O Lord, we are your children, give us the faith to receive your grace and love fully in our lives ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Thus far in this sermon series about the Church, we’ve seen that the Church is a Eucharistic community – meaning that all we are and do is rooted in the way in which God brings us together, nourishes us in grace, places before us the story of our salvation, and summons us to follow Jesus in the way of the Cross. Now, that’s a very short summary, and so if you’ve missed any of the sermons so far, I’d encourage you either read or listen to them online. Today, the question is “what is faith?”
“You’ve just got to have faith,” they say. “My
faith is what got me through that ordeal,” she says. “Faith is what saves you,”
he contends. Faith, it then seems, is really important. But what is faith?
Clearly, faith is not a thing – it’s not an object that you can hold. And I don’t
think we want to say that faith is about our thoughts either – because that
would mean that people with intellectual disabilities or dementia could not
have faith since they aren’t able to have these supposedly “faithful” thoughts.
If faith were about our thoughts, certainly we wouldn’t need Jesus – if faith
was just about thinking the right things, Scripture alone would be sufficient.
But we have all experienced that faith is often the most robust when we come to
the end of answers and experience something bigger and grander than us. In other
words, if faith can be captured within the limitations of our thoughts, then it’s
not worth it.
Faith
comes from a word that is about loyalty, honesty, confidence, trust, and
allegiance. The Latin word is fides, which is where we get our word “fidelity.”
Perhaps the word fidelity would be better than faith to remind us about what
faith is really all about. We talk about the importance of fidelity in marriage
– which is a way of saying that commitment and loyalty are central to a
faithful marriage. We talk about recordings of high fidelity – meaning the audio
is true to the original.
Faith
is not about our thoughts on the validity of position, rather faith is about orientation
and trust. When a couple promises to be faithful to one another, they aren’t
promising to believe that the other person exists – that’s ridiculous. And,
yet, when it comes to religion and God, that’s exactly what we reduce faith to
being. So as we’re talking about faith, we have to get past the idea that faith
is another way of saying “opinion” when it comes to matters of religion. Faith
is a commitment to, a trust in, and a prioritization of that which is good, and
true, and beautiful.
And
for a description of what faith looks like when expressed in a human life, I
want to turn, as Jesus does, to children. In today’s Gospel text from Mark, when
the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest, Jesus sat down, assuming
the posture of a teacher, and said “Whoever wants to be first must be last of
all and servant of all.” And then he took a child, hugged this child, and said
to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” Furthermore,
in the next chapter of Mark, Jesus says “For it is to children 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.” Children show us how to have faith.
If
Jesus puts children at the center, perhaps the Church ought to learn from this
example. We do not fund children’s and youth ministries because we want the Church
to have a future, although we do. Rather, we need children present and active
now so that the Church has a present. Whether it is in formation, worship,
music, or service, we need children with us and among us, because Jesus himself
has told us that in welcoming them, we welcome God and that the kingdom belongs
to them. The more we can welcome children and families into the Church, the
more apparent the Kingdom will become.
Perhaps
more than any other society, we value children. And that is not a bad thing. We
see children are being sweet, cute, inspiring, full of potential and
imagination. So many parents make sacrifices for their children – in driving
them to and from recitals and practices, in spending Saturdays doing family
outings, in setting aside money for college. This is unique throughout history
though. For Jesus’ hearers, and for most of the people who have read Scripture
since then, children were not the center of a family’s life. Children were seen
on the same level as slaves – people without standing, without autonomy,
without dignity, and without respect. Now, this isn’t because people before us
were not as enlightened as we are or anything of the sort. For one, child
mortality rates were much higher than they are today. Children dying was simply
a brutal fact of life, and so pinning our hopes and dreams on any single person
didn’t make sense when we aren’t even sure that this person will make it to adulthood.
The Old Testament makes it clear that children are gifts and blessings from God
– so it’s not that children were not valued and loved, it’s just that their status
was as low as it gets.
And
this radically changes the tone of Jesus’ admonition to welcome children. He’s
not saying welcome in the adorable little children – he’s saying welcome in
those who are vulnerable, those who cannot contribute anything, those who are
not highly regarded. It is a direct rebuttal to the disciples’ bickering over
who was the greatest. In other words, don’t try to climb the ladder, because
the Kingdom is on the ground floor.
So
when it comes to faith, we can say it is childlike in the sense that it is
humble. Faith acknowledges that we are dependent and needy children and we need
our loving and heavenly Father to provide for us. We put so much emphasis these
days on independence, autonomy, and self-determination that we’ve essentially
pushed God out of the picture. Children know that they are dependent, and they
don’t deny it. Children are their most joyful, their freest, their most childlike
when they are confident in their parents to love, support, and nourish them. It’s
the same for us – when we put our confidence not in ourselves, but in God’s
provision for us, we have a childlike faith.
The
sort of faith that is commended to us by Jesus is rooted in humility. Being
humble doesn’t mean having a low opinion of yourself; rather, humility is about
the recognition of our place before God. And children help us to see not the
weakness of being dependent, lowly, and needy, but rather the blessings that
come through trust and reliance on God – the Father and Mother of us all.
Faith,
as Jesus suggests in this passage, is about welcoming. He makes it clear that
when we welcome a child, we are welcoming not only him, but the one who sent
him. Far too often, we treat faith as an individual action – something we
either have or do not have. We think faith is what we do in our meditations, in
our reading of Scripture, in our prayers, in our personal thoughts about God.
And this is not to say that faith excludes those things, but faith is so much
bigger than that. I’ve been saying it a lot recently because it’s a message
that the American church, in particular, needs to hear and be challenged by.
Faith is always in the plural. Faith is not about me and Jesus. Faith is about
us and Jesus. And Jesus makes it quite clear – if we are to receive him, we
have to receive others. And not others who can do us favors, not others who can
help us get a promotion, not others who have influence, but we are to welcome
the voiceless, the overlooked, the forgotten.
And
this is a point that we so easily miss – Jesus does not tell us to welcome the
lowly, people like children because Jesus feels bad for them and doesn’t want
them to be left out. No, it’s because Jesus himself was one of the lonely, one
of the overlooked, one of the rejected. Lest we forget, Jesus was condemned as
a criminal and publicly executed in the most horrific and dehumanizing way
possible: crucifixion. Howard Thurman has a book called Jesus and the
Disinherited and one of the central points in the book is exactly this. Yes,
of course, Jesus cares about the poor and the marginalized and wants us to also
care for them. But Jesus does not tell us to welcome the lowly from a place of privilege,
but rather from a place of lowliness. Simply put, when we welcome the lowly we
welcome Jesus, not as a reward for caring about the lowly, but because Jesus is
one of the lowly, the disinherited, the tossed aside. As the 4th-century
Church Father, St. John Chrysostom put it, “if you cannot find Jesus in the
beggar at the church door, you will not find him in the chalice.” So faith is always
about welcoming. Faith is having a posture of openness instead of being closed.
When
Jesus says that only those who receive the kingdom as a child will enter it, he’s
talking about grace. By definition, children have not earned anything – which is
why it is so proper and fitting to baptize children. We fool ourselves into
thinking that adults, or teens, are ready for Baptism and infants are not. If
nothing else, baptizing babies reminds us that none of us have earned salvation,
none of us have deserved mercy, but rather grace is always a gift, given to us out
of God’s abundant love for us before we even thought about asking for it. Again,
when we make faith about our thoughts and our words, we’ve left behind the message
of grace. And children so clearly help us to understand that, through and
through, faith is about grace.
Faith
is about an orientation and trust in this wonderful and amazing gift that we
have been given. We are loved by God, we are forgiven, we are saved – and this
is not through our doing, but through the gracious love of Jesus Christ. And because
we did not earn God’s love, it means that we can never lose it. Because we did
not ask to be saved, it means that nothing we do can take it away. Because
forgiveness is not the reward for our actions, it means that nothing we do can
ever separate us from God. Just think about how much time we waste trying to
prove ourselves to the man or woman in the mirror, to our friends, to our
coworkers, to our competition. We waste so much time worrying about what others
will think about us, when the truth is, most people aren’t thinking about us
most of the time. But God, who loves us more than we can ask or imagine, always
has us in mind. And if that truth is where we put our confidence, our hope, our
faith – just imagine how different our world could be.
Understanding
faith through the lens of grace makes us thankful. If there is nothing that we
have to do to deserve, earn, or keep God’s love, then it means that we are
freed up so that we can actually use our salvation and enjoy our forgiveness. Life
is not a test to see who will be proven right, or who will amass the most
wealth, or who will build the biggest following, or who will be the most
famous. No; life is a gift to be enjoyed. Life is the canvas on which the story
of love is woven. Jesus tells us that he came to give us abundant life. Faith
is simply about receiving this gift as a child: with awe, with wonder, with
gratitude. When is the last time you laughed like a child? Played like a child?
Trusted like a child? That’s what faith is all about – living in the freedom
that comes from knowing that our loving Father will take care of us.
Faith
is not about religious thoughts. Faith, as Jesus commends it to us is best seen
in children. Faith flourishes in the low places, perhaps that’s why children
spend so much time on the floor or playing in dirt – they know something that
we have forgotten about lowliness. Faith is about openness and welcoming others
because faith is always held in common. And faith is a gift of grace – a way of
living in trust, confidence, loyalty to God, who as our loving Father wants
nothing more than for us to know that if we could live like children, that we
would find the abundant life intended for us.
When
Isaiah prophesied that “a little child should lead them,” it wasn’t a metaphor.
The Son of God came to show us that faith is all about knowing, trusting, and
living as if God really does love us provide for us as a Mother and love us as
a Father.
