I grew up on a farm and occasionally my dad would come in from chores and complain about a sow that ate her young piglet. Now this was an extremely rare occurrence or we would quickly have gotten rid of all our pigs. But it occasionally happened. Recently, curiosity led me to explore why this happens. Sometimes a sow eats her piglet if it is stillborn, in order to make sure that the remains do not contaminate the rest of the newborns. Sometimes she accidentally rolls over and squishes the piglet, thus resulting in injuring the piglet beyond help. But then occasionally there is the rogue sow who just turns to cannibalism for some reason. All of these are regrettable instances. And truth be told, we are horrified just even reading about it.

But a recent conversation led me to think about eating the young. We experience cannibalism in the church on a frequent basis. Oh, it may not be intentional in many cases, but it happens. We have our spiritual young who are born into the church, and yet, we sometimes savage them and “eat” our young.