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Twinbrook Baptist Church Rockville, MD Ordinary Time October 08, 2006 Pastor: Kip Ingram |
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They brought children to Jesus, and the disciples scolded them for it It has not been a good week for children and young people in this country. In Lancaster County, PA, at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in small place called Nickel Mines, a disturbed man broke into the school with guns and other materials of abuse. He made the young boys leave, while he bound up the young girls. There were signs that he was prepared to abuse the young girls before he was done. But the police arrived before he expected, and when they closed in upon him, he began to fire wildly at the young Amish girls before killing himself. He left behind him a classroom bloodbath so overwhelming that one experienced investigator could not control her emotions as she counted bullet holes in lifeless bodies, and she had to leave the scene. The shooter also left behind a close-knit religious community in shock and grief, trying to deal with this tragedy in their own way while trying to avoid the prying eyes of a relentless media surrounding them Meanwhile, revelations about a sexual predator in the U.S. House of Representatives have created shock around the nation and embarrassment among congressional leaders. Former Rep. Mark Foley initiated a number of inappropriate, aggressively suggestive emails and other kinds of conversations with teenagers in the Page Program. In fact, we are coming to understand that this kind of thing had been going on for years and that at least some Pages were warned about him by other Pages when they entered the program. We are still finding out exactly what has happened to the Pages, but it is becoming clear that at least some of them, some of the teenagers sent in trust by their parents, had to deal with inappropriate sexual advances from Mark Foley. What makes these two examples so striking is the unexpected places in which they happened. In spite of one or two notorious exceptions, the Page Program in Congress has been a historic opportunity and rite of passage for promising young people. It seems that Congressional leaders would work diligently to provide a good learning experience and an extra-safe environment for teens in their ”home away from home.” It seems that young people would be as safe in the halls of Congress as they could be anywhere, . . . unless it is in a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, PA. The Amish are a peaceable people, led by their religious commitments to leave behind the lifestyle and values of the modern world. And all they mostly ask from that world is to be left alone to live by their convictions. It's hard to think of a place more safe for children, more removed from our modern violent world, than that one-room schoolhouse in an out of the way placed called Nickel Mines. And yet, children and young people still must bear the abusive wounds of our world. They brought children to Jesus, and the disciples scolded them for it. ”The novelist and brilliant social critic Michael Ventura writes that Americans hate their children.” In commenting on his provocative statement James Hillman writes: ”His observation seems preposterous. What culture in history ever spoke more as a child, felt more as a child, thought more as a child, or was more reluctant to put all childish things away? And what culture today campaigns more to save the children globally, provides more emergency help for preemies and for surgical transplants in infants whatever the cost, and engages in more frontline defense of the fetus? Yet all this is a cover under which hides an appalling neglect. Just look at the evidence. Of the 57 million children (under 15 years of age) living in the United States, more than 14 million are living below the official poverty level. The United States ranks below Iran and Romania in the percentage of low-birth-weight babies. . . . half a million [children] make their 'homes' in residential treatment centers and group and foster homes. More children and adolescents in the United States die from suicide than from cancer, AIDS, birth defects, influenza, heart disease, and pneumonia combined. Each day, at least 1 million 'latchkey children' go home to where there is a gun.” The weakest link in the chain always shows the signs of stress. If you pull on a chain and create enough tension in the links, no matter how strong some of the links may be, the weakest link will always feel the most tension and eventually break. Children are most often the vulnerable link in a society. They feel the tension and bear the strains of our social network. If our society is stretched, the children will often be the first to feel it and show signs of coming apart. In a real sense, they carry our burdens, they live with the results of our distortions, they bear the wounds of our sinful neglect. With the tragedy in Lancaster County, there have now been 100 school shootings since Columbine in 1999. Is it enough to say that we have a school security problem, or does this gruesome ritual reflect something more widely true about our society? They brought children to Jesus, and the disciples scolded them for it. Evidently, some of the earliest followers of Jesus wanted his movement to be a childless movement, with priorities and values on other things. After all, the thinking goes, children are good in some ways, but everyone knows they take time and energy, ongoing patience and costly resources. Jesus was about the things of God, challenging the religious movers and shakers of his day. He had a religious movement and a community of followers to build. He didn't have time to be with children. So the disciples scolded the parents and children for coming to Jesus. ”But when Jesus saw this he was indignant, and said to them, 'Let the children come to me; do not try to stop them; for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these' . . . And he put his arms around them, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.” Who will tell the children that Jesus loves them and wants to bless them? With the funerals for the children in Lancaster County this past week, I hope, I pray, that somebody somewhere shared these words of Jesus: ”let the children come unto me . . . for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” I hope someone shared God's love for these precious children and the value of children everywhere to God. I hope someone mentioned that the living Christ wants to embrace children in loving arms and gentle hands, blessing them with utter goodness and love. I hope this is done, not in a way that denies the tragedy of what happened or the grief felt, but in a way that will begin to bring comfort and healing and hope. For us here today, how do we tell children that Jesus loves them and wants to bless them? Consider this: most of us have seen someone with a young child using baby talk. It's interesting that sometimes when we see another adult using baby talk with a child, we are struck by how strange and irrational and downright silly it seems. There's nothing quite like an adult who is willing to make contorted faces while changing the inflection of her or his voice to create amusing or comical sounds. Elemental, nonsense words come out of the mouth (the adult's mouth, I mean), like ”whee” or ”goo goo.” When I was in Texas last week, I hit it off with my sister's 2 year old son. We were posing for a picture, and I heard him burp. So I said: ”burp!”. And he laughed and responded with the same word and tone I used. Then I said it again: ”burp.” And so began an ongoing conversation between us that lasted off and on throughout the day. When we see another adult acting this way, we can be struck by how strange it is, by how un-adult it is. And yet, when it is our turn to hold or be with the child, we often do the same kind of thing. In acting this way, what we do is identify and make room in our thinking for the child's world, then we engage the child on that level, which enables our interaction to be meaningful for them. There are many ways and levels on which to convey God's love, from telling about Jesus in story form to saying something that a child can enjoy repeating with you. Our calling is to find ways to tell children that Jesus loves them and wants to bless them in a ways that they can find meaningful. Jesus said one more thing to the disciples: ”I tell you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it.” ”Like a child.” I wonder if part of the reason our society seems to devalue children is because we as adults devalue the child in ourselves? We are pushed, and we push, to grow up so fast. We are pressed to let go of our childlike ways in the name of maturity and efficiency and achievement and becoming worldly wise. We don't have time to be spontaneous like a child when we only value efficiency and mastery. We don't have eyes for childlike innocense when we have become only realistic and cynical. We don't have the inclination to trust like a child when life has made us always and only suspicious. We don't have the capacity to play like a child when we are dominated by fear and worry. We are tempted to split ourselves off from the child within, even to despise that child for what it now represents to us-painful experiences from our past, shameful feelings of rejection or self-loathing, deep regrets or disappointments. It is easier to disregard other children when we disregard the child within. This is something for all of us at any age to work on. Yet Jesus is challenging us with something even more profound, because he is saying that we cannot know God in a meaningful way unless we find that child within. He is saying that we cannot encounter God truly except as a child. Imagine that the kingdom of God has a large sign over the entrance that says, ”for children of all ages only.” We hear the fun and laughter and sharing inside. We see the trusting faces of those who walk in. But are we willing to pay the price of admission? Will each one of us dig deep into the pockets of our lives to find what is needed? In the opening verses of the Letter to the Hebrews, the writer says that God spoke to the Hebrew people in former times and in various ways through the prophets. But now, the writer asserts, God has spoken to us in a Son. That Son is Jesus, and he comes into the world not fully grown and mature but as a child. He is the baby to Mary and Joseph, but he is also the child of God who invites each one of us to find something that has been lost within ourselves and our world. In a moment we are going to sing a hymn of faith (#133), a hymn typically used at Advent or Christmas time. The words of the hymn draw together three elements of faith that should always be interwoven: the coming of Jesus as a child, the finding of our own child within, and the awareness of children in need around us. The title of the hymn is simply, "like a child." And unlike the other hymns, it's title is written without any capital letters. In fact, like an e.e. cummings poem, none of the letters are capitalized. There is minimal punctuation and no periods. The style is unpretentious, simple, childlike. Perhaps we would scold the writer for trying to introduce such an untidy, undeveloped hymn into our hymnal, but then we hear the words of Jesus echo in our hearts: ”let the children come.” May children of all ages come to the living Christ. i. James Hillman, The Soul´s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (New York: Warner Books, 1996), 84. |
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