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At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And calling to him a child, Jesus put the child in the midst of them, and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven…”
Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people; but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” And he laid his hands on the children and went away.
SERMON
A curious item crossed my desk this past week. According to an editorial in the “Personal Journal,” a publication celebrating the 300 year-old American theologian and preacher Jonathan Edwards, under the headline, “Hell, Yes” the anonymous writer notes that "69 percent of Americans still believe" in hell, which he correlates to a strange sociological finding that "economic growth responds negatively to church attendance but positively to belief in Hell." (“Evangelical: Right and Might,” Martin Marty, Sightings, 10/13/03) Good times are ahead not because the leading economic indicators are up, but because belief in everlasting hellfire is!
Everlasting hellfire or the eternal rewards of heaven, having no time end to either, riveted the human imagination from Medieval Christian times, an embellishment of the four thousand year old idea that there is an underworld of eternity that parallels this world bounded by time. It is a wonder to consider, that humanity would take what was done, said, and believed in this life, brief as it is, as a measurement for how one would spend all the time remaining!
Time. We spend it, waste it, don’t have enough of it, and our children often have too much of it. In religion it is perhaps the single quality of our lives that is contemplated most. What allegiances do you give your life over to, in the time you have? In order to seek after the highest ideals, to search through our moments for whatever spirit is alive that deserves embodiment in our lives, religion uses time as a tool. “Life nor death can part us, O thou Love eternal,” reads a line of one of our hymns. What is that spirit that is love in all times, and how would we know it in our lives? “It sounds along the ages,” we will conclude this morning’s worship by singing, and begging the question of what is the “it” that is in and accessible to all ages?
There is, perhaps, nothing more personal, philosophical, or religious about our existence than time, for all of us wear its thorny crown as one moment folds into the next; and our personal age is in one sense never more apparent and crucial, and in another way, more meaningless, than when we sit at Lake Michigan on an autumn day and wonder: How many ages have passed with this sight seemingly the same? How many times will I be able to enjoy it? What have I missed and mistaken in my time? What has been my delight?
There is nothing more capricious and nothing more consistent than age and a human being. On the one hand, age has never been about how many years an individual has been on this earth, because that number alone tells us nothing about the character or experience of the man or woman; whom they have loved, how they have lost, what they have gained, who they have become. We say she is wise beyond her years, or he is not as mature as he should be. In another way, age tells us more than we can fathom, especially if we look beyond the number as simply the number of times one has seen Lake Michigan in autumn!
When we think of age we often think the word refers to the number of years one has been alive. But, there is nothing more personal, philosophical, or religious about our existence than time, and I would invite you this morning to look deeper than the number of years you have been alive. If religion is about seeking a spirit that is timeless such that it is “Love eternal” that “sounds along the ages,” we must, in order to experience it, see past the time that borders our lives as birth and death. To catch just a glimpse of the timeless we must ourselves seek some approximate release from time. We need strive to see that age is not just a chronological number.
For example, our concepts of age are based not just upon the number of years we have lived, but also upon what is happening to our bodies. Age is a physiological feeling, too. One mother complains her teenage son suffers from stupidity in the physical risks he takes by emulating something he’s seen in a stunt movie and douses his shirt in lighter fluid and sets it aflame while wearing it. But, adolescent risk taking combines both peer group influence with real bodily and hormonal changes, unlike anything in elementary age or young adulthood. The physiological evidence is powerful. Adolescent boys’ and, of course, adolescent girls’ bodies change unlike any other time in their lives. Forty is not just a dreaded age number but the marking point for significant bodily changes which might actually be the driving force behind our dread. My mother, in her seventies, is not as mobile as she once was, and I know, in watching and talking to her, that her compromised physical mobility makes her “feel old.” Likewise, my body can’t do what it could do just ten years before, and for 20 years in ministry I’ve watched women deal with “the change,” the menopausal alteration of body and feeling precipitating a change in a woman’s concept of herself. Maybe it’s not, “you’re as young as you feel,” as much as it is “what you are feeling is what you think when you think of your age!” Age is not solely or primarily a chronological number. Age is a physiological feeling.
Or, our concepts of age are based upon the time in history we are living. Age is not a chronological number, but an historical number, too. We have actors and actresses in their late 20’s and early 30’s play Romeo and Juliet, instead of, “O my God!,” kids the age of my little boy playing them as the fifteen year olds the playwright conceived them to be! A child born in 1000 AD could be expected to live only 24 years! Our 9th grade Coming of Age class would be well into middle age if they lived then! A child born in 1903 had a life expectancy of 50 years! When the Bible reads that Methusaleh lived 969 years it makes one wonder not how someone could have lived that long, which is of course ridiculous; but what was the symbolic meaning of that particular number, chosen to portray a man which, if he lived to 25 would have been considered old by his culture! Age is not a chronological number! Will people 500 years from now chuckle at Willard Scott’s acknowledgement last week of a 103 year old Kalamazoo woman! Maybe age is the harvest of historical providence! It is a lucky break that we are living in the historical time that we are!
And maybe age is cultural, so your age is a cultural number, not a chronological one. “The true meaning of honoring elders,” a speaker recently admonished a group at a retirement home, “is to be young at heart.” Our culture covets chronological youth, unlike other cultures, and that is so implicit to our living that it influences us in deep and unseen ways. For our culture there is little inherent value in getting older unless you can betray your years and become young at heart. The message is implicit but powerful: Find the child within you and you will be wise appropriate to your years, which is an ironic message in a culture that doesn’t particularly treat its children all that well! Maybe that’s because we want our elders to be children, not our children! Depictions in mass media make it clear that if older men and women act like teenagers again, they have found something valuable, even though, frankly speaking, with an adolescence so full of self-doubt and confusion, I do not really want to act like a teenager again and neither would my wife want me to! Instead of guiding our children to become more responsible adults, our culture emphasizes staying youthful as long as possible, even unto the grave! When Jesus said “unless you turn and become like children,” he didn’t mean what our culture means: that you should believe in magic, believe in things that aren’t real, be innocent and childlike in thinking, be a kid again.
Human beings tend to take extraordinary individuals out of the context of aging in one of two ways. Either the extraordinary individual is looked upon as not affected by age, or age is insignificant in terms of what the individual said or did. So has time done to the man Jesus. If we apply our understandings of age to him his message becomes decidedly different. If we take his chronological age as 33 at his death, then these things can be said.
His contemporaries, including those who followed him and condemned him, were much younger than he was. He was not the unblemished youth tragically cut down in the prime of his life. In his time he was an old, aged man, an elder!
It was the custom of his culture to be subservient to elders. So, that this man through whom so many perceived God, would be treated as a God with whom to be subservient, is understandable given his culture. We portray Jesus as a young adult and his disciples, followers, and enemies as older, which tells you more about what our culture wants to be true more than what was accurate to his culture and time. We want youth to be truthful in their rebellious drive for self-identity and self-differentiation. But, that was not Jesus’ culture or time!
If he was 33 he did not experience the body of a 40 year-old man. He did not experience infirmity, incontinence, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, the deteriorations and alternations of the body that some of us know intimately after the age of 33! He did not experience the bodily changes of a woman throughout her life, which, if she is born this year, is expected to be 79, well over twice his age! This is not to disregard or minimize the enormity of his sufferings, and it is not to suggest he didn’t endure the physical deteriorations of age. He was an old man by his time, an elder by his culture, and he lacked the bodily experience that many of us have had. Yet to understand what he as a man did and did not experience, to understand better the meaning of his life and actions, one need understand his culture and time.
But when it is recorded that he said to become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven he was saying something our culture and our time, and even our bodies, obscure. He was not talking about someone 12 years old, who can make choices about right and wrong, but believes in the most outlandish things, and was in his time someone whose life was halfway over! He was not talking about having the wisdom of a child, because in his culture wisdom belonged to elders. He was not talking about feeling like a child, either, through dressing up our bodily deteriorations to disguise them! But he was saying something radical. That even he wasn’t as close to the kingdom of God as were children, to whom he was as a servant, too! To become like a child is to love like a child.
Children give love to all souls. Children receive love from any soul. To become like children is not to give up the critical mind that can discern the real from the make believe. To become like children is not to give up moral choice or to think that moral ambiguity is somehow imaginary and that God will somehow miraculously make everything all right. To become like children is not to believe in the make believe, not to have allegiance to magic, not to mistake what we insist is right and good for God, to mistake our will for His. To become like children is to realize that our age is not the chronological number corresponding to our years upon this earth. Our age is to be measured by our capacity to love. Become like children and measure your life by the width and breadth of your love. Become like children in your love, for that is the spirit that is alive in all ages!
AMEN.