Some of you may have noticed that we’ve had a little bit of
a baby boom at St. James. Willard,
Annabelle, Virginia, Walden Mae, Calvin and Percy Elizabeth were all born in
the past year, and the Scarisbricks are expecting their second child soon. They are all beautiful babies and a wonder to
behold! There is something about the
birth of a child that renews the energy of the entire community. They make us feel alive again, full of
possibility.
Watching my own son applying to colleges this fall, I’m reminded,
too, of how quickly they grow up. Some
of you have just dropped-off your own college freshmen at various schools
around the country, I’m sure with a mixture of pride, grief – and relief! The relief comes in no small part from our
recognition of the fragility of life, how vulnerable and dependent we all are –
especially kids – and how much can go wrong along the way. Getting a kid to college is no small
triumph. You have to dodge a lot of
bullets along the way.
Whether or not we are parents, we get it that children evoke
in us a sense of both hope and vulnerability. We are hardly surprised then, that Jesus
should embrace children and make of them an object lesson for our
edification. Jesus welcomes
children? Big deal, we think, who
doesn’t? Only curmudgeons and
misanthropes are put out by the cries of children interrupting our
solemnity. But there is an edginess to
Jesus’ welcome of children. He isn’t
doing it just to make us feel warm and fuzzy.
This isn’t about “oohing” and “ahhing” over babies (not that there is
anything wrong with that).
Jesus is inviting us to consider what kind of people we want
to be. He is reminding us of the knife
edge we walk between vulnerability and hope.
And he is challenging us to be a community in which vulnerability is
protected rather than exploited, so that our hope is not in vain.
Notice that Jesus offers this lesson in response to an
argument that his disciples were having about which of them was the
“greatest.” Recall that Jesus was
traveling with his disciples through Galilee on their way to the city of
Capernaum. As they walked, Jesus was
teaching them that the Son of Man will be betrayed and killed, and that three
days later he will rise again. This is
the second time in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus proclaims this teaching and still
the disciples don’t understand what he is talking about. And they are afraid to ask.
Jesus is talking here about his own vulnerability and the
vulnerability that we all share as human beings. He will suffer, be rejected, and die. So will we.
And yet, Jesus trusts the power of God’s love to raise him up and hold
him in being in a way that we can not imagine or anticipate, transcending
suffering and death. Jesus lives his life
with full awareness of his vulnerability, but always encompassed by this
horizon of hope which empowers him for service to others.
The disciples do not understand and they are afraid. They don’t want to acknowledge their
vulnerability. They retreat into an idea
of “greatness” that distances them from the pain of the world, defending
themselves with the armor of success. Their image of greatness is about being
the “big man” upon whom others depend, while never having to depend upon anyone
else.
While we are not told this, it seems to me that we can infer
the disciples’ idea of greatness from the counter-example that Jesus
offers. Jesus’ defines greatness very
differently, as being a “servant of all.”
Then he takes a child and sets her in the midst of the disciples. (And I’m convinced it was a girl child,
because they are the most vulnerable people in the world.) He embraces her in his arms and says,
“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes
me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
What is the meaning of this object-lesson? Children are the most dependent, most
vulnerable members of society. They are
the least of the least. Jesus takes the
most vulnerable person and places her in the center of the community. True greatness lies not in our
self-sufficiency and invulnerability, but rather in our capacity to accept our
mutual dependence and be of service to each other in our need. Nothing reveals more about the kind of person
we are – the kind of community we are – than how we respond to human
vulnerability.
Why is this so important?
Accepting our vulnerability is the means whereby we touch into the
wellspring of compassion. In
acknowledging our own need, we develop the empathy necessary to respond with
compassion to the vulnerability of others.
In welcoming the vulnerable, we welcome God, opening the door to the
divine compassion that heals and makes new.
It is only by accepting our vulnerability that we become transparent to
the divine love that raises us up beyond our fear of suffering and death, and
allows us to live in the horizon of hope.
This is a very counter-cultural teaching, offering a very
different image of mature adulthood. We
tend to raise our children to take care of themselves, to become
independent. The goal is for them to become
self-sufficient. Awareness of
vulnerability in ourselves is something to repress, and a weakness in others
that we are encouraged to exploit to our advantage, pushing them to the margins
of the community. That is what it means
to be successful – to be “great.”
Jesus is suggesting something quite different. He would have us raise our children to take
care of each other, to recognize their mutual need. The goal is for them to become servants who
recognize their own vulnerability and so respond to the vulnerability of others
with compassion. Mature adulthood is marked by the capacity to ask for help and
respond creatively to human need in service to each other. Jesus envisions the kingdom of God as a
community in which vulnerability is acknowledged, and vulnerable people are
placed in the center of the community rather than the margins.
As we gather around our vulnerability with tenderness and
care, we create the horizon of hope that empowers us all for service. The church is that community which places the
most vulnerable at the center of its common life, and thereby welcomes God into
our midst. Later in Mark’s Gospel,
Jesus, against the protests of his disciples, will gather children to him and
bless them, saying “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of
God as a little child will never enter it.”
We receive the kingdom of God by acknowledging our vulnerability and
living with hope.
Worried that their son was too optimistic, the parents of a little boy took him to a psychiatrist. In an attempt to dampen the boy’s spirits, the psychiatrist showed him into a room piled high with nothing but horse manure. Instead of displaying distaste, the little boy clambered to the top of the pile and began digging.
“What are you doing?” the psychiatrist asked.
“With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”
How else could we bear the absolute dependence of childhood
– and all the manure that life throws at us - without an absolute trust that we
will be provided with everything we need?
And maybe a pony too!
Jesus offers us an image of the community of his followers
with a little child at the center of their common life and says, “This is what
the kingdom of God looks like. Welcome vulnerability. Be of service to others if you want to be
great.”
For the past few weeks I’ve been carrying the image of
another child, Aylan Kurdi: a three year-old, alone, washed up on beach in
Turkey, having died along with his older brother Galip and his mother, Rahem,
in their attempt to flee the horror of the civil war in Syria. They had hoped to escape to join relatives in
Canada. But there was no community
gathered around Aylan and his family.
They were not at the center, but as far on the margins as one can
imagine, lost among the four million Syrian refugees encamped in Turkey,
Lebanon, and Jordan.
Pope Francis, in calling for each of the congregations of
Europe to welcome and sponsor a refugee family, and doing so himself in the
Vatican, provides us with an object-lesson much like that of Jesus. He is reminding us of what it means to be
great. He is challenging the church to
actually be the church: the community of
disciples that places the vulnerable at the center of its common life, rather
than at the margins.
I feel convicted by the Pope’s response, but also
encouraged. As we welcome Willard,
Annabelle, Virginia, Walden Mae, Calvin and Percy Elizabeth, perhaps they will
remind us of our own vulnerability, and inspire us to find creative ways to
place the most vulnerable people, the Aylan’s of the world, at the center of
our common life. They are depending on
us to teach them what it means to be truly great.
