Sermon: As A Child

Today's Psalm and the reading from Hebrews invite us to dig once again into the question of who we are before God:  ‘what are human beings that you, God, are mindful of them, or mortals that you care for them?' The question gives voice to the wonder that we experience when we reflect  on our own existence, the diversity and strangeness of other people, the variety and sophistication of creation and above and within and through it all, the ever caring, ever graceful, love and glory of God.

Such wonder could take us in many different directions. Today is St Francis day and so we might well be drawn to reflecting with him on our sense of fellowship with animals and flowers, sun and moon, fire and water and  even death itself, for it was Francis who wrote, ‘Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape."

My own attention has been grabbed however, not by the sublime Franciscan vision of the harmony and fellowship of all that is, but by the last few lines of our gospel reading: the story of Jesus, the disciples and little children. Although very short, the story captures both reality and mystery and reminds us both of human fear and stupidity as well as of the promise and claim of the Kingdom of God.

People were bringing little children to him 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 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.

                And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

As you may know, this little passage is often read at the funerals of children and babies. And so we find that Francis' Sister death puts in an appearance once again. I am just back from holiday in Hungary and in the ethnographic museum in Budapest I enjoyed very much the exhibition which gave a good indication of how life would have been lived in peasant communities before they were impacted on by the industrial revolution.  The final exhibits were about customs around death and there was a very small coffin. The label read, ‘with infant mortality at such a high rate the death of a baby or young child was not considered a tragedy'. We find that sad and shocking but the sentiment is perhaps not so far from the experience of many human beings. And yet we are often quite alienated from it today. The book of Psalms is far too blasé about child murder for us to use some verses in worship (See Psalm 137 verses 8 and 9), and a typical Alexandrian papyrus from the first century AD records a letter from a husband to an expectant wife saying ‘if it is a male child let it live, if it is female cast it out'.  And it is obvious from the demographics if nothing else that that there are parts of the world where such infanticide is still practiced. And I don't know about you but I feel that, compared with the way we would write it up today, the grief and traumas associated with the massacre of the innocents in Matthew's gospel is relatively understated.

Let's stay with the Bible for a moment but to consider a different matter. When we read the gospel stories we find it easy enough to work out who are the goodies and who are the baddies. Thus we are against the grumpy elder brother in the story of the Prodigal son and we silently sneer at the people who pass by the wounded man on the Jerusalem to Jericho road before the Good Samaritan comes to his rescue.  We smile at Peter's clumsiness and impetuosity and we ‘tut tut' under our breaths as Pilate washes his hands. When it comes to the Pharisee and publican and prayer we absorb the story at one level and think ‘thank God I'm not like that awful Pharisee'. And so it is that in today's story we lazily join with Jesus in rebuking the disciples who are holding children back.  But when we do so we are in danger of paying more attention to the faults of others than to the radical message of love and grace that is wrapped up in this and every gospel story.

When Jesus said ‘let the children come to me' he was affirming the humanity and spirituality of the very young.  We like to think that this is second nature to us as but the reality, I fear, is that we really struggle to relate appropriately to children as individuals, as a church and as a society.

So what is our attitude to children?

It used to be said that children should be seen but not heard, and there are churches and perhaps families where this is still the ideal. This is children as decoration.  Another old attitude to children is that they need to be another pair of hands to get on with work as well as another mouth to feed. Child labour persists across the world today and is rightly seen as a scandal.  But I would suggest that there is another scandal which is that children are very often not allowed to work in the home.  Thinking back I cannot remember a time in my own childhood when I was not expected to make a kind of work contribution to the household and later to my father's business. In bringing up my own children it was much the same.  We did not call it work. We called it helping. To see children as workers and helpers is to honour their dignity as human beings. Of course this can go too far, childhood should be the age of play and learning and the work that children do should not get in the way of these two priorities, indeed I believe it can often augment and enrich them both.   Childhood is not about relentless leisure and luxury but about freedom from the burdens of responsibility that belong to adults (and which adults carry best when they have had a good childhood). The tragedy for children in our culture today is that they are given a powerful cocktail of leisure, freedom and pressure - peer pressure to conform and consumer pressure to shop.   This combination can rob them of the blessings of true childhood as readily as any stroppy disciple or Victorian aunt.

You will think that my own model of childhood is to see children as little adults. That's more or less what I think but it is better expressed as seeing adults as big children. Children are vulnerable adults who need to be protected in various ways because of their innocence and inexperience and immaturity. 

That's certainly part of what Jesus was saying when he said ‘let the children come to me'. Let the vulnerable ones come. And this, of course, is all of a piece with his concern with the sick and the outcast and the poor.  Indeed I think the more we equate ‘children' with ‘the poor' and ‘the sick'; the closer we get to understanding the priorities of the kingdom of God and the essence of the gospel message. It might not make much sense in terms of the children we see going off to nursery in the back of a four by four, but it makes a lot of sense in terms of the lot of children down the years and across the world.

Jesus said that we need to be as a child to enter the kingdom of God.  A lot of preaching tries to explain this by distinguishing between being childlike and childish but personally I don't want to go there.  Rather I want to invite you to consider the circumstances in which you begin to feel most as a child, when you  are taken back to the vulnerability of innocence, inexperience and when you know that for all your life experience you are not yet really very mature.

And I want to suggest that it is the circumstances which weaken or belittle us, which disempower or alienate us. The experience of losing a job, of getting ill, of being injured in an accident, of having a stroke, the experience of finding ourselves suddenly poor or betrayed or shut out or simply bewildered by the behaviour of others.  These are the kinds of experiences that make us ‘as a child' and it is when we are in this state, a state of acquired or rediscovered humbleness, that the message of the gospel becomes relevant and the doors of the Kingdom begin to swing open.

For it is when we are in this state what we know that we cannot earn God's love and care but that we must simply accept it as we are.  For it is not the charm of children that Jesus responds to but their ‘objective humbleness'. Sometimes our circumstances remind us that we never really grow out of this objective humbleness. But all too often the pressure to be adult robs us of this spiritual childhood. But it is a spiritual matter and it is our spiritual work to remember, recall and re-inhabit our nature as children of God each and every day. We would be better adults living in a better world if we could manage that. Sadly however, it is not something we can achieve by effort but only by entering into vulnerability.  The good news here is two fold. First, the God in whom we believe is precisely the God who will meet us and care for us when we are at our most vulnerable and humble, frightened and frail. When we are as a child before others and before God.  And the second part is that St Francis is right. Sister death is not to be escaped and as she draws near to us, or to a loved one, so we, if we are wise or if we have wise counsellors, will rediscover that objective, childlike, accepting humbleness that is the entry requirement for God's Kingdom.