up in an airplane

flying in an airplane actually forces you to draw closer to god weather you want to or not. In some way you expect part of it, that is depending on how morbid you might be in expecting your untimely demise. But there is something about the gripping fear that takes a small moment of faith and expands upon it. It had the potential to make something wonderful. We're all so... terible really. We need fear and horrible things or else 90% of us would never face God or anything. We would just coast. And watch tv, and seek headonistic experience. Thank you God for the blessing of a terrifying, exasperating, infuriating life.

Abandon Everything

Matthew 19:13-15

13Some people brought their children to Jesus, so that he could place his hands on them and pray for them. His disciples told the people to stop bothering him.14But Jesus said, "Let the children come to me, and don't try to stop them! People who are like these children belong to God's kingdom." [b] 15After Jesus had placed his hands on the children, he left.

Deuteronomy 11:13-21

¹⁸ Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. ¹⁹ Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ²⁰ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, ²¹ so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth.

I have a niece who’s name is Zoë. She’s 3. She and her family came down for a visit not too long ago and, among other things, we all had a chance to hang out in the back yard one afternoon.

I built a sandbox back there for just such occasions.

We could hardly get Zoë out of it. And the sand box is something that I can still get. I can still sit in there with her and play and shovel and in some way understand the allure of the sandbox. So we were back there playing in it, and she did something surprising.

She was just sitting there in the sand and then she leaned forward and laid down in it on her stomach. She started making a face plant sand angel, arms and legs moving the sand around. It was great. I just sat there watching her and thinking, I should have made this thing bigger—I want to try that! She was just swimming in the sand, and she gave no explanation to me as to why, because I am sure that it was clearly evident to her, and needed no explanation.

Now her mother and my wife were a ways off and I don’t think they saw what was happening. I had a flash of concern, I thought, Should I stop her? Should I get her out? Maybe scold her? But at the same time I thought of what the damage really would be; a little dirt in the clothes? Maybe some sand in my house when she changed for her bath? I can handle that. So I just let her keep on. And while I was watching her and laughing, I thought to my self, Now THAT is playing in the sandbox. That is some serious sandbox time. I thought too that since I didn’t have kids, I didn’t immediately know what was the right thing to do, what were the rules, but the more I watched her just wallering in the sand the less I figured that I needed to stop her.

She saw me chuckling and grinned this huge grin at me and then sat up and started heaping sand on my knees.

Kids are great aren’t they? The Bible has some very specific things to say about children as well, and even makes some of its most important stories include the childhood of that person. Isaac and Ishmael, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, David, Josiah, Timothy. There are verses and verses of what the Bible says should be done to and for children.

Genesis 15:5 talks about children as a reward from God, as part of His promise to the people of His own.

Exodus refers to the people of God’s chosen as children. Over and over they are addressed as such.

Psalms 8:2 describes children speaking about the strength of God and silencing His enemies!

Mark 9:37 is a passage which has Jesus telling us that to be welcoming to a child is to welcome Christ himself.

Matthew 21:16 Jesus talks about reveling in the songs of praise that children were offering him.

We read another few passages this morning. All of these things add up to one thing in my understanding that children are important.

And that may sound like a, No Duh, kind of thing to say to everyone. Obviously kids are important, where would the human race be without them?! We have children’s camps, children’s time in church, children’s Sunday school, pre-school, Montessori, baby Einstein, transitional children’s food, children’s fashion, toy sections in every store on the face of the earth. Obviously children are important!

But, really, I am meaning that children are spiritually and emotionally important to us. Think about a child, and not about the mundane misunderstandings that have to take place in order to get them to live in the world of adults. Think about that kid in the sand-box and what is really occurring there. There is complete involvement, an eagerness to participate, laughter, questions, and imagination.

Apply those same ideals to worship, or our life of faith and children can cultivate the spiritual life of others with those traits.

Everything is new to them and they help us see God through new eyes. They ask questions that help us clarify our beliefs and add energy to our own prayers to God.

What is worship? Children worship with each new discovery of their lives. The aspects of worship--reverence, respect, love, awe, praise, adoration, appreciation, and honor—these come naturally to children.

With all of these things in mind I think I might go one step further and say that children are spiritually integral to our lives. In that mind set it gives new meaning to the phrase “Be fruitful and multiply.” But those words make a strange kind of conjunction with what Christ says later about children and the kingdom of heaven don’t they? God isn’t telling us in Genesis to populate the earth with our progeny just for the sole purpose of crowding the land with swarms of humans, but instead is giving us a biological charge that he knows will be another way for us to understand and experience God while on earth.

Because you have to be an adult to perceive the wonderful things that children do. As a child you are just living life. As adults we can see the experience and understand it and allow it to affect our spiritual nature. But we have to allow it.

In the Gospel lesson today, we have a pretty classic tale that we have probably all heard before. Jesus is out and about with the local people and there are whole groups of them who have brought their children. Now, children in this society are viewed very differently than today. They are socially and physically powerless. Nearly half of all children in the ancient world died before they were 12. In gentile communities a child would often be abandon if the family couldn’t provide for it.

The disciples in our reading are busy being about the work of the kingdom. They have the Roman and the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees breathing down their necks at every turn. They just don’t have time for the foolishness that politically powerless children represent at this engagement. Jesus needs to be about telling people how to throw off the yoke of oppression and learn a new way to seek the will of God. This is important stuff. Take your kids and go home people. The word rebuke in our reading is “epitimao” in Greek and means strongly hindering. You could almost imagine the disciples as line of bouncers at a concert, refuting those who aren’t making the cut, denying entrance to the backstage.

Jesus however turns all of those notions completely on their ear. He realizes the truest form of what the Father was saying when the original couple left the Garden of Eden. He is able to see beyond the social feelings of the time and see what God means for in our children. And he says two very important things. First, that while he and the disciples are working to bring the kingdom, it doesn’t belong to them! It belongs to the following generation. He says to the disciples, you are working for a legacy, not for your own interests.

The second thing he tells them is that further if you cannot act like a child in regard to God you will never be able to receive what God has in store for you. And then the scripture does something wonderful. It describes Jesus’ tender actions that have become the inspiration for scores and scores of paintings the world over. He takes the children in his arms and blesses them.

This is a blessed statement for us. In these few words Christ gives us subtle and important instruction in life. First that we are required to think of our actions here as a legacy for the following generation. And not just the day in and day out grind of providing for the family, putting food on the table, and clothes on their backs. But instead the spiritual provision of how to act, how to seek God and how to understand the faith.

And as is His style Jesus asks us to do something and then in the same series of sentences tells us how to fulfill the change. You want to know what you need to teach your children? Well, it’s what they already do by nature. How does a child believe and love? Ever had a child zero in on that one special stuffed animal? They believe that against all the evidence this thing of fluff has emotions and heart just like any of us. They love it with all their hearts making no distinction. The commit to it with total abandon.

I think again of little Zoë in the sandbox. Embracing every grain in the joy of the feeling and the ability to just play. That is the heart that God is requesting from us. He tells us, if you want to see the true kingdom, then come like this. Concentrate only on me, commit to the action with everything that you are. Wallow around in my Love!

Go on a walk with a child. We were walking with Zoë and every pebble she picked up was interesting and special. She gave every single one of them to my wife to put in her pants pocket. We would only walk a few steps before she would pick up another. Children approach the world with wonder and questions. Reverence, love, awe, praise, adoration, appreciation, and honor come naturally to children.

God tries over and over through scripture to have us understand the meaning behind that. The importance of this constant wonderment.

The verse from Deuteronomy might seem a little odd this morning, but I want to draw it in here. In verse 19 when it starts talking about how to teach the children, I think it is making a little joke. “When you sit at home and when you walk on the road, when you lie down when you get up…” Yeah, on the one hand it’s a great piece of scripture that tells us that anytime is the time for talking about God and who He is, but more than that it’s making a little joke about kids in general. What parent reading that wouldn’t think, yeah, if I can get a word in edgewise. Kids ask questions and talk before bed, they need stories or extra hugs or water or whatever, they talk getting up, they talk on walks they talk when you are sitting, they want to involve you and play, and DO…

In one way it is saying that we can teach children and answer their questions not just in the church, and that means all of us, not just the parents of those particular kids. Yet in another way it is exemplifying to the adults what kids already know. God is everywhere, worship of God can be everywhere, and out hearts should be in that desperate place of needing to find out more and more and more all the time. God is infinite. And if we really believe that then we can also believe that we will never really know all there is to know about God.

I think we get to a certain point in our adult lives and think, well I know enough now. I might figure out a thing or two here and there, but really.. I’m kind of done. Much to our great and faithless tragedy. We loose the ability we once had as children to be in constant question and wonder about all the facets of God.

And so God blesses us with children; who have that awesome ability not only to quiz you to death but to love you implicitly at the same time. And that is a great way to treat God. Question and ask out of that desperate need to know Him and His world better and better and still Love Him without any reservations.

So you want to enter the Kingdom? Not only are we called to live and work for it, in order to ensure the legacy of faith and a beautiful world for the next generation, but each and every one of us, must realize the amazing power and blessing that comes from living a spiritual life exactly as a child would live it. Get in the sandbox, and lie there with total abandon.