When God is a Child: Children as Guide and Goal

Text: Mark 9: 30-37


"The Peaceable Kingdom" by Paul Mariani*


There can be something scary about all the energy, unpredictability, forthrightness, and frankness packed into little beings who look so much like us but don't know athe social codes that buffer us from awkward encounters.  So we are uneasy if the child we greet ducks her head and refuses to reply.  Or if the baby placed in our arms starts wailing and can't be consoled.  We don't know what to say if a toddler asks, "Why is your nose so big?"  Which is exactly why we need children in our all-too settled and certain lives.  Many of the world's religions teach that a little child will lead us, that a divine child will save us.  But it is not sweet innocence that makes children such good emissaries of the Holy. It's their ability to strip away pretense and privilege.  It's the fact that they are the iconic "least of these" Jesus said are the best ambassadors of God's realm.

We tend to romanticize childhood but ignore children.  We imagine Jesus gathering around him children who were as well-behaved, well-scrubbed, and well-dressed as the cast of the Cosby Show--because those little ones are easy to welcome: the precocious ones who say amusing things . . . the precious ones who warm our hearts.

But real children sometimes, if we're honest, make us uncomfortable.  They are unpredictable. They are often troubled.  They make so much noise and have so many needs.

Paul Mariani's poem--and Mark's Gospel--will not let us sentimentalize children.  Like the speaker of the poem who nervously faces eighteen kindergartners, Jesus's disciples don't know what to do with the little ankle biters who follow in his wake.  In the next chapter of Mark we will read that the disciples try to block the children's access to Jesus.  Shooing away the children  after Jesus had just told the to welcome them shows how persistent is human resistance to welcome the least welcome.

On this hard truth hangs the doctrine of incarnation: God comes to us as a child.  We tend to pull out this doctrine once a year with the Christmas ornaments. But God comes not only as the peasant baby born in ancient Bethlehem.  God is the child on the streets of modern day Calcutta or Khartoum.  Or Mobile.  And though we think our culture is both child-centered and God-fearing, 22% of children in the U.S. live below the poverty line (according to the 2010 US Census) through no fault of their own.  More sobering still is the statistic that 38.2% of African American children live in poverty, numbers suggesting we care less about these Christ-bearers and the ways of God than we profess.  In our culture we turn a blind eye to the most vulnerable as we overindulge the children of privilege.  Yet even children living in physical comfort can be impoverished in terms of affection and care and guidance.

Perhaps even we at Open Table, so proud of the beautiful and brilliant children and young people in our midst, might improve our welcome.  I wonder if sometimes we assume that a gentle smile is someone else's job.  Or if we go to the other extreme and make too much of a young person who might dislike too much scrutiny? Do our children smell the awkwardness or impatience on us?  Do we sometimes forget that children are not here to amuse us but  connect us to the divine?  We have an obligation to teach them about the life of faith, but they have much to teach us. Jesus said when you welcome them, you are ushering me into your midst.  When you listen to a child, you are hearing the voice of God.

And if that claim sounds strange to our ears, it was even more shocking--probably even offensive--to most 1st Century citizens, who very intentionally marginalized children.

However, children are quite literally at the center of Mark's Gospel account of a counter-cultural Jesus.  For the last 3 Sundays I detoured from the lectionary's progress through Mark in order to preach from James, but as we return to Mark's Gospel, let's place today's scripture in the context of the Mark's entire 9th chapter, which is almost smack dab in the middle of that brief Gospel and certainly at its thematic center.

Chapter 9 begins with the indisputable climax of Jesus's ministry, the story of his transfiguration atop a high mountain. Having just been so exalted by God, Jesus immediately warns the disciples that his ignoble death is near.  Having just been elevated, his next miracle is to heal an epileptic child in the most detailed healing story of Mark's gospel (Mark 9:17-30): from the pinnacle of glory to the service of the lowly.  Then, as Jesus and followers pass through Galilee, he again tells the disciples that he will be killed--and will rise on the third day. Their insensitive response to Jesus' sense of his imminent death? They begin arguing about who among them is the greatest--perhaps to determine who would become his successor.  As the disciples jockey for power, Jesus spies the most powerless figure nearby, a little child, and brings him silently into the middle of the circle.  He holds the child as he explains that the way we treat little ones (like the child in his arms) is the way we treat him--and the way we treat him is the way we will experience God.  The child leads us Godward.

An advent song by Brian Wren is titled "When God is a Child" and the refrain says this:

When God is a child, there's joy in our song.
The last shall be first and the weak shall be strong.
And none shall be afraid.

At a former church we often sang this hymn during Advent, a different verse each week, as a different child each week would light the appropriate candle in the Advent wreath.  One Advent the child lighting the wreath sang part of the song as a solo each week.   The congregation sang together the verse and refrain--until the last line.  On the final line, all other voices dropped out and the child sang, alone, "And none shall be afraid."  What a powerful image of the weak being strong, of the power of vulnerability.

As we see in Mark's Gospel, Jesus welcomed the children, not because they were cute, but because they were considered the least, the most vulnerable, and they were the key to this great reversal of priorities at the heart of his teachings.  When God is a child, we "get" this reversal.  Then God's realm, if momentarily, holds sway.

Our children--the children of the world and the children right here at Open Table--are not only our guides to God but also our very goal.  Again, Jesus welcomed the children because they were living reminders of our goal.  Not by virtue  of their adorableness.  But because a life of stripped-down vulnerability relies on trust. That is my heart's goal.

Have you ever seen the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"?  Brad Pitt plays the title role as a man born with the body of a very old man who gradually grows younger and younger with each passing year until, after more than 80 years of life, he returns to infancy.  And dies.  His life culminates in a new born state.  And that may be what Jesus was recommending to Niccodemus about being born again.  Our goal in life is not to acquire and attain and achieve more and more but to become like a child, bare and vulnerable and dependent totally on God.

Author Bruno Scholz put it this way: "If it were possible to reverse development, to attain the state of childhood again, to have its abundance and limitlessness once more, that 'age of genius,' those 'messianic times' promised and sworn to us by all mythologies would come to pass. My ideal goal is to 'mature into childhood'."

Robin Maas asks this: "How is it, then, that such a fundamental aspect of revelation should continue so consistently ignored, sentimentalized, suppressed?  Why do we steadfastly resist the obvious implications of Jesus' teachings on childhood and even more, his own childhood, as a sign not of the beginning of our spiritual quest but, in a very real sense, as its consummation?"

Why indeed?  Because it is hard to pursue a goal that is about not pursuing a goal.  The spiritual goal is paradoxically achieved by giving up, by "falling upward" as Richard Rohr suggests in the book we'll study in October.

Working hard and being responsible and taking on challenges is healthy and necessary.  We're talking here about a spiritual process that totally redirects our lives.  We're talking about receiving love as trustingly as a baby nurses at the breast of his mother.

The child is both guide and goal.  And children embody the world's hope.  Every time a child enters the world--a child who is like none other--there is fresh hope for the just and peaceful reign of God. Our planet would not be so imperiled if we had been listening to the future generations not yet born but for whom we are responsible.  We need to be led by the child of hope.

Hear the prophet Isaiah:  "For unto us a child is born . . .  and her name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Mother, the Princess of Peace."

Whether we have literally birthed children or not, each of us has the responsibility to give birth to hope. Each of us must nurture new life on this planet.  We are charged to be both parent and child, generating hope and embodying hope, listening to children to hear God directing us.  And each of us lives on faith that God is already upholding us. There is a new way, there are novel thoughts, there are fresh possibilities.  There is hope.  When there are children.  Because God is a child.

PRAYER.  Young God, we would follow your voice that we often hear best from those this world considers the least.  Thy kingdom come, we pray. Thy will be done so that to be first we must be last and the servant of all.