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 September 20, 2009, Pentecost 16, Al Souls' Episcopal Church 

      God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble.

      Some of you may remember a movie from 1950 called “Harvey,” staring James Stewart as a character named Elwood P Dowd who sees a six foot tall talking rabbit? Here’s a quotation:

      I started to walk down the street when I heard a voice saying “Good Evening, Mr. Dowd.” I turned, and there was this big white rabbit leaning against a lamp-post. Well, I thought nothing of that, because when you’ve lived in a town as long as I’ve lived in this one, you get used to the fact that everybody knows your name.”

      I mention this because it is one of my favorite examples of missing the point. Another such example, though not at all funny, is found in today’s Gospel reading. In this reading we learn that Jesus told his disciples what was going to happen to him. He told them he would be arrested, handed over to the authorities, and killed. The disciples responded to this by debating among themselves which one of them was the greatest. It all misses the point.

      Jesus told his disciples that whoever desires to be the first among them will be the last and the servant of all. He then placed a child in the midst of them, and taking the child up into his arms, he said: “Whoever shall receive such children in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me, but him that sent me.”

      There is a long standing and somewhat unfortunate custom among grown-ups to speak of children in unrealistic terms. Sometimes, children are held up as paragons of virtue and honesty. But, children are not being honest when they blurt out some embarrassing remark. They are not being honest, they’re merely being indiscrete. They’re not honest; they just lack a filter. Anyone who thinks children don’t lie, cheat, and steal has clearly never spent much time around children. I’m not trying to be cruel here; just realistic. We do children no favors when he sentimentalize and objectify them.

      Sometimes, people speak of childlike faith which never questions. But, children question all the time. They ask questions about all kinds of stuff, often nonstop. In fact, we very much want children to question things, and we even want them to question authority. Children are often full of questions, and this is a good thing.

      And so what, then, does our Lord Jesus mean when he points to little children as examples of what we are to become, or when he places a child in the midst of his disciples and says that to receive one such child in his name is to receive both our Lord and the Heavenly Father who sent him? The reason he did so had to do not with what children can do but with what they cannot do; children are pointed to by Jesus not because they are strong but because they are weak. To understand this, we need to consider the context of the conversation, and that context is the cross.

      The cross represents to us the means of our justification and redemption; the salvific event and atoning, propitiating sacrifice offered once and for all by our Lord Jesus Christ who is both god and man. The cross also represents the way in which we live out and into that new life as the reconciled children of God. In 1 Corinthians 1:18, St. Paul has all of this in mind when he writes: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” St. Paul knows how the message of the cross itself determines his entire manner and mission. And so, he tell the Corinthians in Chapter Two: When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom … I was resolved to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling.  Paul writes something quite similar to the Galatians, Chapter 6: “Be it never that I would boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” St. Paul seems to have known the meaning of our Lord’s words about finding our lives in losing them and about how we must take up our own cross and bear it as we follow him.

      What does it mean in practical terms to bear the cross? It may mean martyrdom. It means changing course. It means moving in a new direction. From childhood, we spend our time trying to become better, stronger, and smarter. We train and we work and we compete to win, not lose. And yet, we know that there are times in life that require from us submission instead of dominance, entreaty rather than command, when strength is possessed in weakness, and when the only way to win is by losing. That is what it means to bear your cross. For example, You can never be a real student or a real disciple when you are unwilling to submit to your master’s lesson plan, when you lack the humility to admit that you couldn’t follow that last lesson, and when you cannot deflate your ego long enough to say, “I don’t understand; please explain it to me again.

      You cannot forgive unless you are willing to accept the pain it brings you, no matter how weak and vulnerable it makes you feel. You cannot heal and recover unless you’re humbly prepared to admit you’re sick and have a problem. You cannot truly know the joy of service until you’re able to disappear and get out of the way, and discover that it is amazing what you can accomplish when you take yourself out of the equation. Unless you are willing to lose some control of your life, and let go of that hard earned autonomy, and relinquish ownership of what used to be private, then you really shouldn’t get married. This may not sound terribly romantic but unless you are willing to bear your cross marriage isn’t for you.

      Our Lord Jesus spoke of little children in today’s gospel reading as those who were regarded as the weakest, most vulnerable, first to suffer, often neglected, frequently abused, easily marginalized and victimized among us. The meaning and the message of the cross leads us to the humility necessary to become like children in this regard. The cross also teaches us that we must embrace precisely those who are the easiest to hurt and most fragile, and that to embrace them is to embrace Christ and to know God. This is the way of the cross. It is to have the mind of Christ the suffering servant, the wounded healer, the crucified savior. “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  

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