Scripture: Psalm 51:1-12 & Matthew 18:1-14
8/5/2018
When we are born and as we begin to enter into the childhood of our lives the world is a magical place, a place teeming with life, and angels, and magic—a place where each day brings something new to be explored. The woods spoke to us with whispers of persons, cultures, tribes, long since past who roamed in these exact locations. The winds carried the silent musings of creation taking with it rustling leaves and sand off of long dirt roads. To commune with nature simply meant walking outside and into the dew of an early morning, taking time to observe the sunrise as without fail it greeted you each day, or feeling the droplets of a late spring rainstorm replenishing the earth with the necessary ingredients for new growth until whole cycle began again. The silence of snows of winter were something to experience with reverence as Robert Frost poems came to life all around you until your bones were chilled with the air and the clouds and sky and the inability to distinguish where on ended and the next began. And of course all this was a gift from God—God’s magnificence on display for everyone to see. Long before the responsibilities of adulthood began to crowd in on your time, long before you had children of your own, long before you checked the weather each morning and could predict rainstorms and snowstorms, sun and clouds, hot and cold. Long before that time in which the machinations of the world, the why things happened the way they did began to cause you to go blind to the movement of the spirt in your very midst. Long before all of that, we were each children.
We are an inquisitive people and I imagine it is in our DNA to ask why things happen. We have both plumbed the depths of the Marianna Trench even as we have danced in the shadows of Tranquility Bay. We have split atoms, and mapped genes, and peered into the deepest parts of space to the place where our reality was given birth. We want to know how things work—how atoms, molecules come together to form other more complex creations. We study theory and history and science and mathematics and medicine and biology and physics all in the pursuit of that knowledge that will bring us some amount of comfort, all in the pursuit of that singular piece of information that will snap the final puzzle piece into place that we might know and see and understand the world as it truly is. We have a drive towards perfection and complexity and mastery. Mastery over our world and all that is within it. Mastery over the weather and its impact on the world. Mastery over science and the ability of the natural world to bring about both hurt and heal. Mastery over our history as a people that we might never again repeat the mistakes, the brokenness of the past, the holocausts and Khmer Rouge’s, the Cold Wars and those that seem to have gone on forever. Mastery over our society and the seemingly intractable problems that seem to emerge like a record needle stuck in a scratch that just repeats the same measure over and over and over again. Mastery over our religion. We want to be responsible for our own salvation, our own grace, our own faithful pursuits and feel some degree of discomfort when the Spirit blows where she will and tries to take us to new places with new experiences and new calls to work for peace, and justice, and hope, and healing. While all the while the roadmap to peace, to justice, to hope sits right at our fingertips, right in our line of sight if we will but open our eyes and stop struggling to have mastery of anything.
I have to imagine that to be Jesus, surrounded by a group of followers seeking to better understand how the world worked and more importantly how God worked in the world, was to be peppered with questions almost all the time and I would assume that that’s a natural response. No doubt many of us have been in the presence of those who we presumed to have a great deal more knowledge about our areas of interest, our areas of passion. And when in that space, our inclination, our drive as humans is to garner as much insight as humanly possible from the one in our midst until we border on overwhelming for the one seeking to share in wisdom and vision. So it is that the disciples begin the scripture lesson for this morning with a question, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven?” Now, what’s not clear, at least to me, is whether they are asking a question about rankings or type. Are they asking, Jesus, of all the people who have come before us, who is the greatest? Or are they saying, what type of person is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven? And how shocking must Jesus’s response have been to them as he calls for a child. A child? This is an age before children were presumed to be their own little people they were both commodities and burdens. Boys were laborers. They apprenticed under their fathers to learn whatever trade it was that the father worked in. If the father was a fisherman, the boys likely tended the nets, cleaned the boats, scaled the fish. If the father was a farmer the boys likely worked in the fields with the hired hands, spending the better part of their days baking in the hot, Hebrew sun. They provide almost free labor to the Jewish economy. Girls for their part were more of a burden. They could help out around the house but were unlikely to be able to bring in any wealth on their own. Women in general had no rights to property and the best thing that a family could do for their daughters was to get them married off as fast as possible, remember that Jesus’s own mother was likely no more than 12 or 13 when she brought Jesus into the world. And yet, here is Jesus calling for a child to be brought into his midst to answer the query of the disciples. And his words in response to the disciples are sharp, “unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” And just like that Jesus had turned the question on its head. It is as if he said, “You who are striving to be the greatest in heaven can’t even see that unless you change the way you act in this world, the way you view this world, unless all that changes, you will never even see the kingdom of heaven exploding in your midst. These kids sitting over to the side, maybe playing tag or hide and seek, they see much more clearly the realm of God in their midst than you who have been following me for the better part of three years do. Rather, Jesus concludes, “those who make themselves humble like children are the greatest in heaven.” One has to imagine that the sense of shock that passed over the faces of the disciples was immense. One had to imagine that they chewed on this sentence, this sentiment for a long time afterwards. How can we be more childlike in our interactions with the world. In a world in which the responsibilities of adulthood demand a certain level of egotistic pursuit. In a world in which we work to get to adulthood so that we can garner a certain degree of respect and autonomy. In a world in which to be an adult is to cast oneself against the backdrop of creation in an effort to gain a greater degree of comfort for ourselves and our families. Into this world, are we really to revert back to the place of children in order to see the realm of God emerging before our eyes?
This morning we have gathered all the children of our church and those that we count in the larger family of our church together and we have sought to bless them as they begin new journeys. For these children who are embarking on the journey that is every new school year there will be strange and unfamiliar experiences that are had, new friends to be made, new things to learn. There will be tests and homework and more tests and more homework and girl crushes and guy crushes and favorite teachers and not-so-favorite teachers and tardy slips and report cards and even more tests and homework. And when they leave from this place to take their first few steps on this odyssey of mystery and discovery we want them to know that when they feel those initial pangs of uncertainty that they can look back and see our community of the faithful standing back there praying, encouraging, loving, we want them to know that no matter what happens to them in the midst of their education, our church remains firmly behind them and their parents, their caregivers, with the desire to renew our commitment to their growth in the spirit. We do all this in hopes that we can support them in their journeys with God. And yet we are told that it is they who will ultimately lead us. It is they that will show us how to see the realm of God erupting in our worlds, it is that who will teach us the humility before all people necessary to save our own souls and our world.
The psalmist for this morning calls on God to cleanse him of all that could be considered iniquity, all that could be considered as transgression, as that that could be considered as sin. For he knows that he has fallen short, as we all have, of God’s calling on his and our lives. And look at how he says that cleansing takes place—it will take place by learning. And not just learning through education, through arithmetic and science, through literature and history, but through the secret wisdom that is found in the inner most realm of our hearts. We are imprinted with this knowledge, the knowledge of the ways of God, when God is at work knitting us together in our mothers’ wombs. When God is knowing us and creating us at the beginning of time, when we and God and all that is were a singular reality. Before all of this, in our very infancy we knew this. And then we started burying it. We started pushing it down into the recesses of our souls, we started ignoring that still small voice as we allowed the wanderlust of our spirits to take us far away from the God of our origin, from the God of our founding. And so maybe it is, as the prophet Isaiah will say sometime later that a child should lead us. Because it is children who still see not just with their minds eye, not just with the knowledge of how things work, but, rather the intimate awareness of why things work. Of the spirit that still passes over this world and this creation, of the spirit that still yearns for all people to be made one in Christ Jesus, of the spirit that eventually will bring all of God’s children home. Children have an innate ability to see and in seeing to believe even when the rest of us have closed ourselves off to the redemption and reconciliation that is available to us each moment. So maybe it is that children who can see the world as a peaceable place and not hostile, children who can see the world as a place teeming with life, and vegetation, and hope, long before the cynicism of adulthood begins to overtake their minds, children who believe that the world is still a magical place where all is possible in the power of the spirit, children who love everyone they meet might be our educators, those who will lead us into the future. My middle son, Seamus, teaches me this almost everyday as he will walk up to friend and stranger alike and say, “hi, my name is Seamus” because in his mind, everyone is a potential friend, everyone a potential playmate (including Asa), everyone welcome to be and exist in his little world just as they are. And all children should be allowed to exist in that space for as long as they can, because, before we have taught them greed, before we have taught them hatred, before we have taught them to distrust persons who don’t look like them or speak like them or believe like them. Before we have taught them that the world is a scary place to be approached with trepidation and fear. Before all that, children live into the love and care and concern that is stitched into the fabric of all our souls. And so maybe it is that not just a child, but that children can and will lead us, help us to locate that wisdom that still cries out in the deepest part of our souls to love, maybe they will lead us to the time in the future in which we are at peace with each other and all creation, perhaps they will show us how to humbly be the greatest in the realm of God, perhaps they will teach us how to breathe in and out with the very breath of the holy spirit, perhaps it is they who show us the way. All praises to God for the gifts of this earth. All praises to God for the chance to gather in this space. All praises to God for the gift of children who by their very presence show us how to see the realm of God erupting in our worlds. And Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s peoples. Alleluia, amen.