“One Such Child”

Mark 9:30-37; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8

James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a

¹³Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are one with gentleness born of wisdom. ¹⁴But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. ¹⁵Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. ¹⁶For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. ¹⁷But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. ¹⁸And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

^4:1Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? ²You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. ³You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

⁷Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and the devil will flee from you. ⁸Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you.

Mark 9:30-37

³⁰They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; ³¹for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” ³²But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.

³³ Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” ³⁴But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. ³⁵He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

³⁶ Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ³⁷ “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

The Sermon

Somewhere there is a yellowed photograph, a family picture with the grandfather at the center. You wouldn’t know it from the picture but the grandfather, who had immigrated from Serbia forty years earlier to spend the rest of his life working and then owning a farm in Indiana, had a notorious temper and didn’t suffer fools gladly—and at one time or another pretty much everybody found themselves in that category, as far as he was concerned.

On his lap is a toddler, maybe two years old, just old enough probably to understand some words and maybe speak a limited vocabulary. But the toddler in that photograph is grouchy and whiny and fidgety and fussy.

I don’t know if it’s the barest hint of a vague memory or just pure imagination when I look at that picture, but I see in my mind a whole family who have quite correctly lost patience with my whining and fidgeting and fussing. Everybody’s a little on edge: this two-year-old won’t stop being a two-year-old; but come on, they’re saying, not now. Not when we’re trying to keep the patriarch of the family calm long enough to get the picture. And having become aware that everybody’s upset with me, now I’m more upset than I was before, and it looks like it’s going to be a total disaster and all my fault.

And somehow, out of nowhere, all of a sudden there’s a little bounce in the old man’s knee, and while everybody else is more and more frantically saying to the little kid, “Quiet, quiet!” the demanding old man with the short temper is smiling at him and saying, “Leave him alone. He’s all right. Take the picture.”

Do you remember the first time somebody spoke up for you? Took you from feeling like you were the least of all to making you feel like you were on top of the world?

A friend of mine had a landscaping job during summers in college and would occasionally have to ride in the truck with his employer. This was not always perhaps the most salubrious environment as said employer had a habit of leaving the windows open and, seeing an attractive woman, would offer up witty repartee such as, “Whoo-oo!” (leaving my collegiate friend hiding his face in his hands and silently shaking his head).

But one time the window was rolled down and as they came to a stop at an intersection, the boss noticed a big kid bullying a little kid. “That make you feel pretty tough?” he asked and both kids looked up. “I tell you what,” he said, staring right into to the bigger kid’s eyes, “You pick on him, I’ll pick on you.”

How do you think that little kid felt?

Do you remember a time when somebody really went to bat for you?

I heard about a German lady; she’s probably gone to her reward by now. But as an older woman she remembered being a little girl, being interrogated by Nazis, and they were starting to do some act of torture to her, and one of the Nazi guards finally let his humanity surpass his uniform, and he said to his fellow torturers, “For God’s sake, stop it; she’s a seven year old girl!”

And as an older woman, she said to the amazement of those around her that whenever she remembered that man’s voice, in that hellish, satanic context, it was still one of the warmest memories of her life.

Did anybody ever speak up for you when you thought there was no one around who possibly could?

On the way to Capernaum, the disciples argued with one another over who was the greatest.

When they got where they were going, and went into the house, Jesus asked them—and I’ll paraphrase this—“What were you idiots arguing about on the way?” And nobody said anything.

So he sat down, and he called the twelve, and he said, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child, and put the child among them; and taking the kid in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

It won’t be the last time he talks to them about children, and the next time is one of the few times we see Jesus downright irritated. In Mark’s next chapter, people are bringing their children to Jesus, and he hears the disciples saying, “Get these kids outta here!”

And Jesus becomes “indignant” and says to the disciples, “Let the children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”

And it doesn’t say this exactly, but you may well imagine the disciples remembered what Jesus had just told them in Capernaum. “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.”

Do you remember a time when you were a child and somebody really spoke up for you, made sure you knew you were welcome?

I hope so, because to experience that kind of thing as an adult can be kind of tricky—you don’t want somebody making a scene, you don’t really want the attention drawn to yourself; you don’t want to end up feeling like you owe somebody a favor; you certainly don’t want to look like you couldn’t have taken care of yourself just fine.

For adults it always seems to take an enormous leap of humility to let someone else stand up for you, speak and act on your behalf.

But we remember first responders, not so long ago, running into a couple of buildings that everybody else was frantically running for their lives to get out of.

And we remember people in many of our lifetimes having to find the courage to say, “I know you and I go way back, but if your business isn’t going to serve my black friends, you’re not going to see any more of me.”

And maybe, if there’s any such thing as a collective subconscious or anything like it, we can still somewhere deep within us remember what I felt like when Jesus picked us up and put us in the middle of his inner circle—the central, most important group—and said to them, “it is to people just like this child that the kingdom of God belongs.”

And instead of identifying one kid, or one group of kids, or one kind of kid to put ahead of everybody else, he says, “I’ll go to bat…I’ll go to the wall…I’ll go to the cross for all of you.”

You don’t have to worry about being left alone or picked last for the team any more. And you don’t have to live your life as a struggle to finish in first.

“Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you.”