This sermon was preached August 24 and 25 at Holy Trinity by the Lake. Here are the weekend's readings.
I wonder if you grew up, like me, in a family where at large family gatherings, especially dinners, generous use was made of The Children’s Table. Capital T. Capital C. Capital T. The Children’s Table was occupied mostly by, well, children, although the youngest adults were fair game and might find themselves there, too, if The Main Table ever ran out of room. Youngest adults, of course, was a relative phrase but if you made it to forty you were more or less safe. Probably. The situation was mostly practical. More bodies than seats means something has to give. Split ‘em up! Divide and conquer. Banish them to … The Children’s Table.
Of course it was more well-meaning than that. And of course nobody who made the table assignments would have thought about it as banishing. But of course, also, to divide the tables by age over against some other arbitrary qualification, feature, or interest (like musical tastes, biggest ears, or most memorized lines from The Princess Bride) was to make silent assumptions about who was interesting to whom and from whom you might expect to hear either entertaining or edifying things.
The silent assumptions often made things more predictable, people knew where they stood in advance, even as the assumptions made in silence silently shrank the family’s imagination for what was possible. And this is a longstanding pattern with precedent: think Jesus’s disciples when they tried to keep the kids away, lest the kiddos interrupt what Jesus was about to show the “true followers” in a space protected from noisy, smelly, inquisitive children. Think the feeding of the five-thousand, when the disciples shrugged their shoulders, unconvinced that the gifts of a child could be of serious use or constitute a genuine blessing for the life of the community. “All we’ve got is this child. And his lunch box. How can what he brings to the table possibly be enough?”
I’ve been thinking about this dynamic for a while, the assumptions we make about age and who is worth listening to. Different generations of people have been thinking about it recently, too. I’m sure you’ve seen or read the mostly unhelpful articles. Millennials wonder when Boomers will hand over the reigns. Boomers for their part are understandably in no hurry to be written off by Millenials. Meanwhile, Generation X invisibly wonders why the Millennials and Boomers are fighting as if they don’t exist and aren’t also standing in line. Did you know that, astoundingly, three of the previous four presidents, including our current one, were born in the same month of the same year, 1946?
Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this, a zero sum game, one generation, winner take all, guarding against the others. But choosing to witness the alternative, a community that collaborates, listens, honors, and shares real and vulnerable space in common life, one that fosters relationships of mutual blessing - mutual gratitude, amazement, and wonder - in the midst of our differences, well these spaces take intention and effort. More than that, these spaces require the belief that each of us has been given true gifts that would truly bless and build up the others; it requires the belief that being in community opens us to the possibility that God might change us from the people we were before we opened our hearts to each other. If we are lucky, we come to more than make room for this possibility; we come to pray for and delight in it.
These sorts of spaces take work. Never finished work. But it’s good work, holy work, and work worthy of the time and energy it takes. Especially for Christians. After all, Jesus refuses the disciples’s refusal of the children, and he even blesses the lunchbox of the boy, to feed a hillside of people. A friend said to me one time, “I want to give a talk about friendships and significant others. But then I realize that that was absurd. For Christians, there are no insignificant others.” One of the things being a Christian is to discover is that we belong to each other, because we belong to God; that my life and death is with my neighbor. We who are many are one body, says St. Paul, because we all share the one bread.
But each of us, I suspect, has days when we do wonder if we belong to each other or what kind of place we can have in the body. After all, love and belonging, in a world as determined by humiliation and competition as this one, are hard things to trust.
In the first lesson today, we find the prophet Jeremiah evidently in need of some convincing he belongs to the body. Specifically, he needs some coaxing to speak up. He’s been at The Children’s Table for so long he has come to believe it’s his true place. Why should The Main Table listen to him? What would he have to say to Israel that anyone in Israel should take seriously coming from his mouth?
As I listen to my own very vocal toddler at home, it occurs to me that of course Jeremiah’s doubt about his voice and its place in the body is not a doubt with which he was born. He learned it when he was young. From others who taught it to him. Even others who cared deeply for him. But then one day Jeremiah hears a voice that gives him voice. The voice belongs to God.
But the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord."
Like Moses before him, like just about every other character in the whole daggum book, young, old, and in between, the ones who wonder out loud if they’re cut out for the call and the invitation God gives them, God insists to Jeremiah that the most important thing about him, the assurance he should have that he is enough, so that he can speak without fear, is that God is coming with him.
Trivia time! Did you know, by your baptism, this is true of you, too? That the most important thing about you - more important that you’re greatest failure, more important than your biggest win - is God’s love for you and presence with you? You, beloveds, children of God. Sealed by the Spirit, marked as Christ’s own. Just like Jeremiah, called out of fear.
I pray we can all receive this reminder today and each new day remember the good news that God’s love is our belonging and that we have a full place at the table, and that we are called to lift up this Good News to one another and others, but Jeremiah’s call asks us to particularly notice and consider the young ones among us and the ways we as Christ’s body visibly communicate the fullness of their belonging, or not. In other words, Jeremiah is, yes, a general reminder to see, encourage, and make room for each other, but Jeremiah is also the very specific reminder that children are very often among the marginalized and invisible, even if we don’t always think of them this way. Like the man Jesus found covered in chains that other people had put on him, whom, like the woman in today’s gospel, Jesus nonetheless healed, when children are found on the margins it is very often because we put them there.
That’s why I don’t think it’s too much to call Jeremiah’s story a healing. So many healings in the Bible have to do with people set free from the rule and rules of those in power. Of course, it takes help sometimes to see in the first place that we possess the kind of power a person might do well to be freed from. A person at The Main Table might not think much about The Children’s Table. But Jeremiah did. Thank God, Jeremiah trusted the voice that gave him voice. Jeremiah spoke up. Thank God, Israel listened. Thank God, the Word bridged a void. Praise God redemption took root.
So we who follow Jesus and seek to take him at his word go out of our way to listen to our children. Children like Greta Thunberg, fifteen years old when she spoke of climate justice at a conference organized by the U.N. last year. We listen to the students of Stoneman Douglas High School who became voices in their community, locally and nationally, in the days after a gunman wreaked hellish havoc on their lives and on their school. It is one thing of course to say we disagree about the strategies or proposals that speak to the concerns to which our children give voice. It is quite another to dismiss their voices as naive or unseasoned or anything else. Dismissing the voices of children is the one thing, it turns out, our Savior expressly forbids.
On the Day of Pentecost, when fire fell on the first disciples, the Holy Spirit, on what we’ve come to call the Birthday of the Church, scripture tells us that these words from the book of Joel were coming true: the Lord said, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit” (Joel 2:28-29).
Yes, even on the ones who don’t drive the local economy, the retired and those at recess, both alike, that’s where the Spirit is painting new pictures, showing salvation, revealing the new things of God in this world, bestowing blessings with the power to give life to the whole church, to all of us. That’s why a friend likes to tell me it’s smart to get yourself at least two mentors, 30 years in both directions, one older and one younger. Because, look. You and I worship a God who emptied the grave - who are we to pretend to know where or in whom God won’t show up?
So we come to this table today. And we notice there’s just one table to share. There is no children’s table. Or maybe there’s just one children’s table. Because we only come to the table at all as God’s children. Either way, as God calls us to this meal together, around one shared table, God calls us to become a dinner party unlike any other in town. Where there are no insignificant friends. Where the host invites the young and old alike to speak out loud the visions and dreams God gives them.
Because it doesn’t have to be the way the world imagines, a zero sum game, one generation, winner take all, guarding against the others. Baloney. But here we commit - and already in two short weeks I have been so inspired by the breadth and depth of our particular church family’s commitment - here, we commit, we choose to witness an alternative life together, a community that collaborates, listens, honors, and shares real and vulnerable space in common life, one that fosters relationships of mutual blessing. Because one of the things it is to be a Christian is to discover is that we belong to each other, because we belong to God.
Thank God, and amen.
Of course it was more well-meaning than that. And of course nobody who made the table assignments would have thought about it as banishing. But of course, also, to divide the tables by age over against some other arbitrary qualification, feature, or interest (like musical tastes, biggest ears, or most memorized lines from The Princess Bride) was to make silent assumptions about who was interesting to whom and from whom you might expect to hear either entertaining or edifying things.
The silent assumptions often made things more predictable, people knew where they stood in advance, even as the assumptions made in silence silently shrank the family’s imagination for what was possible. And this is a longstanding pattern with precedent: think Jesus’s disciples when they tried to keep the kids away, lest the kiddos interrupt what Jesus was about to show the “true followers” in a space protected from noisy, smelly, inquisitive children. Think the feeding of the five-thousand, when the disciples shrugged their shoulders, unconvinced that the gifts of a child could be of serious use or constitute a genuine blessing for the life of the community. “All we’ve got is this child. And his lunch box. How can what he brings to the table possibly be enough?”
I’ve been thinking about this dynamic for a while, the assumptions we make about age and who is worth listening to. Different generations of people have been thinking about it recently, too. I’m sure you’ve seen or read the mostly unhelpful articles. Millennials wonder when Boomers will hand over the reigns. Boomers for their part are understandably in no hurry to be written off by Millenials. Meanwhile, Generation X invisibly wonders why the Millennials and Boomers are fighting as if they don’t exist and aren’t also standing in line. Did you know that, astoundingly, three of the previous four presidents, including our current one, were born in the same month of the same year, 1946?
Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this, a zero sum game, one generation, winner take all, guarding against the others. But choosing to witness the alternative, a community that collaborates, listens, honors, and shares real and vulnerable space in common life, one that fosters relationships of mutual blessing - mutual gratitude, amazement, and wonder - in the midst of our differences, well these spaces take intention and effort. More than that, these spaces require the belief that each of us has been given true gifts that would truly bless and build up the others; it requires the belief that being in community opens us to the possibility that God might change us from the people we were before we opened our hearts to each other. If we are lucky, we come to more than make room for this possibility; we come to pray for and delight in it.
These sorts of spaces take work. Never finished work. But it’s good work, holy work, and work worthy of the time and energy it takes. Especially for Christians. After all, Jesus refuses the disciples’s refusal of the children, and he even blesses the lunchbox of the boy, to feed a hillside of people. A friend said to me one time, “I want to give a talk about friendships and significant others. But then I realize that that was absurd. For Christians, there are no insignificant others.” One of the things being a Christian is to discover is that we belong to each other, because we belong to God; that my life and death is with my neighbor. We who are many are one body, says St. Paul, because we all share the one bread.
But each of us, I suspect, has days when we do wonder if we belong to each other or what kind of place we can have in the body. After all, love and belonging, in a world as determined by humiliation and competition as this one, are hard things to trust.
In the first lesson today, we find the prophet Jeremiah evidently in need of some convincing he belongs to the body. Specifically, he needs some coaxing to speak up. He’s been at The Children’s Table for so long he has come to believe it’s his true place. Why should The Main Table listen to him? What would he have to say to Israel that anyone in Israel should take seriously coming from his mouth?
As I listen to my own very vocal toddler at home, it occurs to me that of course Jeremiah’s doubt about his voice and its place in the body is not a doubt with which he was born. He learned it when he was young. From others who taught it to him. Even others who cared deeply for him. But then one day Jeremiah hears a voice that gives him voice. The voice belongs to God.
But the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a boy'; for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord."
Like Moses before him, like just about every other character in the whole daggum book, young, old, and in between, the ones who wonder out loud if they’re cut out for the call and the invitation God gives them, God insists to Jeremiah that the most important thing about him, the assurance he should have that he is enough, so that he can speak without fear, is that God is coming with him.
Trivia time! Did you know, by your baptism, this is true of you, too? That the most important thing about you - more important that you’re greatest failure, more important than your biggest win - is God’s love for you and presence with you? You, beloveds, children of God. Sealed by the Spirit, marked as Christ’s own. Just like Jeremiah, called out of fear.
I pray we can all receive this reminder today and each new day remember the good news that God’s love is our belonging and that we have a full place at the table, and that we are called to lift up this Good News to one another and others, but Jeremiah’s call asks us to particularly notice and consider the young ones among us and the ways we as Christ’s body visibly communicate the fullness of their belonging, or not. In other words, Jeremiah is, yes, a general reminder to see, encourage, and make room for each other, but Jeremiah is also the very specific reminder that children are very often among the marginalized and invisible, even if we don’t always think of them this way. Like the man Jesus found covered in chains that other people had put on him, whom, like the woman in today’s gospel, Jesus nonetheless healed, when children are found on the margins it is very often because we put them there.
That’s why I don’t think it’s too much to call Jeremiah’s story a healing. So many healings in the Bible have to do with people set free from the rule and rules of those in power. Of course, it takes help sometimes to see in the first place that we possess the kind of power a person might do well to be freed from. A person at The Main Table might not think much about The Children’s Table. But Jeremiah did. Thank God, Jeremiah trusted the voice that gave him voice. Jeremiah spoke up. Thank God, Israel listened. Thank God, the Word bridged a void. Praise God redemption took root.
So we who follow Jesus and seek to take him at his word go out of our way to listen to our children. Children like Greta Thunberg, fifteen years old when she spoke of climate justice at a conference organized by the U.N. last year. We listen to the students of Stoneman Douglas High School who became voices in their community, locally and nationally, in the days after a gunman wreaked hellish havoc on their lives and on their school. It is one thing of course to say we disagree about the strategies or proposals that speak to the concerns to which our children give voice. It is quite another to dismiss their voices as naive or unseasoned or anything else. Dismissing the voices of children is the one thing, it turns out, our Savior expressly forbids.
On the Day of Pentecost, when fire fell on the first disciples, the Holy Spirit, on what we’ve come to call the Birthday of the Church, scripture tells us that these words from the book of Joel were coming true: the Lord said, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit” (Joel 2:28-29).
Yes, even on the ones who don’t drive the local economy, the retired and those at recess, both alike, that’s where the Spirit is painting new pictures, showing salvation, revealing the new things of God in this world, bestowing blessings with the power to give life to the whole church, to all of us. That’s why a friend likes to tell me it’s smart to get yourself at least two mentors, 30 years in both directions, one older and one younger. Because, look. You and I worship a God who emptied the grave - who are we to pretend to know where or in whom God won’t show up?
So we come to this table today. And we notice there’s just one table to share. There is no children’s table. Or maybe there’s just one children’s table. Because we only come to the table at all as God’s children. Either way, as God calls us to this meal together, around one shared table, God calls us to become a dinner party unlike any other in town. Where there are no insignificant friends. Where the host invites the young and old alike to speak out loud the visions and dreams God gives them.
Because it doesn’t have to be the way the world imagines, a zero sum game, one generation, winner take all, guarding against the others. Baloney. But here we commit - and already in two short weeks I have been so inspired by the breadth and depth of our particular church family’s commitment - here, we commit, we choose to witness an alternative life together, a community that collaborates, listens, honors, and shares real and vulnerable space in common life, one that fosters relationships of mutual blessing. Because one of the things it is to be a Christian is to discover is that we belong to each other, because we belong to God.
Thank God, and amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment