Grace and peace to you from
God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, the
last six weeks or so I’ve embarked upon what for me is a huge challenge, a
growing edge. My home congregation has started a two day a week mother’s day
out program—something, it turns out, that is a very needed service in the community.
Being the diaconal person that I am, I felt that this was something in which I
should be involved. And after praying about it at length, I said that I would
work for the program as the infant room “teacher.” Now the reason that this is
such a growing edge for me is that, for years, I have resisted, you might even
say fought tooth and nail, being involved with children’s ministry. I spent
three years studying in a program that trained one to teach bible studies to
adults, and a further three years in formation to become a consecrated
deaconess, and I did not think that my training and talent should be wasted on
teaching three year old Sunday school . . . or in working in mother’s day out.
I have always seen my gifts as lying in a different direction.
I’m not convinced yet that my
talents don’t lie in a different direction. I can’t say that this has been a
revelation about what I’m supposed to be doing for the kingdom. Five infants,
aged four to ten months, in a small room together, can be challenging. However,
as is usually the case when one is involved in ministry of any kind, it isn’t
about me. It is about the children, about what Jesus said here in Mark 10. Let
the little children come to me. I’ve realized that taking care of five infants
in mother’s day out isn’t a lot different than being a hospital chaplain. Being
a chaplain wasn’t about what I had to offer patients and families and staff, it
was about meeting them where they were, about walking sometimes a hard, and
sometimes a joyful, path with them.
So how does one do that with
infants? One would think that caring for infants would be a snap. They eat,
they sleep, they get their diapers changed, they play, and they cry—a lot. To
be honest, that’s kind of what I thought when I said I’d do this . . . but I
should have read Mark a little bit more closely. Jesus took the children in his
arms, put his hands on them, and blessed them.
It’s been a long time since I
was the parent of small children, much less infants. I’d forgotten how
important touch is to children. It took
me aback when a five month old was fussing in her swing, waving her little arms
around, and I thought maybe she was hungry, so I grabbed her bottle, thinking
to quiet her. But what was really going on was that waving her little arms
around was her five month old way of lifting her arms to me to be picked up,
which, when I did so, quieted her immediately, and won me one of those
priceless baby smiles.
And I’m just Jane, a lowly,
sort of bumbling, deaconess. I can barely imagine this scene from Mark, when
Jesus himself took the children into his arms. The text says that he put his
hands on them and blessed them, and we church people I think automatically
imagine that Jesus was putting his hands on their heads and pronouncing a blessing
on them, something like what might happen during communion, when the presider
blesses small children who don’t receive the elements. But I wonder if we’re
missing the point, reading too much into it. Could it be that just the act of
touching conveys blessing? Harking back to the chaplain experience, people are
often calmed when they are touched. Not sit and hold someone’s hand or give
them a hearty pat on the back, but just gently, lightly, touch them. It is amazingly comforting. It offers the
gift, the blessing if you will, of presence. We humans need that as infants and
we need it still as adults.
In this scene from the
gospel, the disciples were preventing people from bringing their children to
Jesus, which is another example of the disciples just not getting it. They
considered children too immature to need Jesus. But then Jesus says about the
children that it is of such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Last
Thursday afternoon, I watched a group of toddlers sitting with the pastor in
“chapel”—children from 11 months to 18 months. They have learned the sign of
the cross. They have learned Jesus Loves Me, and a couple of other gospel
songs. When one sees this, one understands that the kingdom of God truly does
belong to them. But Jesus also went on to say that anyone who does not receive
the kingdom of God as a little child will not enter it. So does that mean that
if one doesn’t learn about Jesus and the kingdom at a very young age, there is
no hope of entering the kingdom? The other thing that I observed during this
“chapel” session was a very young mother of 21, who was volunteering that day,
listening. She didn’t make the sign of the cross. She didn’t know the gospel
songs. Or if she did, she chose not to participate. Maybe her heart had been
hardened by past experience, or maybe this was new information to her. I don’t
know, but she was listening, just exactly like the toddlers were listening. What
an amazing thing, if this were the first she’d heard of the gospel, offered in
a loving, safe environment with no judgment and no expectations.
This, I think, is truly
fulfilling the great commission. And as Jesus demonstrates here, the great
commission is not just to go and troll for adults. The fact is this gospel that is entrusted to us exists on the
edge of extinction. And I’m not talking about our sinful secular culture that’s
killing Christianity. No, Christianity, the gospel, is always, and has always been just one
generation away from disappearing from the face of the earth. To kill the
message of Jesus, all you have to do is simply not tell it to your children.
The disciples, it seems, are momentarily, at least, unaware of this truth. Our
primary responsibility as Christians is to testify to the power of Jesus; not
to argue about Christian faith, but to simply tell the things that we have seen
Christ do in our lives. As if we were talking to a little child, because after
all, the kingdom is not something we can earn by our works or our
exemplary life. All of us, no matter what our age, receive the kingdom as a
gift, a blessing, of God’s grace.
Amen.
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