The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

Because this story seems to be about children, it is very easy for us to listen to it, and smile, and then dismiss it and move on. That may have something to do with our having seen it illustrated in hundreds of sickly sweet stained-glass windows, that image of Jesus gathering around him one or more children—almost always white children.  

What we forget when we hear the story that way is how it starts, because in that beginning is the tension we’re meant to reflect on.

The disciples have come with a question. Their question is an adult question. It’s a question about rank and power. Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? 

We live with that question all the time. It’s so natural for us to think in those terms it’s like the water we swim in; we are hardly even aware of how much it influences our way of navigating the world.

We Anglicans especially have ways of reading the outward and visible signs of what we imagine are inward and social rankings. Are you a priest, or a deacon? Are you a bishop, or an archbishop? Do you have a little plus sign by your name? On which side of your name?

Do you go to a poor church or a rich church? Did you go to Oxford or Cambridge, or Harvard or Yale? Oh, you went to a community college? Did you go to a private school? Oh, you’re a part of a club?

That is not just an Anglican thing, of course. It is a human thing. We have adapted down through the generations to be supremely sensitive to the signifiers of rank and status. That by itself is not necessarily a good or a bad thing. Where we get into trouble is with the meaning we hang on all those markers, like tinsel on a Christmas tree.

Children have not yet learned this link. When we are children we are certainly no less aware that some of our friends are faster, or stronger, or smarter, or more popular. But the spectrum of those differences that separate us is much narrower in our circle of friends, and much less important than the one big thing that unites us—we are all children, and we are all learning.

Jesus answers that question about rank with a lesson about people who don’t really care about rank. The eyes of children aren’t narrowed, scanning for the outward markers of status and power. Instead, the eyes of children are open with wonder, seeing and appreciating everything just as it is for the first time.

That is the humility of a disciple. We can hardly be bearers of the message of the gospel, a gospel that proclaims a god who comes among us to destroy all that separates us from god’s love, if we go about our work as disciples by wasting our time on the distinctions and status symbols that we allow to divide us.

My mother spent her whole working life as a first-grade teacher. She spent all her adult life in the company of six-year-old people. What she learned from them, and what she taught me, was that it is a lot easier to be a disciple if you go through the world with eyes still open to wonder. 

Even the things she didn’t understand or the behaviors she couldn’t grasp, my mother approached with curiosity rather than judgment. Curiosity is the ticket to wonder. So I learned from my the crucial difference between being childish and being childlike. That, in a very short summary, is the message Jesus is offering us this morning. 

It’s childish to be worried about who is the greatest on the playground, or who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. It’s childish to think our skepticism and snark is a more powerful key to truth than wonder, and to denigrate those who approach the world with open eyes and open hearts. Those are the moments when we fashion millstones for ourselves.

It’s childlike to live at the intersection of humility and wonder—because you cannot experience wonder without the kind of humility that knows there is still so much left for you to see. And when we can still experience wonder, then we can still experience the awe that reveals God’s love to us, God’s purpose for us, and God’s audacious hope in us. Amen.