Community Church Sermons

Year B

October 7, 2012

Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost

World Communion Sunday

Children’s Church

Mark 10:13-16

Rev. Martin C. Singley, III

Senior Pastor

LISTEN IN!

I like to imagine that this beautiful story in Mark 10 is kind of like what happens when Rhonda or John call the kids forward for the Children’s Welcome (at the 10:15 service). The kids come running from all over the place, just about doing flips and cartwheels down the aisles, trying to be the first one to reach the chancel so they can slide down the stairs on their bottoms (oh yeah, if you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it!), and get the best seat right next to the Pastor. The girls are dressed up so pretty, sometimes with lots of bling and glittery stuff in their hair, and the boys – well, the boys are boys. What interests me about them is not their fashion, but their action – like a couple of weeks ago when Jake Blevins and Kyan Walker Krajewski took one of Rhonda’s props – a diaper – and were hitting each other over the head with the diaper while Rhonda was holding forth with the high truths of theological wisdom! Oh, I love Children’s Time and – most especially – watching John and Rhonda desperately trying to survive the moment.

Now in some churches, this kid-stuff is not welcome. I’ve had members in some of the churches I’ve served who’d react to all this by saying, “These kids today!! Why, when I was a child, I used to sit quietly in church with my hands folded, listening intently to the Word of God. Children today are just not as well-bred as I was. Why do you know that, just to get to church, we had to walk five miles – uphill – in the snow – carrying the piano so we could sing…” Oh yes, some church-folks don’t much care for kids.

But thank the Lord, Jesus did not belong to that crowd! Oh, some of that crowd was there, even among the disciples. There they are in the story, desperately trying to get the kids to not be kids, shushing them up, and keeping them from getting to Jesus. After all, Jesus had important stuff to say to the “big people.”

When Jesus found out about this, the Bible tells us he was “indignant.” That’s a nice respectable word the Bible translators felt was more fitting for general consumption than the actual word which pretty much means, “Jesus was really ticked off!”

“Let the kids come to me!” Jesus commanded. “Don’t hinder them! After all, the kingdom of God belongs to them!”

You know, if the Church really is the earthly presence of the kingdom of God, maybe we can hear Jesus saying it this way, “Let the children come. The Church belongs to them!”

I think these words of Jesus are important not only because they invite children into the fellowship of the Church, but because they reorient our very understanding of the Church.

The Church is to be a Children’s Church. It may be full of grown-ups, Q-tips, and people like Bob Puckett who are so old they knew God when God was just a boy. But listen to what Jesus says about us big people. “You’ve got to become like these little people! Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

Children’s Church.

That’s what we are called to be!

Today is World Communion Sunday. This special Sunday was started by the Presbyterians back in 1936 as a means of celebrating Christian unity with other denominations. The idea caught on and in 1940 the predecessor organization to the National Council of Churches adopted it and helped spread the idea around the globe. Today – over the course of this Sabbath – millions of Christians from countless denominations across the world will set aside their differences and gather at the Table of Christ. We will break bread together, and drink wine (or grape juice in our case), and we will do what Jesus asked us to do whenever we come to the Table.

We will remember him.

What do you think would happen today if we remembered Jesus for this moment in our Gospel text from Mark 10, when he welcomes children and tells us all to become like them? And what would happen if we looked around the table at all those people gathered – here in this sanctuary – and there from every corner of the earth - and saw them as Jesus sees them.

As little children!?

I was once asked to go to a hospital to see a man who was at the end of his life. I didn’t really know him – in fact, I don’t remember his name these many years later - but I had an impression of him and it wasn’t a good impression. He was a hard man, a guy who always seemed to be angry about something. He didn’t treat other people very well, and was very critical of everybody and everything. I saw him for what I thought he was like.

But that day, when I came into his darkened hospital room, he was sleeping, lying on his side, hospital gown wide open in the back, dentures in a glass on the bedstand, hair rumpled, face unshaven. When I came around to the other side, I saw that he was lying in a fetal position, hands up by his mouth almost as if sucking his thumb. He looked so small and helpless, and in the pain of his dying, he was making muffled groaning sounds –like he was calling for his mother.

For the first time, I saw that man not for what I thought he was, but for WHO he truly was – a little child, some mother’s little boy, a child of God.

We have a problem in the Christian Church these days. It’s a problem we share with people of other faiths too, but we are Christians and our religion tells us that before we look at the speck in the other’s eye we should be sure to check for logs in our own. And there is a log in our eye. A big one.

“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” the apostle Paul writes in Romans 3:23.

And it’s true. We have all sinned – every last one of us. We’ve broken the rules, violated commandments, hurt others and ourselves.

Sin is a reality in our lives.

But sin is not WHO we are. Long before you ever committed a sin, you were created as a child of God, in the very image of God – and God said of his creation, “Behold, this is very good!”

That’s WHO you are. There is an image of God in you! There is a goodness in you. You are God’s child!

The problem that pervades the Christian Church these days is that we have stopped seeing the WHO of ourselves and each other, and have too often substituted the WHO with the WHAT.

We see people for WHAT they have done, WHAT they are doing, WHAT they haven’t done, or are not doing. We see people for their faults and flaws and sin and not for their identity as God’s beloved children. Long before we see people as the children of God, we label them as sinners. And then we tie millstones of guilt around their necks.

I recently reconnected on Facebook with an old friend – a young man who lived near my first church. He grew up into his twenties and, somewhere along the line, met a girl with whom he fell in love. They decided to move in together and found a nice apartment complex in which to set up housekeeping. Everything was going along beautifully, until the fire. I don’t remember what caused it, but early one morning the apartment complex burst into flames. The tenants – including my friends - barely got out with their lives. They lost all their possessions. Standing on a sidewalk across the street watching the conflagration, my friend and his love were sobbing great tears of sadness, and without coats to wear, were shivering in the bitter cold of winter.

That’s when a neighboring pastor came by. He knew my friend and went over to see him. This pastor then launched into a diatribe in which he claimed the fire was God’s judgment upon my friends for not being married. And after making sure he had told them what awful people they were, he got back into his car and drove away.

I wonder how differently that story may have gone if instead of seeing my friends for what he thought they were not, he had instead seen them for WHO they are – children – a son and a daughter of mothers and fathers who loved them – the beloved children of God made in God’s own image. Maybe – just maybe – if he had seen them as children, that pastor might have passed on his need to judge them and instead given them his coat to wear, and put his arms around them and said, “It’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this together.”

Children’s Church.

One of the ways we can become that is by reorienting our vision – seeing people not for the WHAT but for the WHO. And then – like little children – using our imaginations to find creative ways of helping them grow into the people God created them to be.

One of the reasons I enjoy Facebook is that people put up pictures on their wall, and some of those pictures are fantastically meaningful. Here’s a picture someone shared this week (show pic).

It may not be obvious at first, but the little boy in this picture is wheelchair bound. So his parents incorporated the wheelchair into his Halloween costume! He’s the ice cream man in a fancy ice cream truck! Can you see the sign that says “Buster’s Ice Cream?!”

Isn’t that wonderful?

I think when you begin to see people as children, you come up with both an urgency to help those who are having a hard time with life, and a childlike imagination that allows you to figure out how to do it. You begin to realize that YOU have gifts that can make life better for someone else. One of the great ministries of our church is something called the A.C.T. Luncheon. A.C.T. stands for Adult Community Training and is an agency that provides assistance to people with disabilities. A.C.T. assists some 59 individuals in our area. Every month we invite them to come and have lunch here at the church. Judy Stiles and her kitchen angels put on their wings and serve up good food and lots of love. Some of our very talented folks come and sing and entertain. I think one of the really beautiful sights around our church is a parking lot full of modified vans and handicap buses that signify the A.C.T. luncheon is in session! And YOU support that helpful ministry to these beloved children of God. When we open our eyes to SEE God’s children, we discover new imaginative ways to HELP God’s children!

And just as importantly, we learn that we are all children who are part of a family that is larger than we realize. Today is also the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Week and every year in our church we observe this week. Many of us here today are dealing with depression, or bi-polar disorder, or schizophrenia, or any of the other many illnesses that prevent people from being able to cope with life. And within our church family there are many who have stepped forward to say WE are the ones – our CHILDREN are the ones – who so often are pushed out to the edges of society because of mental illness.

But not here.

Not in Children’s Church.

In Children’s Church the arms are open wide, and EVERYONE is welcome to take a seat at the Table of the Lord.

“The Community Church must become a children’s church,” Jesus said. I want to ask you today to commit yourself to helping us become that.

And I want to say something specifically to YOU CHILDREN who are here today.

You may be burdened by the weight of life, the consequences of things you’ve done, regrets for things you’ve left undone. You may feel trapped underneath all the WHAT’S of your life.

But when you come to the Table today and eat the bread and drink the wine, Christ will be taking from you all of those WHAT’S, and lifting them to the Cross where all sins are forgiven and new life begins. And in Holy Communion, God claims you as his own and gives you an identity that can change your life and our world.

You are a child of God. Together, we are a Children’s Church.

“Let the children come,” the Lord says, “for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”