Sermon, 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mark 9:37)

When Jesus tells the disciples to welcome a child as though they are welcoming him, he is not commending the innocence of childhood to his disciples.  Neither in this part of the Gospel, at least, is he telling his disciples to be like children.  In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus presents the least valuable person in society and tells his disciples, treat this person of no “value” as you would treat me.

That sounds harsh to we who try to preserve the innocence of childhood longer than any of the nations and peoples who have come before us.  But other peoples in this “modern” world understand the relationship between “value” and childhood differently than we do.  In China, where the more children a couple has the more provided for they will be in old age, The government’s one-child policy has led to highly increased abortion rates for girls.  Presumably, the parents consider it more important to have a male whose labor will be more “valuable,” thus earning more money as they mature and provide for their aging parents.  So, to understand Jesus today, our focus needs to be, not so much on the child, but on the ways in which we human beings judge something, or someone to be of value.

Value can mean two related but different things.  Something or someone can be valuable to us because we derive a material benefit from that person or thing, which we can quantify.  If the price is high, that means its value to us is high and we won’t sell it unless we get something of at least equal value.  It is worth our while.  Or, something or someone can be valuable because it has an importance for us that is not as easily quantified, but it satisfies some desire, which we can’t quantify, but is no less important to us.
 
For the ancient Jews, most of whom were poor and living in a harsh environment, children had to start working as soon as they could carry something.  Note that Jesus presents a “little” child, presumably one who was too young to be of any “value” in the daily labor of the household.  But if you were a carpenter and needed anyone you could find to hammer some nails, how soon do you suppose a boy could at least swing a hammer?  If you needed someone to grind meal for bread, or else nobody ate that night, how soon would you put your daughter’s elbow grease to work?  Extended childhoods did not happen in Judea and Galilee.
  
In the better-off Roman culture, children were extensions of their fathers, who would continue their father's bloodline after they died.  If a child was born deformed in some way, the father had every right to abandon that infant to death.  Until the daughter was married off, or the son achieved the independence of adulthood, the father’s authority over them was absolute, even to life and death.  Either way, little children were of little value, of little worth and little importance.

It is in this context that Jesus sets a little child before them, a child little enough that he can take her in his arms.  And he tells his status-conscious disciples, "If you are to be a leader in this community, you must welcome this powerless child of no value exactly as you would welcome me."  There's a big word for what Jesus is trying to teach his followers - transvaluation.  Our values need to be transformed.  Our calculation of what is worth our time and investment needs to be transformed.  Whatever we imagine about the future, and how our legacy might be continued, that also must be transformed.

To do that, we need to avoid making the same mistake that the first disciples made.  For the second time, Jesus has told them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”  And for the second time, that last part goes in one ear and comes out the other.  Of course, this broken world of sin and alienation has trained the disciples, and us, to expect the worst, to discount good news as simply the silver lining of a dark cloud.  We are trained to expect loss.

An Economics textbook I once had defined the “dismal science” as the allocation of scarcity.  In the economy of the world, there never seems to be enough to meet all our needs or wants.  In fact, the least available things in this economy are the most valuable, if you judge the value of something or someone solely by its market price.  So, we learn to either hoard what we have and never give, or if we’re not gonna have enough anyway, then to live and spend like there’s no tomorrow.  But in the economy of God, there is always abundance.  In the economy of the world, all that we have comes to us from the outside.  A business partner on the other side of the table writes us a hefty check.  A relative living hundreds of miles away leaves us a substantial inheritance.  Money goes into our bank accounts.  But money is spent, or squandered by others, and just fades away.
 
But in the economy of God, there is always abundance: abundance of friends, abundance of fellowship and abundance of new possibilities.  God's economy is not failure-proof.  But from within our failures and disappointments arise new possibilities, new relationships, new understandings of what is most valuable in the economy of God.  Jesus Christ also failed, descended into darkness, but rose from that darkness.  And from within our disappointments, Jesus rises and brings us with him.  You and you and you, each and everyone of you, are of the greatest value to Jesus Christ.  He died for our failures.  And he rose from the dead to give us all everlasting value.