ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
The Fifteenth Sunday of Trinity, 20 September 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass
Readings: Wisdom 1:16-2:1 & 12-22; James 3:13-4:3 & 7-8a; Mark 9.30-37
Mark 9:36
He took a child and put him in the midst of them.
I suppose He liked children. I don't really know. Do you remember those old Bible illustrations, in which Jesus wears white, and everyone else is slightly grubby, and they cast adoring glances at the innocent children playing in a little light dust? There's probably one up on the wall here somewhere. I love all that, but we're going to have to forget those children; this isn't Victorian art appreciation, this is us meeting the living God and what happens then. And we can forget modern children too. The child Jesus lifted up and put down in front of his disciples was not a protected species. The child had no rights. Childhood was something to be got through as quickly as possible, because a child was a useless creature. Childhood changes. Today we have children aged twenty-six.
A child at the time of Jesus stood for everything we don't want to be: uninformed, immature, no status, owning nothing, a useless mouth, earning nothing, ignorant, weak, and probably dirty. Yet Jesus gathers us together, and puts a child in the middle, and says, This is my ambassador. How you treat these useless mouths is a measure of what you think of me, and what God means to you. This story has layers of meaning so deep and so rich that we can feed on them all our lives, finding different meanings as we grow older. In one sense Christ shows us himself. The dirty, status-less child, the non-person put in front of us by Jesus as God's ambassador, represents the crucified one. All that was true of a child, the exclusion, the lack of status in society, was true of one who was crucified.
Why did Jesus resort to this bit of street theatre with a child? Because He was exasperated with his disciples, that's why. They were kicking up a fuss about who was the greatest. Who's in, who's out, where am I on the scale of things, do I count for much? It sounds pathetic, I know, and it's what we do all the time. We can't help it. There is in the Christian faith an antidote to this poison of constant anxiety about oneself. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. The greatest turns out to be the weakest. We help them. So we are helped along our spiritual journey, because our rivalry, who's the greatest and all that, just dissolves when we look at the child who is to be welcomed as the greatest, as God.
There's a scary passage in the Wisdom of Solomon in which we learn that the ungodly - and that's us in case you were wondering - the ungodly shall be punished according to their own imaginations: that's the limit of their lives, what they do, what they think. They summon death, we heard today, they consider him their friend, because our life is short and sorrowful. Our first lesson was from the Wisdom of Solomon. It's a book in the Bible which everybody thinks they've read, but they probably haven't, because it's in the Apocrypha, those books in the middle which aren't in everyone's Bible. It's not the Song of Solomon, and it's not Proverbs by another name, it's the Wisdom of Solomon. It's about what Wisdom is, or who she is. It's about our love affair with God, sometimes it's on, sometimes it's off; it's about the difficulties we all go through. It's about the idols we worship. It's about the ungodly and how they, I mean we live, the dangers of negative and pessimistic lives, and the threat always posed by the righteous man, who makes us look bad. The very sight of him is a burden to us. The book describes our lives. I commend it to you. Now he's giving us homework. It's in that book, for example, we learn that the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God.
As Christians we try not to live at the mercy of our own imaginations, comparing, contrasting, judging, frightened of the judgement of the righteous man. We can hear a different song. For you and I are also that child whom Jesus takes in his arms: we are those children without status, immature and weak, but now raised to a new dignity by what Christ has said about us: whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. He puts us in the care of his disciples. That's it. So it is as children of God that we come to church. It's a very good way of being in church. Just as I am, standing here, sitting there, now, as free as children, leaving outside our fears, our net worth which we are frightened of losing, our lives of fantasy wins. None of that. Just as I am, welcomed now. The Christian, like the child, has nothing. Children are born believers. Children do not believe in death, we have time on our side, a future, a lifetime with God, an eternal lifetime. Like children our arguments amount to very little. What were you arguing about, said Jesus to his disciples. They were arguing about who was the greatest. As if it mattered. Whoever welcomes us welcomes the God who has saved us from ourselves.
What is on offer is a new freedom to approach God. At communion we leave our seats, and, just as we are in the present moment, we walk to the altar. We walk on our own, yet in company. That is a sacred action. for each of us, it expresses our trust in a God who has noticed us, as Jesus took that child in His arms. God comes forward to welcome his children. Communion illustrates, in dramatic liturgical form, what is happening all the time in our lives, as St James tells us in his letter this morning: Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.