Let the Children Come to Me (Mark 10:13-16)

Let the Children Come to Me

First UMC of Pocatello

October 6, 2024

Mark 10:13-16

***

Last week the Gospel challenged us to make more room for others, to reconfigure how we think or how we gather so that all people have the opportunity to come and encounter Jesus without any interference from us. But the disciples were slow learners; every so often, as in today’s story, they continued setting arbitrary boundaries around Jesus. “People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them.” Rebuke is a strong word. Some other English translations say that the disciples “scolded” them, “spoke sternly” to them, “interfered” with them. The point was clear: the disciples thought that Jesus had more important things to do than visit with these tiny, needy humans who wouldn’t fully appreciate or possibly even remember him.

Even though Jesus had started telling his disciples that his ministry would end with suffering and death, they were still attached to political understandings of the Messiah and the kingdom of God. Like most of their fellows Jews at this time, the disciples had grown up believing that God would one day send a Messiah to the people, an anointed liberator who would throw off Roman occupation by force and re-establish Israel as a strong and righteous kingdom. The Messiah would be a revolutionary, known by his wisdom and his divine power over evil – that is, over those evil people.

Right before this encounter with the children, Mark says that “[Jesus] left [Galilee] and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan. And crowds again gathered around him, and, as was his custom, he again taught them…” (10:1).

That’s really significant. Jesus makes a shift from his Galilean ministry in the north to his Judean ministry in the south. Jesus heads closer to the city of Jerusalem, where it’s all going to go down.  For him, what’s’ going to “go down” is the cross. For the disciples, it’s a revolution.

So the disciples couldn’t help getting excited about the journey south. They thought that things were finally about to get “real,” that Jesus was going to take his gloves off. And – c’mon! – the first thing that happens down in Judea is that a bunch of parents and grandparents show up not with weapons and rallying cries but with kids? “Get out of here. This guy’s got more important places to go, more important things to do.”

Jesus sees them turning children away and gets angry with them. He doesn’t get explicitly angry with his disciples very often, but this is one of those moments. He rebukes the disciples for rebuking the children. And, contrary to their expectations and their priorities, he takes the time to pick up every kid – every unaware infant, every wriggly toddler, every cautious or overenthusiastic elementary schooler. Takes the time to embrace them, to bless them. And while he’s doing that, he looks around at his disciples and says in no uncertain terms, “It is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

Look at them, Jesus says to the disciples, says to us, and learn something essential about who I am and about the kind of kingdom that I have come to bring.

I am grateful for the ways that this congregation has been expanding its ministry to children. In recent months, you have rallied around Camp Sawtooth in a rejuvenated way, sending more kids to camp on scholarship and getting involved as leaders. There are more kids attending nursery and Sunday School than there have been in the past three years, so you’ve made resources available for hiring nursery workers or you’ve volunteered to help teach these classes before worship. For nearly fifty years, y’all have stewarded the spaces used by TLC’s daycare community. TLC’s presence here hasn’t been an interruption, a distraction, or something beside the real point, but actual ministry – the embrace and blessing of kids, no strings attached.

We know that there is a critical need for licensed and affordable childcare in Bannock county, which qualifies as a childcare desert. We know that housing insecurity, food insecurity, and lack of childcare all mutually reinforce poverty. And so, over the past year, your church leadership has arranged for TLC to expand into new classrooms and has paid for several new HVAC units to keep old rooms useable. And, very publicly, you all have given so generously to raise a roof no only over your heads, but over the heads of children and caregivers you may or may not ever meet.

Well done. Keep going. Keep drawing the circle wider.

Just be wary of that impulse which we see in the disciples, the impulse to prioritize the institutional triumph of the Church over the simple embrace and blessing of people. Because, in our time, we don’t outright rebuke the kids who come to us; instead we’re tempted to desperately cling to them as a sign that one day the Church will rise up again and take its dominant place in the community and the culture. But no kid wants that pressure foisted upon them. No tired parents wants to feel like the survival of all this depends on the degree to which they have it all together. Our desperation is the equal but opposite desperation of the disciples, another way of seeing the kingdom of God not as a force of blessing but as a victorious program.

So I hope this congregation – I hope you continue to love kids without rebuking them or the ones who bring them. And I hope you continue to love kids just for who they are, not for what they represent. And if that kind of work of open-handed, open-hearted loving of children excites you, get involved. There’s more work to be done.

Now, what do Jesus’ words mean – “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it”? I’m interested in the relationship between those two movements, receiving and entering. When we receive something, we can hold it, or it comes into us. It’s an inward dynamic. But we enter something that’s outside and around us. So in order to enter the kingdom that’s all around us, we first have to receive it for ourselves. And we don’t have to look very far to see what Jesus means by receiving the kingdom as a little child: “He took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.”

The kingdom of God belongs to those who are held in Jesus’ arms and who receive his blessing – his word of love, his word of truth. The kingdom of God belongs to those who commune with Christ, who abide in him, who bear his words. When we come to him with no agenda other than to be held and loved and blessed by him, then we can enter into the new world, the new creation, that he has brought about all around us. In other words, the kingdom of God belongs to those who pray.

What we experience shapes what we expect the world to be like. It’s why we tell stories to our children – stories of courage and kindness, stories of sharing and forgiveness. We want our kids to believe in a world where opportunities to have courage and kindness, to share and forgive wait around every corner. We tell our kids about faraway places, we point up at the moon, we read about dragons and elves and magic because we want our kids to believe in a big and expansive world that will never bore them but is always waiting to surprise them. We feed our kids, and put them to bed on time, and tell them that we love them because we want them to grow up in a world that they sense has warmth and affection at its core. We baptize our children so that a sense of God’s personal concern for and involvement with them tinges their sense of reality no matter happens later in life. Our experiences shape our expectations.  

And, similarly, it is in childhood that we have our first and most formative encounters with rebuke. You’re not meant to be here. You – your feelings, your interests, your questions, your needs – are in the way. This – whatever ‘this’ is – isn’t for you. Somewhere back there, each of us was denied something so simple: a blessing, an embrace, a place in the company of love. Somewhere back there, when we were in a state of utter receptivity, we were rebuked. And that, too, has shape our expectations of the world. Maybe this is a world where you are not fully wanted.

When that happened to you, it made Jesus angry. That rebuke was not from him. All he has for you is time, attention, blessing, and love.

Receiving the kingdom of God like a little child means going back to that vulnerable place, that receptive place, no matter how old we are, and allowing divine love to take hold of us. Only then can we enter the kingdom of God, which is nothing other than this life that we are living and this world that we are living in shimmering with the possibilities of grace.

At this Table, God wants to receive you, whether for the first time or the thousandth time. Come here to exchange rebuke for blessing. Come here to receive grace, that you might enter grace. Don’t hinder yourself. Let yourself come – your full self. The kingdom of God awaits you.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.