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Like a
Child
Mark 10:13-16
18th Sunday After Pentecost
8 October 2006
Lately, of the hundreds of
catalogs I receive throughout the year, more and more feature children. I’ve been identified and targeted. Clearly, someone somewhere knows that I have
kids. So now I’m inundated with every
possible thing for children I might consider buying. Children’s clothes, children’s toys,
children’s books, children’s bedrooms, children’s computer software, children’s
ride-in battery-powered mini-Mustang cars.
I would like to assure whoever makes those cars that there is no way I
am putting two little boys behind the wheel of something that has a gas pedal
and can go 2.5 miles-per-hour, even if it does promise it has “seatbelts for
safety.” But the thing is, no matter how
little I need the things they’re selling, I can’t seem to put the catalogs
down. I’m entranced by what I find
there.
The girls are dressed in the most
adorable little dresses and tights, with chic little shoes and glossy girly
hair. The boys have a good-natured,
All-American rough-and-tumble look to them.
Babies bounce on their handsome fathers’ knees. Children play happily – and quietly -
together in color-coordinated rooms.
Older sisters read to younger brothers on quaint quilts that look homemade
(but aren’t). Little boys in fall
sweaters carry footballs, while little girls in pink rooms play house. Families lounge in sunny kitchens in matching
pajamas. In every picture, children and
families are smiling, or laughing, and looking completely charming and
thoroughly happy. And you know
what? The mothers in these pictures
never ever look frazzled. They have
found the secret to a happy family and a well-ordered life – the right clothes,
the right furnishings, the right stuff, the right life.
When I look up from the
promise-making pages of these slick catalogues, at the real children in my
life, the difference between real and ideal is jarring. Real children rarely play together happily
and quietly in their rooms for long stretches of time, no matter how
color-coordinated and well-decorated those rooms are. The precious outfits are soon stained with
blueberries or oatmeal. And it turns out
that the rough-and-tumble look of little boys comes because they actually do
get rough and they actually do take tumbles.
And not only do real children rarely sit still for nearly as long as the
catalog layouts imply, they frequently interrupt whatever sitting-still time we
grownups try to get. Real life, real
children, do not match the gauzy sunlit photographs in my mailbox.
In the last few decades, marketers
have realized more and more that childhood is a goldmine. So advertisements are increasingly aimed at
younger and younger potential consumers.
And, of course, their parents.
They keep us in their thrall with their implicit promises of contented
kids and a harmonious home.
It is not just the marketers,
though, who picture childhood as a happy, magical time, and children as sweet
little cherubs who just need the right outfits and educational toys. Long before advertisers shaped our collective
worldview, 18th-century Romanticism began holding up a vision of
childhood as a time of happy innocence and unfettered delight. Wordsworth, in particular, elevated the child
to such a level that the most logical response was something akin to
worship. 200 years later, we continue to
romanticize childhood and idealize children, despite our own real experience
with less-than-ideal childhoods and less-than-perfect children.
It has not always been that
way. Ancient societies did not exalt
children or hold sentimental notions about childhood. For the vast majority of human history,
childhood didn’t shine with a golden light.
Childhood was a time of non-status, and “children were not considered
persons in their own right.”[1]
So the disciples are not acting in a
particularly malevolent way when they try to turn children and their parents
away from Jesus in this morning’s Gospel story.
They are just doing what any adult male would do. And that is the problem.
People are bringing their little
children to Jesus, in order that he might touch them. Apparently, word has gotten out about Jesus,
the teacher and healer, whose touch changes people’s lives. The people want their children to be touched
by his holy hands. If his touch could
heal the blind, the deaf, the bleeding, and the dead, what wonder could he do
for a healthy child at the beginning of life?
But the disciples try to stop
them. They know that children should not
be allowed to interrupt a teacher and his students.[2]
But that is what children do, isn’t it? I mean, forget the romantic notions of ideal
children – here is what they’re best at.
They interrupt. With gusto.
And not only with gusto, but with
precision. A meal, a show, a
conversation, a nap – the things adults feel are most important are the things
children are most likely to interrupt.
Here, it is a lesson they are interrupting. Jesus is trying to teach, trying to tell the
people important things about marriage and divorce, about law and love. And all of a sudden here come all these
people, with their parade of loud and messy children. Kids talking and giggling, skipping and
jumping, some pushing ahead, some straggling behind, all of them getting in the
way. None of them acting with order or
decorum. None of them behaving the way
you do when someone is trying to teach.
So the disciples try to put a stop
to it. To protect their teacher. To respect his listeners. To keep things running the way they’re supposed
to run. And the truth is, we get it,
don’t we? Haven’t you ever shushed a
child? I certainly have, and this very
morning. Sometimes, there really is
important business to tend to. That is
all the disciples are trying to do: let the adults attend to their important
matters.
And Jesus gets livid. The angriest he ever got, that we know about,
is right here, in this passage. The word
Mark uses means indignant, agitated, grieved.
It’s the only time in the Gospels that this word is used of him, and
it’s because of how his followers are treating children. Can you imagine Jesus furious? And his fury is on behalf of the children.
It is not because he, like we, had
some naïve and sentimental view of children.
It is because he, like God, was always an advocate for the last, the
least, the lost, and the powerless. And
children, especially in his time, were radically powerless.
But that’s not a reality confined
to antiquity. Let’s not be fooled by the
exalted and sentimental status of children in contemporary society. Children in our time are just as much at risk
as ever. Everywhere in the world,
children are the ones on the frontlines of hunger, poverty, and violence. While we spend more on pet food in the
But children are not only
vulnerable in poor countries far, far away from us. Think of the worst news you hear in our own
country. We are as violent as any nation
on earth, and our children bear much of the brunt of it. Whether it is little girls shot in an Amish
schoolhouse or little boys shot on a inner-city street corner, the children in
the richest, most powerful nation in the world are still radically
powerless.
And though it is the horror of
school shootings that gets our attention, most of the harm done to children is
not done with guns. It is done with
words, or lack of them. It is done
through neglect and impatience and greed and meanness. It is done through our inability or
unwillingness to create a culture of care and respect and deep values. It is done through our failure to provide for
them a community of faith and a world at peace.
In their vulnerability, children take what we do to them and say to them
and give or don’t give to them, and it shapes them. It stays with them.
It was this vulnerability that
brought out Jesus’ fury at those who would hinder children. “Let the little children come to me,” he
demands of the men who had refused them. “It is to such as these that the
And at that, Jesus sweeps the
children up in his arms, and he lays his hands on them, and he blesses them.
The disciples had meant to protect
Jesus from interruption as he taught.
But here is the real teaching, the real kingdom beautifully manifest –
the most powerless of all, held in the powerful arms of his great
blessing.
He means for us to be in those
arms, too. It’s what he means when he
says to receive the kingdom like a child.
This is you, he is
saying.
If you want to be a part of me, this is you. Radically vulnerable, and you know it. Weak and wounded, and you know it. Willing to be swept into my arms and my love
and my blessing.
He is not saying some sentimental thing
about how we need to be childlike, how we need to be innocent and playful and
simple in our faith. He does not hold up
some nostalgic picture for us of what a child is. He holds up the real thing – real children
with real pain and vulnerability. He
holds them up and blesses them and reminds us that we too – despite our
pretensions towards power and greatness, towards order and control – we, too,
are wounded and vulnerable. Because
however we may think we have ordered our lives, we do not have the power to put
them in the ultimate order we crave.
If you want to be touched by him,
held by him, blessed by him, then you admit this first of all. You admit your vulnerability, which means you
admit your need. And then he takes you
into those powerful arms of blessing. He
lays his touch of love on your life, and he blesses you.
And what do you do then, once
you’ve been gathered into those great arms with so many other children? You go out with that healing blessing on your
life, to gather other children in. You
do not hinder. You do not treat people
as interruptions. You do not romanticize
the powerless or the needy or the children.
You see real pain and real need, and then you let yourself become the arms of Christ.
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