St. Paul's Episcopal Church

St. Paul's Episcopal Church
425 Cleveland Ave SW
Canton, Ohio 44702
Phone: 330-455-0286
Fax: 330-455-9818
E-mail: office@stpaulscanton.org

16 Pentecost
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Canton OH
Mark 9: 30-37

September 20, 2009
The Rev. Barbara L Bond

Out of the mouths of babes

The Gospel of Mark gives us a portrait of Jesus’ disciples that is sometimes unflattering. When Jesus speaks to them, they never seem to get it. He tells them what is going to happen to him, and they seem to just stare at him. Duh? Well, let’s be fair. We have the advantage of hindsight. We know that Jesus was betrayed, killed, and after three days he rose again. For these less-than-brilliant fishermen, the concept was mind boggling and they couldn’t take it in. Perhaps it was too much information – too painful to contemplate. So let’s give them a break. They just didn’t want to go there.

So Jesus and the twelve continue down the road, and making conversation with each other, they start arguing who will be greatest in the Kingdom! They weren’t sure what the kingdom was, they weren’t sure what Jesus was talking about, but they were quite sure about seniority and status. I’m the greatest! No, I am!

Jesus must have overheard this conversation, because when they got to Capernaum, he sat them down and asked innocently, “What were you talking about on the road?” And no one answered. I imagine Jesus sighed, and wondered how he could illustrate something important to them, so that they would really get it.

So he took a little child. I imagine they were sitting in a circle, and Jesus put the child right in the middle. And I imagine they thought, What?

See, children had no status in those days. In our time, we love our children, we talk with them, we plan our lives around them. Not then. A child in Jesus’ time was very vulnerable, likely would not survive childhood, and wasn’t interesting to the community until it was an adult. It was women’s work to raise the child, and mostly children were not really visible. Jesus sits with twelve men, and puts a child in the midst of them. He got their attention.

Jesus was trying to teach them about the great reversal in the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of Men was all about power – after all, they lived under the Roman Empire, and the Roman Peace was all about military power, violence, and force. The Empire was peaceful because it was powerful. One did not challenge Rome’s military and political power. The disciples had bought into that idea when they argued about who would be greatest among them. And Jesus said, no, no, no.

In God’s kingdom, everything is reversed. The greatest will be the one with the least power. Look at this child. She has the least power in our society. If you want to have power in God’s Kingdom, then you have to be like a child. Open, innocent, without guile. No bickering about power. Just welcoming and accepting. Wow. Whoa.

So – with that in mind, I had a talk with our children this morning. This is the first day of Sunday School. In years past, I’ve shown up with a plan, and told the children what we were going to do. But not this year. We met up in the St. Nicholas Chapel this morning, and they told me what we are going to do. Here’s what they said:

First, they prayed for endangered animals, and sick and homeless people. And they said they want to continue hearing Bible stories.

Then they wanted to help others. The Bake Sale in December will once again benefit Heifer International, and the children are excited about making beautiful items to sell, to raise money, to send farm animals to poverty-stricken areas of the world.

And in two weeks, they want to visit a homeless shelter themselves, in New Philadelphia, and interact with the children there.

And next February, they want to make Valentine cards for our homebound and sick parishioners, and hand-deliver the cards.

I hope I have learned something from the children. I hope I can take this lesson into our community, and learn to listen to all of you. And I hope you will listen to one another. And listen to Jesus when he says that we should be servants, not power brokers.

This morning we are going to have a meeting after this service, where we get into the nitty-gritty of the Thanksgiving Basket program. We have received much good advice from the Martin Luther Church folks who previously ran this program. Maybe one of the most important things they told us was this: we can try to control this process, and impose all kinds of requirements and double-checks; but in the end, there are a lot of hungry people out there, and we are the servants. Our savior told us we are the servants, and it is our job to pay attention to the least among us. I hope we are ready to do that.

AMEN