The Greatest and Least
By Rev. Dan Smith
September 20, 2009
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Lessons: Mark 9: 30-37
Tucked away in the nether regions of the Somerville Theatre, down a dark staircase past the doors to Theatres 5 and 6, one can find a place called MOBA. MOBA, for those who have not been, is the Museum of Bad Art. MOBA’s mantra? Art too bad to be ignored! I stumbled into once after a good movie. I stayed for about a minute. While I don’t remember any of the art, I do remember MOBA, and its mantra, and I was reminded of both this week while reading our passage from Mark 9, and the one that follows in Mark 10 where Jesus further embraces not one child but several. Jesus and the Children! I was imagining an entire MOBA special exhibit devoted to the theme, complete with some saccharine Victorian era painting, and with a triptychs of those overly sentimental Sunday school visuals that put the “ill” in illustrated. There could even be a section of stained glass, or so I thought until I remembered that we have a window here that depicts Jesus and some children. I can see you all looking around for it. It’s tucked way, way up there on the back wall in the corner of the balcony. Well…the good news is that it’s not bad art! Far from it! The better news comes in the story that goes with it.
In 1957, a First Church member named Mary Ellis Purcell Lester had it commissioned, along with the two that flank the tall Tiffany window behind the middle of the balcony. It so happens that there was a women’s group at the church at the time, known as the Wednesday Informal Group, also known as the WIGS, who in addition to performing all manner of good deeds, took it upon themselves to provide lighting for that oculus window so that it could visible from the outside at night. The window depicts Jesus surrounded by children. He’s got his left arm around one child who is sitting serenely on his lap while his right hand reaches out to touch the head of another child sitting close by. Older youth are gathered by his side. Mrs. Lester is known to have said the following: “It is not too much to suppose that a single sudden sight of this silent, softly shining symbol of your devotion to God and to humanity may, upon occasion, restrain those who plan evil or restore those distraught by awareness of the evil about them. The constantly recurring sight of it will be a true benediction.” According to Mrs. Lester, that sweet image of Jesus and children just might have the power to restrain those who plan evil and to restore those who are distraught by it!
This little morsel of First Church history was all I needed this week to reorient the cynicism I’ve so often felt about stories of Jesus and children. Thanks in no small part to too much bad art, thanks especially to those Sunday School images too bad to be ignored (and believe me, I tried), stories about Jesus embracing children and saying that they will lead us to the kingdom of God have lost almost all their original punch. These stories were never intended to romanticize the innocence of children or to inspire our sweet and precious affections. Instead, they were and are intended to turn all earthly empires upside down! Mrs. Lester had it right! The stories of Jesus have the power to restrain, and restrain not the child mind you, but to restrain us. These stories are shared that we might learn to reign in our all too adult tendencies towards greatness without weakness and towards power without vulnerability. And so these stories also have the power to restore our lives and communities to our God-given wholeness.
To really grasp the radical nature of Jesus’ embrace of children we first have to understand their place in first century society. In his book, Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography, John Dominic Crossan explains how the ancient Mediterranean mind viewed children. He writes that a child was a nobody in Jesus’ day “unless a father accepted it as a member of the family rather than exposing it in the gutter or a rubbish dump to die of abandonment or to be taken up by another or reared as a slave.” This is not academic hyperbole. To back it up, Crossan quotes from an excavated papyrus letter that a first century husband sent to his pregnant wife while traveling. “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 [my friend] Aphrodisias do not forget me! How can I forget you? Therefore I urge you not to worry. 29th year of Caesar Augustus, the 23rd day of the month of Payni.”
As Crossan comments, “tender to his pregnant wife but terrible to his unborn daughter [the letter] shows us with stark clarity what an infant meant in the Mediterranean” under Roman rule. “If it is a girl, cast it out?” In the midst of such a world and empire, Jesus proclaims the opposite. Let them come in, he says! Let them all come in to a household and kingdom and empire where God’s love sets the rules above all earthly powers.
This is where the restraint and restoration comes into deeper focus. By joining children into the kingdom of God, or better still the kin-dom of God as some feminist scholars have suggested, Jesus is ushering forth a challenge to the kind of relationships that ruled the day, relationships that based on power-over and to the exclusion of vulnerability with. By calling forth the child into the midst of a quarrel about greatness, he reminds the disciples about the virtues of weakness and vulnerability, of humility and dependence on others and on God. The work for the disciples and for us is to restrain our constant striving and positioning that perpetuates unjust, sinful, even evil relations that are not of God. Jesus knows that those who are powerless, those who know their frailty, who know by sheer necessity what it means to be utterly reliant on others bring precisely what is needed to upend the powers of our earthly kingdoms and to rewrite the rules. Only when the last become first and the first become last will we enter that Kin-dom of God that is based on mercy not merit, and grace for all rather than greatness and gratification for a few. Only when we let the children and all who are vulnerable come, will we enter into a household of God that is built upon a covenantal foundation and a much different rule of mutual love, mutual respect, mutual responsibility. Can you see the difference between the ways of our world and the ways of God’s world?
In Mark especially, so many scenes of Jesus teaching take place within someone’s home. This one is no exception for it’s within someone’s household that the disciples argue, and to that household where Jesus brings the child. It is in our apartment and homes that we organize and prioritize our daily habits of living. How would we do things differently if were to consider not only this church but our homes as well to be Households of God, to be outposts of that greater Kingdom of God which is ruled by an entirely different order. Would we treat our children, or our aging parents any differently? Would we try to reorient our habits as hosts, as families, as neighbors, as consumers, as people who share this fragile earth and its resources with those outside our homes and those in future generations? We belted out a hymn last week by that very title, “The Household of God.” It underscores the dilemma before us all. The Household of God has room for us all, everyone has a place at the feast. The best and the worst have hearts needing love, there is room for the greatest and least! If it only were as easy as keeping a light on at night, and letting God’s message shine forth through our windows. I wonder where in our daily and family lives we could use some restraint, and with it some restoration?
Think about it. Have you made anyone feel “like a child” lately, at work or at home? Have you looked down on someone or has someone looked down on you? Have you treated yourself like a child lately? I bet most of us can readily conjure a good story or two. The tendency runs deep in us all. Here at First Church we have tried hard to treat children, and everyone else, friends and strangers alike, as full partners in this community, welcoming everyone to the communion table and encouraging kids to sit wherever they like, and not just in our so-called “kids section.”
We’re learning from our children how to be the household of God, but children for Jesus also represented all of society’s vulnerable. We have learned how to not only bless our children and our teachers, we have also learned how to bless same-sex marriages in this community. We are having sacred conversations on race, examining the privilege of whiteness, learning about the ways that we so often take for granted our proverbial seats at the front of the bus. We are learning that we will never know greatness in God’s eyes until we are a whole people of God, reflecting the gorgeous diversity that exists with the wider community of God’s people. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer. People of color. Immigrants. Disabled. Those who have money and those who don’t. Those who have an education and those who don’t. We must turn to God in Christ to help us to restrain our power over, and to restore us to wholeness. We must learn the new rules of this decidedly new and different household and kin-dom. This means exercising a new power with our brothers and sisters both in church and beyond. Even and most especially, we must restrain our powers over when reaching out a so-called helping hand to others. Are we getting there? Absolutely! Can we get there to manifest this order where we are all equal citizens, all saints, all beloved children of God? Yes we can and yes we must.
The Episcopal writer and spiritual director Martin Smith who many of us encountered last Lent when we read his Seasons of the Spirit brings this message home for us all the more. If indeed the household and kingdom of God is not only around in community and our wider world, but within us as well, within our hearts, what implications do these stories have to our inner lives. He writes that he often invites adults to identify themselves in meditation with someone in these scenes of Jesus taking children into their arms. Some experience the story as the disciples who in the presence of Christ become aware of the repressive side themselves that keeps their own inner child down. Some experience it through Christ’s eyes and have felt his anger against the exclusion of the child and the vulnerable. Most, he write, have chosen “to experience the whole thing from knee height,” as one of the children themselves. He tells us that they usually find a deep satisfaction at being taken in Jesus’ arms to be cared about, held, touched and blessed without reference to achievements! They have allowed the child within them to enter into her or his rightful place close to the Christ with in them.
Can you imagine that? Truth to tell, part of me wonders if the reason why Christ so often has children in conjunction with his teaching about God’s household is because children, better than most any one of us know how to cry, and what better a symbol of life and world turned upside down vulnerability than tears. Could it be that the best takeaway from this passage is Christ’s call to restrain through those voices learned from overbearing parents that stifle our basic human cries for things like rest, and fair play and pure unadulterated joy! I often wonder if the reason why I see so many tears in this place on a given Sunday morning is because when we come into this household of God, we get in touch with those deepest needs we feel…to be comforted, held, touched and blessed? Restrain your too grown up selves, he says, and let the children come to me! Get your self-important tendencies towards power and greatness to the back of the line. Show me some tears. Tell me your story! Bring your weakness, your self-doubt, your self-deprecation, your naked vulnerability to me. Crawl into my lap. Come into my embrace, and delight in the surprise that what you thought was last is best and greatest. Let them come to me. Let them all come to me.
Having opened with bad art, I now close with some good art, at least in my book, from one of the my all time favorite singers and songwriters, Stevie Wonder! Hear this first verse of his song is called “Jesus Children of America”:
Hello Jesus
Jesus children
Jesus loves you
Jesus children
Hello children Jesus loves you of America
Are you hearing
What He's saying?
Are you feeling
What you're praying?
Are you hearing, praying, feeling
What you say inside?
Amen.