Once More From the Top

Sermon for 19th Sunday after Trinity – 6 October 2024 – All Saints Kesgrave

Text: When Jesus saw this, he was indignant.  He said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. (Mark 10v14)

God give you peace my sisters and brothers.

The story is told of a vicar who, on their first Sunday in their new parish preached an absolute barn stormer of a sermon.  The congregation were stunned by the words from the pulpit and the challenge of living a Christian life it brought them.  The vicar’s hand was enthusiastically wrung at the church door with some congregants even saying ‘that was the best sermon I ever heard’.  During the after-church coffee there was much back slapping of the churchwardens who were roundly congratulated on their choice of vicar.

On the next Sunday the vicar preached the same sermon as the previous week…  It was still received well with people presuming that the repeated words were for those who didn’t worship every Sunday (after all this was a Church of England parish…).  Hands were still shaken at the door with the usual ‘nice sermon vicar’ but with slight less enthusiasm as the previous Sunday.

On the third Sunday the vicar preached the same sermon as the previous two weeks!  This was met with stunned silence.  No hands were shaken at the door and the vicar was given the cold shoulder during coffee time.

The churchwardens had decided that action needed to be taken so they summoned, I mean politely requested, the vicar to attend a meeting with them at 9 O’clock on Monday morning.  When they met they asked the vicar why the sermon had been repeated three times.  To which the vicar responded, ‘When we’ve started living the words of the first sermon then we can move on to the second….’

Friends I will try to not imitate the fictional vicar in this sermon and promise to not use our time here amongst you as an opportunity to recycle previous words, (however if you’d like to read them please feel free to have a look at my WordPress Blog…).  

With our use of the three yearly cycle of Lectionary reading it can be tempting to repeat words – with nearly 40 years in Holy Orders behind me I am on my 14th trip around that cycle.  One dear friend of mine in Johannesburg wrote 52 sermons, one for each Sunday of the Book of Common Prayer readings, and then preached them every year for nearly 50 years!  Finding words that are New Every Morning Sunday after Sunday can be a challenge.  So please forgive us people up front if occasionally we re-visit and re-emphasise some well-worn words.

However we do have divine permission for the repeated sermon from none other than Jesus himself.  Today we hear how Jesus repeats himself.  It was only in the previous Chapter that Jesus rebuked His disciples for arguing over who was the greatest and reminded them about true greatness and welcoming the little ones:

³⁶ He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, ³⁷ ‘Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.’ (Mark 9v36-38)

Turn the page of the Bible and the disciples are turning away the very little children Jesus commanded them to welcome!  No wonder Jesus is indignant.  I’m pretty sure Paddington Bear’s Aunt Lucy would have approved of the hard stare given by the Son of God to his forgetful followers!

(And this is not the final time they forget what they are supposed to do and how they are meant to welcome others, but that is for another sermon in two weeks’ time…)

Jesus would that, with Michelle the French Resistance fighter in ‘Allo, Allo’ He could have told His disciples, ‘I shall say this only once’.  But they are a pretty dim bunch of blokes, or perhaps they just can’t comprehend the enormity of what Jesus is going to ask them to do not once, not twice, but three times.

Here it is:

• Let the little people in
• Become a little person 
• Big people don’t get to come in

Let the Little People in

Above all else those who are welcomed most often by Jesus are those whom everyone else rejects.  Not just the little children but also lepers and Samaritans, widows and shepherds, women of easy virtue and fisherfolk (who by the way are pretty rubbish at catching fish without the help of the Son of God!).  These are the ones Jesus puts in the middle of the faith.  

Rachel Held-Evans, an American writer and minister describes those whom Jesus welcomes like this;

This is what God’s kingdom is like.  A bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.  (Rachel Held-Evans)

These are the ones who Jesus says should be filling our pews.  So it is good to see our churches make space for those who have been rejected and denied entry by others.  Ukrainian families fleeing war and destruction, young people from our uniformed groups who will stand in silence with us on Remembrance Sunday and school children whose faces will shine with the light of Christmas in just two months’ time.  These are the ones who belong here and it is a joy to know that of the four parts of the Diocesan Growing in God strategy that our parish has chosen to focus on for the next while is Growing Younger.

Jesus reminds us that our task is to let the little ones come to him.

Be a Little Person

The call of Christ to let the little ones come to him comes with a call for personal transformation.  We are to become like them.  Listen again to His words:

He said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. (Mark 10v14)

This may seem a little bit of a no-brainer but I presume that anyone who spends time coming to church, helping lead worship, take a turn on the tea rota, or arranges flowers for the Harvest Festival wants to go to heaven?  I hope that is the case or else the last 40 years of my life would have been something of a wild goose chase!  What professional Christians such as myself and most of those who to play dress-up at the front of the church, need to constantly remember is that a well-preached sermon, or a beautifully intoned Evensong will not guarantee entry to the Kingdom of God. 

The Kingdom of God does not belong to excellent preachers and great theologians.  The Kingdom of God belongs to ‘little children’.  It belongs to those whose faith is full and deep and wide because it believes the promises of God in a way that only little children can. 

Jesus calls us to be little people to be childlike in our faith and devotion to God.  Sadly too often, and I know the temptation to behave this way myself, instead of being childlike in our devotion we can slip into being childish and treat the things and the people of God as our possessions to do with as we please.  Whenever I hear the word ‘mine’ in church meetings I pray harder.  As Screwtape reminds us in one of his letters by C.S. Lewis;

And all the time the joke is that the word ‘Mine’ in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything.   In the long run either Our Father [Below] or the Enemy will say ‘Mine’ of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.   They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong – certainly not to them, whatever happens.   (from the Screwtape Letters^[1]

If we are to be a parish that grows younger the thing we must guard against most of all is pettiness about who does what, who owns which portfolio, who is to blame for this or that.   We must aim to be childlike not childish.

Big People don’t get to come in

Finally, and perhaps the lesson the disciples of Jesus and we their successors need to learn most, is this;

….anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. (Mark 10v15)

In the end it all comes down to control.  Those who want to be in charge (says the Interim Priest-in-Charge😉) can’t contemplate other people being content without them having some sort of control over them or say over how things should be.  It seems that sometimes Christians can be the Air Raid Wardens of the faith, desperately running around telling people they must do this thing or they can’t do that thing.

A Canadian priest friend of mine has this to say to those who exclude others:

oooOOOooo

This blog  ‘Once More From the Top’  is copyright © Andrew Dotchin 2024.  It may be reproduced free of charge on condition that the source is acknowledged.

 

The little children and Jesus

¹³ People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. ¹⁴ When Jesus saw this, he was indignant.  He said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ¹⁵ Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ ¹⁶ And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.                             (Mark 10v13-16)

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^[1] Read more about The Screwtape Letters in my Blog Resisting the Prowling Lion.