On
Friday I performed a wedding on the beach at the foot of Montara Mountain between
San Francisco and Half Moon Bay. The parents
of the groom are members of this congregation, and the couple had met me a few
times on Sundays and at a family memorial service I’d done, and around the
beginning of this year they approached me about officiating. I agreed to do it gladly, for the sake of the
parents, and I started meeting with them once a month or so for pre-marital
counseling. They impressed me as individuals and as a couple,
with their sincerity and maturity and evident love for each other. So it was a real joy to stand with them as
they made their marriage vows. Plus,
they are surfers, so doing it by the ocean felt especially appropriate, and
that is a place I also love to be. My
family came down for the ceremony and we made a little weekend of it, and it
was like the old days, when my daughter was small and we lived five blocks from
the beach in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
All
that said, I was surprised last week as I was looking ahead to the wedding, to
find myself having some misgivings about it.
The form of service that we used was a “Non-theistic Judeo-Christian
Ceremony” adapted from the Book of Common Prayer. There was no Eucharist, no mention of Christ
or the Holy Trinity, no Lord’s Prayer.
There was a reading from the Scriptures, from the Song of Songs in the
Hebrew Bible. I am generally an
accepting and open-minded person, and I’d done this kind of thing before, so as
I say, it came as a surprise to me, but I found myself wondering what I was
doing. I am a Christian priest, after
all, so why was I officiating at such a questionably Christian wedding? Was there more I should have done in our
counseling sessions to impress upon this couple their need for Jesus? Was I failing in some way to uphold the
integrity of my ministry?
As I
wrestled with these thoughts, I found encouragement in today’s reading from the
Gospel of Mark. In this story we hear
how Jesus’ disciples tried to discourage people from bringing their children to
him, to place his hands on them and bless them.
The Gospel doesn’t say exactly why they did this—maybe the disciples
thought that Jesus’ time was too valuable to waste on small children, who,
after all, were unable to really understand who Jesus was, or to make a
conscious choice to follow him as their teacher and Lord. But we can say that in some way the disciples
looked down on the children as being beside the point of the real, important
ministry that they and Jesus were engaged in.
Of
course, we know that Jesus took that dim view of the little children and turned
it around. He said we need to receive
them, and to bless them, not for their sake, but for ours. Because the children are like little
emissaries in our midst of the Kingdom of God.
If we want to know that Kingdom, says Jesus, and how we can enter it, we
mustn’t relegate the children to a marginal place in the community, or make
them an afterthought in our ministry, but put them right at the center of it.
Adults
seem to need a religion of distinctions and definitions, of qualifications and
regulations. But children need a
religion that is more than a set of rules, or a dumbed-down version of the grown-ups’
ideas about God. They need a religion
based on relationships of love and trust. Their need to love and trust others is as
innate as their need to be loved and protected, and this is as true of their
relationship with God as it is of their relationships with the adults in their
lives. They rely completely on a world
that is beyond their understanding, the world of adults, and their natural
inclination is to love us, and to believe in our world, to want to learn what
they can about it and to express what they are learning. The way they learn best is with rituals in
which they can participate, with pictures and stories that feed their
imaginations, and by taking those imaginations into play.
Jesus
respected the rules, but he taught a religion that was about more than rules,
it was about love and trust; love and trust of the one he called “Abba”—which
means “Daddy.” He taught people that
they were to be like God in the way they treated each other, to be fearless and
compassionate and resourceful, creative, forgiving and generous, because the
wisdom of God is vindicated by her children.
And he taught them that the world they thought they knew was really
embraced and pervaded by a much greater world that was beyond their
understanding. It was a world Jesus could
not describe, or define, or explain to them, but he could tell them stories and
parables so that they could imagine what it was like.
We
have an expression in English, “child’s play,” that describes an activity so
easy as to be frivolous. But that’s not
fair. That doesn’t do justice to the
real play that children do, which is often full of laughter and fun, but can
also be gravely serious. Left to play
freely, children will make up games about work and struggles for power, about
war and peace, and crime and punishment, and illness and sorrow and death. Likewise, Jesus’ appeal to our imaginations
is not a sentimental indulgence in whimsy—it’s not just a nice story he tells,
it is a drama he plays out, with total commitment, all the way to the cross.
The
Gospels are very clear that the passion and crucifixion of Jesus was something
that had to happen. And Christians have
tended to take this to mean that it was something God needed—it had to happen
so God could win his wager with the Devil on the human soul, or because God
needed a sacrifice to satisfy the just demands of his righteous anger at
us. But there is another, minority, view
in the Christian tradition that says that the passion is something we needed. It had to happen, you might say, to complete
the story God is telling us in Jesus Christ.
It is partly a story about the tragic depths of our wickedness, our
propensity to make scapegoats and victimize the innocent with murderous
violence, a story proved true again on Thursday in Roseburg, Oregon, as it is
in countless places every day around the world.
Christ’s place in that drama is, as always, with the victims.
But
it is also a drama that has to play out so that God can tell the rest of the
story, in the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, in the gift of the Holy
Spirit and the community of saints, and the consummation of the kingdom that
still is coming. The cross is necessary
so we can have the whole Christian story, which is not only about how we are
wicked children, but also about how we can grow up into the full stature of Christ,
and inherit our share of his kingdom. In
this light we can see our whole tradition as a single work of the imagination,
as play, in which each successive generation, beginning in childhood, does its
part to keep the story going.
So
John of Patmos could tell of the persecution of the early church as a great cosmic
drama with angels warring in heaven and a dragon loose on the earth, and the
fall of Babylon the great, and the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem. So Francis of Assisi could enter so fully
into his imitation of Jesus, that he received the wounds of the crucifixion in
his hands, and feet, and side. So that
same Francis could imagine a world in which sun and moon and stars, wind, water
and fire, the earth and all that grows upon it, and even the death of his body,
are beloved brothers and sisters, all joining with him in a song of praise to
the creator God. So we, also, are called
out to play, to enter the story, imagine it fully, and live it out in our own
way. And if that sounds like too much
effort, or you think that you are getting too old for such games, I can only
repeat the advice that Jesus gave—let the little children show you how.
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