“From Good to Great”

Mark 9:30-37

September 24, 2006

St. Paul United Methodist Church of Little Rock

Reverend John A. Fleming

Like many of you, I grew up with pictures of Jesus hanging on the walls of my Sunday School rooms. There was no such thing as rotational Sunday school in those days. There were no murals of city walls and camels and lush green trees. When I was a kid in Sunday School, the walls were made of plaster and painted white and pictures of Jesus hung on them.

I remember some of those pictures. There was the one painted, I later learned, by Warner Sallman. This picture of Jesus hangs in nearly every Christian church. It is the one of th head and shoulders of a somber Jesus whose eyes seemed to follow you across the room. You’ve probably seen that picture of Jesus. In another one of my Sunday School classes, there was a full bodied picture of Jesus with the smallest of a lamb folded in his arms and in the other was a shepherd’s crook. In this picture, Jesus is standing on a hillside looking down at the sheep and watching them closely. It is kind of like the image that David paints with words, the one of still waters and green grasses. I like that picture of Jesus. I remember another one. My guess is that you have seen it, too. It is the picture of Jesus sitting on a large rock. There is a smile on his face and gathered around him are children, ten or twelve children, who seem to be hanging on to every word of Jesus.

Children, as you know, had a special place in Jesus’ kingdom. While everyone else tended to ignore anyone shorter than their waistlines, Jesus noticed them. He saw them hanging on to their mothers for dear life when they were afraid or shy. He saw them trying to keep up with the grown-ups when they walked and when they fell behind, Jesus noticed that some of the grown ups nearly pulled their arms out of their sockets to help them along. You might say that Jesus saw how adults took care of children when other adults were around, but tended to lose interest when no one was looking.

In the world we live in, children are high on our list. When we hear of someone who is pregnant, we begin to pray that all will go well. We go to the hospital when a baby arrives. We send gifts. If we are parents, we dress our children nicely. We send them to dance class. We go to their ball games. We ooh and aah over our children. In Jesus’ day, children weren’t the main event, they were fillers. They were gifts of God who someday would be useful for something. Someday they would help take care of their parents. Someday they would hold down good jobs. Someday they would have children of their own. But for now, they were, well, just children. Jesus was interested in them, which was not the norm. Jesus was not afraid of babies. He held them in his arms. He blessed them. He knew how to hold them, placing one of his hands behind their wobbly heads. He knew how to pass them back to their nervous mothers without dropping them.

In our day, children are innocent and playful and vulnerable and honest and fresh faced and cute and loving, for a while. If you have been around children for any length of time, then you know that children can get fussy and noisy and clingy. As one teacher observed, “Even the best of children will knock each other down for a favorite toy.”

So Jesus wasn’t holding them up as moral examples when he took children in his arms and blessed them. He never said that we should act just like children. What he said was this, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Which, of course, was another way of speaking about God.

So says Jesus, if you want to spend a little time with God, then get down on the floor with Julie Ann. Get finger paint on your new white shirt and play with play dough. Laugh at the joke she just heard and wants to tell you over and over again. There aren’t more important things. The laundry is not more important. Checking your electronic mail is not more important. Even earning a living and getting a raise is not more important. She is not interested in any of those things. Opening your life to her is better than getting a raise or finishing a project. She won’t be able to lend you any money. You cannot list her name as a job reference.

Our District Superintendent, Reverend Phil Hathcock, once served the church where my Conway family attends. There was a note low on his door that read, “Anyone shorter than this line does not need an appointment to see the pastor.” In his own way, Phil was saying that children are important to him.

Look at our children. They have no status. They have no influence. They have no income. Which, of course, is what makes her wonderful in God’s eyes.

Now what is Jesus up to here? Our lesson for this morning is another one of his lessons about the kingdom and how the things that we think are important are not and how the world we live in ought to be turned completely upside down, on its head. It is a world where the first are last and the last are first and anyone who thinks they are on the top rung of a ladder are in for a surprise. Jesus takes a child and places her in his lap. Then he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes God.” Jesus, you see, is daring us to welcome a nobody. He is challenging us to believe that in God’s kingdom greatness is only available to those with no ambitions to be great.

The entire lesson came about because Jesus caught the disciples playing a little girl as they made their way to Capernaum. Jesus has just predicted his arrest, death, and resurrection. Now he and the disciples are nearing Capernaum. Jesus walked ahead. The disciples staggered behind. When the twelve were sure Jesus was out of ear shot, they argued among themselves about who was the greatest among them. Jesus called them on it. If you’ve ever tried to pass a note in school and got caught doing it, then you know how the twelve felt when Jesus turned to them, caught them you might say, and asked, “What were you arguing about on the way?” You could have heard a pin drop. Mark tells us that they were silent. They were silent because they were arguing about who was Jesus’ favorite. They argued about who was the best disciple, who was the most faithful disciple, who would have been voted Most Likely to Succeed.” They did that, I think, because they heard what they wanted to hear when Jesus said, “The Son of Man is about to appear.” They thought a showdown was about to happen. They thought the kingdom was about to come. They were sure that those who were with the Messiah when all this happened would have special places. When the Messiah sits at the banquet in his kingdom, the disciples wondered which one of them would be sitting on his right and which one would be sitting on his left. They wanted to know, “Who is first? Who is best? Who is greatest?”

So they played a game. We all do this when we are afraid of something. We act like nothing’s wrong. We change the subject. We talk about something else. Something else makes us feel stronger. That is what the disciples were doing. That is why Jesus sat them down for a leadership lesson. That is why he said, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he reached for a child. In effect he said, “So you want to know who is the greatest. Let me show you. Here she is, all twelve pounds of her. She can’t even sit up on her own. She doesn’t have a job. She has no money. She is the last and the least, and the greatest in God’s eyes.”

In our world we set up hierarchies that sometimes we aren’t even aware of. Barbara Brown Taylor is one of my favorite preachers. She tells a story about the Sunday that she stood standing in the foyer of the church where she was the pastor. A father with his crying child passed by. His wife was behind him with their second child in tow. The second child, the older child, was beaming and excited. The preacher in Barbara Brown Taylor had to ask, “What’s wrong?” The mother explained that her older daughter, the excited one, the beaming one, had just had her first lesson in being an acolyte. The Children’s Minister had just finished the lesson. She had just learned the ropes. Her younger sister was there, sitting on the front pew, taking this all in. She was excited about what she was seeing and so she called out, “I want to be an acolyte, too!” The children’s minister looked over at the child and then up at the mother. Her look asked, “Are you going to tell her or should I?”

For the upteeth time in her short life, she was about to be told no. Her mother said, “Honey, you will have to wait.” You see, she was too young. She was too small. The candle lighters were too heavy. Lighting the candles was too big of a responsibility. The robe that she would have to wear didn’t quite fit. She would have to wait. Being told that, again, was her undoing You see she was never first. She was always last and it was going to be that way for a long time.

Barbara Brown Taylor wrote these words about the experience, “God help us. We are doing it right here in the church, in the sanctuary, making sure that the first go first and the last stay last.”

I will admit to you that I don’t know what the answer here is. I don’t think that we can ask one of our six year olds to be the chair of the Trustees this next year or to ask a ten year old to be in charge of our Staff-Parish Relations Committee. What I do know is that God’s values are not always or even often our values and that being humble isn’t a bad thing.

What we have is a little child to remind us that God organizes things a little differently than the world does. We also know that if we want to welcome god, then there is no one we can ignore. We must pay attention to the ones who only come up to our waistlines. We have to pay attention to the ones who are always at the end of the line and the ones who go away crying on their mother’s shoulders.

In God’s world, things are different. God’s kingdom is different and so if you want to enter it, then I suggest you go and find a child, maybe even a baby, wrap your arms around them, bend down to talk to them. Look them right in their eyes and say “hi” to God. Let us pray.

(Special thanks to the writings and the sermons of Barbara Brown Taylor. I used several of her ideas in this sermon. Thanks to everyone who gave me a chance, when I looked very young).