Sermon, August 5, 2007 -- Mark 10:13-16

“Welcome the Little Children” (Mark 10:13-16)
Rick Olson, August 5, 2007

Suffer the little Children. That’s often the way you hear it, suffer the little children . . . but I don’t much like it, ‘cause it’s got an edge to it, you know? As if it were a burden, as in all right, all right . . . we’ll suffer the little children . . . but of course, modern translations like the one I just read don’t have suffer, in the old beloved King James Version translation, it translates a Greek word that means allow or leave as in allow the little children the freedom to come to me, tolerate the little children coming to me,

But today when we read it, it’s so burned into our consciousness by years of Sunday school, we say well of course suffer the little children, and we sometimes even do it with our mouths in a rictus grin as the little darlings run amok at the back of the sanctuary, we say “Oh well . . . suffer the little children,” with a little laugh . . . but because we’ve heard it forever, it’s come to mean something kid of trivial, kind of trite, but in Jesus’ day it was actually pretty radical.

And to see why that is, you have to understand the position of children in 1^st Century society, which wasn’t quite as high as in our own . . . in fact, children were sort of the prototypical marginal people, the prototypical mouths-to-feed, right up there with widows, and even below slaves and women, who were at least capable of work . . . little children, and it’s not an accident that it’s little children, weren’t considered worth much until they were of working age, which came at about puberty . . . and so when the disciples speak sternly to the folks who were bringing “little children” it was a bit more than don’t bother me now, kid, I’m busy or keep those children quiet in the back of the sanctuary . . . it was on a par with the Syrophoenician woman, who was a gentile and a woman to boot, and her daughter completed the trifecta of marginality, of exclusion—Gentile, female and a little child to boot . . . and Jesus didn’t just suffer her, he healed her

So it’s a pretty radical thing that Christ has done, suffering the little children, or as our boring old translation has it, let the little children come to me, and Jesus is indignant that the disciples had tried to exclude them, it made him mad, riled him up, got his goat, that the most helpless members of society were being excluded from fellowship with him.

And it’s very clear that the little children are examples in this passage, they’re types . . . look

at what Jesus says: “do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” Such as these, folks like these, and so people who are like little children are also the ones to whom the kingdom of God belongs. And notice that he doesn’t say “it is such as these who are welcome in the kingdom of God,” but it’s such as these to whom the kingdom of God belongs. They own it . . . people who are like little children, who are on the bottom of society’s rung, the widows and orphans, the halt and the lame, the poor and oppressed, these are the ones to whom the kingdom of God belongs.

This is another way of saying what Jesus says over and over again in the New Testament—the first shall be last and the last shall be first. The lowest on the society’s rungs, the folks who are at the back of society’s bus, who are at the most outside circle looking in, those are the ones who own God’s kingdom. And what about the rest? What about the people like the religious authorities of the day, in no way on the outside looking in, what about the well-to-do, in no way on the ladder’s lowest rung? “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says—and you know it’s important when he says that—“Truly I tell you: whoever doesn’t receive the kingdom of God like a little child, whoever doesn’t come unadorned by society’s trappings, humbled in goods and spirit, whoever doesn’t come as the least of these, will never enter it.”

Brothers and sisters, it’s good to remember that in the first century church, adults as well as infants were baptized in their birthday suits, as God made ‘em, nekkid . . . and it was a symbol of this humility, of this coming to God as a little child, of being the last instead of the first. When all the world’s trappings are stripped away, replaced by the blinding white clothing of Christ. And as we baptize these precious children, so helpless, so sweet, so dependent upon us for their every need, I ask that you remember that ultimately, to live the fullness of the Christian life, to renew and revitalize ourselves daily, we must come to him as one of these, welcoming not only these little children, but everyone into God’s warm embrace.

People of God, we’re about to witness the amazing grace of God, who welcomes the most helpless, most dependent members of our world into the family of God. And through this witness, through our seeing of this welcoming, we can relive our own baptisms, whether we actually recall them or not. As we witness these events, re-member, re-construct, re-constitute your own baptisms, always re-calling just whose you are. Amen.