153 As Little Children

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “As Little Children”, originally shared on September 30, 2021. It was the 153^rd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   It’s been said that growing old is required; growing-up is optional. Is there something we can learn about growing-up from being a child? How do we receive the gift of faith as a child without being spiritually childish? Today, we’re going to find out.

   If I paid closer attention, I’d probably know the answer but since I haven’t, I’ve wondered if the Assignment Editors who send reporters out to cover news stories consider the psychological toll it takes on them. If a reporter gets a gruesome murder one day, do they get sent to a flower festival the next?

   That came to mind when reading this week’s Gospel text, Mark 10:2-16. Here you get Jesus’ hard teaching on divorce. Hard because it didn’t approve the loopholes that many religious leaders of the time thought were there. Instead, building on God’s intention rather than the religious Law, he heightened their awareness of the need for a Savior.

   And then, we get a teaching that seems softer, more like a flower festival, and more like what many people imagine Jesus to be. Accepting.

   Yet, both stories would have challenged the way most people thought about God at the time they were lived. They would both have been difficult.

   The way we think about children has a lot to do with this.

   We think of young children as young people who need to be protected and cared for, whose each stage of life is precious, who are treasured and who parents sometimes wish could “stay that way forever.”

   This is not at all how children have been regarded in most places for most of human history.

   Have you ever visited a museum, like the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Gardens in San Marino? Or some other place where they show Early American art? Children are portrayed in adult clothing, only they are smaller.

   Children were portrayed as incompetent adults. To be seen but not heard. Drags on the family finances until they could do some income-generating work.

   At the time of Jesus, women were not allowed to learn or to worship at synagogue services, and children’s status was seen as even lower than women’s. They were not worthy of the time of a respected teacher like Jesus.

   So, when little children were brought to Jesus for a blessing, Jesus’ response was shocking to the values of the people of his day. We see it in Mark 10:13-16,

¹³ People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. ¹⁴ But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. ¹⁵ Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” ¹⁶ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

   OK, we get it. Children are human beings, and all people are created by and belong to God. Children have a faith that is appropriate to their spiritual age that is still genuine faith. They too are recipients of the inbreaking Reign of God.

   But this is also shocking to us. What does Jesus mean when he says, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”?

   Do you have to be baptized as an infant? Go to Sunday School? Be an angel in the Christmas play?

   Can you do stuff to receive entrance into God’s reign. No. It’s a gift.

   I think that Jesus is saying that we can learn something about the most important things in life from children.

   Sometimes, when Jesus talks about little ones, he is talking about new (spiritually young) Christians, as in Mark 9:42,

⁴² “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.

   Jesus uses exaggeration as a rhetorical device to emphasize the importance of not obstructing the work of God in new Christians.

    But here, in Mark 10, I think that Jesus is teaching that salvation is not something we achieve because that is coming through Jesus at the cross. Salvation is something we receive.

   We can’t earn it. We can’t do anything to deserve it. We are totally dependent upon God for it, like a little child is dependent for everything on their loving parents.

   We all must enter the Reign of God the same way, as dependents. As recipients of God’s grace. As little children.

   We do not to come to a childish faith, but to a child-like faith. When we think of someone being childish, we maybe think of being irresponsible, selfish, or immature.

   A child-like faith knows of its dependence, is open to the presence of God in the Word of God, and trusts in God for guidance in a living relationship with God.

   Paul, writing in Hebrews 15:11-14 writes of spiritual maturity:

¹¹ About this we have much to say that is hard to explain, since you have become dull in understanding. ¹² For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food; ¹³ for everyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is unskilled in the word of righteousness. ¹⁴ But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.

   People come to faith by the grace of God, as a little child receives what he/she cannot achieve but is wholly dependent to receive. But we grow out of a childish faith through the Word of God and the Sacraments, through prayer and discipline, through sacrificial service to others, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

   We grow from “the flesh”, a technical term Paul uses for life without Christ, to the life of the Holy Spirit. Paul writes, in his first letter to the church at Corinth, the 3^rd chapter, the 1^st and 2^nd verses:

And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. ² I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready,

   Open your heart to receive the gifts of God as a little child. Let the Holy Spirit, as streams of living water welling up within you, help you grow and form you into spiritual maturity.