Mark 9:30-37
One of the best sermons I’ve ever heard preached came from the mouth of a 3 year old. It was in seminary, in the school chapel, on a Thursday night. Normally, that chapel was a pretty intense and intimidating place. It was where we learned to do the dance of liturgy to the impossibly high standards of our professor, in front of a congregation entirely made up of people who knew exactly what mistakes we were making and how they would have done it differently. It was where we learned how to chant, how to sing, how to hold our hands at the altar. It was where we prayed three times a day, sometimes in two languages, and where we went to make our confessions. It was where we learned how to preach, both by listening and by doing, and where we heard sermons from some of the most learned and gifted preachers of our time. Some might say it could be a cold place, both figuratively and literally, the stone floors cool to the touch year round. But on Thursday nights, it was a place that overflowed with warmth and noise and joy. On Thursday nights, the children worshipped with us.
My first year of seminary, the senior class two years ahead of me was full of parents. Some of them had come to seminary as parents, and others had become parents while on the mountain. They were known as a particularly prolific class, three families boasting five children each and many more families with multiple children that had been born since their parents matriculated. They were the only class, the whole time Ben and I were in Sewanee, in which the students were outnumbered by the children. And seminary children don’t tend to be the “seen and not heard” variety. So when Thursday night worship rolled around, and all the children spilled out of the pews and rolled around on the floors and scribbled all over the bulletins, it was a noisy and full house. The students and professors who preferred a somber, contemplative, highly structured liturgical experience tended to skip Thursday night worship.
Students preached the sermons on Thursday nights, and typically we each only got to do so once so it was always a big deal. I don’t remember who was in the pulpit that particular night, but I’m sure they did a great job. The three year old who outshone them may or may not have been sitting under her dad’s pew kicking the back of mine occasionally through the whole first half of the service. The service was an otherwise totally unremarkable one, except for one thing. At the moment of the fraction, when the priest held up the bread and broke it in half, something very special happened. In the drawn out silence that was the practice in that chapel, a little voice started singing. It wasn’t the fraction anthem, the song we usually sing after the bread is broken. From under a pew came a loud, high pitched voice singing “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Jesus…”
It was amazing. A room full of seminarians who spent all our time studying how to do this perfectly, a room full of people who by definition took ourselves and the liturgy a little too seriously, stunned into silent giggles, watching for the professor at the altar to react. The father of the little singer had already frantically shushed her while turning bright red. The majority of the congregation were holding their breath or desperately muffling laughter behind hands and prayerbooks. The celebrant smiled a bit and went right into the Lord’s Prayer. For the rest of the liturgy, everywhere you looked there were smiles and chuckles and tears of barely contained laughter. The little girl went forward as usual to receive communion, not an ounce of self-consciousness at the way every eye was on her.
At dinner afterward we all laughed about it again, but we also reflected on what it meant. That child was not intending to make a scene or make us all laugh. She also wasn’t just playing, oblivious to the goings-on at the altar like we might have assumed. She knew the liturgy, the rhythms of worship, well enough to know that after the bread was blessed and broken, the people of God would sing. She had never attended a liturgy class or read a theology textbook, but she understood that moment was special, and happy, and so she sang the happiest and most special song she knew. And what’s more, she sang it to Jesus, somehow understanding the real presence of Christ better than anyone else in the room. A little child came into the midst of us, and just by being a child, she showed us something important about what it is to honor God with our whole heart.
As someone who has worked directly with young children for most of my life in some capacity, I am not one to sentimentalize childhood. Children are people, and people are complicated. But when Jesus brings a little child into the midst of the disciples and admonishes them to welcome that child as if she were God, Jesus was not being sentimental about children. Childhood in antiquity was treacherous, often short, and children lived entirely within the sphere of the home and therefore of women until they were old enough to labor or marry. People loved their children, just as we do now, and with a high infant mortality rate in the ancient world, everyone was vividly aware of how precious every year of life is. But back then, just like now, children were the least powerful and most vulnerable class of humanity. They had no agency, no property, and were entirely dependent on their families and communities to feed, shelter, teach, and protect them. So when Jesus overheard his disciples arguing about who was the greatest among them, he placed the least powerful person he could find right in front of them. He told them to welcome children like they were welcoming their teacher, their Lord, their creator. He placed before them the least and the last and challenged them to see the face of God.
It wasn’t an easy task. We might look at the precious face of a child in a painting, or a smiling photograph of our child or grandchild, and think otherwise. But children fuss, and cry, and have runny noses and mysteriously sticky hands, and they make noise and embarrass their grownups and ask questions we’d rather they didn’t and sometimes they imitate the parts of ourselves we wish to ignore. It is not somehow easier to see the face of God in a child than it is to see the face of God in an adult stranger on the street. But that’s the point. Children rarely behave the way we’ve scripted them or envisioned them. Young children rarely follow the unspoken rules we obsess over, because no one has shamed them into submission yet. They act out, they push boundaries, they ask why until their curiosity is satisfied or else piqued by something new. Sometimes they make us want to shout, and maybe just as often they make us want to laugh. And Jesus wants us to treat them like we would treat him. Not an object to idealize or an idol to worship, but a sibling to welcome. A fellow Christian to love and learn from. A mirror in which to see how God sees us.
Mother A Writes 