Raising Up the Lives of Children: A Sermon on Children's Sabbath by The Rev. Donald Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Pentecost 21 – October 18, 2015
Raising Up the Lives of Children: A Sermon on Children's Sabbath
by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer, Rector
Job 38: 1-7, 34-41 Mark 10: 35-45
I always love that story about James and John – known as the Sons of Thunder – because it describes so wonderfully how many Christians understand their relationship with God. You know, I have a cartoon in my office in which a female parishioner approaches the priest and says, “Rector, I think you ought to be canonized.” And the cartoon shows the little cloud with the image that is going through the Rector’s head – and in that image his face is in a stained glass window with a halo over his head. The little cloud over the parishioner’s head pictures the Rector with duct tape over his mouth, with his hands tied behind his back, ready to be shot out of a canon. Two different images of what it means to be “canonized.”
And so it is for Zebedee’s two sons in today’s Gospel passage. James and John envision themselves perched in Heaven, one of them at Jesus’ right hand, the other on his left, looking down on all creation from the heavenly throne. They want to follow Jesus, but their image of what that looks like is being framed in a stained glass window. Jesus has no problems in seeing them at either side of him – but the background is a very different image. Their image of greatness and Jesus’ image of greatness are two different things.
Today we honor National Children’s Sabbath, when we are asked to consider – and do something about – the plight of children throughout the world who face hunger, inadequate or transient housing, deficits in early childhood development, chronic illness, threat of injury, lack of access to adequate health and mental health care, abuse and neglect, too few positive role models – and public schools that are overwhelmed by the daunting tasks of educating children whose ability to learn is compromised by these situations. And our lessons – especially from Job and Mark – provide us with both opportunity and challenge. The opportunity is to acknowledge that this suffering exists. The challenge is to ensure that we do not take away the message that there is nothing we can do to address it. We may not be capable of ending all suffering, but, like the boy throwing the endangered starfish back into the sea, one starfish at a time, we are surely called to end the suffering that we can affect.
It is all too easy to throw up our hands and say, “It is too big of a problem” or worse, “We don’t have the resources to begin to address the problem.” I have a lapel button that says, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” If we think we don’t have the resources, consider the fact that the United States Congress is about to pass a bill that eliminate the federal estate tax -- what amounts to around a 250 billion dollar tax cut that benefits only the top .2% of Americans with estates of more than $5.4 million. We have the resources. The fact of the matter is that addressing the curse of child poverty is far less expensive than what we do now – which is pay for the costs of dealing with the repercussions of NOT addressing it.
I am proud that Trinity Church has taken an important role as we recognize the value of educational opportunities for all children through the ministries of our Choir School and Trinity Academy, through the ministries of our Christian formation programs for children and youth, and through the ministry of our acolyte program, which has become a leadership development program over the past several years.
Let’s look at what the Book of Job has to tell us. At the heart of the Book of Job lies the question of suffering and Job speaks for all of us when he questions why people suffer. In last week’s lesson, we heard Job lamenting the fact of the wretchedness that had befallen him – he who had formerly had wealth and comfort – and he questions God in the form of a trial. This week we hear God’s reply, in which he questions the audacity of Job to question the provenance of God, who created all things. But even at the end of the book of Job there are not really definitive answers about why there is suffering in the world. But author Carol Newsome explains this doesn’t mean that we can’t draw some conclusions. She writes:
To deny that there is a single definitive answer is not to say that one cannot gain insight into the problem of suffering in a world created by a loving God. What the book of Job models is a community of voices struggling to articulate a range of perspectives, each one of which contains valid insights as well as blindness to other dimensions of the problem. . . By refusing to give the book a neat resolution and declare one of the perspectives to be the solution, the book of Job draws us toward a recognition that our craving for an answer is an attempt to evade what we know to be true. Especially in times of religious crisis, richness of meaning and even a sense of peace are not to be found in a pre-packaged answer but emerge from wrestling with God.”
We as Christians have lost what our Jewish forebears had as a part of their spirituality – the idea of “wrestling” with God, not as equals, but in an effort to explore and find the deeper truths to which God points us.
Job gives voice to all who are concerned about suffering in the world, and today especially, about the suffering of children. How, we should ask, can over 5.2 million children be without health coverage? How, we should ask, can 14.7 million children live in poverty in the richest nation on earth? How, we should ask, can a Black boy born in 2001 – that is, 14 years old – already face a 1 in 3 chance of imprisonment in his lifetime, or his Latino age-mate face one in six odds of imprisonment? God does not provide an easy answer; indeed there are no “easy” answers. But there is a faithful answer for those who are listening.
This brings us to the passage from the Gospel of Mark. The theme of this entire chapter is service: Earlier in the chapter, Jesus instructed his disciples to let the little children come to him, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. He then instructed the rich young man that the meaning of discipleship was not to know and keep the commandments but to place everything one has to the service of others. Immediately following the passage we heard this morning is the healing of Blind Bartimaeus. So in this one chapter Jesus teaches us about the importance of serving those who are young, poor, and in need of healing.
Indeed, servant leadership is the theme of today’s Gospel. James and John want to be rulers; Jesus calls them to be servants. The disciples were as susceptible as most of us are, if we are honest with ourselves, about cultural notions of status, wealth, honor and power. So they naturally thought they should try to get the best seats in Jesus’ entourage – and the other disciples naturally were upset by this grab for power and glory. Recall that back in chapter 9 Jesus caught the disciples arguing over who among them was the “greatest”. Jesus’ response to that argument was to place a child among them and took it in his arms saying, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” But still in this chapter, the disciples regard the little children as distractions not worthy of Jesus’ time or ministry.
In fact, Jesus’ emphasis on servant leadership runs through all four of the Gospels; this is not some fluke in the Gospel of Mark – it is central to Jesus’ message. It is central to the Gospel. On this Children’s Sabbath, I urge us to think about servant ministry in two ways. The first is the traditional personal way – what we think of when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, the type of service that Mother Teresa offered to the poor of India. That type of “hands on” service that so many of us offer through so many of our ministries here at Trinity.
And then there is the second type that requires an entire community to address systemic issues around human need. Just as all of Job’s neighbors had a kernel of the truth in their analysis of Job’s situation, so we as a nation are called to form a consensus around the issue of confronting the issue of child poverty. I cannot believe that there is one member of Congress who believes that child poverty is a good thing. And yet members of Congress do nothing about it and instead respond to the lobbyists and interest groups that finance their campaigns. As voters in a democratic society, we can do something about it.
We need to recognize that servant ministry is more than the manual acts of service that we perform in service to others. It is a way of life, based upon an appreciation of all of God’s creation and our relationship to it, that guides us in the paths of justice as we care for the least, the last, and the left behind in service to our Lord, Jesus Christ. That is lifestyle stewardship. That’s lifestyle servant ministry. And that is what we need to do in order to achieve the greatness to which Jesus calls us. AMEN.