The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
September 20, 2009
16^th Sunday after Pentecost

Scripture Readings:

Epistle – James 3: 13 – 4: 3, 7-8a¹

¹³Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. ¹⁴But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. ¹⁵Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. ¹⁶For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. ¹⁷But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. ¹⁸And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace. ….

³You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. …. ⁷Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Gospel – Mark 9: 30-37²

³⁰[Jesus and his disciples] went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; ³¹for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” ³²But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.

³³Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” ³⁴But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. ³⁵He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” ³⁶Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ³⁷“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

“If You Don’t Feel Close to God, Guess Who Moved?”

So Jesus’ move here, along with this baptism and confirmation today, seems to provide us with just the right opening that we need to talk about our ministry with, and welcoming of, children: like the little five-year-old sitting next to his mom during the prayers – the one who, in the space of just five minutes (while we’re all trying to focus on God and our prayers) swings his feet against the back of the pew in front of him, drops a bag of crayons on the floor, picks it up, looks at all of the feet and legs under the pew while he’s on the floor, tries to dislodge a piece of gum that’s been stuck to the underside of the seat (probably since the tenure of Ken Adams), uses the pages of the bulletin as a fan (and is just held back from making it into a paper airplane and tossing it over the balcony), stands and waves to his friends on the ground floor who are by now smiling up at him, crashes back down into his seat and loudly asks for a pillow of his own, holds his legs out stiffly and then crosses and uncrosses them several times – trying to go as fast as he can as he does, glances up at the dome of our ceiling and studies the height and possibility of hitting it with a crayon, gazes at the play of the sun through the stained-glass windows and wonders if angels are real, lies back down on the floor then in order to get a better view of the ceiling, kicks his brother in the process and then dodges his brother's retaliating kick, is sternly instructed to move over and stands again to make room for his mother who is now changing places.... Welcoming those kind of children? Oh yeah, for sure! A decade ago this child was the congregation’s hyperactive nuisance; now he could very well be a member of the Order of the Arrow in the Boy Scouts of America.³

Well, that may be one way to start a sermon around this story, but I’m sure that’s not what this story in Mark’s gospel is all about. Actually, I think it may be much closer to this one – a story of a letter that was discovered in an ancient garbage dump near Cairo and dated June 18^th in the year 1 BCE. It’s a letter from a worker writing to his pregnant wife back home, telling her not to worry about his return; sending her his love, he writes: 

Hilarion to...Alis. Many greetings...and to (our son) Apollonarion.  Know that we are even yet in Alexandria.  Do not worry if they all come back (except me) and I remain in Alexandria.  I urge and entreat you, be concerned about the child (Apollonarion) and if I should receive my wages soon, I will send them up to you.  If by chance you bear a son, if it is a boy, let it be, if it is a girl cast it out. …. You have said to Aphrodosias, “Do not forget me.”  How can I forget you?  Therefore I urge you not to worry.⁴

Here is a world that you might think is light years away from Adeline or William, but (in point of fact) it’s not so far away from what still happens with children around our world who are considered to be of the “wrong” gender or the “wrong” sexual orientation: a world where a child is a nobody unless its father accepts it, a world where it’s commonplace (even legal) for children to be disposed of in the gutter or the local garbage dump to die, or to be taken by someone who wishes to raise her as a slave – a world where the Greek word for a woman who assists another woman during labor and provides support to her, the infant, and the family after childbirth (a doula), originally meant “servant-woman” or “slave.”

Children weren’t the “least” or the “last” on the social ladder

in the society of Jesus’ time – unless they were slaves or orphans. So, following Mark’s story, commentator Kathleen Corley says that we can reasonably infer:

...that Jesus’ hearers are told to identify themselves with the enslaved or those in position of servitude.  In fact, the reign of God belongs especially to them....  Surely the statement that young slaves were of God’s kingdom would have been met with surprise or even shock by his hearers, especially the free, even if they were poor.  Any who had been forced to sell children into servitude, however, would have appreciated Jesus’ subversive speech.⁵

Then Jesus took a young child – one who’d been disowned, dumped, maybe even accused of being “an illegal” or thrown away into slavery – and sets this child in front of everyone so that they all could see her; he then wraps his arms protectively around her, and says to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me….”

My God. What a radical way to ignore or push aside the social boundaries of his own society! What a way to “get in the face” of those who’ve been used to exercising their power to value themselves over others! If you’ll follow me in my doing my usual bit of “thinking theologically” here, we could reasonably conclude that a 21^st century interpretation of Jesus' saying would be to say that in our own acts of caring for such vulnerable human beings, we come face to face with the divine – that if any one of us really wants to be the “the greatest,” then it’s actually that kind of caring that is a sign of true greatness and power.

The young woman, Mary Lennox, in the film The Secret Garden⁶ might seem like an unlikely model for the kind of servant discipleship that Jesus is talking about here. No well-behaved child herself, she’s a spoiled and yet gutsy young girl. And yet it’s through Mary that not only the garden but the entire household is eventually transformed. What all of the others (a lot like Jesus’ disciples) don’t dare ask, Mary is always wondering about. Where’s that crying coming from? What’s behind the curtain? What does that key open? Her constantly questioning spirit leads her to a garden that she revives with the help of a new-found friend named Dickon. What the labor-driven house mistress, Mrs. Medlock, can’t achieve with the young invalid, Mary tackles with intensity. After Colin’s father sees his son walk for the first time, he says to Mary, “You brought us back to life, something I thought no one could do.” What’s more, through her, the father learns how to love and to cry – and not surprisingly, Mary herself learns how to cry and then learns how to love. Her parting words are, “If you look the right way, you can see the whole world is a garden.” It’s just this kind of seeing that I think Jesus is trying to show us in today’s reading from Mark’s gospel.

The poet, Carl Sandburg, is credited as having said, “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”⁷ A baby is a great teacher of self-sacrifice as our pink cloud of “playing house” quickly succumbs to the reality of taking care of a totally dependent little human being. As John and Katie have, no doubt, learned: regular sleeping patterns, keeping a clean house, and having quality adult time all but disappears from our lives during those infant and toddler years – unless you have built-in grandparents and baby-sitters, of course!

What will gradually emerge, instead though, is a profound sense of awe at recognizing and then being able to meet the needs of this little person, of experiencing a kind of timelessness and deep relaxation while nursing or bottle-feeding, of feeling an incredible joy – even the presence of God – while holding a sleeping and deeply trustful infant cradled in our arms.

Whether or not it’s an urban myth or just a legend created over the internet, there’s a beautiful story about a little boy who couldn’t wait for his new baby sister to come home from the hospital. He couldn’t wait to be near her, to hold her, to talk to her. But, for obvious reasons, his parents didn’t want him to be left alone with her – after all he was only four years old – they wanted to supervise his visits. He kept begging to be left alone with her, though, so one night his parents finally relented. They agreed to leave the two very young children in a room alone for just a few minutes. Standing just outside the room, though, they listened for anything out-of-the-ordinary while their son was finally alone with his new baby sister. Their son tiptoes up to her crib, stands for a time looking in at her, but then is overheard to say, “Tell me what God is like, because I'm starting to forget.”

I believe that we are born with memories of the divine, we hear them repeated in the whispers of the wind and in the movement of the leaves as it passes. We’re reminded in the shapes of the clouds in the sky and in the way that the setting sun fills them with the soft colors of the rainbow. Welcoming a child into our lives reminds us of a time when we too were close to God and hadn’t yet developed our hard-edged and material-driven agendas. Traumatic experiences in a dysfunctional home – unexplained loud noises, fights, endless criticisms, sour impatience and the absence of kind and loving words – may have caused our inner child to go into hiding. I really believe that, however terrified and buried, this young child still exists inside of every one of us.

And I’ve also come to believe that by treating that part of ourselves as we intuitively would like to treat other children, we can both heal old wounds and re-experience our connection with the divine. Part of what it means to be a member of a religious community, I think, is to find our own emotional and spiritual reality and then consciously select those experiences that continue to feed that reality. It’s up to each of us to find our way back to innocence. Whether it’s spending time in prayer and meditation, in gardening or fishing, in book groups or kayaking, in psychotherapy…or in the company of children, this part of our souls has got to be nourished.

Spending time with little children can allow that youngest part of ourselves to be validated. If we’ll stay with it, our divine inner child will actually learn how to “come out and play” with other children. I think Jesus is saying to us all that if we could learn how to serve the needs of children, we could probably learn how to serve the needs of anybody. Of course, ultimately it’s by being able to live in a beloved community that such healing, wholeness and rediscovery will happen. Reclaiming and welcoming our inner divine child is a lifelong process. But let’s keep at it, shall we? Because if we don’t feel close to God anymore, guess who moved?

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