(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “As Little Children”, originally shared on September 30, 2021. It was the 153rd 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 3rd
chapter, the 1st and 2nd 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.
