Why do children get yelled at in the grocery store, grabbed and furiously whispered to at funeral visitations, and generally scolded wherever they go?
Mostly, I believe, for acting inappropriately for their surroundings or circumstances. Running around playing tag is inappropriate for a funeral home. Indoor voices only here in the house, please.
Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.There is not simply a suggestion that childlike faith is good, there is a warning that without some quality like that of a child, one cannot be a part of the new life Jesus is preaching. With it comes a warning to those who would exploit this childlike quality.
Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18:3-6, RSV)
But what is the quality of a child being commended?
Perhaps it is the ability to be inappropriate. I do not mean licentiousness or self-centered greediness or meanness. It is the ability to give an inappropriate response that is of the kingdom, of the neighborhood (to use Brueggemann's term) that Jesus preached. I mean an answer that is inappropriate to empire, to consumerism, to the world that would have us be lovely little cogs and productive little ants and anxious security-minded people who are always at level orange.
A response of hospitality is inappropriate to a threat of violence, and yet it might be an entrance to a whole new relationship and way of being.
A response of joy in the midst of a funeral is inappropriate to "how grown-ups ought to act," and yet how many of us laugh at a memory of our dearly departed with her favorite hat on at a jaunty angle or with his favorite pipe doing a Popeye imitation?
A response of thanksgiving in the midst of suffering is inappropriate (ought we not be yelling that we are the victim here?), and yet Martin Rinkart wrote "Now Thank We All Our God," while serving the church during the Thirty Years War and the severe plagues and famine that followed.
A response of kindness, of forgiveness, of compassion is inappropriate before we secure our recompence and our revenge and whatever passes for justice in our minds and hearts.
Children act inappropriately, as if they don't belong to the situation they are in. Adults reprimand them, teaching them what is appropriate and what is not. We children then become us adults, well conformed to expectations and the ideals of our age.
And yet faith, obedience to the Gospel, often requires an answer, a word, a stand, an attitude so foreign to the situation of the world, that it is hard to give in our conformity.
If we would but remember that we don't belong to the situation or the expectations, we belong to God. And if we are faithful, we will act inappropriately. Not in ways that hurt or demean or damage others or our community or our common humanity, but in the ways that build it up and deny these very hurtful, hateful ways of the world.
To be like a child is more than simply being able to play. It is belonging to a family, a faith, a hope, a life, that disregards the demands and expectations of the world we all think we live in for the sake of the neighborhood to which and in which we all belong.
2 comments:
I will say this - and well put by the way - that when my daughter was 3, she stoop up and said something at my grandmother's funeral. It broke the ice. Sometimes inappropriate behavior is appropriate.
Out of the mouths of babes...
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