Sermon Mark 10:13-16 October 4, 2015 Ordinary Time; World
Wide Communion
Bless the Children
A tradition that has not changed through thousands of years
and thousands of families is the tradition to bless the children. Fathers in
the Old Testament blessed their children before the father passed from this
life to the next. Mothers blessed their children as they left the home for the
day’s work ahead.
The blessing over someone is to bestow good upon them, to
consecrate them, to set them apart, to ask for protection and guidance, to mark
them as God’s own. We witnessed the Pope passing out blessings upon all those
who he met along the path of his travels. But, blessing giving isn’t limited to
the Pope. All of us have been gifted with this ability to bless others. Now,
blessings however, are more than saying, “Bless you”, when someone sneezes. It
is also more than what we do here in the south. You know how we talk, right?
Yes, that’s it. We say things about others whether they are compliments or
condemnations and we end all of our statements with, “Bless his heart!” Or we
end them with, “Bless her souls.” These are not the blessings we are talking
about today and not what Jesus said with the child on his lap.
The blessing is a welcoming, it
is an encounter with the one who willingly receives. The blessing is an
openness to radical hospitality.
The willingness of Jesus to receive all those who were
brought to him opened up the opportunity for the followers of Jesus to witness
a social revolution. Jesus was creating a greater equality of all people,
men were not the dominant ones as he lifted up the women, healed them, gave them
voice, spoke of their rights. Jesus then took the children in his arms and used
them as the springboard for the future by welcoming them openly and blessing
them publicly.
The disciples were frustrated with
Jesus and the attention he was giving to all those who had no status. They were
his followers and if they were going to invest their time and their lives to
him he could at least draw a crowd of elite rather than the vulnerable. Who
wants to be a follower of someone who only relates to broken people? Who wants
to be a follower of someone who hangs out with the marginalized, the stranger, the
foreigner, and the least of all these people in the world?
Every generation since Jesus took these tiny ones in his lap
has had to wrestle with who is really welcome into the kingdom of God?
We are imperfect people living in
an imperfect world where fairy tales do not come true. We live in a world where
people hurt each through neglect and ignorance, through intent and force.
People die at the hands of each other all across the world. There is not a
continent that has gone untouched by the violence of humanity. My father had a
friend who left Holland the same year he did and headed to Australia. They were
in search of the place where they felt they could live safe and secure. His
friend moved his family to San Francisco and raised his family there. But,
after awhile he became frustrated again with the violence and he decided to move
his family to where he believed it was truly safe. He moved his family to the most southern tip
of New Zealand. And it was safe there. Until one day my father received a
letter from his friend letting him know once again how disappointed he was
because there, even in New Zealand violence existed. As broken people our very
lives show the symptoms of our failures toward one another and to God.
Jesus has been showing the disciples all along that no one
is worthy or more valuable than another. Jesus has been telling the disciples
that they can’t fight over which one of them is greater or who gets to sit next
to him in heaven. If this story was written in the 21st century they
would be asking who gets to ride shotgun with Jesus.
As Christians these days we try to find a church where we
belong. We seek a church home where we can find people who will welcome us as
we are in all our ways, warts and all. We put ourselves in a vulnerable spot
the first time we walk through a new set of stained glass doors. And we
sure hope the folks on the inside don’t send us away because we might be
bothersome to Jesus.
Part of the welcome, the blessing, that comes from the open
arms of Jesus, is that he lets those who enter his arms know they are at
home with him in his kingdom.
It might be impossible for us to open our arms in welcome
the way Jesus does, and so we close our eyes and remember that it is God who is
doing the welcoming through us and everything is possible through God. Our
dependence on God allows us to let go of trying to justify ourselves and we can
open ourselves up to God’s mercy and grace in Jesus Christ who receives us and
all others as we are.
You see the disciples were trying to be good followers of
Jesus but were still trying to figure out how they belonged in God’s kingdom.
They were wondering (and I believe we all do too) how does God love them, and
how do they know they belong to God?
You see, the first six questions of the catechism that we
use to teach the children helps answer the question, “How are we to receive and
enter into the Kingdom of God?”
Here they are:
1.
Who are you? I am a child
of God
2.
What does it mean to be a
child of God? That I belong to God, who loves me.
3.
What makes you a child of
God? Grace-God’s free gift of love that I do not deserve and cannot earn.
4.
Don’t you have to be good
for God to love you? No. God loves me in spite of all I do wrong.
5.
How do you thank God for
this gift of love? I promise to love and trust God with all my heart.
6.
How do you love God? By
worshiping God, by loving others, and by respecting what God created.
As Jesus says to his disciples ‘Welcome the kingdom as a
child welcomes it.’ Let us welcome God’s kingdom, let us welcome Jesus as he
welcomed the child. Let us receive the least of these and let us be received as
Jesus received. Let us find our home and find our family here in this place.
Let us receive the gift of grace so freely given and let us be blessed.
Amen.
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