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Children's Influence
- Jim Hamilton
St.
Mark’s Episcopal Church
Sunday, September 24, 2006
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
This Thursday, I helped organize
the first Community Eucharist service of the Seabury Western
Theological Seminary’s new school year. Worrying that
I had forgotten all the intricate details and particulars expected
of us when leading a service, the candles, which communion set
to select, what the presider should wear…all these nitpicky
details, I was not fully immersed in the actual service. I barely
paid attention to the sermon.
It all went pretty smoothly until there was a flow problem
with Communion. It was basically a traffic jam.
It took a redheaded two year old to jar me back into the reason
for the service. His father, one of my classmates, walked him
all the way from the other side of the room during the peace
and said, “Isaiah said that he wants to give you the peace.”
He looked bashful and squished up his face. But then, he opened
up his chubby arms for a hug. I couldn’t have felt more
welcome, I couldn’t have felt more at home.
The Episcopal Church is renown for being fussy. Propriety is
often paramount in Anglican etiquette. And, there is some comfort
in that. Being appropriate at all times can guard from being
too intimate. Being appropriate at all times can shield us from
the most important issues of poverty, disease, education and
the environment. Being appropriate at all times can set boundaries
on who is our neighbor. But, being present, being real, being
CHILDREN is messy. A child talks in the middle of the sermon,
a child asks for more host at Eucharist, a child is vulnerable,
intimate and transparent.
In the ANE, that is what we call Jesus’ time, children
had a slightly different importance than they have to us today.
They meant possible labor. They meant a protection of the culture.
And babies had a very difficult journey to adulthood.
In the ANE birthrate was higher, while the life expectancy
was much lower. They were having many more babies per person
than we do today, but many of them would not live past puberty.
Infant mortality was around 30%, average, meaning that 3 of
10 children would have died before reaching one year of age.
To put that into perspective, in the US it is about .6% (and
that is the second worst in the modern world) and even the country
with the highest current rate, Angola, is still less than 20%.
What’s more, if children made it through infancy, they
were only likely to live to age 20 and before reaching puberty
they would likely have lost at least one of their parents. Only
10% made it past twenty. It was not ideal to be a child in the
ANE. They were a vulnerable group, the first to die from disease
and often orphaned without any chance of being provided for
in any way.
Jesus was asking his disciples to take in these helpless and
nearly hopeless and welcome them as if they were Christ himself.
This summer I worked as a chaplain in the Neonatal Intensive
Care Unit at Good Samaritan Hospital. At that NICU, I witnessed
many fragile newborns. Some were premature and hooked up to
machines; others were born with deficiencies that made them
more susceptible to disease. But, when I was preparing for this
sermon, I was reminded again and again of one particular child.
She was not born prematurely, but she was born with severe birth
defects. Her respiratory system was not developed, she had difficulty
breathing. Her legs were born broken. Her eyes were born crossed
and fixed. And, her brain was only partially developed. I remember
attending rounds where the Neonatologist requested that a nurse
create a document for the parents explaining the fragility of
their child so that authorities wouldn’t presume abuse
if the baby should pass away in transit from the hospital. Her
chances of survival, her chances to live any semblance of a
normal life are more akin to the chances of the child that Jesus
presents to his followers in today’s Gospel. So, I want
you to recast the story in your imagination. Set it today, in
a NICU at a hospital. Jesus is a Neonatologist holding rounds
on all the patients. When he gets to this child, deformed and
barely breathing, he lifts her out of her crib and says, “She
is why we are here, she is the reason that we are called to
this earth. We must take care of her as if she were a VIP. She
is as important as I am. And whoever takes care of her, is taking
care of God.”
For me, this magnifies the import of this passage. Children
are precious and fragile, even more than they are today. And,
we are to serve the most fragile, the most broken. We should
not bother ourselves with progressing our own social standing.
The ANE was an Honor/Shame society. Status and position were
deeply important in determining the social structure. Last week,
we heard a story where Peter actually rebuked Jesus. This holds
a great deal of weight in an Honor/Shame society. Peter may
have been jockeying for control of the Jesus movement, or at
least he was confused as to Jesus’ tenuous grasp on what
they all hoped would be a revolution against the Romans. Because
of their mistaken ideas of the future of Jesus’ mission,
they were fighting over potential cabinet positions in the Jesus
Kingdom. This kind of self-aggrandizement was a common cultural
occurrence, and was often done publicly. Yet, they did understand
that Jesus had a counter cultural ideal. Jesus’ condemnation
of the Pharisees was fresh in the Disciples’ memories.
They knew to not reveal what they were talking about.
But Christ knew what they were talking about. And he, once
again, turned their notion of social propriety on its ear. He
took a child, the story does not say whose, and cradled it.
He charged the disciples to care for it. In my opinion this
is a rallying cry for the spiritual attunement of stay-at-home-moms.
A monk has nothing on a stay-at-home-mom. A child represents
fragility, hope and openness. Think of the Christ child, think
of Jesus telling Nicodemus to return to his mother’s womb,
think of Christ saying, “let the little children come
to me.” We are supposed to care for those as fragile and
full of hope in our culture as children were in the time of
the ANE. And we are also to become like children.
This takes me back to Isaiah’s hug, the redheaded two
year old who jolted me back into the reason for Eucharist. The
Eucharist is a time where we can bind our lives together and
put our faith in the love of Christ. Be like a child. Love like
a child. Have faith like a child. Trust in God like a child.
And hear Christ’s command to take care of all the lost
children of the world. Those who seem to be hopeless are often
the one’s that God uses for the most spectacular miracles.
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