Childish behavior

9/20/09

Mark 9:30-37 (New International Version)

Who is Greatest?

 33They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” 34But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.

 35Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

 36He took a little child and had him stand among them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, 37″Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”

 

Mark 10:13-16 (New International Version)

The Little Children and Jesus

13People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. 14When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 15I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” 16And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.

 

            Growing up in the 1990’s was quite an experience.  I grew up during an era when the cartoons on television were worth watching.  We watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-man, The Thundercats, and perhaps one of my favorite cartoons of all times, Animaniacs. 

During my Junior High years I was quite the hit among girls and boys alike because of my ability to mimic the voice of Wakko Warner, one of the characters from Animaniacs.  I even had a Wakko shirt, which I bet still hangs in my closet in Ohio.

But something happened between the summer of my last year of Junior High and my first year of High School.  I remember being in the 9^th grade, a freshman, and speaking in my Wakko voice in a mixed gender group.  And this comical voice that had so often brought forth laughter in the 8^th grade now elicited a different response.  I got told by a girl that I was immature and that I needed to grow up.

What the heck!  Last year I was cool.  Now I’m immature?  That hit me hard.  I still remember that 15 years later.  Not only the experience, but the feelings with which I was overcome.  So what did I do?  I tried to grow up, to mature.  Gone were the silly voices and the silly T-shirts.  They were replaced by sarcastic banter and polo shirts.

Perhaps you have a similar story of when you made the decision that it was time to grow up.  But today I want to encourage you to be childish once again.  Today I want to show you that there are characteristics that most children posses at some point in their lives that we should all seek to reacquire today.  And we will get there, but let’s first start by looking at the context of our scripture for this morning.

            I sometimes feel bad for the twelve disciples.  They really are not made to look too bright in the Gospels, are they?  In the text leading up to our scripture for this morning we find that Jesus and his disciples are passing through Galilee and they stop for a teaching moment.  Jesus reveals to them yet again that he is going to be handed over to the authorities, killed, and then rise again on the third day.  And yet again the text tells us that they don’t get it.  And when these things really do happen, we see that the disciples still didn’t understand what Jesus was talking about until after the resurrection.

            So I feel kind of bad for the disciples because I think I can understand why they seem so confused so often.  Jesus was always teaching in parables.  He was always talking about mustard seeds, yeast, lost coins, lost sheep, lost sons, sowers, reapers, and now he was talking about dieing and rising again.  I would assume they were trying to figure out what it was that Jesus was trying to tell them in this parable, only what they didn’t know was that this wasn’t a parable at all.

            In addition to the fact that Jesus often did teach in parables, the disciples may have assumed this was a parable because it did not fit into their understanding of who Jesus was.  They understood him to be the next great king of Israel, like David and Solomon.  Jesus was going to reunite the chosen people and they were going to drive the Romans out of their Promised Land.  So there was no way that Jesus was going to die.  This must have been a parable.

            So these poor confused disciples are walking along the road to Capernaum after Jesus throws this non-parable parable at them and you can see by their conversation that they are still expecting Jesus to be some kind of militant leader or physical king.  They are talking among themselves and arguing about which of them is the greatest.  I would think that they are trying to establish some kind of hierarchy for their future positions under Jesus when he becomes the next king of Israel.  Jesus hears them chattering back and forth as they walk and after they arrive at their destination Jesus asks them what it was that they were talking about back there.  Oops, they just got caught.

Now Jesus launches into a parable, or perhaps more of a metaphor.  He takes this teaching opportunity and sits down to tell the disciples something important.  “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”  To illustrate this, Jesus gets a hold of the closest child to him and says that whoever welcomes one like a child welcomes him and welcomes the one who sent him.

At first glance it might seem like Jesus is just rattling off random things here about humility, children, and being welcoming.  But I think that these things are very much connected. 

How old was Jesus when he began his public ministry?  Around 30 years old.  Why would he have waited 30 years to begin his ministry?  This is God incarnate, he was probably more knowledgeable at three years old than most of us are at thirty or sixty for that matter.  No, Jesus waited until he was thirty to begin his public ministry because that was the common age for someone to be considered to have lived enough to be able to teach others.  Think of Paul’s letters to Timothy when he tells Timothy to not let anyone look down on him because of his age.  Your credentials in the first century included your birth certificate (okay they didn’t actually have birth certificates) that confirmed that you had gone around the sun at least 30 times and were therefore experienced enough to have something worthwhile to teach others.  This makes Luke’s account of a twelve-year-old Jesus teaching at the temple all the more impressive.

Children were to be seen and not heard.  Sure, children were a blessing, especially sons, but they also got in the way when grownups were trying to have a serious discussion.

So Jesus says that if you want to be first in his kingdom, you need to be a servant to all.  Even to the little children, welcoming them in as your guest.  That is humbling, especially for these disciples that were thinking that they were going to be the great decision makers, the great political advisors, and the great generals in Jesus’ kingdom.  No, they are getting stuck with diaper duty.

Evidently the disciples were not listening to Jesus when he spoke these things to them because if we look ahead to Mark chapter 10, people are bringing their children to Jesus and the disciples are chasing them off!  He just said to welcome them, now they are chasing them off!  Jesus rebukes the disciples for doing this and he gives them a stern lesson.  He tells them that anyone that does not receive the kingdom of God like one of these children will never enter into it.  The parallel in Matthew 19 says that unless we become like children, we will never enter into the kingdom of heaven.

So I am getting pretty excited about being a daddy in a little more than three months.  This last week I painted our nursery (Yukon Gold) and I found myself full of anticipation, more so than I have been for a while as I thought about the opportunities that I would have to raise up and teach another living, breathing human being.  But as I looked at these scriptures from Mark about Jesus and the children, I realized that perhaps there was something that we should be learning from children.  We are to receive the kingdom of God as a child does and if we want to enter the kingdom of heaven we need to become like a child.  So what does that mean?

I started thinking about what characteristics children have that we as adults should emulate.  And don’t worry, I know that there are also things that we should not seek to emulate.  The first thing I thought of is that children are inquisitive.  If you have ever been around children, you know that they ask a lot of questions.  How much longer until we get there?  Why can’t I have a candy bar?  Why is the sky blue and the grass green?  Why can’t I have a pet snake?

Many of you will remember Greta Shenk, who was a YPCA member that came to Staunton Mennonite as a part of the Y-church program.  Both of Greta’s parents are seminary professors and I had the opportunity to study under them both in my seminary days.  Greta’s parents, Sara and Gerald, are both quite intelligent people.  Gerald has a PhD in Sociology of Religion and Sara has a doctorate in education.  So they wanted their children to grow up with the opportunity to learn as much as they could.

Sara and Gerald made an effort to answer all of the “why” questions that their children asked.  They didn’t want their children to just mindlessly do as they were told, but to be informed even as little children.  So when asked “why?” they would take the time to explain things rather than just say “Because I said so!”  

But Gerald shared a story one time about when they rented a boat for a family vacation and they were having some issues steering the boat.  I don’t remember what they were heading toward, but I will say that it was a waterfall because that makes the story better.  So they were on this boat and they were heading toward this waterfall and Gerald just starts barking out orders to the three kids.  Grab the sail!  Lower it quickly!  Throw the anchor overboard!  And the kids kept asking, “Why daddy?  Why daddy?”  That was a time when he needed them to just do as he said and not take time to answer questions!

But kids are naturally inquisitive.  They ask questions.  They realize that there is a lot that they have to learn yet, and they believe that they can learn from other people.  I believe that the same is true for us as Christians. 

So often we are discouraged from asking questions as Christians because I guess that we are afraid that asking hard questions will damage our faith.  But I find it much more damaging to my faith when people just throw orders or doctrine or scripture at me than when they actually sit down with me and have a discussion, even if that discussion involves us all admitting that we don’t always have all of the answers.

I come back to the text leading up to our scripture for today where Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to be handed over, killed, and then rise again.  Chapter 9 verse 32 says, “But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.”

I remember being told that when you ask a question you run the risk of looking like a fool for a few minutes, but when you don’t ask a question you run the risk of looking like a fool for the rest of your life.  The disciples did not ask questions and they didn’t seem to understand Jesus’ role here on earth until after the resurrection.

How many of us have never asked the difficult questions that we have, either because it will make us look less intelligent or less spiritual or for whatever other reason you can think of?  I encourage you to ask those “why” questions like a little child.  Ask the tough questions. 

As I shared with someone from church that I would be speaking about the childlike characteristics that we are to emulate he responded by asking about the scripture form 1 Corinthians 13 where it says something along the lines of when I was a child I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child.  But when I became a man I put away childish things.  He asked me why the Bible seems to say in one place to be like a child and in another to put away childish things.  Why does the Bible contradict itself?  Those are the kind of questions I want you to feel free to ask.  Children are inquisitive and I believe that we as Christians should be inquisitive as well.  Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find.

The next characteristic of children that I think we need to adopt as our own is that children are inviting.  We were all children at some point in our lives, and we were probably all told, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  Why did our parents teach us to not talk to strangers?  Because most of us would talk to strangers.  Kids don’t understand the norms of society.  They look at people that they don’t know, they smile at them, they talk to strangers. 

Maybe you have had this experience as well, but I have been in a conversation with a young family, meeting them for the first time, and I always try to talk to the little kids as well.  And every now and then these little kids will invite me over to their homes.

I think that the parents are sometimes a little embarrassed by this.  “Hey little Johnny.  We just met Mr. Kevin.  I am sure that he doesn’t want to come to our home.”  Or maybe “He’s a busy man and he probably can’t come over to play right now.”

I think that it is great that kids are so open and inviting to other people.  Now obviously there are some safety issues involved when we are talking about kids, but at what point in our lives do we become so privatized?  When do we begin to walk past our neighbor on the street and not even make eye contact, yet alone say hello.  God forbid we invite them over to our home like I’ve been invited by a little child!  Our lives are private.  We build fences, both figuratively and literally between us and our neighbors.  We go to work in the morning, come home late in the evening, throw something together for supper, eat in our homes, watch television all evening, do it all over again the next day and we never have to interact with anyone else.

We have made our lives private, and following along those same lines we have made our faith private.  We even use terminology that indicates that our faith is private.  We talk about Jesus as our personal savior and we say that we have a personal relationship with God.  Where do we get this stuff?  That isn’t biblical.  Yes it is important to have a relationship with God, but it should never just be about you and God.  It is about a communal relationship with God.  Jesus isn’t your personal savior like you have a personal assistant or a personal trainer.  This even seems to suggest that there is another savior.  Jesus is my personal savior; you better go find your own.  No, John 3:16 tells us that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son.  Jesus wasn’t just sent for me, he was sent for the world.  Privatized lives lead to privatized religion.  My God is too big to be my personal god.  We need to be more inviting, inviting people into our homes, into our lives, and into a life of following Jesus.

The third personality trait about children that I want to point out that we should emulate is that they are accepting.  Children are not racist.  Children are not sexist (until girls/boys become yucky).  They do not discriminate based on class, level of income, occupation, education, hair color, eye color.  Maybe even more impressive is that children do not judge other people based on what they have done in their past.  They just play with whoever is close by.  They might disagree on their favorite toys and their favorite baby food, but they don’t fight.  I’ve never heard of a baby killing another baby over the rights to oil, gold, or diamonds.  That’s something that they learn later in life, probably from watching us.

This accepting nature is the way that Jesus models relationships for us in the Bible.  Dining with the tax collectors and the sinners, hanging out with the prostitutes, even lifting up the actions of a good Samaritan as the way his followers should respond to people in need.

We as Christians are quick to say that we need to love the sinner and hate the sin.  But how are we living that out?  I fear that too often we attempt to isolate ourselves from “sinners”.  And believe me, I get this.  I know why we avoid certain places and things.  We try to avoid certain temptations.  James tells us to resist the devil and he will flee from you.  But there is a big difference between resisting temptation and avoiding the very people that we are told to love; the very same people for whom Jesus died.

As we begin now to decorate the nursery in our home, Sonya has made the executive decision that she wants to decorate the room with items from Ten Thousand Villages.  She wants to decorate it with handicrafts made by artisans from around the world.  Wall hangings and toys from Africa, Asia, Europe, South America.  And though this will be a more expensive alternative to shopping at Target or Babies-R-Us, I support this idea.  I want our child to embrace the diversity of this world.  I want our child to know that all people are not just like him or her.  I want our child to respect other people’s opinions and their culture.  I hope that we can allow our child to maintain that characteristic that all children are born with that says all people are okay, even if we don’t agree with them.  But yet I also want my children to stand up for what they believe in.  Not to be wishy-washy on their theology, but to approach God with awe, reverence, and confidence.

Inquisitive, invitational, and accepting.  Those are three of the personality traits of children that I believe we should seek to adopt.  Which ones do you think would be helpful?

We Have Seen the Lord!

Kevin Gasser

Staunton Mennonite Church

4/12/09

 

John 20:1-18

 

20Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes.

 

11But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

 

            Turn on your television or radio and you will here guarantees.  The Men’s Warehouse tells us, “You’re going to like the way you look.  I guarantee it.”  Rogain guarantees that you will regrow hair in a few months.  Nutrisystem guarantees that you will loose weight on their program.  There are numerous guarantees out there to get rich fast, to make someone fall in love with you.  You name it, someone will guarantee that they can provide it for you.

            I’ve always been told that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  So to these guarantees, I usually find myself saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

            Today I would like to look at our scripture from John 20 and I hope to see that God makes a number of guarantees to us as well.  Guarantees that seem too good to be true, but guarantees that I am confident of because I have seen it, therefore I do believe it.

            Our text for today tells us about four main characters.  We begin with Mary Magdalene, and a little background on who she was.  Mary was a woman that had been fully dedicated to serving Jesus ever since he healed her from demon possession.  Some traditions even say that she was a prostitute.  But she became a disciple, following Jesus from town to town, hearing him preach and teach, watching him heal and perform miracles.  Surely Mary knew that Jesus was the Messiah.

            The one that Mary had been waiting on, no the one that all of Israel had been waiting on had arrived.  He came preaching a new message, speaking as a prophet, saying that the kingdom of God was at hand.  Mary witnessed all of this and I’m sure that she and all of Jesus’ other followers got pretty excited about this new kingdom. 

But then just as fast as Jesus gained popularity, he had everything taken away from him.   Mary witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion.  Just three years into his public ministry, on a day that we commonly refer to as Good Friday, Jesus was nailed to a cross, tortured, mocked, and he eventually died.  Mary witnessed it all.

            Our story picks up on the following Sunday.  Mary comes to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus, to put oils and herbs on the body before he is left alone to decompose.  She hadn’t come earlier because the day after Jesus was killed was the Sabbath day, a day where it would have been against the Jewish law for her to anoint his body.

            So Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb of Jesus early on Sunday morning and finds a bit of a surprise…the stone is rolled away from the entrance.  And when Mary sees this she runs to find Jesus’ disciples, the men that have spent the last three years learning from him.  And she finds Peter and John and she tells them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”  Evidently she looked into the tomb to see that it was empty and the stone had not simply been removed.

            Well Peter and John hear this and they jump to their feet and they run to the tomb.  John is younger than Peter so he gets there first and stops outside, looking at the stone that has been moved and peeking inside at the clothes left laying there.  Then Peter shows up and he runs right into the tomb where he too finds the clothes that Jesus had been buried in.  And they believed Mary that Jesus’ body had been taken, and they walked back home, confused, dishearten.

            That, my friends, would be a terrible story if it ended there.  This would be a terrible story if this guy named Jesus had gotten everyone excited about being the Messiah, then gets himself killed, and then even his body is stolen from his grave.  Thankfully this is not how the story goes; the story doesn’t end there.  But let’s pause this story and come back to it in just a few minutes.  First let me tell you about my week.

            I have been doing a lot of work around the outside of our home this week, taking advantage of the beautiful weather.  We got some seeds planted in the garden, I got the lawn mowed and some bare patches seeded.  And I took some time one day to dig up some shrubs in the front of our house.

            I didn’t realize how much work this would be.  Those evergreen shrubs put down some pretty deep roots.  So I spent a lot of time bent over, digging in the ground, trying to uncover some of these roots.  And as I got underneath the shrubs I found that I could pry them up by pushing down on the handle of my shovel.  That is, until I got to the biggest shrub.  Perhaps I was getting a little too carried away, but I decided to try to stand on the shovel handle for additional leverage to get the last and biggest shrub out of the ground.  And when I did, I heard a cracking sound and found myself standing on the ground.  I had broken the handle of the shovel.

            Like the story of Jesus’ death, the story of my shovel would be a pretty bad one if we just stopped there with brokenness and disappointment.  But neither story stops there.  There is more.

            As I examined the broken shovel, I noticed the sticker on the handle which had the word “Lifetime” printed in big bold letters.  I chuckled a bit as I read that sticker, thinking “It sure did have a short lifetime.”  I considered looking into taking advantage of this lifetime guarantee, but it is my understanding that jumping on the shovel handle probably qualifies as user abuse, therefore voiding my lifetime guarantee.

            But as I stood there with the two broken pieces of my once whole shovel, I realized that we too have a lifetime guarantee as Christians, a lifetime guarantee against our brokenness.

If we pick back up our story from John, we find that after the disciples find the empty tomb, Mary returns to the tomb and weeps.  And as she weeps, she meets a person that she does not recognize immediately.  She thinks it is the gardener.  But as they have a conversation together Mary realizes that this is not the gardener that she is speaking to.  This is Jesus, the Messiah, Rabbouni, she calls him.

Mary Magdalene has an encounter with the risen Lord.  Jesus, whom she saw killed with her own eyes a few days earlier is now standing before her once again, having a conversation with her.

Mary runs to the disciples and she tells them what she has seen and heard.  She tells the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”  And later that evening, 10 of the disciples also saw the risen Lord.  The brokenness had been restored; Jesus had been raised from the dead.

Now that is a lifetime guarantee.  A guarantee made between God and human beings.  God has made several of these guarantees with us humans.  God guaranteed that he will never leave us, nor forsake us throughout our lifetime.  God guaranteed that he would send a messiah that would come to the earth to lead God’s people.  And God did just that through the person that we know as Jesus Christ.

            And through Jesus we received another lifetime guarantee, one that transcends even death.  Jesus made the guarantee that anyone who believes in him shall not die, but have eternal life.  And if we truly want life, we need to follow him.  We have a lifetime guarantee.  A guarantee that we can believe because we can see it.

            One thing that I love about the lifetime guarantee that we receive from Jesus is that it isn’t just a guarantee of life after death.  God not only has promised us life after death, but God has also promised us life before death!  God is active in this life, God is active in this world, God is here today! 

Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God not only being something that we hope for in the future, but something that is available to us all right now.  And I believe that like Mary Magdalene, we can say “We have seen the Lord.”  Maybe we haven’t seen Jesus with our own eyes, but surely we have all seen the Lord.  Surely we have all witnessed God working in our lives and in the lives of others.

            When I was growing up, I remember when my older brother got a new toy and I wanted to play with it, I would ask him “Can I see that?”  And he would always wave it in front of my face and say, “You see with your eyes, not with your hands.”  But I would like to say today that we see the Lord with all of our senses: our eyes, ears, hands, tongues, and noses.  And today I have asked three people to share with us how they have “seen” the Lord in the last year.  Garlan, Kristin, and Kathy will share how they have seen the Lord recently.

            (I have asked three people from our congregation to share stories for about two minutes each about how they have witnessed God moving in their lives and in the lives of others in the last year.)

            We have seen the Lord.  Part of my job as a pastor is that I get invited to be a part of some of the most memorable and important parts of your lives.  In the last year I have been to the hospital to welcome babies into the world and experience the gift of new life.  I have been in hospitals holding the hands of and praying for those who are ill.  I have baptized a new member of this congregation.  I have been a part of two people beginning their life together in marriage and I have stood by a grave as you have said good-bye to loved ones.

            I have seen the Lord because you have allowed me to walk with you through these experiences.  And I thank you all for that.  On this Easter Sunday, I echo the words of Garlan, Kristin, Kathy, and Mary Magdalene.  We have seen the Lord, because he is not dead.  He lives among us and within us today.

So what do we do with this information?  Don’t keep it to yourself.  Let others know that you have seen the Lord.  Share your stories with your neighbors.  Tell them how you have seen God move in your life and in the lives of others.  Help them to see the Lord as well.  Because we serve a God who was not only crucified, but a God that was raised again to new life, a new life that is available to us all.  We have a lifetime guarantee that we can see and show others.  You can see it and believe it.

Easter Sunday is our guarantee that death does not have the final word.  Easter Sunday is our guarantee that neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor demons, nor things of this time or things to come will ever separate us from the love of God.  Easter Sunday is our guarantee that all those who name Jesus as Lord will have eternal life because love conquers all.  We have seen the Lord.  Let’s make sure others see the Lord in us as well.