9-22-2024 Every Single One

These are the children that are welcome to Jesus...are you one?

Transcript

We have a little child in our midst today. How delightful. Wanda, is your grandchild? [My niece; great niece.] Your great niece. What's your name? […Jordan? Jordan.] Welcome Jordan. Did you know the gospel lesson was about you today? Did you know? It's about you. Jesus telling all the grownups there, ‘Move back. Let the children come forward. I want to see the children. Bring the children to me.’ Jesus was kind of fed up with the adults. He wanted the children, so I just wanted to mention it to you, Jordan. You are one of the ones Jesus specifically says he wants. Alright, um, speaking of children I have three stories today about children. First, is from when my oldest son, Adam, was four year… 5 years old. And we went to a big heart-host party with friends and there were lots and lots of couples and lots and lots of children, and as soon as we got there, the children all came running to the door in a pack, kind of like when you see a swarm of bees, grabbed Adam and ran away and he was in the pack. They went into the far back bedroom where I knew there were bunk beds and I yelled as a mother would, ‘Don't jump. There will be no jumping’. And then we went to get a drink and it was maybe 7 minutes later that we heard a big thump and a yell and a (audible deep breath) and a whimper, and we all…all the adults looked at each other and said he jumped. They all came running out of the bedroom and here is my Adam in the back limping. So, later that night I was looking at his, uh, swollen and red leg and he was complaining about how it hurt. And I said … ‘What happened? What did you do?’  ‘Nothing. It just started hurting.’ ‘Adam, you could tell me. I need to know the truth. I need to tell the truth so we could talk to the doctor. Did you jump off the bunk bed?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you climb the ladder up to the second to the top bunk.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘And then you jumped off it?’ ‘No.’ He wasn’t going to tell me. Several days later it was still hurting him and still didn't look right so I called the doctor and said, let's get an x-ray, so I told him we're going to get an x-ray. Told his father we're going to get an x-ray. Got him in the car to go get the x-ray. Went to the place we were going to get the x-ray, stopped the car, put it in park, um, and went to get out and he said to me, ‘Mom, I have to tell you something.’ And I thought confessions! How many confessions have been done in parking lots and cars. So, I braced myself to be a good mom. I said, ‘Go ahead. Tell me.’ He said, ‘I can't get an x-ray.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Cuz, I really am a dinosaur and dinosaurs don't get x-rays. No, they don't.’ That's my first story. My second story [you didn't even know… what… you didn't even know… was…] I didn't even know he was a dinosaur to begin with, so that was a news flash. The next one was there was a little boy whose father, uh… he was one of three sons. He was the youngest. He was four and his father was getting ready to go to Iraq to do his third tour of duty and we had a commissioning service on Sunday morning for him. And in the weeks after Tony had left for Iraq, his uh, his youngest son was acting out in all kind ways; and he wouldn't sleep and he wouldn't eat and he was causing trouble at school… and finally his mom brought him to just talk to me to see if I could help figure out what was going on. And so, uh, we were in a room with a big whiteboard and markers. And so, I talked to him and I said, ‘I know it must be weird being at home without your dad right now.’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Where is your dad? He wouldn't answer me. And I said, ‘Is he here in the United States?’ He just shook his head and he wouldn't say anything. I said, ‘Okay. I know that your dad went to Iraq. How did he get there?’ And he took the markers, and he was quite a little artist and still is today, now that he's all grown up. And he took the markers, and he drew his house and then he drew a place up in the upper corner. So, his house is here in the upper corner. Was here. And he told me that was Iraq. T Then he took the red marker and he went [motioning rapid up and down jagged lines] between the United States and Iraq. He said that's how he got there that's how he's getting there. I said, ‘Can you help me understand what it is?’ He said, ‘It's the line of fire.’ [oh] It's the line of fire. ‘He's going to the line of fire.’ So, you know that he overheard adults talking that they hoped he wouldn't be. This is what his little mind took. And then there was another four-year-old boy whose 2 and 1/2 year-old brother died. Um, huge tragedy in the whole community… and that little boy lived on a farm. And he was after his…after his, uh, brother died, he took up climbing things. And he climbed up on the sink to get to the top of the medicine cabinet. And he was climbing trees. He was 4. And then they found him in the barn where somebody had left the long ladder up… way, way up in the loft of the full-sized barn. So, they got him down and, again, parents were so grief stricken, and they said can you just come over and maybe read a book to Tommy? Talk to him a little bit. We can't get him to stop climbing. We think that maybe it's his anxiety because he's picking up on all the sorrow and he doesn't know what to do with it, so he just keeps moving and climbing. And so I did talk to Tommy and I finally got him to explain to me what he was looking for way up high. And he said I'm looking for Jason because he's up in heaven. So, then I read a children's book called Heaven Is Not Up. We talked about it. He was greatly disappointed to find out that he could not just climb there. So, if you look at those three stories of children, just three that I've encountered, what is the one thing you notice that is true for all three children? What is true about all three children? [Misinterpreting] Yep, they misinterpreted. They heard bits of something right and they misinterpreted that. That is true. What else? [They were hurting] They were hurting. What else were they feeling? [Grief] Grief. They're hurting and they were feeling …[Loss] loss…fear. Did you hear that fear come through? Certainly fear about trying to give a dinosaur an x-ray, right? Absolutely, certainly fear about the line of fire. Right? So, there was fear that all three of the children expressed and that kind of brings me to today's lesson in which Jesus says, ‘Let the children come to me.’ He took a little child and put it among them and taking it in his arms, he said, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child, in my name, welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.’ And from this passage, and its parallels in other gospels, we have churches and nurseries filled with artistic renderings of beautiful, clean, well-dressed children cuddled around Jesus, who by the way, is also clean and well-dressed and beaming. And there it is. Let the children come to me. We know this passage. It's on the picture in the church, and there is no chance that's what the children that Jesus was talking about looked like. Not a chance. In first century Palestine, we're talking about peasant children of peasant parents who were oppressed by Rome, right, who were witnessing violence against anyone who stepped out of line, according to what the Empire dictated. The parents would never have risked bringing the children forward, moving them to the seat of honor, bringing them out front. Some parents might have used the children to beg for them if they were desperate enough. Right? These are the children that Jesus was saying bring them to me. These children who know loss and know hunger, who overhear things that the adults say, and don't completely don't understand it, and maybe are afraid to ask because they've been told to be quiet. Children who are fearful with a free-flowing anxiety that they can't even attach to anything. Those are the children that Jesus wants. And the truth is those children don't always exist next to us or in the house down street or across town or in our schools. The children that Jesus is talking about are the children inside every single one of us, because have you not felt grief? How deep is your sense of loss? What keeps you up at night with fear? What do you wish you had the answer to but you don't know any better than anyone else what we should do about this problem and the problem persists. How many of you have waited for the doctor to call or the operation to be scheduled and, like a child, really wanted to just cling to the car door when it was time to go in for the procedure and yell I don't want to. Right? Became popular in psychology a number of years ago, a long number of years ago now, that we talk about this inner child. And we did talk about it and sometimes we make reference to it, but it's kind of in a ‘yeah I did my inner child work and now I'm okay’. Way. Right? I think maybe Jesus insistence that we bring the children to him is about children, but it's also about us. I think this is Jesus’ way of saying, you don't have to try to climb and climb and climb and climb and compete and figure out who the greatest is. You can set that aside. You don't have to worry and fear and beat yourself up, because now that you have to have the operation of the procedure, there's a part of your brain that's thinking I did this to myself, because I just wouldn't stop doing fill in the blank or whatever you were doing. So, you can't talk about how afraid you are because somehow you think you deserve it. It doesn't have to be a child who is endlessly looking for their brother who has died. Anyone who has lost anyone knows what it is to look across the park or across a crowd at a barbecue or in the corner of a library and swear you saw the person you miss because you miss him just that much. Right? Today's lesson is about comfort, and it's about Jesus saying bring your whole self. Bring your vulnerable self. Bring the part of yourself that you don't like to admit out loud. Bring the part of yourself that is sick, and maybe you brought it on yourself, but dang it, it hurts. And you need to get something for it and you don't want to go alone, but you don't want to take the person that's offered cuz they're going to lecture you the whole way. We need to come as vulnerable, hurting, frightened children because this is whose Jesus’ arms are big enough to gather in Every Single One.