Year B Proper 24: Skip to glory

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

sermon for Sunday, October 21, 2012, Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

“You do not know what you are asking.”

That was Jesus’ first response to James and John’s audacious requests for the places of highest honour in Jesus’ coming glory.

“You do not know what you are asking.”

One commentator that I read this week suggested that when James and John asked to sit at the right and the left hand of Jesus when he came into his glory, they didn’t know that they might as well be asking for the places occupied by the thieves on the hilltop, on the crosses to the left and to the right of Jesus as he was crucified, as he came into his glory through an inglorious and wretched death.[1]

But if they didn’t, perhaps they should have.

The piece of Mark chapter 10 that we have left out between last Sunday and this is the third and most explicit of the passion predictions that the gospel of Mark contains. Between last Sunday and this, in terms of the story, Jesus has told his disciples for the third time and in more detail than ever why he is going up to Jerusalem, and how he will be received there, and just how ignominious the coming into glory of the Son of Man will be.

‘“We are going up to Jerusalem,” he said, “and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.”’ (NIV)

And in the very next breath, James and John ask for the seats of honour beside him in his glory.

Did they know what they were asking?

I don’t think so. I think that John and James, just like the rest of us, wanted to skip the cross and go straight to the resurrection and the ascended glory of the age to come. When they heard abut the cross (even though, at this point in their journey, they still did not really know that this was for real, that Jesus would really die) – when they heard about the predictions of death, they had the good sense to be afraid and astonished, and to hope and wish that it could all be smoothed over, blinked away.

The main goal, surely, they thought, had to be the glory. They still were seeking a Messiah who would blow the world away, take Jerusalem by storm, so that Rome had nothing on it. Because, frankly, who wants a leader who is at the mercy of others, who bleeds, who dies?

In a way, James and John were right to ask their question, even if it did mean asking to skip the cross. Theologians still wrestle with the questions of whether Jesus really needed to die in order to “ransom God’s people,” whatever that means, at the end of the passage; and if he did need to die, then why? Why couldn’t he, why can’t we, skip straight to the glory?

We know that we follow Christ crucified, that we walk in the way of the cross, but can’t we just talk about the resurrection instead?

Actually, I don’t think that Jesus was angry or upset with James and John for asking their question. He got it. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus himself prayed with blood, sweat and tears to determine whether or not he could, in fact, skip the cross and head straight for the glory. It’s a pretty natural, normal, reasonable request.

And yet, the symbol most easily, most readily, most instantly representative of Christian faith is the cross. How many of you are wearing or carrying crosses on you today? We know that it is essential to our identity as Christians, as followers of Jesus Christ.

I don’t expect us to get this all sorted out nicely in ten minutes on Sunday morning: why the cross, why we are still waiting for the first to be last, or the last to be first, why, although we have seen the glory of the Lord, at least in glimpses, through the clouds, through the haze of life, we are still, it seems, often walking in the shadow of the cross.

God’s answer to Job – who are you to ask? How would you understand it anyway? – might have to do for some of that today.

But I think that there may be a clue for us in what Jesus tells the rest of the disciples.

“You know,” he says, “the rest of the world competes to lord it over one another, and to exercise power over those weaker than themselves. But it is not to be like that for you. Because you follow me, and I came not to be served by those under me, but to serve, to give my whole life for all of you, who have given up your livelihoods to follow me, and to give my life for many others besides.”

I’m paraphrasing, but still, “It is not to be like that for you.” “I came not to be served but to serve, and to give up my life for the people of God.”

Here’s the thing: I saw a billboard a while back (I wrote about it at the time online – https://rosalindhughes.com/2012/04/22/where-winners-worship/ ), which advertised a certain church as being “Where Winners Worship, and God is praised.”

It got a pretty strong reaction from me. I had to ask, if this is where winners worship, where do the losers belong? Because believe me, despite my winning ways and my winning smile and my killer accent, there are days when I do not feel anything like a winner. There are days when I need a church where losers pray and God listens anyway.

Winners also welcome.

If we want to be the best church, the winningest church, we have to serve those who have lost the most. Not just the most in terms of jobs and homes and income, although that too; but also those who have lost hope, lost faith, lost loving relationships; those who are simply lost.

Racing for the glory, we might find that we’ve left Jesus behind, in the dust, caring for someone who needed a healing word or a loaf of bread.

If we want to succeed as Christians, we have to be prepared to lose our preconceptions and our inhibitions and our souls to serve those whom God sends our way. If we want to be first in line for glory, we need to be tending to those who are last in line for glory, for dignity, for respect in this world, and letting them go ahead of us. If we want glory, we need to dig through the dirt to find it. Just like Jesus did, digging through death to enter new life, and dragging us along behind him.

You know how in baptism we share in Jesus’ death before we are brought out of the water into new and unending life?

We are here, in Jesus’ name, not to be served, but to serve; and if we want glory, we have to accept the cross.

The good news, of course, is that the cross is not the end of the story. There is resurrection.

The good news, for those of us who are worried about our position, about our status as winners or losers, about our standing in the eyes of God – the good news is, it’s really not a competition. God loves us all, really, no exceptions, and we do not need to compete for a better share in that love; it’s all good. We all win.

James and John won, but not by finding an easy path past the cross to glory. They did not end up on those crosses either side of Jesus on the hill, either. And if the life to come is truly lively, it probably is not an eternal tableau in which Jesus sits forever in the same jeweled throne, with the same disciples permanently fixed in the seats either side of him. Whatever James and John were asking for – whether they understood it or not – Jesus understood. And they knew Jesus’ presence with them, leading them, guiding them, loving them, every step of the way.

Whatever our anxieties are about following Jesus, about serving those whom we are sent to serve, about how things will work out for us, Jesus understands that, too. He doesn’t promise that the road will be easy, or straightforward. He doesn’t promise that we will get to skip the cross and go straight to the glory; but he does promise that through the cross comes resurrection. And he is on the road with us, serving and supporting and leading us, all the way.

[1] The Oxford Bible Commentary, John Barton and John Muddiman (eds) (OUP, 2001), 908

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Year B Proper 24: Sunday sermon spoiler alert

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

“You do not know what you are asking.”

One commentator that I read this week suggested that when James and John asked to sit at the right and the left hand of Jesus when he came into his glory, they didn’t know that they were asking for the places occupied by the thieves on the hilltop, on the crosses to the left and to the right of Jesus as he was crucified, as he came into his glory through an inglorious and wretched death.[1]

But if they didn’t, perhaps they should have.

The piece of Mark chapter 10 that we have left out between last Sunday and this is the third and most explicit of the passion predictions that the gospel of Mark contains. Between last Sunday and this, Jesus has told his disciples for the third time and in more detail than ever why he is going up to Jerusalem, and how he will be received there, and just how inglorious the coming into glory of the Son of Man will be.

‘“We are going up to Jerusalem,” he said, “and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.”’ (NIV)

And in the very next breath, James and John ask for the seats of honour beside him in his glory.

Did they know what they were asking?

[1] The Oxford Bible Commentary, John Barton and John Muddiman (eds) (OUP, 2001), 908

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Bumper sticker theology

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

Last month, the Episcopal Cafe reported that the Diocese of Delaware has made Episcopal license plates available (not plate-holders – actual license plates!) – http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/dioceses/episcopal_plates_1.html

The Cafe also sampled a blogpost, “Automotive Evangelism,” by a driver of the plates, Elizabeth Kaeton – it’s at telling-secrets.blogspot.com/2012/09/automotive-evangelism.html

Kaeton wrote,

I love the interest shown by neighbors and random folks in the parking lot at the grocery store – or post office or retail outlet or gas station – who ask questions. Which is the point, right? I’ve only had the license plate since Saturday and already I’m finding myself in conversations with people about my church and my faith

– and I found myself a little jealous. The plate just states the car’s denomination, and apparently it is the ultimate evangelistic conversation starter! I drive around religiously with a bumper sticker that explicitly invites comment: “I am Episcopalian, ask me about God,” and the most reaction I’ve ever got is the odd funny look from the car that’s pulled up next to me at a red light. Although, to be fair, that could have more to do with my singing along with the radio or making faces at my daughter than with my bumper stickers.

My own Episcopal diocese, the Diocese of Ohio, produces the bumper stickers and also displays them on yard signs and billboards around the region. My favourite billboard, which I don’t think we have in bumper sticker form, is “If you’re looking for a sign from God, here it is,” because I like that we have a sense of humour. My children’s favourite, which we have as a bumper sticker, on cinch sacks, and on the youngest’s latest youth event t-shirt, is “God loves you, no exceptions.”

Putting up a billboard – from the Diocese of Ohio website, www.dohio.org

I love seeing the billboards, because I love my church and its mission to proclaim the universal and abundant love of God. I am reassured when I pull into a parking lot and see the bumper stickers, because it often means I’ve arrived at the correct place to meet whomever I am meeting. I like the opportunity to wear my religion on my sleeve; it seems like a fairly easy and innocuous way of spreading the Word (although it does make me obsequiously apologetic of my errors on the road, concerned as I am that my one wrong move will turn the drivers around me off the entire Episcopal Church). But in the few years that I have been advertising, I have never once been asked, complimented, insulted or otherwise accosted about my church of choice.

Then, today, it finally happened. I was wearing my Bishop’s Bike Ride cycling shirt at the local library, emblazoned with “Love God, love your neighbor, change the world” on the back, and the janitor turned off his vacuum cleaner to ask me, “What’s the Bishop’s Bike Ride? Is that an English thing?”

So we had a brief chat, and I sauntered out with a slight swagger in my step, having had my very first evangelical encounter as the result of Episcopalian attire, personal or vehicular. (Unfortunately, I don’t think that I came across as having a whole lot of wisdom, grace or poise, having seriously mistimed my exit to coincide with a torrential rain and hailstorm which nearly knocked me off my bike; but at least that was an act of God.)

On the way home, once the hail had subsided and numbness from the sudden temperature drop had begun to set into my fingers, I thought, “Why did he think it was an English thing?” As my shoes filled with rain I realized, “It’s because I have a fairly pronounced British accent.” Then, as the sun mockingly broke through, I remembered: I spoke first.

Turns out, the shirt had help from a direct, personal invitation to conversation. Perhaps the blogger’s license plate did too, and she’s just being modest about her friendliness and general outgoingness to all humankind.

At any rate, here’s my takeaway from the whole license plate/bumper sticker theology thing:

1) Keep it simple, keep it positive; a sense of humour helps.

2) Don’t cut off traffic if the Episcopal shield (or your religious emblem of choice) is on your rear bumper.

3) It’s not a conversation-starter. You are.

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Packing bags

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

I try to summon a spirit of tenderness to the task: praying for the woman who wanted toothpaste (I had none); wondering who will want the pet food – who still has room in a hungry life for a heartfelt relationship with a dependant dog. I pack soap, to smooth soiled skin. I try to slip a treat, an unnecessary piece of escapism, into each bag. I try to summon a spirit of tenderness to the task.

But the cold, heavy, metallic cans are unyielding and hard-hearted. They stamp regular patterns into the base of the bag; they leave their mark. They bear witness to an unromantic, untender truth: that hunger hurts. They make me mad.

I try to summon a spirit of tenderness to the task, but I will settle for a spirit of angry tenderness, of indignant love, if God will lend it to me.

20121017-111922.jpg

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Choices

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

From today’s lectionary selection:

“When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed. Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them; for they were seized with great fear.”

The swineherds had just seen their flocks run off a cliff into the sea at the behest of Jesus, who was somehow seduced into showing compassion not only for the demoniac man but for a herd of demons, too. That’s what love will do for you, sometimes; it can be a real pig.

Of course they were afraid. Of course the townspeople were seized with great fear. The rich young man and his dilemma had nothing on them. They were now faced with the choice of celebrating the restoration to health of one man set against the loss of livelihood of many; they had paid a significant communal price for the health of an individual, who sat before them healed and renewed; and they did not know where it all might end.

Their choice was to explore further healing, or to pull back from the brink, to preserve and protect what they still had, at the risk of missing further miracles. It was a scary choice, and perhaps they went with the safest option; but at what cost?

I realize that I am reading this through the lens of the season that is upon us…

“So Jesus got into the boat and returned. The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.'”

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Year B Proper 23: sermon

Posted on October 14, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for October 14th 2012, preached at Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio

There’s a novel by Nick Hornby which I read some years ago called How to Be Good.* In it, the protagonist, an ordinary, grumpy, middle-aged man, undergoes a sudden transformation which makes him want to be a better person. It is a simple idea with profound consequences. From the first time he gives away his and his wife’s cab fare home from a night out, and she is horrified at the idea of taking the bus or walking home, he continues to push his family and neighbours (he doesn’t seem to have friends, exactly) further and further out of their comfort zones and into the realms of, at best, eccentric, and, in the eyes of many, crazy and irresponsible generosity.

It is definitely not a religious book, but it does get you thinking about what we choose to do and to neglect; where the gap lies between what we could do to change the world and what we do; and what our families and friends would think of us if we slung a rope across and bridged that gap.

The question raised by the book, and I think that it’s the same question raised by the rich young man in today’s gospel, is how good is good enough? How much do we have to do to say that we have done enough? How can we know that we have earned our place in heaven, or even on earth?

Frederick Buechner, in Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, puts it this way:

“The trouble with being rich is that since you can solve with your checkbook virtually all of the practical problems that bedevil ordinary people, you are left in your leisure with nothing but the great human problems to contend with: how to be happy, how to love and be loved, how to find meaning and purpose in your life.
In desperation, the rich are continually tempted to believe that they can solve these problems too with their checkbooks, which is presumably what led Jesus to remark one day that for a rich man to get to Heaven is about as easy as for a Cadillac to get through a revolving door”**

But it’s not just the super-rich that want to solve the world’s problems with their own resources. It’s not just the wealthy who want to buy love, or reassurance, or comfort, or benign dreams. Some of us do it without great wealth but with great expenditure of time and energy, feeling that if we can only do enough, all will be well. Some of us do it with alcohol or other drugs or easements, hoping that one more shot will do the trick of making everything seem alright, manageable for a while. Some of us do it by denial; if we don’t drink, if we don’t eat, if we don’t go out tonight, we’ll feel better about ourselves. The trouble is that the voice which pushes us to do more, give more, be better to save ourselves can be the same one that, if my only job were to stay in bed all day, would be saying to me, “You’re not doing that right. Your sleep is too restless. Your dreams are rubbish.”

The good-enough thing: it’s the same syndrome as the rich young man, just with different symptoms. The young man was sad because, with all his wealth, with all of his scrupulosity with regard to the commandments, he could not be sure that he could save himself. He had done it all: all that was asked of him, but he needed more, because he knew that there was more.

In a strange and slightly screwed-up way, he feels himself to be as tormented as Job, despite his riches; like Job, he wants to contend with God, to plead his case, to know that he is justified; and he cannot in his heart find God in order to do that. He is as alone and as defeated as that other righteous man.

He is as desolate in is wealth as Job is in his desperation.

And of course it is better to do without Job’s suffering. Of course it is more comfortable to have power and wealth and health than not. Of course he is not as lonely or as miserable as Job, and we would all rather be this one than that.

The point of the comparison is not to say that it doesn’t matter how comfortable or otherwise we are, what afflicts us or doesn’t; the point is that there will always be something still missing unless and until we identify God as the one who is good, and who can and does make us good enough.

It is no coincidence that the Psalm which we sing today, the psalm that cries out to God in despair and yearning, is the psalm which Christians know chiefly because of Jesus’ words in his darkest hour: my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.

The Psalmist, Job, the rich young man all cry out to a God whom they cannot see nor feel close by, whom they try to find but cannot, and in the case of the rich young man, if he carries on trying to find God in his own riches and goodness, he will fail, and he will carry on crying out in vain.

It is no coincidence that Jesus knows that Psalm and uses it. He has been where the psalmist and where Job and where this young man have been. The letter to the Hebrews reminds us that, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.” Jesus has been desolate and miserable, he has felt abandoned, and he has been tempted to put his trust in wealth, fame, status, political power; all of those temptations were offered him when he was driven out into the wilderness after his baptism. But Jesus’ answer was God: that the love of God is the source of all strength and goodness; that the promises of God are trustworthy and not to be tested; that the purposes of God outweigh any other demands or burdens or propositions that may be put to us.

Jesus says, “Only God is good.” And Jesus says that what is impossible for mortals is not impossible for God; “for God all things are possible.” And he tells the young man, “Then come, follow me.”

“Come, follow me.”

The young man went away grieving, because he could not find it in his heart to give up trusting in what he had and go out on a limb to follow Jesus instead. And Jesus loved him anyway, and grieved for him.

At its most basic, the challenge of this gospel is to identify what we are trusting instead of God, what we cannot let go of, even to help others, even to save ourselves. What are we relying on to save us instead of God? Because while the challenge to us of this gospel might be to give away more money – it might be – for many of us, the challenge is probably something else; most of us do not identify with the super-rich, as this young man would have.

The challenge to all of us, whatever percentile of wealth we fall into, is to place our trust in the right place, in God, who alone is good and who alone makes us good enough. The challenge to all of us is to follow Jesus, to walk in his ways, loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves, generously and extravagantly; forgiving as people forgiven, healing as people refreshed, proclaiming the good news of God who loves us.

And I know, from just a very short time with you, that this is a generous and loving community. So the challenge for us as a parish is to share that love where God is calling us to share it; to trust God to act in the world around us, and to see where we are called to join in God’s work, to bring our gifts to lay at God’s feet. To seek out the places where Jesus is already walking through Euclid and our other communities, and to follow him, follow his trail through our own neighbourhoods. Because we are no good on our own; we can’t save ourselves, let alone the world. God alone is good; and God will help us to do God’s work, if we only follow Jesus.

It’s a discernment that calls for prayer and for sharing the promptings of God’s Spirit that each of us is offered – because God does speak to us. It’s work that calls for humility, allowing that the least of us might just have the most to offer, that the quietest voice might offer resonant wisdom. It’s ministry that calls for a high degree of trust in God – what is impossible for us by ourselves might indeed be part of work that God will make possible despite our weakness. It’s work that we will do together over the next weeks, months, years, working out together God’s purpose for us in this place.

At the end of the book How to be Good, the protagonist is still trying to find his balance; that rope bridge that he has thrown across the chasm between what he should be able do to change the world and what seems actually possible in the reality of daily, family life seems to be like a tightrope. Discipleship can place high demands on us, and it is an ongoing journey; we don’t resolve once to follow Jesus and everything else is easy; the way of the cross was never easy.

But unlike the character in the book, we are not trying this alone; we have a community of faith to help and to guide one another; and we do not have to rely only on ourselves to make things right. God alone is good, and we are called first to love God, and live into the goodness that God offers us.

__________________

* Nick Hornby, How to Be Good (Penguin (USA), 2002)
**Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, revised and expanded edn (HarperCollins, 1993), 98

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Year B Proper 23: Some novel assistance

Posted on October 13, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

Some further deliberations on the rich young man gospel (Mark 10: 17-31), with help from a Nick Hornby novel.*

(Sunday sermon spoiler alert!):

There’s a novel by Nick Hornby which I read some years ago called How to be Good. In it, the protagonist, an ordinary, grumpy, middle-aged man, undergoes a sudden transformation which makes him want to be a better person. It is a simple idea with profound consequences. From the first time he gives away his and his wife’s cab fare home from a night out, and she is horrified at the idea of taking the bus or walking home, he continues to push his family and neighbours (he doesn’t seem to have any friends, exactly) out of their comfort zones and into the realms of, at best, eccentric, and, in the eyes of many, crazy and irresponsible generosity.

It is definitely not a religious book, but it does get you thinking about what we choose to do and to neglect; where the gap lies between what we could do to change the world and what we do; and what our families and friends would think of us if we slung a rope across and bridged that gap.

The question raised by the book, and I think that it’s the same question raised by the rich young man in today’s gospel, is how good is good enough? How much do we have to do to say that we have done enough? How can we know that we have earned our place in heaven?

…..

At the end of How to be Good, at least as I remember it, the protagonist is still trying to regain his balance; that rope bridge that he has thrown across the chasm between what he should be able do to change the world and what seems actually possible in the reality of daily, family life seems to be like a tightrope. Discipleship can place high demands on us, and it is an ongoing journey; we don’t resolve once to follow Jesus and everything else is easy; the way of the cross was never easy.

But unlike the character in the book, we are not trying this alone; we have a community of faith to help and to guide one another; and we do not have to rely only on ourselves to make things right. God alone is good, and we are called first to love God, and live into the goodness that God offers us.

 

*Nick Hornby, How to Be Good (Penguin (USA), 2002)

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Year B Proper 23: Poor little rich boy

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

“No one is good but God.”
It was a warning. It was the truth.
The rich young ruler had plenty of responsibilities weighing him down like heavy garments, like fur rugs and gold chains. He was weary; he was worried. He did not know if he could bear the burden well enough, faithfully enough. He just didn’t know if he was any good.
Jesus looked on him and loved him.
He asked him, gently, if he had kept the commandments; he already knew what he would hear. This was a decent man, a troubled and trying man, striving to save himself.
He had already forgotten the first thing that Jesus said, that only God is good. Those words were drowned out by the voices that told him every day that he was no good, that he did not deserve his wealth, that he was not up to his job.
Jesus knew those voices. He had heard them in the wilderness. Even now they threatened to whisper their deceits in the night; that’s why he rose so often before dawn, to pray, to escape the whispering demons.
He pushed a little harder: “Try this: give it all away. Would that help?”
And then he leant in close, put his arm around the young man’s shoulders, administered the coup de grace: “Come, follow me. Come with me. My burden is light. My way does not demand goodness but God, and God is with you. God loves you.”
But he heard nothing beyond,”Give up,” and he walked away without hearing the rest.
And Jesus looked after him, and loved him, and shook his head in sorrow for him, and turned again towards Jerusalem.

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Miracles

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

“He went to a town called Nain, and hid disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!'”

I know we’ve been here before. My guess is we’ll pass through again. This morning’s reading made me think, once more, about miracles, about they don’t make miracles like they used to, and we no longer expect them to.
I worked for a little while at a hospital. One day, a young man died, suddenly, tragically, bizarrely. Irrevocably.
His family, his friends, his church decided to perform a resurrection. Loudly, tearfully, prayerfully, ecstatically, noisily, they tried, for hours I’m told, to raise their dead son.
I wasn’t there that day; I know the story because when I came in the next morning, my colleagues were still shaking, shaken by what they had witnessed, in the lives of a bereaved family, in the life of their own faith.
They had done all that they could to help, offered their space and time, oils and candles, advocacy and prayers. But not their faith. They knew dead when they saw it, and they had no expectation or belief that this young man would “sit up and begin to speak,” no matter how hard his mother hoped.
I thought of this family of strangers this morning, reading this other story which ended more happily.
I wondered what would have happened if they had got their miracle, beyond the obvious joy of a son restored to his mother.

“Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us,’ and ‘God has looked favorably upon his people!'”

Would this small and fervent church have collapsed under the weight of the glory, even as it stood, broken-hearted but unbowed by its grief?
What would have happened to the reasonable, fragile faith of my own friends, myself?
Does the absence, or rarity, of those old-time miracles help to save us from ourselves, help to save us for the sake of our reasonable, fragile, fervent faith?

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Year B Proper 22: Little children

Posted on October 7, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for my first Sunday at Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, Ohio – October 7, 2012

I think that, with your indulgence, I’ll save talking about Jesus’ take on divorce and remarriage for when we have got to know one another a little better. For now, I’ll simply say that when Jesus talks about hardness of hearts, he is talking about a state that we have all lived in, lived through, because, God knows, we are none of us perfect.

And that brings me to what I would like to talk about this morning: how we can live more fully, more hopefully, more perfectly into the promises that God has for us, that Jesus offers to us, into the kingdom of God.

“People were bringing little children to Jesus in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 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. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’”

It is to such as these, it is to the little children, that the kingdom of God belongs, and to enter into it, we need to learn from them.

There has been a thread running through the readings of the past few weeks in which the disciples of Jesus persist in getting themselves into a grumbly sort of trouble with him. Actually, I think it goes back to when Peter made his leap of faith and told Jesus that he believed him to be the Messiah, the Son of God. And just after that he said some other stuff that caused Jesus to call him Satan! Then there were the arguments about who was the greatest, and Jesus told them off and told them to look to the children to see how discipleship was to be done. And then last week the disciples told someone off for unauthorized good works, because he was not one of them, and Jesus gave them a lecture for that.

It appears that the disciples, emboldened by their true and brave realization that Jesus is the Messiah, have grasped an authority and a role in leadership in which – as good as those things are – they have forgotten what they had learned before, about service, about kindness, about inclusion, about healing and touching and feeding and forgiving. They have become drunk on power, acting like gatekeepers to Jesus’ love and attention, and they have forgotten that the only power that they have derives from following him and sharing the good news of him.

They need to re-learn that childlike wonder and humility, dependence and joy, fear and curiosity that had brought them to this place of faith in the Christ; otherwise they are in danger of hardening their hearts and missing the point, the hope of it all.

It’s too easy for any of us to become hardened, to let cynicism drown out the voice of the little child.

A little child looks to the adults in his life for safety and care, for food, for warmth, for knowledge and security, for love. Hopefully, he finds it in his parents and family, in his teachers and guides. Hopefully.

We look to our leaders with different eyes. We are cynical about those who have the power to affect our lifestyles, and those who hold our paychecks. We struggle to trust the right people, and to discern which are the right people to trust; we either withhold our faith from them all, or we put too much faith in one or another individual to save us all – elect the right person, and restore our future.

We forget that only God is really the leader of the free world, that only God can hold it all together. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t do the best that we can to elect good and trustworthy leaders, and to improve the conditions of our families and our fellow citizens, and to do the right thing. Speaking of which, if you are not yet registered to vote, you have until this Tuesday to make that happen, to have that say in how we wrestle with these problems for the next four years.

But the next four years of this country, or, for that matter, the next four years in the life of this parish, are not the same thing as the kingdom of God, and when we get cynical and tired and fixated on one detail or another, we miss that bigger picture, that God is in the midst not only of this country, of this parish, of our lives, but of all life, that God is in the midst of our whole lives, and that our whole existence is dependent upon God’s loving care.

When the disciples tried to restrict the grace that Jesus offered, Jesus called them out on it, and brought the children in.

We need to be sure, in our work as disciples, in this parish, in our daily lives, in our prayer and in our families, that we are doing that work of God, the work of welcoming and caring for the little ones, the ones who cannot care for themselves. We need to be sure that we are welcoming the ones who are confused and curious, who are joyful or who throw tantrums, who get smelly (that’s characteristic of very small children, I’m told), who are difficult to understand and to reason with, who are afraid of the dark and of the monsters that hide under the bed.

We do not get to discriminate, to judge, to gatekeep for God.

It’s a challenge, to receive the kingdom of God as a little child, to ask questions as though we don’t know all the answers already, to be frank and forthright about our feelings and our friends as little children are, to admit that we are dependent on one another and on God, that none of us can stand all alone, without any help, any comfort, from the people around us.

It’s a challenge for our new relationship together; it’s a challenge to trust, to be hopeful, frank, and loving with one another, little children of God together, believing that God has work for us to do together as brothers and sisters in Christ.

And there is joy in it as well, there is a playfulness and a lightness to be found in little children, to be found in being little children of God.

Do you remember, when you were a little child, and the grown-ups would ask you what you wanted to be when you grew up, and the possibilities seemed limitless – astronaut, president, farmer, lion-tamer – nothing was impossible or beyond your reach?

Little children know how to live with boundless belief, with hope beyond measure, with a fierce and joyful faith. They have not yet learned what is beyond their reach, and they know that, with the right help, they can achieve anything. We can learn a lot from them, as individuals, as a church, about believing that with God, all things are possible, that with God’s help, we can do great things we have yet to imagine.

And here’s one more thing: have you ever noticed how children have the ability to make you smile just by being? A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a church and there was a baby in front of me who feel asleep before the sermon, and slept like, well, like a baby the whole way through it, so peaceful, a baby who knew the peace that passes understanding, and every time my eye fell on him, I just had to smile.

There are those who talk about the children that Jesus received as the poorest of the poor, as having no power or influence, or even value in that time; but I don’t know that that’s true. When God’s Spirit fell upon Jesus at his baptism, and God said, “This is my Son,” that was an expression of delight and love. When those childless parents in the Bible prayed desperately for children of their own, they were asking for something of infinite value.

Jesus took the children in his arms, and blessed them. To accept the kingdom of God as a little child is to accept the blessing of Jesus, to accept God’s love and delight in us. It is to know that we are beloved of God, infinitely valued by God, who has made us barely a little lower than the angels.

And yes, we sometimes get it wrong, and we give up on happily ever after, and we forget to hope and to trust boundlessly; but God loves us anyway, and welcomes us back with loving arms. God smiles at us, just because we are. And that’s good news that we can, and that we are called to share with anybody, and, like little children, with everybody who will listen.

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