Kids

Mark 9:30-37

30[Jesus and the disciples went on] 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.”

*******

I don’t know about you, but I have been avoiding these GOP debates for the sake of my blood pressure. I know why people think we shouldn’t talk politics in polite company, or religion, for that matter, even though our emotions betray how important these things are to us. On the other hand, I don’t know if it really is religion and politics that get us worked up as much as it is our fear about being wrong and the absolute survival instinct that kicks in when we have to prove ourselves right at all costs. We have lost the ability to listen to one another and public discourse has gone from respectful disagreement about issues to personal attacks and outright bullying. Then again, I’m not sure we’ve ever been far from our worst selves. One of my favorite movies, 1776, shows how the first continental congress fought while trying to have a conversation about independence, and it came to blows between John Adams and John Dickinson once they started calling each other names like “coward” and “landlord” and “lawyer.” Not sure if that’s a historically accurate conversation, but it’s sadly not surprising. This past week was the saint day for Hildegard, who was an Abbess, composer, scientist, and visionary in Germany at the start of the second century. The German film adaptation of her life shows how many obstacles were in her way as she tried to deal with the Abbot and find a cloistered place for her sisters, away from the brothers who they shared space with. When her visions were first made known, the higher authorities were terribly nasty to her, angry and jealous because she had a gift they did not have, and they treated her with contempt.

In this morning’s Gospel reading, I think we have a picture of the disciples arguing on the way from much the same sort of fear. Jesus has just told them, again, of his upcoming crucifixion, death, and resurrection. They don’t get it. They don’t understand what he’s talking about, they remember Peter was rebuked and called ‘Satan’ last time he spoke up in confusion, and they are afraid to ask Jesus what he means. After all, the disciples were not exactly the cream of the crop when Jesus called them. If they had been the best and the brightest students, they would have been apprenticed to important Rabbis after they made Bar Mitzvah, and wouldn’t have been working in the family business, or reduced to collecting taxes. If the community had thought these disciples smart and holy, they would have some extra measure of respect, but when Jesus called them they were basically nobodies. 

I posted on Facebook awhile back an article about how little we seem to value labor in our culture. For all of the talk of pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps, getting our hands dirty, earning our bread, we have it in our culture that if you want a respectable job you’ve gotta go to college and get a degree and work at a desk. If you work with your hands you don’t get as much respect as if you wear a suit and tie. When I was in High School, I was in honors classes, but wanted to learn how to work on cars my junior year. We had a whole wing of the building for ‘vocational tech’ classes, from mechanics to electrical work to marketing. But because I was on the college track, I was discouraged from those classes. The mocking chant from the geeks to the jocks was usually something about who was going to pump gas for whom when those nerdy kids who got picked on for being smart ended up working for Microsoft. As though there’s a difference in whose job is more important! Or, rather, as though there is a difference in how important a person is, based solely on their job.

The disciples had finally made it, they thought, by being disciples of this very important Rabbi who was shaking everyone up. They had gone from smelly fishermen to sought-after teachers. Except that now, this one lesson their teacher kept returning to didn’t make sense, and they were afraid to ask him what he meant. They didn’t want to look dumb. Didn’t want to make Jesus think he’d made a mistake in choosing them. Didn’t want to be known as hypocrites or frauds.

So what’s the next thing they do? They argue about who’s best. They’ve gotta build themselves up, make themselves more important, prove their worth to the movement, secure their place in the spotlight.

We do this so often when we get wrapped up in every little thing we fight about, don’t we? Do we actually have the answers when we argue about what’s going on in the world, or do we just want to have something to say so we feel important? Sometimes we do need to name big problems, work together toward solutions. When we had the gathering of folks here on Monday to talk about what to do with our local Heroin addiction, we needed to start that conversation, and hope it will continue with some community support for the sake of some much-needed healing. But when we take our public discourse into areas of blame and shame, we lose track of our hearts. Kim Davis has been all over the news for refusing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This is a problem, now that it’s legal according to the Supreme Court that those licenses be made available, and she does get paid to work for the government. But even more of a problem is the amount of public shaming of Kim Davis that came out of that conflict, and continues still. What good is it to argue that her claim to Christianity is true or false based on how she looks or dresses or how many times she has been married? What good is it to make a mockery of her character for an argument about the right to love another person?

But we are afraid. So afraid that if we don’t make ourselves big and important that no one will notice us or care about us. Afraid that we have to constantly prove our value or we will get thrown away otherwise. That is, after all, the way the rest of the world works. 

But that’s not how Jesus does things. That’s not what the kingdom of God looks like.

In Jesus’ time, children were not really people. Far from the Hallmark vision of adorable, squeaky-clean little cherubs all gathered on his lap with perfect hair and straight white smiles, children ran around like dogs, who also weren’t domesticated pets. Children may or may not live to adulthood, so there wasn’t a lot of energy wasted on them. They had no power. They were raised by women who had no power. They were completely dependent, often thrown away. Remember that slaughter of every child under the age of two after Jesus was born? Children of an occupied people are given even less care. It’s like Lord of the Flies all the time.

Children, however, are the object lesson Jesus gives his adult disciples for what the kingdom of God is like. Welcome this child, and you welcome me, he says. Welcome this one who is socially worthless, this one who is typically ignored if not beaten, this one who still runs wild and cannot be controlled yet by the ‘proper’ way of doing things. Welcome this person who is not yet counted as a person, Jesus says, and that is where you will find God. 

Children just exist, no matter how we try to put them into boxes, market to them, shape them into good little consumers, or bully them out of asking questions. They’re curious and not ashamed about it. They’re themselves even while they imitate the adults around them as they learn how to move around the world. They are dependent for many things, and they can surprise us in the questions they ask and the generosity they model. They can sometimes be little snots, too, and we welcome them anyhow, because we’re just bigger snots.

But more than that. Even in places where children are unwelcome, unwanted, intrusive and only in the way as collateral damage, Jesus is exactly all of those things, too. The Christmas manger and child Jesus in the temple may bring to our minds adorable images, with problems no bigger than a scraped knee, but children in this world are thrown away all the time, which is far from adorable. Children are beaten, mistreated, bullied, abused, neglected, sold, traded, and used for terrible, hurtful things, because grown ups have power and children don’t. So Jesus comes to us as a child. Jesus lives among us as a child. The kingdom of God is right here in our midst in the very ones we so easily discard.

It’s not about proving our worth, or making sure we have the loudest, most important voice at the table. Jesus was thrown away, nailed to a cross for public humiliation, for every time we throw one another away, every time we throw ourselves away into the fray of proving our importance rather than trusting the God who loved us into being. Jesus comes to us as a child who has been beaten. A child who has been bullied. A child who has been ignored. A child who still wakes up every morning, with or without dinner the night before or the promise of breakfast today, just to keep living in this hurting world. Jesus lives among us as that very child, to welcome each and every child who has known the pain of that experience, no matter if that child is five years old or sixty-five years old. If that child wears a suit or a pair of coveralls or the only shirt they own since running away from home. Jesus runs with the children, weeps with the children, laughs with the children, carries the children, died for the children, lives again for the children, loves the children. Jesus welcomes the children. Every last one of us.