SPEAKER_00: Our Old Testament reading comes from Deuteronomy, the 24th chapter.
SPEAKER_00: We'll be reading verses 17 through 22.
SPEAKER_00: Let's listen now for God's word.
SPEAKER_00: You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice.
SPEAKER_00: You shall not take a widow's garment in pledge.
SPEAKER_00: Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you from there.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore I command you to do this.
SPEAKER_00: When you reap your harvest in your field, and you forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it.
SPEAKER_00: It shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all your undertakings.
SPEAKER_00: And when you beat your olive trees, do not strip what is left.
SPEAKER_00: It shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.
SPEAKER_00: When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left.
SPEAKER_00: They shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow.
SPEAKER_00: Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore I am commanding you to do this.
SPEAKER_00: God's wisdom for us today.
SPEAKER_00: And our next reading is from Matthew chapter 19, verses 13 through 15.
SPEAKER_00: Listen now for what the Spirit says to the church.
SPEAKER_00: Then children were being brought to Jesus in order that he might lay hands on them and pray.
SPEAKER_00: The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus said, Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.
SPEAKER_00: And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.
SPEAKER_00: May God bless the reading and receiving of Holy Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: A couple of weeks ago, um our family had the gift of attending our 10-year anniversary at the alumni conference of the school we went to, Columbia Theological Seminary.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the coolest things was that we got to bring Hopper with us.
SPEAKER_00: He got to come too and he got to see where we lived, where we took classes, where we worshiped.
SPEAKER_00: And he really felt like he was attending the conference.
SPEAKER_00: When we arrived, we checked in at the desk and we got our name tags, and Hopper got his own name tag.
SPEAKER_00: And he took it and put it on, and right away he felt like he was a part of what was going on.
SPEAKER_00: And so he would grab a snack from the lobby and walk up to a total stranger and introduce himself.
SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Hopper.
SPEAKER_00: I have popcorn.
SPEAKER_00: He would just uh tell folks his name and then a fact about what was happening, and he was just a part of what was happening there, and no hesitation, no concern about whether he belonged in the conversation, no worry about what anyone might think.
SPEAKER_00: He had a name tag.
SPEAKER_00: And he had openness and trust and curiosity.
SPEAKER_00: Children have a way of entering the world without all of the layers of calculation and ego and baggage that adults can carry around.
SPEAKER_00: And they enter in that way, but somewhere along the way we learn different rules as adults, don't we?
SPEAKER_00: We learn who has status and who doesn't, who's supposed to be there and who isn't, who deserves our attention and who should wait.
SPEAKER_00: We learn how to rank importance.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the kind of world that the disciples were living in, too.
SPEAKER_00: When we arrive at this moment in the Gospel of Matthew, parents are bringing their children to Jesus for a blessing, and the disciples step in to stop them.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus responds with words that challenge the way we see the world.
SPEAKER_00: In some ways, they challenged the entire Roman order of hierarchy in humanity.
SPEAKER_00: He said, Let the little children come to me, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.
SPEAKER_00: So this week, as I mold these texts, I found myself wondering, why does Jesus keep pointing to children?
SPEAKER_00: Just one chapter earlier in 18, he's pointed again to children.
SPEAKER_00: What is it that children reveal about the kingdom of heaven?
SPEAKER_00: And what might we need to unlearn as adults, as a church, as a society, if we are going to receive the kingdom the way Jesus says we must?
SPEAKER_00: Because in this small, easily overlooked moment, Jesus is not just blessing particular children.
SPEAKER_00: He's blessing all children.
SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, he is reframing the moral center of the community.
SPEAKER_00: Now it's tempting for us to be harsh on the disciples in the story.
SPEAKER_00: Can you believe them, trying to keep the children away from Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: They're just kids.
SPEAKER_00: But the disciples are not being rude or hateful.
SPEAKER_00: I imagine they think that they are being responsible and rational.
SPEAKER_00: They're managing the crowd, they're protecting Jesus' time, they're guarding his energy.
SPEAKER_00: Kids are noisy and nosy and they interrupt and they play.
SPEAKER_00: But the disciples are acting according to a very familiar logic.
SPEAKER_00: Logic of the world, the logic of empire, the logic of scarcity.
SPEAKER_00: There's just not enough time.
SPEAKER_00: There's not enough attention, there's not enough resources, so we protect what we have and we guard access.
SPEAKER_00: We decide who is worth Jesus' time and who is worth our attention.
SPEAKER_00: This is the logic of the world.
SPEAKER_00: We center our attention on the people who seem to have the most to offer.
SPEAKER_00: We give more attention to the most productive or the loudest or the most charismatic or the most powerful, the most successful, the most impressive.
SPEAKER_00: If we keep our eyes on the strong, we think, then surely the whole system will hold together and we will understand how the world works, if we see how it's working for the people who are the strongest.
SPEAKER_00: This is the logic of empire.
SPEAKER_00: And not just the Roman-occupied world of the disciples then, but our world as well.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus does something so important and so often missed.
SPEAKER_00: He centers the disciples' attention on the people who have nothing to give them.
SPEAKER_00: No influence, no wealth, no power.
SPEAKER_00: He centers their attention on those who are the most vulnerable.
SPEAKER_00: Children are the most vulnerable to the failures of a community.
SPEAKER_00: Because when a community breaks down, it is always the vulnerable who suffer first.
SPEAKER_00: When public education fails, children suffer the most.
SPEAKER_00: When the healthcare system collapses, the sick, the elderly, the poor, they suffer the most.
SPEAKER_00: When war rages, children suffer the most.
SPEAKER_00: They are displaced, they lose their families and their homes, they lose their lives, caught up in the violence of powerful and terrible decisions made far, far away from where they are.
SPEAKER_00: The world often treats children as expendable, as collateral damage, as numbers in a report.
SPEAKER_00: Sure, these stories of harm to children stir up a lot of strong feelings in us.
SPEAKER_00: We feel strong things, but what actually happens?
SPEAKER_00: What do we do in response to those stories, to the news?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus refuses to see them that way, refuses to see them as numbers.
SPEAKER_00: When he blesses children, he is not simply offering a sweet moment of kindness, though he is also doing that.
SPEAKER_00: He's also correcting the lens through which the world so often sees.
SPEAKER_00: When Jesus blesses the children, he is claiming all of them.
SPEAKER_00: When he touches the sick and restores the outcast, he is calling for the healing and restoration of all who live on the margins.
SPEAKER_00: When he says a few chapters later, When you welcome the alien, the stranger, you welcome me.
SPEAKER_00: He is reminding us that God is always found among those who are at risk.
SPEAKER_00: And in the kingdom of God, the measure of a community is not how well it serves the powerful, but how faithfully it centers the vulnerable.
SPEAKER_00: I couldn't help but think this week about one of my favorite Presbyterian ministers, because this coming Friday, the 20th of March, the PC USA will also celebrate Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Rogers' Day.
SPEAKER_00: Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and he was ordained to his television ministry for children.
SPEAKER_00: And when asked about why, he said, anyone who does anything to help a child with their life is a hero to me.
SPEAKER_00: We live in a world, he said, in which we need to share responsibility.
SPEAKER_00: It's easy to say, it's not my child, it's not my community, it's not my world, it's not my problem.
SPEAKER_00: He went on to say, then there are those who see the need and respond, and I consider those people my heroes.
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SPEAKER_00: Rogers helped us to see and to remember that once you start looking at the world through the eyes of a child who's standing before Jesus, you begin to realize that the kingdom of heaven doesn't grow outward from the powerful, it grows outward from the vulnerable.
SPEAKER_00: The disciples in our story today believe that they are doing something reasonable and rational.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus sees something they don't.
SPEAKER_00: He sees the way that they treat children, reveals the truth about their hearts.
SPEAKER_00: The writer James Baldwin once says something that feels almost like a commentary on this very passage.
SPEAKER_00: He says, The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.
SPEAKER_00: Then I am beginning to suspect, he wrote, that whoever is incapable of recognizing this might just be incapable of morality.
SPEAKER_00: Baldwin understood something Jesus was trying to teach the disciples, that children are never interruptions to the work of God's kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: They are the measure of it.
SPEAKER_00: In Presbyterian baptismal liturgy, when our congregation is asked this question, we ask them, Will you nurture this child in the life of the church and pray for them?
SPEAKER_00: And the congregation responds, We will.
SPEAKER_00: And in that moment, the church publicly declares, this child is not only their parents' responsibility, this child belongs to all of us.
SPEAKER_00: And in that sense, in baptism, the church is saying, the children are ours too.
SPEAKER_00: Not just the ones who live in our homes or the ones who look like us or speak the languages we speak, not even the ones who belong to our church, every child.
SPEAKER_00: Which is why Jesus doesn't simply allow the children to come.
SPEAKER_00: He commands it.
SPEAKER_00: Let the children come to me, he says.
SPEAKER_00: Do not hinder them.
SPEAKER_00: And friends, we live in a world full of hindrances.
SPEAKER_00: And our lives, our communities, our church ought to be places where these barriers are removed between the most vulnerable and the fullness of life that God desires for them, and for which Jesus came and taught and died and rose again.
SPEAKER_00: And the beautiful thing is that Jesus doesn't only talk about this kingdom, Jesus doesn't just moralize and give us commands to follow.
SPEAKER_00: He shows us what the kingdom looks like.
SPEAKER_00: He shows it.
SPEAKER_00: Again and again, he gathers people around a table.
SPEAKER_00: And it's always people that most of us wouldn't invite.
SPEAKER_00: Not just the powerful and not just the respectable, but the overlooked and the hungry and the tax collectors and the lepers and the ones who say, who the world says should wait their turn.
SPEAKER_00: And at that table, something remarkable happens.
SPEAKER_00: There is plenty.
SPEAKER_00: There is enough, enough bread, enough grace, enough mercy, enough seats.
SPEAKER_00: The logic of scarcity that shapes so much of our world begins to loosen its grip at the table that Christ invites us to.
SPEAKER_00: And we discover that in the kingdom of God, abundance flows outward from the love of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And in just a few moments, we will gather around this table, and when we do, we are not just remembering something that happened a long time ago.
SPEAKER_00: We are also practicing the life of the kingdom.
SPEAKER_00: We believe something happens when we don't when we not only follow Christ, but we meet him in the bread and in the cup.
SPEAKER_00: Because at this table, no one earns their place, no one gets to cut line, no one proves their worth, no one arrives with more status than anyone else.
SPEAKER_00: We come just like children.
SPEAKER_00: We come open, we come hopeful, we come trusting, we come curious, with empty hands ready to receive.
SPEAKER_00: And in this place, Christ meets us, blesses us, feeds us, reminds us again that we belong.
SPEAKER_00: So, friends, as we come to this table today, may we remember the lesson Christ taught his disciples that day.
SPEAKER_00: That the kingdom of heaven does not grow outward from those the world deem worthy and important.
SPEAKER_00: It does not grow from the powerful, it grows from mercy.
SPEAKER_00: It grows from the vulnerable, from love and care, and from the courage to center those who the world forgets.
SPEAKER_00: And when we rise from this table, nourished by grace, I pray that we will go back into the world ready to live as people who know the truth Jesus revealed, who live like children.
SPEAKER_00: The vulnerable are never interruptions to the work of God.
SPEAKER_00: They are the place where the kingdom breaks in.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.