Sunday, September 23, 2018
(Much of this sermon borrows from a sermon preached by Dr. Matthew
Tennant, Charlbury Baptist Church, England, 3/1/09)
Jesus says to his
disciples, “Whoever welcomes a child in my name welcomes me, and whoever
welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
What does he mean when he says “welcomes a child?” What does that entail in my life? How do I welcome children? In Jesus’ day children were very low on
society’s ranking of importance. Every
family wanted children, but once born, they were expected to defer to their
elders and to be quiet and respectful.
They did not hold a central place in communal life.
However, in verse 36
we see Jesus, very intentionally, take a child and set that child among
them. Toward the child, Jesus had an air
of tenderness, affection, and great care.
He valued the child. At the same
time, he used the moment to demonstrate how much God valued this one who was
pushed to the margin by the cultural elite.
On other occasions, Jesus made time for blind people that the crowds
passed by. Jesus touched the lepers that
temple goers fastidiously avoided. Jesus
listened to the women that men ignored.
Jesus welcomed tax collectors and prostitutes; a group shunned by polite
society. His demonstrative love of
children and esteem of children is one more example of our Lord and Savior
telling us we’ve got it all wrong in how we value people.
Anyone who appears undesirable or unimportant
in our circles gets to sit at the head table at Jesus’ banquet. So, if we want to be with Jesus, we have to
take on humility that demands that we see ourselves on equal footing with all
others. This is not self-hate. We should love ourselves. We should be confident. And we should strive for excellence in all
that we do. But in our valuing of
people, we do not set ourselves above anyone, not if we want to be with Jesus.
As I proceed, a question to ponder is do you want to be with Jesus. Do you truly want follow him, be his
disciple, and live your life totally submitted to His word and to the Holy
Spirit? We all might say we want to be
filled with the power of the Spirit and the Love of God. Who wouldn’t want
that? But, do you, do I, want to submit
Jesus? Do we want to live life on his
terms?
My brother, also pastor, wrote a sermon in
which he compared this passage from Mark to one of Leo Tolstoy’s stories, The death of Ivan Ilych. I’m going to share my brother’s analysis
as a way of looking into the posture Jesus wants us to take with others.
Tolstoy’s
Ivan Ilých[1]
is a high court judge in 19th-century Russia. He is a miserable husband, a proud father,
and an upwardly-mobile member of Russia's professional class. Setting aside his dreadful relationship with
his wife, Ivan has a good life. He has an
important position with the Department of Justice, and a house that indicates
his affluence. He is very proud of that
house and of how prestigious he is. Ivan
consistently strives to magnify his reputation as an important man. Tolstoy writes that Ivan is “attracted to
people of high station as a fly is drawn to the light, assimilating their ways
and views of life and establishing friendly relations with them.”[2] He’s like Jesus’ disciples walking along the
road, arguing about who among them is the greatest. Jesus tells them, “Whoever wants to be first
must be last of all and servant of all.”[3]
Such
a thought would be foreign to Ivan who works so hard to appear rich and
important. Working on his house to
maximize its eloquence, he falls off a ladder he had climbed while showing the
decorator how he wants some new curtains to be placed. In the fall, he bumps his side on the latch
on the window, leaving a bruise. After a
few weeks, the pain in his side does not go away. Sometime later, he develops a strange taste
in his mouth. After seeing expensive,
celebrity doctors, no one can explain or treat his condition, but it soon
becomes clear that he is dying.
The
frustrating thing about seeing a man like Ivan Ilých go through the pain and
struggle of facing his own death is that he
is not a bad person. He is an
ethical attorney, a good citizen, an enjoyable friend, an adequate provider,
and a fair and loyal employer of his household staff. He never abuses his power, although he is completely
aware that he could. The life that he
built is one of surface value. No matter
what, Ivan keeps up appearances and does not allow anyone into that intimate
place of sharing his burdens.
After
he gets sick, the life of surface value that he has built does not include
anyone to share the journey through ill-health toward death with him. His wife and daughter are in their social
world and are basically unaware of his struggles. His friends are shallow relations that are
not there for him when he faces his own mortality. There is no one to minister to his needs in
his time of travail. Some of his
colleagues, people who he would have counted warmly as part of his circle,
begin looking at Ivan as a man whose job will soon be vacant.
This
lack of pity and compassion from his family, his friends, and his colleagues
begins to torment him. No one will give
him the care he desperately wants. His
whole life he wanted to be first. In a
sense, he received what he wanted. He
had a high position, married well, had children, and so on. “At certain moments after prolonged suffering
he wished most of all (though he would have been ashamed to confess it) for
someone to pity him as a sick child is pitied.”[4] Yet, he had built the kind of life for
himself where there was no one around to do so. Except, there was one person, the young
butler’s assistant Gerásim.
Gerásim
brought Ivan his food. This was his
job. Gerásim took away Ivan’s chamber
pot; this too was his job. Gerásim did
it with humility and a cheerful, life-giving disposition, which was not part of
his job. Gerásim would also lift up
Ivan’s leg, sometimes into the night.
This was an activity that relieved some of Ivan’s pain and discomfort,
and this was not part of Gerásim’s job. The
really beautiful part is the way Gerásim did what he did. It was his disposition. It was the expression on his face. Ivan apologized for his condition and his
needs, and Gerásim smiled, saying, “Why shouldn’t I help you? You are a sick man.”
Ivan
had his position, his house, his reputation, but when facing his own mortality,
he discovered that power and prestige gave no comfort. Now, consider Ivan’s misplaced priorities and
the disciples. They argued about who was
the greatest. Ivan wanted to be known as
great. In our honest moments, do we want
that too? Do we wish people who know us
would say how wonderful we are?
I
do. I would be thought of as erudite, a
speaker of flowing, inspired words, and a caregiver who possesses a deep well
of wisdom and compassion. I don’t know
if you think about such things. I
do.
Facing
his own death, Ivan found that love, compassion and comfort, not greatness and
prestige, were what he really wanted. In
his story, a boy named Gerásim, a peasant with no prospects, delivered the
Messianic goods. He did the mundane
tasks, like bringing food. He went above
and beyond the call of duty, by holding Ivan’s legs, and he was there. Gerásim carried out his tasks giving his full
attention to Ivan. This is the ministry
of presence.
Jesus
said, “Whoever welcomes a child,” a
nobody, one kicked to the curb by society, whoever welcomes that one
“welcomes me.” Do we want to welcome Jesus?
Because if we welcome him and spend time listening to him, we end becoming his
followers. If we decide to, in the name
of Jesus, welcome the one society has rejected, help the needy, encourage the
broken hearted, and move the outcast and marginalized to the very center of our
family, our circle of concern; we do that and we do it in the name of Jesus,
we’ll look the way he wants his disciple to look.
Follow
the story a few verses back from where we began reading. Before Jesus predicted his betrayal and
crucifixion, he had been on the Mount of Transfiguration while with James,
John, and Peter. The other 9 were in a
village at the foot of the mountain when a desperate man came running to
them. His son had epilepsy. The violent Tonic-clonic seizures (9:18)
threatened his son’s life. So, he
brought his boy to the disciples of the miracle worker. And those 9 followers of Jesus, part of his
hand-select 12 disciples, were powerless to face down this evil that wreaked
this child. Jesus came and healed the
boy (v.25-27).
Fresh
off this failure and their inability to understand Jesus’ prediction of his own
death and their fear in asking him about it, they proceeded to posture and
preen and brag of their own greatness.
Immediately after being humbled, they puffed their chests out in
swaggering false confidence.
And
look past our reading to the very next story.
One of the 12, John, sees someone he doesn’t know doing what they
disciples couldn’t do: healing and driving out demons. They were utterly powerless to face the
epilepsy demon. Now, someone else is
acting in Jesus’ name, and John wants
to stop him.
Mark’s
gospel goes to great lengths not only to highlight the disciples’ failure of
faith and failure to learn, but also to show the absurdity of anyone who is not
humble. Before human pain, we must be
humble. Facing demons and disease, we
must be humble. In light of Jesus’
holiness and our sinfulness and weakness, we must be humble because we can only
truly welcome Jesus in a posture of humility.
And we can only truly adopt they posture by going out of our way to
uplift, respect, honor, and help the most vulnerable and rejected people in our
world. In short, we must truly befriend
those who have trouble fitting in and those who have been stepped on over and
over in life. This isn’t charity. It is relationship.
There
was no miracle in Tolstoy’s story. Ivan
Ilých died. His wife was more concerned
with the state of their financial affairs than with the loss of her husband. His friends bemoaned that they had to find a
new partner for their card games. His
colleagues saw an opportunity to fill a prestigious vacancy.
Only
the servant boy Gerásim was sad that he was gone. He had become Ivan’s friend. Ivan Ilych saw the face of God in the servant
who lifted his legs to ease his pain.
We
don’t help the needy to end poverty.
Fighting poverty is clearly a worthy goal, one to which we should
commit. That’s true. It’s just not the final note this morning. The final note this morning is
life-transforming friendship. When Jesus
welcomes the child, he’s telling his disciple and us, you welcome these who are
cast out. Diseased? Disabled?
An ethnic minority? A criminal
record? Morbidly obese? A personality disorder? Mentally ill?
An addiction? We are called not
just to help but to love, and not just to love, but to befriend all of
these. And when our welcome includes
true friendship, then we understand what it is to welcome Jesus.
AMEN
[1] Leo Tolstoy, Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans.
Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude (New York: Perennial Classics, 1967), 245-302.
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