A Welcome for the Ages
By The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
June 10, 2012
Text: Mark 9:33-37
I was extremely surprised to turn on my television a couple of weeks ago and while scanning through the channels because there didn't seem to be anything interesting on, I came upon a channel and I couldn't believe the title of the show. Some of you might have seen this, Toddlers & Tiaras. Have any of you seen it? Yes, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I was in shock. I really was.
From the very opening, I couldn't stop watching it, it had me completely riveted to the screen. For those of you uninitiated in the higher culture of Toddlers & Tiaras, it is about children competing with one another in beauty contests, being dressed to the nines and competing publicly to see who has the best song and dance routine, who looks the best and who has the finest hairdo and so on. It is a beauty pageant for very little girls and it is amazing the lengths to which some parents will go to get their toddler with a tiara looking like a beauty queen.
I thought about why we are fascinated by that and I think part of it is that our culture has a way of romanticizing children, of sentimentalizing children, of trying to make children something that they are not, but having an ideal picture of something that is protected and nurtured and beautiful and finished and complete. We impose upon children our own standards of what we think is beautiful and good and successful. We do that as a society a great deal. We impose our views on children and then we ask those children to live up to them.
What was fascinating about Toddlers & Tiaras was not the little girls, it was their mothers and sometimes their fathers who were treating their children as a project as if they could be more beautiful than they ever were in their life, in some ways it was profoundly sad.
Because we sometimes romanticize and sensationalize our sense of children, we have a hard time understanding our text this morning. We are told that Jesus is with his disciples and the disciples had children around and parents had come with their children to see Jesus. But the disciples forbade them from coming to Jesus. They didn't want Jesus to be bothered with children and so they shunned them and pushed them away.
One of the things that we often don't understand about that era is that children were actually seen as non-persons. Under Roman law they were not yet citizens. They were often shunned by society and they were treated as objects; chattel, as it were.
As Phoebe Perkins, the New Testament scholar points out, these children were often not only rejected and pushed away, but their mothers in particular were pushed away and shunned and mothers and children were hidden in places where people couldn't see them. When the mothers and the children came to see Jesus, the disciples were simply doing what was the custom of the day.
But there was also something more. Part of Roman culture in those days, and this was imposed upon the Jewish community in Palestine as well, was something that was known as pater familias, which gave the power to parents to be able to determine whether or not their children were persons.
Isn't that staggering? A father decided when a child belonged to the family and that the father had the power to say if a child belonged or didn't belong to this home. It was horrendous.
When Jesus, in being encountered by these disciples, rebukes the disciples and said, “Let the little children come unto me for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven,” Jesus was being radical. This was not just a nice, sentimental warm and cosy Jesus saying I want to take little children and be nice to them. This was a radical statement about how the Kingdom of God is different from the laws of this world. It was amazing.
Because it was that radical, it affected the whole way in which society following Christ saw children. It had a profound, temporal sense. By that I mean a down to earth, earthly sense. When we look at the story of Jesus receiving the children, we know that this is a message not only at that time for those disciples, but a message for all time. It was a message saying that the church that would follow Jesus would invite children in.
One of the most powerful paintings is the etching by Rembrandt van Rijn and the Hundred Guilder series where Jesus receives the children and brings them to him. When you look at the faces of the children and the faces of the parents and the demeanour of Jesus, you realize that that acceptance is so powerful. You'll never forget it once you see it. It's in books, it's online. You can see it anywhere. It's an etching, but it's brilliant. Rembrandt in the 17th century was capturing something that in fact all of us should capture as Christians, namely, Christ's recognition and acceptance of children and a desire to bring them into the Kingdom of God.
Unfortunately we're in a world that sometimes does the opposite. If you'd read the recent UNICEF report on child poverty in the world, our own country of Canada does not stand up very well in the listings. Thirteen point three percent of Canadian children live in poverty; 13 percent, that is abysmal.
When you look throughout the world, the amount of children that are still used for slave labour is astronomical. I grew up in a part of the United Kingdom that doesn't have a very rich history here. In the 1700s, two thirds of the children in the towns where I grew up in Lancashire amongst the cotton mills were used as child labourers, two thirds of them.
Yet, we ended child labour, supposedly. The world was supposed to have ended child labour in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet Charles Dickens, who arduously opposed child labour, would be horrified that it still exists. It exists in many places throughout the world and there is still, I believe, a need for the Church of Jesus Christ to say that the slavery of children and the bondage of children for labour is simply not the Kingdom of God. Full stop and period.
That is why I am proud, after having met with some members of parliament a few weeks ago in Ottawa who were Christians, how much they have opposed trafficking of people because they know that children are part of that human trafficking. The world is sometimes a dark place for children.
Not all of them are going to grow up in the lovely homes that you're going to provide. Not all of them are going to have the advantages of being able to come into a church, being sprayed with water by a minister and hugged and felt welcome and having lunch afterwards. No, the next morning they get up and they go to the factory and they make buttons in India.
No, there is still a need for the word of the Kingdom of God and Jesus' receptivity towards children to be made known. There's also something communal about what we do in Christ's name. I think it is fascinating that Jesus did all this with the children publicly. He made it well known, “Let the children come to me for theirs is the Kingdom of God;” public, out in the open. When we baptize children, we baptize them publicly, out in the open.
I don't know if this is good news for you or not, but about 10,000 are probably listening right now to your child crying on my shoulder and on David's shoulder and there's a lot of people. It's public. What you've done is very public, and so it should be. The reception of children is communal.
This last week I've been taking a course in Nova Scotia on the Book of Romans. It's been a phenomenal week with the world's leading scholar on Romans (James Dunn). But it's one of my classmates who also inspired me. He is a person who works in ministry in Beirut in Lebanon and he was telling me about a story that's going on right now in Syria.
It's something that the Christian community has set up in one of the most dangerous parts of Syria. What they have done is taken their property and, because so many people are frightened of the violence and the danger, they have given a place for children to meet.
What they have done is set up soccer teams and they have given shirts from all the great soccer teams of the world; Barcelona, Real Madrid, TFC, Manchester United, all these soccer shirts and they dressed them and no child knows what form or function or family they come from whether they're on the side of rebels or on the side of the political parties, they just play soccer together and they do it within the confines of the church and its properties.
He said, “You know, Andrew, this is for me a sign of what the Church of Jesus Christ is all about. It is that safe refuge and welcoming place for children. It is the open door for them to grow together and communally be with one another. And hopefully,” he said, “some of them, because of their experience, will decide that they are going to follow Jesus Christ and therein find the outstretched hand of someone who draws them in. “
As I mentioned, child labour in India is a problem and it is in other countries too. But it is fascinating there was a statement by the Indian Council of Bishops not long ago in Mumbai. In it they made a declaration that all children are persons and they are children of God. That through Christ's commission, every single child, wherever they are, should feel that they belong to Him.
It might not have sounded like a bold statement any more than when Jesus said to the disciples, “Let the children come to me” might not have appeared a bold statement to us. But in both cases, it was a profound and bold statement of faith. And so, when we receive children, we don't just receive them with a baptism, we don't just receive them with water, we receive them into the community of faith.
I would encourage the parents today as David did at the seminar to make sure that you bring that child up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and don't miss the opportunity to bring your child into a deeper knowledge of God because in this world, it is really needed.
There's one last thing. Jesus, when he invited the children, said, “Look, unless any of you become like a little child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of heaven.” What did he mean? Well, I think he meant only when you have this true sense of dependence on God can you really be a child of God and enter the Community of God: A message about children for adults.
It's only in our lives when we truly trust and depend on God that we are open to the presence of God and the welcoming of others. It's there that motivates and moves and empowers our lives and there are many of you today who I think are depending on a whole lot of things in your life. You're depending on an upturn in the market. You're depending on good health and a secure job. You're depending on a healthy child.
You're depending on many things, but sometimes there comes a point in life where you turn and you think and you depend on God. When you depend on God then all the other things that you desire, all the other things that you need, are held in abeyance and offered to Him.
When Jesus outstretched his arms to those children, he outstretched his arms to you. When he outstretched his arms in this life, he outstretched them to you forever. In the receiving of children, all of us have a lesson to learn. All of us have something to grow with. All of us realize just how welcomed we are by our living and our Gracious Lord. May you in your hearts today reaffirm that and may you pray for these children that they and their families do the same. Amen.