Childlike Church in a Grown-Up World

By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch

September 23, 2012 

Mark 9:30-37

 

 

Here’s something I’ve seen happen in every church I’ve ever served in. Families with children join the church, or start coming back after a long hiatus. They are sitting in the pews with their children. The children get antsy and a bit distracting, as children do. And one of the “long time” members leans over and whispers to the family, “You know, there’s a nursery.”

And as often as not, the family never returns.

“Do not despise these little ones,” Jesus says. And in another place he says, “Let the children come to me, for of such is made the Kingdom of God.”

And here, in our gospel today, he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Meaning, if you welcome a child, you welcome God.

Now, I doubt there’s a soul in this room who doesn’t love children. And, to judge by the number of children in worship and in general at St. Stephen, I think it’s safe to say we do a good job welcoming children and their families. That’s obviously a good thing. That’s how a church grows. That’s how we insure that the faith gets transferred to the next generation, and that St. Stephen has a “next generation” that can “inherit” this wonderful building and the traditions and uniqueness of our church.

That’s our practical reason for welcoming children. There’s also a moral reason—they are the most vulnerable, the neediest. We have a moral obligation to take care of them and to raise them in the faith.

Those are good reasons. In fact, rabbis in Jesus’ time taught that we should “welcome” children for exactly those reasons, but that’s not why Jesus is telling us to welcome children in this passage today.

What Jesus is teaching is at least somewhat illustrated by something that happened to me the Saturday night before my first worship service at St. Stephen over eight years ago. I got a phone call from Lindsey Daniel, who was I think a high school senior then, and in charge of the acolytes. Now if you don’t know what the acolytes are, they’re the folks, mostly teenagers, who carry the banners, crosses, and torches in the 11 o’clock service. So Lindsey calls me in order to tell me about how this works, that I was to go out after the choir but before the Omega Cross—she explained that was the last cross. So I thanked her for telling me all this, and she says, “I just didn’t want you to mess us up!” and I could hear her mother, Paige, in the background saying, “LINDSEY!!!”

But she was right. I could have messed up the whole procession. I was a beginner, a neophyte. Sure, I’ve been a pastor since virtually the dawn of time, but I had never done anything like this before. I had something to learn from her, and I would do well to humbly learn it.

And that’s what Jesus is telling us about children. We should welcome children because we can learn something from them.  He’s very explicit about this just a few verses later in Chapter 10 when He says famously, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for it is to such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, unless you receive the Kingdom as a little child, you cannot enter it.” The true leader, Jesus is saying—and the true disciple of Christ—has something to learn from children, and that is, how to be a neophyte. What psychologists have a called a “blank slate,” a person who is open to new experiences without having the burden of previous experience holding them back; what the Zen philosophers called “having a beginner’s mind,” doing something you’ve done a thousand times as if you are doing something new, for the first time.

In fact, Jesus considers this so critical to Christian discipleship and leadership that in this passage as it is told in the Gospel of Matthew, the Greek word that He actually uses is “Repent.” “REPENT and become like a child.” Ancient Aramaic had no word for “again,” so He couldn’t say, “Become a child AGAIN.”[1] So what he says instead is “Turn back. Radically transform.” Repent could be translated in modern terms as “Rewind. Live your life backwards until you become little baby again, open to new experience, empty of all knowledge and previous experience that make you so sure you are right, all that stuff that marks us distinctively as ADULTS. Do a Benjamin Button. You’re your life backwards into babyhood. Rewind. And then start over again. That’s how to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. That’s how to be the Church of Jesus Christ. Start over.”

Jesus quickly expands the meaning of “little child” into “Little Ones,” by which he sometimes means his disciples and other times means the naïve and the vulnerable, the poor and the defenseless. These are God’s “Little Ones,” God’s children, who God’s “experienced ones,” like those of us who’ve attended church for years, need to protect and learn from. So really, in that definition, we in the church need to look upon not just children, but any new members we get, any of the vulnerable we serve, as our teachers, as our spiritual mentors, as people who have something to offer precisely because they have NOTHING to offer. No, they don’t know our history, our traditions, our way of doing things. That’s precisely what they have to teach us—how NOT to know those things!

But we get too caught up in the ways of the world.  The Gospel of Mark illustrates that by contrasting Jesus’ call to childlike discipleship with the story of the Rich Young Man (Mark 10: 17ff), who comes to Jesus and asks, “Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Now this is a moral and upright young man, who follows the Law of Moses and takes his faith seriously, and is apparently quite successful and serious and responsible. So Jesus says to him, “There is but one thing you lack. Go, sell everything you own and give it to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven; and take up your cross, and follow me.”

And this serious young man is stunned, because, after all, he is extremely wealthy. Multiple stock holdings, some businesses could go belly-up if he sells everything! Maybe people will lose their jobs! Then there’s the money he’s saving for his kids to go to college. And the charities he supports! He’s a big contributor to the Presbyterian Night Shelter and to Museum of Science and History and the Gladney Center!

And then there’s this whole idea of FOLLOWING Jesus. The rich young man serves on multiple boards. He runs a Fortune 500 corporation. He’s very important. He’s not proud of it or anything, it’s just reality. He can’t just drop everything. Too many people depend on him. Not least, his family. He can’t just turn in his resignation, put on a hair shirt, and start handing out tracts on the street and serving lunch to the homeless!

“And so, he went away sorrowful,” the Bible says; “because he had great possessions.” (Mark 10: 17-22)

I don’t want you to think I’m not taking the rich young man seriously. I am. I am, because he’s you and me. We are important, we have responsibilities, we have people who depend on us.

And he’s not just us individually—he’s us, The Church. St. Stephen or any church. We have property and long-standing members and an endowment and an established history of over a hundred years. And there’s a world full of new folks out there who might come to church with their new ideas of who to minister to and how to minister and on and on.

If we don’t watch it, we can become like the rich young man. We can imagine that we’re just too adult, and too important, to drop everything for these neophytes, these beginners. And that is a problem.

I often think about Lindsey calling me as reminder that I’m not in charge, either at St. Stephen or life in general. What’s ironic is that Lindsey called me quite literally to “put me in my place”—that is, my literal place in the procession and recession in worship. Isn’t it ironic that often our complaint about children is that “they don’t know their place”? Jesus is saying that children’s place is front and center.

Which is an ironic way of him putting his disciples in their place, because they’ve been debating about which of them is going to be first in the Kingdom of God. Who is first in the Kingdom of God? And it’s easy, with all our years of experience, to put ourselves first, to imagine that we have some kind of corner on the God market.

But Jesus is saying that we don’t—that our years of experience and investment in the way things are actually blinds us to the way the Kingdom of God is present in the world today, and we forget our place. We forget that our first responsibility as Christ’s disciples is put ourselves in last place and learn from the beginners.

And increasingly, that’s what we’re doing. Newer members have been leaders in our ministry to the homeless and helped us rethink the annual church mission trip. They helped us develop our revised church website. Next Sunday we will have our Second Annual Children’s Sabbath, with worship led by elementary aged kids and younger. Newer members and established members together have taken charge of the church’s capital campaign and building improvements. Even more exciting is the fact that many of the church’s established leaders deliberately and intentionally seek out the advice and leadership of new folks.

All those are good things, but see, this kind of “rewinding” can never stop. It doesn’t take long for the children to grow up and for all these new, fresh faces to become the old hands who think “this is the way we’ve always done it!” All the sudden, the last become first, and it’s “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” As soon as we think we’ve arrived, that we’re all grown up, we’re in trouble.

So rewinding, returning to the beginner’s mind, rediscovering what it is that the child teaches us, can never stop. The good news is that if we let go of being adults, then we are always children, we’re always growing, and we’re always on the path to the Kingdom of God.

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