WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 6/4/06 Children’s Awards

Mark 10:13-16 “God’s Children”

On a Sunday when our church celebrates the achievements of our children, it seems appropriate to look for a moment at the way children are depicted in the Bible. Of course the cultures of the OT and the NT are very different from ours, but what we are looking for is how God sees children. That is an important question that has major implications for us still, here and now.

1) Children Are A Blessing

The earliest and in some ways the most profound Biblical reference to children is indirect and implicit. Gen 1:28 says of the male and female whom God had created in his image that “he blessed them, and said to them ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.’” Quite simply, children are a blessing from God, and part of the way God blesses his Creation.

That was of course widely understood in a practical and even economic way in the ancient world, and still is today in rural cultures. Many children mean many hands to work on the farm or in the fields. Many children mean someone to care for you in your old age. But even beyond this, there is a sense in the OT era that to have many children is “a blessing from God.” Remember that a “blessing” is more than words: it is an effective action. When blessings are passed from one person to another, things happen: inheritances are decided, for example. A blessing is a gift, always given with warmth and concern and love. And when God blesses you, his power enters your life and circumstances and makes a difference. One commentator says that it is like “God turning full-face towards you and giving of himself” (Derek Kidner) – the picture in the great Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you...”

Children are a blessing, children are a gift of God. But here is – to me – the most amazing thing of all. God has delegated the creation of children to his people, to male and female humans made in his image. Out of their bodies, and out of their love, they can create new people. They can make another person; where there were two, now there are three or more real, live, human persons – created by us! Is that not the most astonishing thing? Well, you may say, that is just biology – didn’t you know that!? To which the answer is: No, it is much more than the biology of reproduction. Humans, the Bible teaches us, are “in the image of God,” and part of that is their capacity for immortality. What we create from our bodies are immortal beings!

Does that not get your attention? Does this not tell you why Christians and Jews have always valued human life so highly; why we speak of the “sacredness” of human life; why Christians have always stood against abortion and infanticide and murder and suicide and euthanasia – and even, in some cases, against war or capital punishment. Every life, however young or old, however weak or “imperfect” by our standards, is a sacred gift from God, and a blessing from him – whether we can see it or not.

To be sure, this does not answer directly the question of whether aggressive surgery is appropriate for Grandma, or whether a ventilator will eventually have to be turned off. Indeed our understanding of the capacity for immortality, and the fact of Jesus’ resurrection, tell us that death is not the greatest evil or the final word. So we weigh that, as well as weighing that every life is a blessed gift from God.

2) Children Are A Responsibility

Children are, of course, not only a blessing but a responsibility. Both OT and NT are full of admonitions to parents to train their children in the right way; to teach them and nurture them until they reach maturity.

There are two parts to this: humans were made to “fill and subdue the earth” and to “tend the Garden,” but they are also made to love and obey and worship God. Both of these have to be taught to children. Knowledge and skills have to be passed on from generation to generation; and not by parents only, but by teachers, by examples, by invention and discovery. Explicit knowledge of the world, tacit knowledge of how to live skillfully in it, have to be both taught and absorbed.

So there is a great Jewish tradition of valuing education, at home and in the best schools at every level. Christians for centuries felt the same; through the “Dark Ages” up to the Enlightenment, Christians were determined to be the best scholars in the world, in every subject. They founded the great universities, they founded schools wherever they went. Sadly we have faltered in that area in the past century; and an anti-intellectual strain still flows through much American Christianity. But the Christian school movement, the rise of home schooling, the increasing enrolments in Christian colleges, and in seminaries, speak perhaps of a better future. Evangelical Christians in particular have, in that respect, an opportunity to rebuild parts of our educational culture in a way the Catholic Parochial School movement did 100 years ago.

But education is incomplete without knowledge of God, of his ways; of what it means to obey him and to worship him in Spirit and in Truth. Those are always primarily the responsibility of families: of parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, “God-parents.” Deut 6 reminds us to “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength,” and also to “impress these commandments on your children.” We have a major responsibility to pass on the faith to our children, and that takes work, and cannot simply be left to “the church” - as though 45 minutes a week in Sunday School will suffice to lead a child to “Love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.” This is where we as parents and grandparents and God-parents too often fall down; if we ourselves think a 20-minute sermon or a 60-minute worship service are all the “Christian input” we need each week, we may find we have little spiritually to give to our children at home.

3) Children Are A Treasure

There are several accounts from the life of Jesus of the way he approached children. When parents brought young ones to him so that he could touch them – and bless them – the disciples tried to keep them away. Jesus was indignant, not only at the disciples’ arrogance in thinking they could decide who saw Jesus, but because he knew the value of children. So he put a child before them and said “whoever welcomes this child welcomes me,” and he gladly took children in his arms and put his hands on their heads, and blessed them.

It’s hard for us to grasp how counter-cultural, how unexpected Jesus’ actions were. In Greco-Roman culture, and even in Jewish culture, children ranked at about the same level as slaves - around the level we would place pets. They had no intrinsic worth. But to Jesus, they had value; to Jesus, children were a treasure. So welcome them, celebrate them; do not overlook them in your important “adult concerns.” Even in the church, value them. There is a well-known story of a prospective minister who left a church interview in dismay when the elders said of the size of the congregation, “of course, we don’t count the children.” He went away, as he said, to find a church “where children counted for something.” One large church Marian and I were members of in Massachusetts had a radio broadcast of the sermons; the result was that no children were permitted in the sanctuary, lest any sound distract from the words of “the great man.” Children count, children matter, children have value in God’s eyes – as Jesus made clear – and should have in ours, however noisy or inconvenient their presence may be!

4) Children Are An Example

Finally - and this is where I think we have the most trouble – Jesus used children as an example. Placing a child before people, he said “the kingdom of God belongs to such as these... I tell you the truth, whoever will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

When Jesus talks about “receiving” or “entering” the “kingdom of God,” he is not saying anything different than when Paul talks of “salvation by grace through faith,” and of gratefully receiving the grace of God as a gift. Jesus used a child as an example not of innocence, nor of humility, but as an example of inconsequence and of the ability to receive a gift without question, with delight, and with gratitude – “whoever receives the kingdom of God like a little child...”

The gift is the kingdom – God’s presence and rule in your heart; the gift is salvation – freedom from God’s wrath; the gift is forgiveness – freedom from the burden of guilt about everything; the gift is righteousness – being seen by God in the likeness of his perfect Son; the gift is adoption – becoming a child of God and a member of his family.

Becoming like little children, receiving God’s gift - giving up on our belief that we can make it on our own, that we can please God – is what Jesus was talking about when he told the adult, educated, wise and revered teacher Nicodemus that to enter the kingdom of God he must be “born again,” or better “born anew,” and “born from above.” He must become child-like in simply receiving with gratitude the gift that Jesus alone could give: eternal life, which his Father offered to anyone who believed in his Son.

“God so loved the world” – including all its children – “that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This is the gift: Jesus the Son of God died for you and for me – if we will have him – or he died for other people (the world) if we will not have him. John 1 spells out what every Christian knows; that “to those who received” the Incarnate Son, the Father gave the right to become “children of God.” To believe and to receive are all that is required to become a child of God and to enter the kingdom of God.

But it has to be done in childlike way. This is not a decision we figure our way to, make a calculated decision about. Gifts don’t come to people that way – or as John puts it, believers were born into God’s family “not of natural descent, nor of human decision..,” in order to make crystal clear that being part of God’s kingdom has nothing to do with us except to receive it gratefully as a gift when it is offered to us. We can do that by praying “Lord, have mercy on me. Forgive me for my sins, especially the prideful one of thinking I am good enough for your kingdom. I come to you as a child would; I accept your gift of Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord, and I ask you to graciously make me a part of your family.”

That is, as everyone understands, a hard thing to do for “independent” adult people. Indeed all the statistics show that the great majority of people who put their faith in Christ do so before their 18^th birthday – one more reason we devote great effort to the spiritual education of our children. To those of any age who perceive themselves as adults, here is the call, here is the challenge: become like children and accept your gift. If you are too proud to accept gifts at your stage of life, so be it; God will respect your autonomy and independence – though one day that may be all you have.

But if you yearn to be part of his family, then “believe” and “receive” Jesus the Son; accept the unmanageable and unpredictable power of the Holy Spirit working within you to think, do, create, pray in ways you could never do otherwise and do not have control over now; accept that adoption into his family is a work of God that he willingly extends to the child-like among men and women of all ages, in all times and places.

And don’t forget the blessing, the responsibility, the value and the example of God’s children.

Let us pray...