
Lover of children,” one begins.
Another says,
“God my Father, loving me,
Gave his Son my friend to be.”
And another:
“Father, we thank thee for the night,
And the pleasant morning light.”
You get the idea.
Shepherds feature prominently in the Hymns for Children. I’m not sure if that’s because children are supposed to identify with shepherds, or if they are supposed to like sheep.
“Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me;
Bless thy little lamb tonight”
covers all bases.
“Saviour, like a Shepherd lead us” is the third hymn that’s actually held up well over the years, but I think it’s mostly because of its excellent tune - called Sicilian Mariners (there are no child labor laws in Sicily, I guess).
The poetry of these hymns is what you might call uneven
“I think when I read that sweet story of old,
When Jesus was here among men,
How he called little children as lambs to his fold:
I should like to have been with them then.”
More than once, a Hymn for Children reaches back like that for a kind of communion with children of ages past. To wit:
“I worship thee, Lord Jesus,
As children did of old.”
Only one of the Hymns for Children has a text written by the great hymn writer Charles Wesley:
“Lamb of God, I look to thee,
Thou shalt my example be.
Thou art gentle, meek, and mild;
Thou wast once a little child.”
Maybe not his best work?
In 1763 Wesley published his own collection of Hymns for Children.* A perusal of the hundred hymns included in that collection provides some clues as to why more of his children’s hymns didn’t make it into The Hymnal 1940.
Hymn 26 in the collection begins this way:
“Foolish, ignorant, and blind
Is sinful, short-lived man,
All which in the world we find
Is perishing and vain…”
Gets you warmed up for Sunday School, doesn’t it?
Hymn 43 relies on the meter of British pronunciation:
“How hapless are the lettered youth,
How distant from the paths of truth
And solid happiness!
Their knowledge makes them doubly blind,
The medicine for their sin-sick mind
But heightens their disease.”
Gender specificity really gets Wesley going.
“How wretched are the boys at school,
Who wickedly delight
To mock, and call each other fool,
And with each other fight!
“Who soon their innocency lose,
And learn to curse and swear:
Or, if they do no harm, suppose
That good enough they are.”
There’s and entire section of Hymns for Girls. It starts this way:
“Ah! Dire effect of female pride!
How deep our mother’s sin, and wide,
Through all her daughters spread!”
I really can’t make myself go on in that section. Take my word for it: it doesn’t get any better.
Elsewhere, Wesley provides a hymn Against Idleness, and another Against Lying. One is titled “A Thought on hell,” and relies on a child’s memory of how the sheep and the goats were divided in Matthew 25 to fully decode its meaning:
”Shall I, amidst a ghastly band
Dragged to the judgment-seat,
Far on the left with horror stand,
My fearful doom to meet?”
Is it any wonder that the disciples spoke sternly to the people who were bringing little children to Jesus in order that he might touch them? Even the best of us, it seems, have been badly mistaken when it comes to Jesus and children, as though they probably won’t get along with one another.
When I was a boy, I had the unusual and unparalleled blessing to learn the music of Tallis and Byrd, Mendelssohn and Bach, Sowerby, Harris, and Howells, and their ilk. Our Choirmaster would mockingly refer to a hymn that none of us, I think, had ever heard of, but he had surely learned growing up in Texas:
“Jesus wants me for a sunbeam
to shine for him each day.”
“A sunbeam, a sunbeam,” the refrain goes on, “I’ll be a sunbeam for him.”
Years later, Kurt Kobain would distill heavy measures of irony and despair by covering a sort of parody version of that hymn:
“Jesus, don't want me for a sunbeam,
Sunbeams are never made like me.
Don't expect me to cry
For all the reasons, you had to die.
Don't ever ask your love of me.”***
Like the disciples of yore, Kobain and his band, Nirvana, had a hard time recalling or imagining an innocent and care-free childhood when an entire kingdom could be delivered into your hands.
Isn’t it odd the way Jesus talks about the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God, he says, “belongs” to children. The word that’s translated to English as “belongs” is actually a form of the verb “to be.” One unconventional translation puts it this way: “Let all the little children come to me, and never hinder them! Don’t you know that God’s kingdom exists for such as these?”*** It is as though the kingdom of God is really a bigger and better version of the Please Touch Museum, which strikes me as very good news. Except that it also suggests that we are very likely to outgrow the kingdom of God. Or, more likely, that our desire for it is very likely to wane as we grow up.
One of the worst effects of our pandemic-driven social arrangements has been the way children have been pushed away from church. Even though it’s not what anyone wants, it’s as though the disciples were holding kids back, as though Charles Wesley was making them sing his hymns, or as though Kurt Cobain had convinced them that Jesus does not want them for a sunbeam. Nothing, and by that I mean nothing, could be further from the truth. And almost nothing could be more vital for us to remember as a church. For, among the many reasons that a church must include children if it possibly can, is the truth that adults need the example and the reminder of children in order to find our way to the kingdom of God. Jesus teaches this explicitly.
It is a little jarring to grow up enough in grace to discover that what I couldn’t imagine in my childhood, and Kurt Cobain couldn’t imagine in his adulthood, is actually true: Jesus does want me and you for a sunbeam, that is, Jesus wants us as innocent and as carefree as our childhoods once might have been, and he wants us to be rays of light in this dark world. Some of us have to reach way back to recall those days of innocence and light, but for most of us, I hope, they are there to be found somewhere.
Yes, Jesus wants you for a sunbeam. He wants you (and me) as childish as he can get us, for he has much to teach us. And he knows that some of us are already too loud, and others too shy, and some of us will push in line and steal someone else’s lunch. And others will suffer silently and alone in the lunchroom, or during study hall, or at home crying into their pillows so that no one can hear. And some have begun to discover their talents and their skills, and others will be late bloomers. Jesus wants us when we are still young enough to hold hands with our friends without even thinking about it, and to smile at nothing but the look on the face that’s smiling into ours, and to giggle, and to snuggle with the dog, and to sleep soundly and wake with the sun, and look up on a bright morning as the sun streams through the fluffy clouds, and think, yes, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, and I mean to be one, too!
If the kingdom of God belongs to children, perhaps it’s because Jesus’ heart belongs to children.
One of those two enduring Hymns for Children from 1940 lays out its own theory about all this in two verses, only a vestige of which of which has survived in the current Hymnal. It says of Jesus:
“And through all his wondrous childhood,
He would honor and obey,
Love and watch the lowly maiden
In whose gentle arms he lay.
Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as he.”
Well, you can see why we couldn’t keep that verse in tact, the mere idea of obedience being somewhat beyond the pale these days.
“For he is our childhood’s pattern;
Day by day like us he grew;
He was little, weak, and helpless,
Tears and smiles like us he knew;
And he feeleth for our sadness,
And he shareth in our gladness.”
In cahoots with the disciples, modern editors have eliminated the “childhood” from this verse, as though the pattern of childhood could not possibly be what Jesus had in mind. He was little, weak, and helpless. So am I. Not always, but often enough, aren’t you? The older I get, the more I realize it’s when I remember that I am still little, weak, and helpless that I need Jesus most.
I don’t know if, at this stage of my life, I could still receive an entire kingdom in my hands and my heart, tethered as I am to so much in this world. But I thank God for the children who sing, and learn, and play, and pray, and make friends here at Saint Mark’s. Because in time, if I pay enough attention to the children, they may teach me again how to make room for God’s kingdom; and they may show me again that there is room in that kingdom even for the likes of me: still sometimes little, weak, and helpless.
I might even learn from children what I find it so easy to forget, that Jesus loves me.
He loves you, too!
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
3 October 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
*”Hymns for Children” by Charles Wesley, produced by the Duke Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition under editorial direction of Randy L. Maddox, with the assistance of Aileen F. Maddox, https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/divinity.duke.edu/files/documents/cswt/65_Hymns_for_Children_%281763%29_mod.pdf,
**“Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” by the Vaselines, covered by Nirvana on MTV Unplugged, 1993
***The Passion Translation
