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Friends United
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November/December 2006
Baby Talk at Christmas
By Stan Banker
I’m not Lutheran, but I admire Martin Luther. It was Luther who said: “When God speaks to humanity, God always speaks in baby talk.” According to Luther, God speaks this way because God is love. And, most often, baby talk is a language of love and trust and care. Therefore, God never forgets that no matter how old, big or sophisticated we become, an element of the helpless, dependent, unknowing child still exists in all of us.
So in love God bends down to our weaknesses, our failures, our problems and lifts us up. When God speaks, God speaks in baby talk. This isn’t meant to insult us, but to remind us of love.
God does not bother Adam and Eve with lessons in animal husbandry or forest management. God simply says, “You’re in charge here. And by the way, stay away from that tree over there.”
God speaks to Moses out of a burning bush, knowing that children are fascinated by fi re and things like that. And when God speaks, he speaks with ludicrous simplicity: “Go tell the people that I AM sent you.”
The Ten Commandments are, for all intents and purposes, basic kindergarten morality. Don’t kill. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t run around with your neighbor’s wife.
The writings of the prophets give stories of big fi sh who swallow little men and a small man who takes on a giant. They also include plenty of object lessons for children that include talk of lions, hot furnaces, wrestling matches with angels—stories that little ones understand best.
Baby talk.
That’s what Luther is saying. He’s pointing out that all the subsequent chatter of learned theologians and practitioners is nothing more than footnotes on baby talk. Those intellectual refl ections must not deafen us to the simple, childlike ways in which God speaks to us. When we begin complicating the faith by talking big and claiming to know more than we do, we tend to smother the elemental power of God’s true messages. After all, babies do not have to be told what Mommy means by “Cootchie, cootchie, coo.” They know exactly what it means. Love needs no explanation.
At Christmas we recognize that God once more bends over into this violent playpen we call our world. And this time God is not simply speaking to babies but coming as a baby, as one of us. Here—in the stories of a weary, expectant family making their way to a little town, toothless shepherds grinning and peering over the edge of the crib at a toothless baby, and wise and wealthy old men from back East reduced to babbling fools in front of a humble family and their newborn baby—here is truth, not as complex theology or lofty ideal, but as truth, simple truth wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And when the child Jesus becomes a man, he also chooses to welcome children into his arms and to speak in children’s stories, imaginative parables and simple declarations of the way things are now that God has come in the fl esh. He speaks of a world where everything is turned upside down and inside out, where the lowly ones are great, the great are brought low, the wise confounded by the meek, the strong overwhelmed by the weak, and where there are surprises plenty for everyone. In this kingdom, grownups who use words that are too large and pray prayers that are too long and get too big for their britches have trouble getting through the door. And strangely enough, Jesus tells them that the answer lies in becoming like a child.
Later, in a sort of frivolous, childish gesture, Jesus enters the capital city clownishly bouncing on the back of a fuzzy donkey. On that day he is welcomed into Jerusalem not by the mayor with the key to the city, but by the children who love a parade, the simpler the better.
These children are able to look at Jesus with clearer eyes than we adults do. They look upon Jesus and see one of their own. That’s what Christmas is all about…a story, an event and a time to remind us of who we really are—the children of a loving God.
Stan Banker is in his 16th year as pastor of Indianapolis First Friends Meeting, Indiana.