A Light in the Darkness of Child Abandonment: St. John, the Father of Orphans
A Light in the Darkness of Child Abandonment: St. John Maximovitch, the Father of Orphans.
“True religious worship that is pure in the eyes of our Father God is this: to personally care for orphans and widows in their distressing troubles, and to refuse to be corrupted by the world’s values.” (James 1:27).
Another St. John. In the middle years of the Twentieth Century there was a barefoot, unassuming priest who let his little light shine into the very heart of darkness, into the horrific world of child abandonment. His official name is John Maximovitch of Shanghai and San Francisco. This particular St. John was a Russian Orthodox priest who was born in Ukraine and ended up being hounded by communists from one part of the world to another until he ended up with a significant ministry in San Francisco. Father John was known as a devoted Christ-follower with a special heart for children. He was beloved by every child who knew him, because he was playful and gave them his light-hearted, undivided attention when with them. When sprinkling holy water on the children, he would often simply squirt the water straight into their face and make them laugh. While leading a church service, he would often be lost from sight until he was found sitting with a young child and playing some silly game.
Motherless Child — The Blind Boys of Alabama (youtube.com)
Orphans in Distress. Early in his ministry in Shanghai, China, he one day noticed the garbage workers making their way down his street, and they were doing a strange thing… The trashmen would often come upon what appeared to be a lump of filthy material on the sidewalk, and they would kick at this small heap of rags. If the shapeless lump moved, they left it there where it lay. If the lump didn’t move, they picked it up and threw it into the garbage truck and moved on. Father John wondered what was going on, so he went out to the street to investigate. He discovered that those lumps of filthy rags were actually young homeless children lying there with nowhere else to go. The starving orphans who didn’t move after being kicked by the garbagemen were considered worthless trash and simply tossed away with the garbage. The children who did manage to move were alive but obviously in great need. This all-too-common part of Shanghai society was unacceptable to Father John, so he immediately went down the street and lifted up all those remaining children and took them to his home. That first day he rescued eight children hopelessly close to death. He continued his rescue operation and soon established an orphanage of over 100 children. It didn’t take long for Father John’s orphanage to include over 1,500 abandoned orphans.
On the Move. There soon came a wave of communists taking over that part of China, and like a mother hen he somehow gathered all his orphans and took them to an island in the Philippines where there was a refugee settlement. But soon, he had to transplant his children to Australia, and then finally to San Francisco. He refused to let even one of his children be unprotected or left vulnerable. During his life-saving “children’s ministry,” John was known to walk quietly through the sleeping quarters of his children, picking up any blankets that had fallen off the sleeping orphan in the night. He ended up spending most of his nighttime hours picking up those blankets off the floor, putting them back on the child, and saying a prayer over each one. Somehow during his extensive ministry with abandoned children, he had time to visit prisons, hospitals, and mental institutions to pray for each person and give them Communion.
‘Father of Orphans.’ John Maximovitch died in 1966 and his body lies in the cathedral he once led in San Francisco. There is also a classical, K-12 school there named in his honor, St. John’s Orthodox Academy. St. John’s heart for children lives on.
“Enough! How long will you defend the evil-doers? How long will show kindness to those who do wicked things? You’re here to defend the defenseless, to give justice to the weak and fatherless, to maintain the rights of the oppressed and needy. Your job is to rescue the powerless and stand up for them, to deliver them from all who exploit them!” (Psalm 82:2-4).
Not Here? Think Again. Certainly we shuddered as we read about the appalling treatment of children in Shanghai, thanking God that this horrific mistreatment of children is not a part of our contemporary life in the United States. Tragically, though, child abandonment is ingrained in our society as well…
VAN MORRISON ~ Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child ~.wmv (youtube.com)
CHILD ABANDONMENT. World-wide, there are over 60 million children who have been abandoned and thus live on the streets or in an orphanage of some sort, as of 2024. In the United States, the latest statistic is appalling: At least 7,000 children older than newborns are abandoned each year, and even more mind-boggling, there are at least 22,000 babies who are abandoned in the hospitals alone. The result of this willingness of a parent to abandon their own child is graphically seen in pediatric hospitals and in the ER’s. It is estimated that fully one-fifth of the total population of children in American hospitals are abandoned. In the pediatric hospitals in the Triangle area of North Carolina, for example, there has been such an increase of child abandonment in the hospitals that there is a minimum of beds available for those children who need medical care. Evidently, parents have found it more convenient to simply refuse to pick up their child in the hospital after medical treatment. Many parents simply disappear from a child’s life after dropping them off at the hospital, and the child remains there in the hospital, abandoned and homeless. The abandoned children continue to take up beds because there is simply no place to house them. All the pediatric mental health facilities are full. And many of the abandoned children in the hospitals are in need of mental health treatment. Foster care organizations reportedly will not accept these children languishing in the hospitals because of their high-risk, especially needy status that most foster homes are ill equipped to handle. Most of the abandoned kids in hospitals are from low-income families, therefore they cannot be placed in private facilities that would be too expensive for them. Right now, at least in North Carolina, a solution to this on-going problem has not been discovered. Meanwhile, the child abandonment issue in pediatric hospitals continues to increase.
“He put a child in the middle of the room. Then, cradling the little one in his arms, Jesus said, ‘Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embrace me, and far more than me – God who sent me… Woe to anyone who is the downfall of one of these little ones. If you give one of these children a hard time, bullying, corrupting, or taking advantage of their simple trust, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. You’d be better off dropped in the middle of the lake with a millstone around your neck.’” (Mark 9:36, 37, 42; also Matthew 18:5-6).
Each Child is Sacred. Creator God hates any type of dishonoring of children, any type of treatment that shows an unwillingness to accept the eternal value of children. Mistreatment of children fills God with divine disgust. Every child is made in the image of God, and so is a sacred human being. In the Judeo-Christian faith, children are honored, held up as valuable and treated as such. Jesus reserved one of his starkest warnings against those who would harm children. Children are highly valued by Jesus, and He went way out of His way to communicate that. He said that there was a special punishment reserved for those who harmed children in any way. He gave a recommendation for anyone who mistreated children: It would be better for you to have a huge boulder, a giant millstone, tied around your neck and be thrown into the deep blue sea, than to receive the punishment you richly deserve. The devaluing and mistreatment of children today is rampant in our society. We could include many grotesque facts about how we are treating our children that are in the spirit of child sacrifice, including abortion, pornography, child abandonment, child abuse, child trafficking, fatherlessness, surrogacy, and inadequate education for poor children. This is without delving into other enemies of children in our society, such as what the social media is doing to the mental health of our youth; the addictive qualities of video games; the presence everywhere of sexual confusion; the indoctrinating and grooming efforts of queer theory and gender ideology; the normalization of what used to be “abnormal,” such as drag queen story hours and pride parades; the beckoning presence of mind-numbing screens to weaken their imaginations, lower literacy, and decrease their attention spans; the horror of gender-mutilation transitioning and the surgery and hormones that accompany that form of child abuse; the weak establishment that unfairly allows biological boys/men to compete against biological girls/women and share dressing rooms. We have treated children abominably as we continue to devalue them in contemporary times. It seems that wherever we find adult sinfulness in our society, it’s the children who are paying the price. Something tells me that the millstone business is going to be hopping come Judgment Day.
ABOMINATION: (Hebrew, “towebah”) = An activity that God considers morally disgusting; a detestable behavior; any action or attitude that is loathed with a passion by God; behavior that God has judged as spiritually abhorrent and unacceptable; something that God hates and finds deeply repugnant; something that is deeply offensive to God’s sensibilities; any action or attitude that God thinks is repulsive, revolting and utterly alien to God’s nature.
Mistreating Children is an Abomination. As we continue to grow in our relationship with God, we discover that we yearn to progress in loving what God loves and hating what God hates. If we are not growing in those two areas of God’s character, it’s doubtful we even have a relationship with God to begin with. Following the example of Jesus in the gospels, loving the sinner while hating the sin itself is crucial to our growing in the character of the Lord. If God finds certain behavior morally disgusting, but we find it acceptable, then we are not where we should be. It might be surprising to realize that God can have hate in His heart. We know that God is full of love, that He is in fact Love. But hate? That is a difficult concept to digest. But think about it more, and it starts to make sense. Like the Father He is, God loves us so much that He hates whatever might be destructive to His creation made in His image, whatever might come to harm us or our relationship to Him. God’s hatred for evil comes out of His eternal protective instinct. Another thing to think about… God is purely righteous, virtuous, filled with goodness through and through. Out of His goodness, He established a moral universe. Since the profoundly tragic fall of mankind, the overall moral universe remains, but immorality has to be dealt with and judged. Because of the way God created the world, there are rights and wrongs, the moral and immoral, the righteous and the unrighteous. God hates the wrongs. It’s no wonder the early Christians called them the ”deadly sins.” God wants to give us life, the evil one wants to give us death. God hates whatever might be deadly to us. God hates whatever in the world was not a part of His righteous plan for the world. Simply put, God’s hate comes out of His righteous love for us and His world. Yes, God hates. But He hates whatever is worth hating. God speaks plainly in His Word about what He loves and what He hates, about what God embraces and what He rejects. The category entitled “Divine Disgust” is intended to be a biblical catalogue of what God hates, what God finds abominable. Naturally, as we are becoming aware of what God hates, we will also learn what God loves. The truth is, if we are being transformed into the likeness of Jesus and thus the character of God, we show our fearful love of God by joining Him in hating what is evil.
“Wisdom pours into your life when you begin to hate evil, for that is what worship and fearing God is all about. For God hates evil with a passion.” (Proverb 8:13).
Terrian – Love Your Children (Official Music Video) (youtube.com)
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE TO HONOR CHILDREN. What did Jesus mean when, after taking up a child into His arms, He said that whoever welcomes one of these little ones in His name in fact welcomes Him? (Mark 9:36). It seems to me that Jesus might be saying:
Here’s the bottom line, people… I love children. I knit every one of their little bodies together in the womb, I strung together their DNA, I wired each nervous system. I breathed their first breath through my Spirit to each and every one of these children! I invented each personality, fashioned each child from scratch, and then danced a jig to celebrate every birth. And so I designed each child to represent much of what is true of my Kingdom: simple and transparent, playful and straightforward, relational and curious, zealous and dynamic, dependent and trusting. Children, all of them in general and each one in particular, are my pride and joy. Unfortunately, each one of my prize packages is also vulnerable in this fallen world of mine. So they have my heart, and I have their back.
I’m like any devoted parent, only more so. I take personally whatever happens to them, as if it happens to me. I’m like the parent who screeches “ouch!” when the child falls on the sidewalk. I identify so closely with my children that when a child is bullied, I feel the humiliation. When a child is victimized, I feel the shame and revulsion. When a child is harmed in any way, I head in the direction of justice for that child. On the other hand, when a little ragamuffin kid is received with kindness and respect, I feel like I’m being received that way too.
When parents graciously open their hearts and home to be blessed with a child – as an act of faith and trust – they had better set an extra plate at the table for me. When schools welcome students into their classrooms as honored guests made in my image, they’d better get an extra desk for me. Whoever welcomes a child, welcomes me, the Lord of children. And in this process arrives the Father, from whom all fatherhood gets its name.
I become a household name whenever love for children is a natural outgrowth of love for me, whether the child is sick or healthy, athletic or awkward, academic or artistic, passive or exuberant, a rock star or someone who is easily lost in the shuffle. I especially root for those underdogs, because I know what that feels like. I was once an unknown child, often dismissed as being “just a kid.” As I grew, I was considered a fool and a misfit. I remained a child at heart, even though I was judged and abused as an adult. I know what those children feel like in an adult world. So, by all means, by every means, welcome my children into your embrace, and you will find that you’d better open your arms a little wider, because I’m right there with you. Make room for me too. And don’t even think about mistreating my children. I have a millstone waiting.
The Best Child Advocacy Program I Know: There is an outstanding, highly effective, Christ-Centered non-profit organization that centers on the current need for child-centered advocacy, Them Before Us (thembeforeus.com). Here is their short mission description: “Them Before Us protects every child’s right to their mother and father by educating lawmakers, media influencers, and concerned citizens about the harm children suffer when those rights are violated. We center the child in every conversation about marriage and family including divorce, same-sex parenting, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, adoption, cohabitation. We take this child-centric message into the culture and courtroom and insist that all adults do hard things on behalf of children.”