Like a Child

by Sharon Marr

(Based on Mark 9:30-37)

I love the unselfconsciousness of children in worship. I love their curiosity, their intensity, their sure sense of welcome and belonging. When they’re delighted, we can see their joy, clear and simple.  When they’re bored, hungry, sad, or irritable, they let us know that, too.  I love the fact that this family of God has welcomed children as they arrived on roller skates, in tutus or onesies, stood beaming with their work, tumbled down the aisle, done flips on the altar rail, or bounced Tigger fashion for communion with a huge smile.

Jesus, in this week’s Gospel reading, takes a little child into his arms, turns to his disciples, and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

On the face of it, this tender gesture is so small and so simple, we could easily miss … that this is very radical. But consider this: Jesus doesn’t say, “Welcome the child because it’s a kind or loving or generous thing to do.” He says: “Do you want to see what God looks like? Do you want to find God’s stand-in, hidden here among you? Are you curious about the truest nature of divine greatness? Then welcome the child. Welcome the child, and you welcome God.”

The context for this remarkable claim is an argument that breaks out among the disciples when Jesus explains — for the second time — that he will suffer, die, and rise again after three days. The disciples don’t comprehend, but they’re too afraid to ask questions. And I take note here, Jesus doesn’t show the least bit of concern that they didn’t comprehend; it wasn’t a test, he doesn’t say I’ve told you this before.  Instead, Jesus asks what their quarrel is about as it was obviously important to them.  They refuse to answer. They’re too embarrassed to say they were arguing about who among them is the greatest.  But he already knows why they’re bickering, so he brings a child into their midst, gathers the child into his arms, and upends his disciples’ notions of greatness and power: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

I could be tempted to sentimentalize Jesus’s gesture.  I’ve heard well-meaning people suggest, for example, that Jesus likens children to God because children are so innocent.  Perhaps …  But the children I know are also spirited, generous, selfish, naughty, obedient, curious, bored, quiet, loud, challenging, funny, surprising, creative, destructive, solemn … and exhausting. I think Jesus knew as much when he described children as trustworthy representations of God.
So what can we really learn about God by welcoming children? How can children open us up to deeper, more authentic communion with the divine?  What might children teach us about greatness?

Here are four possibilities:

Firstly, children show us that our imaginations are pathways to God.  When our Lissy was expecting her second child we were wondering just what sex the child would be and we were guessing amongst ourselves.  After a pause we asked Isabel, four at the time, what she thought the baby would be and she gave it some serious thought and then responded “an Acrobat”!  Imagination.  Isa wasn’t limited to just the sex of the coming child – she was looking ahead to its future!  As it turns out she’s on the ball as our Emily is always swinging on bars or tumbling down the hallway.

Jesus invites the disciples to imagine a world where death doesn’t have the final word.  Where inexpressible suffering gives way to irrepressible joy. Where resurrection is not merely a possibility, but a promise.
But the disciples can’t make the leap.  They’re bound by preconceived notions of who and what the Messiah must be, and they lack the imagination to envision a world as revolutionary as the one Jesus holds out to them. Doctrine, dogma and theology, in other words, hold their spiritual senses captive. Welcome the child, Jesus says in response. Open your imaginations. Return to the capacity for wonder, newness and strangeness you knew as a child.

I taught Bible in Schools for many years and I have seen lots and lots of very imaginative,  enthusiastic children.  The wonderful joy for me was, after one Bible story, a child said wistfully to me, “I want to meet Him”.  Imagination.  She, at five years, could sense the love she would meet.

Secondly, children teach us to risk hard questions on our way to God. As I mentioned earlier, kids aren’t afraid to ask awkward, challenging, and even impossible questions. They’re naturally curious, they’re not embarrassed by their ignorance. If they don’t understand something, they ask, and they persist in asking. As parents we have all lived through that seemingly endless ”but why?” period. In contrast, the disciples are too afraid to ask hard questions. In telling them candidly about the suffering that lies in his future, Jesus offers his disciples the possibility of a deeper, more vulnerable-making intimacy with him. But they resist the invitation, they just want to remain safely in the status quo. 

Thirdly, children teach us to trust God’s abundance. Young children generally expect that there’s enough to go around. Enough time, enough hugs, enough attention, enough love. It doesn’t occur to them to fear scarcity unless they’re conditioned to do so; left to themselves, they assume there is always plenty.

The disciples in this week’s story, don’t trust Jesus’s generosity, sufficiency and abundance. They quarrel for … first place, first dibs, first prize. In response, Jesus points them to the non-striving, un-ambitious, open-hearted trust of a young child.

And, fourthly, children teach us what divine power looks like. This, I think, is the most radical lesson of the four. A young child is the very picture of vulnerability. In some cultures, children are socially invisible. In others, they’re legally unprotected.  In all cultures, children are at the mercy of those who are older, bigger and stronger than they are.

And yet this — this shocking portrait of powerlessness — is the portrait Jesus offers of God. In the divine economy, power and prestige accrue as we consent to be little, to be vulnerable, to be invisible, to be low. We gain greatness not by muscling others out of our way, but by serving them, empathizing with them, and sacrificing ourselves for their well-being.  Whatever human hierarchies and rankings we cling to, Jesus upends them all as he holds a tiny child in his arms.  Do we want to see God? Do we really want to see God?
Then look to the child with no food, look to the child who has been molested.  Look to the child who is fleeing from war.  Look to the least of these, and see the face of God.

In this season of ‘caring for Creation’, children can teach us much.  We need imagination to envision God’s kingdom here on earth.  We need to ask ourselves hard questions. Do our actions and lifestyles reflect a real commitment to the well-being of everyone and everything? Are we secure in God’s abundance that we can determinedly consider the needs of all?  And, finally, can we humbly serve and protect our Earth, and all who live with us on her, reminding ourselves we are stewards not owners?

One of the most amazing truths about Christianity is that God became a helpless human infant. Jesus underscores that stunning truth with another: all children represent God’s heart, God’s likeness, God’s power.  To welcome a child is to welcome the divine. To cultivate childlikeness is to cultivate godliness. To choose vulnerability, is to be great in the Kingdom of God.

Drawing on work by Debie Thomas and Steve Garnaas Holmes

Taming the Tongue

by Pat Lee

(Based on James 3:1-12)

When I first became a Christian back in 1977, this text was one of the ones that spoke to me most. It taught me that I had to unlearn and re-learn how to use my words, and how the tongue can be one of the most damaging weapons we can use. I used my tongue to defend myself because it was the only thing I had to resort to.

I had been brought up in a family where there were many arguments. I had heard many spoken words that were hurtful and, to be honest, nasty. As a child, I didn’t understand why this was happening, and often thought that I had caused it, as my father once told me when I was about seven that I was worse than my brother and sister put together. How does a child cope with that?

I experienced many moments of distress. My way of coping and escaping was to find one of my favourite places around the farm just to be alone – to sit and cry my heart out. Neither of my parents knew anything about the personal struggle I was having at the time, of being sexually abused by a male relative when he stayed with us on the farm. He taught me that this was a ‘secret’ between us. And what kid doesn’t like a secret? This perpetrator had taught me to lie about what he was doing, so, consequently, I became a seasoned liar.

The most comfortable place for me to be was at school in the classroom, but I was bullied – in the playground, and on the way home from school, by some of the boys from a family who lived just up the road from me. My dad knew it was happening because I had plucked up the courage to tell him. His response to me was to ‘just ignore it’. Now, an adult might be able to do that but as a child, I could not. I put up with it until I was twelve, when I began to stick up for myself.

James shows us how a horse can be trained by the use of a bit in its mouth. We had draught horses on our farm so I know first hand how they could be trained and be used to do all manner of things. At the time James wrote this letter, the ships in the story were sailing ships which needed the wind to blow them along. Their captains used to steer them with a small rudder.  And then he gets on to talk about the tongue, which is not very large compared with rest of the body, but can be most influential.

Time and again the Scriptures address the tongue. In Matthew 12:34 when Jesus was talking to the Pharisees, he said, “How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” How we handle the tongue is a great indicator of our hearts before God.
I found a fable from Aesop to illustrate the point. Once upon a time, a donkey found a lion’s skin. He tried it on, strutted around, and frightened many animals. Soon a fox came along, and the donkey tried to scare him too. But the fox, hearing the donkey’s voice, said, “If you want to terrify me, you’ll have to disguise your bray.” Aesop’s moral: Clothes may disguise a fool, but his words will give him away.

James compares the damage our tongues can do to a great forest fire that has been started by a careless action like dropping a cigarette butt, or by not completely extinguishing a camp fire properly. But sometimes by an intended action that goes wrong.
I remember, when I lived in Timaru, a young friend who, with his twin brother, worked on their father’s farm. One day he decided that the conditions were right to do a burn-off, which is a common farming practice on the Canterbury plains. He lit the fire and everything was going well. But suddenly the wind changed direction, and before long he had an out-of-control inferno on his hands. The Fire Brigade was called and swiftly got it in under control, and thankfully no great damage had been done.

In a slightly edited version of my daily reading on 6th September, the Word for Today said this: Your mouth is a powerful tool that can help or harm. If you grasp an understanding of the power of the words you speak, it can change the course of your life. You can either speak positive, uplifting, encouraging things into existence in your life, or words that produce negative, discouraging things. ‘Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that may impart grace to the hearers.‘

I remember an experience I had at Pukekohe Intermediate. I was teaching confidence and communication skills to a number of children who lacked them. One girl, I shall call ‘Alice,’ never spoke at all in her class because she was too frightened. As I worked with her she gradually started to gain the confidence to join in. She discovered that she had a voice and could make worthwhile contributions without being laughed at or criticized in any way. Her confidence grew daily and, with encouragement, her communication skills also improved.
Her mother came to parent interviews with her class teacher. Then next day the teacher called me into his room to tell me that her mother had obviously noticed a difference in Alice, but then added that she thought that I had been wasting my time because she was ‘useless and would never amount to anything’. Her teacher and I were both devastated by this statement, but both of us realized that Alice had been subjected to this kind of oral abuse all her life, which was why she had not been able make any kind of contribution before. She thought that she was useless and nobody would be interested in anything she had to say. Her mother’s words had made her feel inferior and, probably, unloved.
She was such a lovely girl and I have often wondered what became of her. She would now be about 56 years old.

Some harmful words we speak may not be intended to be so, because we are not aware of what is happening in another person’s life, so our words can be spoken unwittingly, without realizing the pain they are causing. This also happened to me. An uncle of mine said something to me one day during a family celebration that caused me a great deal of pain. He had no idea what was going on in my life at that time. He meant no harm, as the question he asked was quite reasonable, but not to me.  I know that he would never have said anything if he had known, as he was a lovely, gentle, caring man. I held it together when it happened, and passed it off with an answer which everyone laughed at. I went outside and burst into tears.

I bet there is not a single person here today who has not been on the receiving end of someone’s harsh, nasty, angry or unkind words. In Ephesians 4:32 it says, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

Of course, we also use our tongues to encourage, bless, praise, give thanks and to speak lovingly to our children and those we love. We praise and worship God with our tongues, giving him the glory he deserves.

But Aesop was right. We need to control our bray. And James teaches that, apart from Christ, efforts to do so are inadequate. Redeemed speech and wisdom only truly come from the work of the Redeemer. Let us cast ourselves on the mercy of our Redeemer and pray that he will continue his work of overthrowing any demonic words that might flow from our mouths.
And let us remember that when someone says or does something that we don’t like or hurts us, not to fall into the temptation of retaliating with our tongues; to turn the other cheek.

My thanks to Mike Leake, associate pastor at First Baptist Church, Jasper, Indiana, for some of the information used in this reflection.

Creation in Focus

September, in the traditional church calendar, is framed as a month to focus on ‘caring for creation’.  As a result, attention is given to things like sustainability, caring for the environment, recycling, and climate change.  Well and good.  Acknowledgement is usually given to God as Creator, but ‘Creation’ is the focus.  Creator God deserves full honour, of course, for this wondrous creation that we inhabit.  The more you learn about it, the more you appreciate it, the more you wonder; and you wonder, how did he do it?!  It’s quite beyond our knowing or comprehension.

Yet, non-Christians know.  Charles Darwin unlocked the secret in the 1850s and defined the creative mechanism as ‘evolution’.  The universe evolved and so in turn did galaxies, the solar system, our planet, and life.  Soup created amoeba, that evolved into fish and land animals and eventually us.

We the church have embraced Darwin’s theory, although, of course, God must be behind it.  He must have kicked it off.
Secularists wouldn’t accede to that, but invoked something called the Big Bang (formalised by Georges Lemaître in 1927; coined by Fred Hoyle and developed by George Gamow through the middle of the 20th century).

So, there it is.  God created Creation via the Big Bang (four and a half billion years ago) and slowly fashioned Creation – including us – for us to enjoy (and care for) today.

Except, the Bible tells it very differently.  There’s nothing of evolution or Big Bang or billions of years recognisable in Genesis.  So Christians must decide what they’re going to believe.  To embrace Darwinism, I must discount Genesis.  And the recorded references to Genesis by the apostles Paul and Peter. Most Christians don’t like to go that far, so Genesis is re-framed as allegory (which it demonstrably isn’t) or an uninformed account written by someone primitive who hadn’t heard of the Big Bang (which it clearly isn’t).

If God did it at all (and popular opinion says he didn’t), did he use evolution or not? Second decision.  Because the claimed evolutionary mechanism and biblical creation are so unaligned and incompatible that it’s disingenuous to combine the two.  People do, of course.  Christians do.  The church has embraced Darwinism and Lemaître-ism.  To its cost.  Its embrace of evolution is arguably the biggest cause of the decline of western Christianity, especially among young people, who are deluged with media, academic and text book claims of apes becoming us.  If evolution is how it happened, then who is God and who needs him?  We are here by random chance and blind accidental mutations and … (words from Ecclesiastes come to mind).

If you’re of the God-triggered evolutionary persuasion, you’ll have tired of this by now, but if you’re a sincere seeker of foundational truth, linger a bit.  Look into it.  There are numerous evidences (scientific and theological) to expose evolution and the Big Bang, and to support the Genesis account (see here for compelling material).  And, although creationists are considered whacko by some – flat-earthers, if you will – that is hardly a godly (or intellectual) position to take up without giving the evidences sober scrutiny.  Don’t scorn.  Don’t be hastily dismissive.  It will revolutionise your faith and your Christian journey to see Creation as miraculously propelled into being a few thousand years ago.  If God did it the way Genesis says he did then everything changes for the Christian.  Isn’t that worth the effort of honest enquiry? 

To whet your appetite, consider:  dinosaurs are said to have been wiped out by a meteor impact sixty-five million years ago.  So any dinosaur fossil dug up must pre-date that.  Yet, to the shock and chagrin of evolutionary scientists, dinosaur fossils are regularly dug up containing soft tissue – still-elastic blood vessels, blood and bone cells, proteins such as collagen and elastin, and even DNA in its double helix formation, uncorrupted.  Real science shows that this could not be, after sixty-five million years, since soft tissue, especially DNA, degrades rapidly.  The only credible conclusion is that such dinosaurs didn’t die that long ago.  Yet, due to the rigid long-age dogma of modern ‘science’, improbable, convoluted (and unscientific) explanations as to how such tissue might have survived are guessed at.
Pluto was believed to be 4.5 billion years old, along with the rest of the solar system, and devoid of all internal energy after so long, and being so small and so far from the sun (forty times earth’s distance). But the New Horizons spacecraft recently sent back evidence of ongoing volcanic activity. An impossibility after such long age. (See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaeeZFKyXuo.) Pluto is young.
In these and most other contexts, scientists are committed to the evolutionary narrative, despite evidence to the contrary.  And they have to be, if they want their work published and not laughed at.  Even so, although the grand scheme of deep time is seldom questioned, dates and theories are constantly revised or changed.

Theologically, death emerged as a consequence of sin. Ever since that moment (and if sin only emerged gradually, as humans evolved, when did the resulting death start?), death has dogged humanity, and is unavoidable, along with taxes.  Jesus came to rescue us from that death, and make eternal life possible.  What would be the point of his coming, his own death, and his resurrection, if evolution over billions of years were true?  It doesn’t fit, theologically.  Death is a fundamental part of evolution, “survival of the fittest”, Nature being “red in tooth and claw” – it was extant from the beginning, long before sin could have emerged.  So, not a consequence of sin and not something to be saved from.  Jesus’s mission was redundant.

And, finally, practically, when you view Creation through the lens of evolution, you only see death, decay and pointlessness; but through the lens of Scripture you see promise and hope and life – abundant life.  As well as answers as to why the world is in such turmoil. 

‘Caring for Creation’ deserves our attention – no one could deny that.  But to focus on Creation in that way while denying the clear biblical reportage– affirmed by Jesus, by the way, and who was actually present at creation (John 1:1-3, 10) – is misguided, and unfortunate for the health of the church.

Ken F

In the Garden

by Liz Young

Although today’s reading highlights the Beatitudes, today I plan to offer praise and thoughts for creation, and ponder how we have often failed to care for the environment.  I will propose we should increase our efforts to care responsibly for the earth and all its wonders, and also advocate for legislation that protects the earth’s resources, and their fair distribution.

Man started interfering with Nature when the world’s population was only about 100,000 and, even when we were hunter gatherers, we altered the distribution of earth’s flora and fauna as we chose what game we would kill and what edible plants we would gather, and which ones tasted nice and sweet to cultivate. Fire and cooking were blessings, as they increased the calorific value of what we ate. Now the earth’s population is more than eight billion, and concrete and comfortable dwellings cover a significant proportion of arable land, which has always been limited by the mountains and the sea anyway; and, as well, we’re running out of traditional energy resources.

It is possible for man to live sustainably: the islanders on Tikopia (in the Solomon Islands) have lived on one tiny island for over a thousand years, cultivating it carefully and limiting their population growth.
The world started getting into trouble when we limited deaths from infectious disease and then deaths from cancer and coronary heart disease.
It certainly makes economic sense for the New Zealand government to reintroduce smoking! Those who indulge die off at around age sixty, and won’t fill up retirement homes as Alzheimer’s patients!
Yes, the introduction of the pill has made contraception available to women increasing their independence, if they can afford it, although the pill needs to be stored in a fridge in the tropics, so is of limited value to women there.

Several of today’s hymns praise God for the natural world around us.
Although I was amazed to see two large kauri in Madeira that had been planted in the 17th century, it wasn’t until the 18th century that appreciation of natural beauty increased in Europe: French and English explorers, in particular Sir Joseph Banks, sent home strange plants to Kew gardens.
As climate change brings more devastation, we need to keep those seed banks secure. Some of you may remember that in the sixties we were given dire warnings that the world would run out of food. But since then more productive strains of food have been developed and at last New Zealand is looking at genetic engineering more positively.
Thanks to Sir David Attenborough and others, television has revealed many natural wonders to us over the past seventy years. These wonders occur in the depths of the earth, in the crevices of volcanoes and 60,000 feet deep at the bottom of the oceans, and in the many karst cave systems. There are plants, the amazing root systems of trees that communicate with each other, fungi and insects, fish and plankton.

Let God fill you with wonder and joy at all that he has created. And being filled with joy, let us be happy to share his bounty with those that are less fortunate than most of us here.

I was happy to see that people are now leaving their spare produce outside the library, because I expect those who are struggling to feed their families prefer to keep their difficulties to themselves.
The Old Age pension is no longer enough to live off, especially if you’re renting, and our Council doesn’t want social housing on the east coast of the Coromandel in case it encourages surfers! But we senior retirees need help with our housework and our gardens, and that could always be done when the sea is calm as long as they (the surfers) don’t want to waste petrol driving all the way to Raglan.

Up to 95 per cent of our food can be from plants. My John looks after our veggie garden. We’ve stopped growing potatoes because they take up too much space, but I always plant two kumara, a month before we leave on our annual February sailing holiday, so that the kumara leaves act as weed mat while we’re away. I just regret that I didn’t think to plant a pine nut and a fig tree twenty years ago when I planted our other fruit trees.

Thinking about abundant garden produce makes me think of food storage. How many of you bottle fruit still? Or have a large enough freezer to hold enough excess garden produce to last you through the winter? I remember leaving our one acre garden in the UK thinking, I won’t ever have to bottle again, only to be shown my cousin’s larder in Morrinsville, stuffed full of bottled fruit. That UK garden had thirty apple trees, which I only looked at closely after my mother died and found at least half of them were diseased.
I’m grateful here for the constant service provided by our primary industries in the war against pests.

So, give thanks for creation – for its beauty, for being able to walk through forests and calm our anxieties, for all the food and healing herbs God has provided us with. And let us share his bounty with as many others as possible. Amen