Welcome the Child

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.  

This “and” is crucial.  Hope gives us the courage to acknowledge and bear our fragility with compassion.  This, too, is part of the object-lesson that children provide.  Little children are resiliently optimistic even in the midst of terrible suffering.  There’s an old joke that goes like this:

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.

A Kosher Parable: Reading Mark 7

Sometimes – probably, more often than we realize – we have to remind ourselves that Jesus was a Jew to understand what he is going on about and why it matters to us.  Today’s Gospel reading is a case in point.  Jesus is arguing with the Pharisees about how to observe the Torah – Jewish teaching – not about whether to observe it, but how to do it.  To understand what is at stake in this debate, those of us who are Gentiles need a little background information.[1]

The argument appears to be about whether or not one needs to wash one’s hands before meals.  This isn’t a health precaution, but a matter of maintaining purity from the perspective of Jewish law.  There are two classes of Jewish law under consideration in Jesus’ argument with the Pharisees.  The first are the kashrut or kosher laws defining which foods are muttar – permitted or forbidden.  These laws govern the familiar practice of pious Jews, who abstain from eating non-ruminants such as pigs and rabbits, birds of prey, and sea creatures without fins or scales.  Kosher meat must be prepared in a such a way that the animal’s death is painless, and milk and meat are kept separate.  Although food that is not kosher is sometimes confusingly referred to as “impure,” kosher law actually has nothing to do with the purity or impurity of the body or other items per se.

The system of law that governs what is tahor – clean or unclean, pure or impure – is distinct from kashrut or kosher law in the Torah.  It has to do with the issue of pollution: touching various objects, such as a dead body, or experiencing certain conditions, such as skin diseases or bodily fluxes, which render one impure.  It also governs how one can be restored to purity through certain ritual actions.  Note that “impurity” is not equivalent to “immorality” and does not involve moral condemnation.   A person may very well become impure quite accidentally through no fault of his or her own.  In fact, most Israelites in Jesus’ time were impure most of the time (and today all Jews are all of the time), because purification required a trip to the Temple in Jerusalem (which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and never rebuilt). 

According to the Torah, these two sets of rules governing kosher foods and purity regulations are kept strictly separate.  While kosher food could become impure under certain circumstances, eating such food did not make the body impure.  According to the Torah, carrion is the only food that renders a body impure. It seems the Pharisees imposed a stricter definition beyond that of the Torah, derived from oral tradition (the tradition of the Elders), stipulating that eating defiled kosher food would make you impure.  Hence their strict observance of a ritual washing of the hands before touching food to make sure that the food does not become impure. 

By arguing that only what comes out of the person renders one impure, rather than what one ingests, Jesus is protesting against the extension of the purity laws beyond their specific biblical foundation.  He is actually making a conservative argument for Torah observance in opposition to the innovations of the Pharisees.  Jesus kept kosher.  He simply refused to accept the idea that eating defiled kosher food could make one impure.  This is the meaning of his declaration that all foods are clean.  All food is clean, but not all food is kosher.

Now, this may very well be interesting, but what does it have to do with us Gentile Christians?  Jesus takes the argument to a deeper level, indicating that the laws of purity are a kind of parable.   Those who are concerned with being contaminated by what is outside of us, miss the spiritual import of the Torah’s teaching that it is only what comes from within us – from the heart, from actions flowing from interior intention – that renders us impure.

This is underscored by the other example that Jesus’ uses to criticize the Pharisees: the practice of Corban, of making an offering to God.  Evidently, oral tradition had made provision for people to avoid taking responsibility for supporting aging parents by taking a vow to dedicate their resources as a sacrifice to God only.  Jesus rejects this kind of legal legerdemain as an abrogation of the demands of the Torah: a human creation devoid of the legitimacy of scriptural teaching.  He is sensitive to the many ways we can use the veneer of religion to justify practices that in reality are antithetical to the deeper moral and spiritual meaning of religious practices. 

Far from rejecting Jewish teaching, Jesus attempts to retrieve and protect its core concern to sanctify all of human life through the practices of justice and mercy that form, and flow from, a compassionate heart.  The observance of kashrut and halakhic teaching is in the service of this core.  The literal practice serves to form our intentions and actions in conformity with the love of God.  Becoming obsessive about the literal practice can blind us to the mercy of God that is at the heart of the life of faith.

We do not need to worry about the contagion of impurity.  Nothing and no one outside of us can defile us.  What matters is what we are putting out into the world.  This is what reveals our spiritual condition.

This past week I was visiting with my aunt, a conservative Baptist and something of a biblical literalist, who loves me dearly.  She was telling me about her daughter’s sister-in-law, who was recently married to another woman – in Indiana.  My aunt was lamenting that this newlywed’s parents and other family members refused to attend her wedding and completely ostracized her and her wife.  For them, to be touched by a gay or lesbian person is to risk defilement.  Their purity trumps their compassion. 

My aunt, bless her heart, understands that this was not the teaching of Jesus.  It is not the sexual orientation of their child – whatever they may think about it – that defiled them, but rather their cruel rejection of her.  My hope is that their daughter has the faith to resist internalizing the sense of worthlessness that her family is attempting to impose upon her. 

It seems to me that this is the purpose of our spiritual practices: to inoculate us from the attempts of others to define us as impure, worthless, expendable.  They serve to remind us that we are God’s beloved, holy children.  Our observance of spiritual practices and moral teachings are meaningful only if they help us to see ourselves and others in this way.  Let our compassion be contagious.

Unless our literal observance serves this deeper meaning, it can quickly become a weapon to degrade other people while masking the rot in our own hearts.  This is the tragic outcome of so many purity campaigns:  they reveal more about the hard heartedness of the moralizers than they do about the morality of the “impure.”  The attempts of certain presidential candidates to condemn the impurity of “illegals,” branding them as rapists and murderers, is but the latest in a long history of using the fear of contagion to manipulate and control people. 

True religious observance relieves us of the fear of the other, the fear of contagion, so that we can be free to love and serve our neighbor.  Authentically conservative spiritual teachers – like Jesus – are dogged and dogmatic in their resistance to attempts to dilute the core meaning of faith.   They are adamant about protecting the essence of religious practice:  recognizing the dignity of humanity created in God’s image and preserving the gift of a world full of wonder, beauty, and joy for generations to come.  

Jesus offers us a kosher parable: it is possible to keep the whole law and lose your soul.  How we keep the law, not whether we keep it, makes all the difference.  It is not our purity or perfection that saves us, but only and always the mercy of God.  Amen

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[1] The following reading of Mark 7 draws on the work of Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, especially the chapter entitled “Jesus Kept Kosher.”