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Be Fruitful and Multiply
“God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them,
‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.’”
Genesis 9:1
This verse appointed today in our BCP’s Morning Prayer is one of the few commands of Scripture that I feel confident in saying I have fulfilled! My wife and I are blessed with three lively little boys, and we have a fourth child on the way. Loving God and neighbor with all my heart is sometimes a challenge, but at the least I can say: “Ok, Lord, we multiplied by two!”
I very much love our Family Table service, especially the moment when the multitude of children gather around the altar for Holy Communion. The image makes me smile and lifts up my heart, and I can always tell looking around the room that I am not alone in that.
Having children is a great act of hope, is it not? I cannot count the ways in which the world we live in often seems a fearsome and uncertain place, and it is not always easy to muster the hope that having children requires. Yet, it has always been something God’s people do, not just as a personal preference but as a radical act of hope. We Christians believe that good will triumph over evil, life over death, love over hate; that God will have the last word and all shall be well. We have faith that amid the changes and chances of this life, we have a strong rock upon which to build, the Word of God (Matthew 7:24-27). We know what to teach our children, and we know who to give them: our Good Shepherd, Jesus.
Having children is also an act of sacrificial love, as parents of newborns know! But it is true throughout one’s life, in different ways. Not long ago, I was chatting with a dad after church, who laughed that paying for two college educations at once was like buying a new Porsche every year and driving it off a cliff! Of course, I could tell that he would much rather have happy, flourishing children than any number of Porsches. To have children is to say with one’s whole life: yes, I have received a great gift in life itself, and now it is my turn to pass that great gift on to the next generation. Cost is no object. Such sacrificial giving, though a challenge, is a great joy. Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).
Of course, not all Christians are able or called to have children. St. Paul said that singleness is a high calling, and allows some to pour themselves completely into serving Christ and His church (1 Corinthians 7). But most of us are called to serve the Lord in the ordinary, yet extraordinary, everyday calling of being fruitful and multiplying. As we do, we are truly following the Lord, in faith, hope, and self-giving love.
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