Child's Play

Job 1:1; 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

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.

The way of wisdom

1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58

I had lunch the other day with a friend whose 18 year-old granddaughter was struck and killed by a car in June while jogging near her home in Mill Valley.  He told me about what happened, and its aftermath, and of his struggle to make sense of it.  And he said that he’d kept thinking about all the time that she wouldn’t have, all the life that she wouldn’t live, all the years she should have been in the world but wouldn’t be.  And the injustice and flat-out wrongness of it was heavy on his heart and made him angry at God.  But then, he said, something shifted in his thinking, and he stopped brooding on his granddaughter’s death, and began to remember her life.  Instead of dwelling on her absence, he began to give thanks for her presence.  And about that time she came to him in a sort of waking dream, and he knew that God had not abandoned her, had not forsaken him.

We like to think that God is wise, by which we mean that God knows the right thing to do, and does it.  And if we are good and sincere people, we might hope that God will give us wisdom, too. The biblical figure who traditionally exemplifies this wisdom is Solomon.  Solomon, who, thanks to the crafty politicking of his mother Bathsheba, won out over all his brothers and succeeded his father David on the throne of Israel.  The story says that he was young and inexperienced and overwhelmed by the responsibility of governing the nation, so he went and made sacrifices to God.  And though Solomon sacrificed in the wrong places, God answered his prayers anyway.  God came to Solomon him in a dream and asked what he could do for him, and Solomon didn’t ask for long life or riches, or to be rid of his enemies, but for understanding and discernment, so that he might make wise judgements and be a good king.

The idea that God is the source of wisdom, and desires to teach that wisdom to us, is one of the great themes in the theology of the Bible.  The scriptures not only say that God has created the world, and called Abraham and Sarah and their descendants to be his people; God has not only made a covenant with them, and liberated them from bondage; has not only brought them into a good land, and driven out other nations before them, so that they might dwell there in safety and peace; but God has also given them laws, ordinances, and commandments so that they might gain understanding and learn how to choose what is right.  

The anti-Jewish polemic in the New Testament has caused us to think of the religion of Jesus as legalistic, as if the point of the law in the Hebrew Bible was to follow the rules literally and exactly, so that in doing so, God would find you righteous and favor you.  Of course, that’s one way to interpret it, but that legalistic streak runs through all religions.  There are a lot of Christians who read the Bible as a set of laws, absolute obedience to which, is our ticket to heaven.  But if you read widely in the Bible you find a lot of places, especially in the Psalms, that speak of a very different understanding of the law. 

This is the view that the commandments are the handiwork of God, much like the created world and the great acts of salvation history.   They are not simply arbitrary requirements, but they reveal that God’s purposes are faithful and true.  The point for us is not simply to obey the letter of the law, though that is important, but to study the statutes of God, to keep them in one’s heart and meditate upon them, to delight in them and allow them to illuminate one’s path in life, so that, in time, one might gain insight into the mind that gave them.  It is the contemplation of the awesome grandeur, the sublime justice, the boundless compassion and mercy of that mind, that the Bible calls “the fear of the Lord.”  It is called “fear” not so much because of the threat of punishment for those who disobey, but because one has had first-hand experience, a little taste, has dabbled ones toes in the shallow ripples at the edge of the ultimate mystery.   This fear, the Bible says, is the beginning of wisdom, the way that leads to knowing what God wants and even who God is.

That wisdom is partly the ability to make good choices even when the rules don’t tell you what to do.  We may not have to govern a kingdom, like Solomon, but we all regularly face decisions where there is no clear-cut right-and-wrong, when there are competing principles at stake and it’s not obvious which should prevail.  It is like this for me almost every time someone comes to our parish office asking for financial assistance.  Sometimes the request is simple and I can meet it whole-heartedly without thinking about it very much.  But more often the situation is complicated and I have to weigh my choices carefully. 

I have to consider all different kinds of factors—have I helped this person before, and how recently?  Will the assistance I give have a decisive positive impact, or will it just delay the inevitable?  Is there something else this person needs more than money, and if so, what is it, and is there someone else who can meet that need more effectively than I can?  In the end I have to make the best choice I can, within the limits of my power and my knowledge, and then I have to let go.  The same goes for all kinds of choices I have to make, as a pastoral leader, as a husband and a father, as a citizen of my town and country, and a member of the human race.   I assume it goes for all of us—we make the best choice we can, within the limits of our power and our knowledge, and make the best effort we can to follow through on the consequences, but at certain point, we just have to let go. 

Because there are even more fundamental choices we have to make; we have to choose not just between different courses of action but between different basic orientations to life.  It’s like the choice my friend had to make between agonizing over his granddaughter’s death and being grateful for the gift of her life.  There are things we have no power to alter and no way to understand, realities that confront us with the choice between hope and despair, between love and hate, between peace and retribution.   The wisdom that enables us to affirm the goodness and worthiness of life in the face of these realities is indistinguishable from faith.  It is grounded in humility about the limits of our power and knowledge.  It is freedom from the burden of having to know why everything happens the way it does, or of having to find the one right course of action that will make everything turn out okay.  Wisdom is trust that there is one who will take up where we leave off, who will tie up the loose ends, and catch what falls through the cracks.  

I think our faith in Jesus is faith in this kind of wisdom.  It’s not so much that he sets us a practical example of good habits and sound decision-making.  What I mean is that Jesus lives by what he knows of the living God.  The love and goodness of God is nourishment for him, more essential than food.  And everything he says and does is for the purpose of sharing that heavenly food with us, even giving his body like bread to be broken and his blood to be spilled like wine. 

That gift, raised again and renewed by the Spirit, makes Jesus’ whole life a revelation of the wisdom of God.  In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we have an inexhaustible subject of contemplation, disclosing depths that theological theories cannot penetrate, but only the radiance of love.  Such love subverts all worldly wisdom, with truth and power that could only come from an infinite source, from the one who alone can tie up all the loose ends of our ignorance and suffering, and catch what falls through the cracks of death.  And so we give thanks at all times and in all places, because in Jesus we have the bread of eternal life, the wisdom that satisfies a hunger nothing else can fill.