To Be the Greatest

Matthew 18.1-4

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

I don’t have anything against cats; we both sense our mutual indifference, cats and me.  It’s nothing personal.  For the most part this creates a wide berth.  You stay over there; I stay over here. But there was one cat we had for many, many years and he hated me.  I was never sure why. But he did.

He hated me until one day I spoke to him in Spanish.  “Como esta Amy George?  Que pasa?”  I tend to ramble in Spanish to myself each day at different times so this wasn’t a scientific attempt to connect to a cat utilizing a foreign language.  I was just muttering.  With my muttering, though, he perked up and ran to me.  “O Gato,” I crooned, “Hola!  Hola!”  He purred.  “Tu es muy fuerte y guapo.”  All of sudden the cat who would hiss and swipe at me was begging me to scratch his head and stroke his fur. He spoke Spanish.

Language, ever taken for granted, holds embedded, complex codes we can often only see in their absence.  We don’t see language until we land in a country far from home.  Many times in my life I have traveled to another part of the world, slept over night, and awoke in the morning only to realize, English is not the native tongue here.  I need coffee and I don’t know what to say. 

This has happened to me in the Netherlands, in Mexico, in Kenya, in France, in Scotland.  We should be honest about how unintelligible the Scots can be.  Bright people, just can’t understand what they say.  There was a moment in each of these places, and others, where I realized, I don’t have the words.  I don’t know what to say.

But this is not true for us here, in the place we live.  You and I bask in the ease and comfort of having our words heard and received without much ado.  You and I do not have the experience of being a refugee, a displaced person whose language and culture and ideas have no home.  We are at home.  We feel at home.  Even in our darker moments, our losses, even our tragedies, we can find words or choose to say, “no words will comfort me.”

For many years I devoted my thoughts and energies to what are “good words.”  In Greek this is “eulogia”; in English, eulogy.  Eulogy literally means good words.  Starting in 1998, I needed to understand what it meant to say good words when someone dies.  I was moved and intrigued by how people feel compelled to speak when someone dies, when someone’s life is over.  But why and how were some words better than others, some good, and some not so good.  There is a need when someone dies to say what is true, right, noble, and fitting.

Grandchildren give the best eulogies.  Their words lack the conflict of a son or a daughter; they are not awash in loss like a spouse.   Their words possess freedom.  And something more.  Somehow they see the child in the one grown old; it is as if they can sense the beginning in the end.  It’s like a fellowship of child-like wonder.

One night, many years ago, I was called to the hospital to pray for a dying man.  He didn’t have many breaths left; he gasped for air.  As I stood by the bedside and spoke to his sister, I watched her stroke her brother’s forehead without fail.  He had long, grizzled gray hair; his face was deeply rutted with a hard life.  Each time her hand ran over his head it was as if she was removing a layer of mistake, a season of shame.  She was bringing him back in time, closer and closer to the child he would be again before God.  It was a kind of baptism.  She needed me to pray for him, to speak words to God on his behalf.  I wanted to say, my words are not necessary.  The power of God is in your hand; you are restoring him as God’s beloved.  I tried to speak as an echo, be the sound of the mercy she gave.

There is within each of us an image in need of restoration, a child of God buried deep in everyone; we must remember it is there.  We forget about this image.  Sometimes it is hard to see this child in each other, see each as a beloved of God.  Had I met the dying man on the street I mostly like would not have seen him as a child of God, a soul simply in need of mercy.  But as his sister uncovered his heart, loved him as he was dying, I could see him as such. 

That is the glory of today.  To see and know the child of God, the beloved, in Gabriel.  To linger for a moment and remember, each of us is held, is the loving intent of God.  That’s the power of baptism.  Gabriel doesn’t need to remember this today, but we do.  In him we can remember, we are immersed in love.  He hasn’t had time to forget this, hasn’t lived enough to be confused, but we have. 

There is a child of God in each of us, of this I am certain.  Yet, we are having a hard time seeing this right now.  This inability is creating a lot of confusion in our words.  We are struggling today, in a bit of a crisis of language, a breakdown in words.  For many it’s like they have woken in a strange land, a refugee in their own land.  I feel as if we are losing the ability to speak to each other, hold a common language.  We are not as bad as a Spanish speaking cat but were close. 

We talk a lot, but don’t hear very well. And more to the point our words are not good; we lack the beauty of eulogia.  On the eve of our celebration of a more perfect union, I fear we are slipping into an intractable disdain, a divorce, disunion as it were.  We don’t see others as part of “us” but part of “them.” I believe we are putting aside the humility needed for community; we have lost faith in each other.

A critical look at our history may lead the cynic to say there was never a great amount of trust in our land, our communities, even our houses.  Given the persistent discord and deep divisions, were we ever really united?  Is the notion of concord a privilege I enjoy because of who and how and where I am? To even ask the question casts a level of suspicion upon me.  Is civility and patriotism simply a façade, a veneer that is lost with innocence?

In the coming years we will be pressed more and more to say what we believe.  There has always been a demand for confession.  Yet today there is a new form.  For thousands of years, we have demanded of the stranger, What do you believe about God?  Our colonial beginnings as a nation was forged by the requirement to confess your theology, your belief about Jesus and the church and the salvation of the cross.  Religious freedom was established by religious conformity. 

Today we are demanding a new confession to achieve conformity. The confessional question is: what do we believe about each other?  What do you believe about gender or sexuality or the inherent worth of an individual or lack thereof?  How you answer these will determine how you are judged.  The bible used to be our litmus test: do you believe the bible is the literal, inerrant word of God, infallible and inspired?  This is not our test anymore.  The bible lacks this importance today.  Now you will be judged by what you believe about freedom and love, the right to determine your life and love the one you choose to love.  What you believe and trust about each other is our new confession.

Unfortunately, the demand for confession never creates a place to trust because it is born of suspicion.  Fear mongering never leads to faith. What we saw with Gabriel a few moments ago, when I asked his parents, will you treat him, raise him honor as a beloved of God?  This is the great question of our life together.  Will you love one another as you would a child?

Imagine if it were the other way around.  If you believe as I believe about marriage, if you believe what I believe about gender and sexuality, if you believe what I believe about freedom and human rights and dignity, if you answer correctly, then you are my beloved, then I will treat you with trust and kindness.  We would never consider such with a child.  To see this in each other without suspicion. Have we not lost sight of the child of God in each other?

Jesus put the child before us and said, here is the greatest, here is the way to enter the kingdom of God, this humility, this meekness is how you will live in peace.  This is the greatest.  Humility is the highest.

Our demand for confession is not leading to good things.  Suspicion never leads to happiness.  This is why the church is so crucial to our community and to our nation today.  If we can extend the trust born of humility to one another, a trust that is not blind, nor a trust that is maintained in silence, but a trust in humility where we say what we believe, not as a demand for conformity, but an honest confession of belief, then we can be a place of light, a place of hope.  We will only be so if we hold fast to humility.

The other day at the men’s breakfast we were discussing what we might discuss in the Fall.  We started a conversation about climate change.  I confessed, I know some stuff, read some stuff, but in truth, I really don’t know anything for sure.  Like Carbon tax.  Does anyone understand this, can anyone explain how this works?  Everyone looked around and said, “No.  Not really.”  We brought up the opioid crisis.  We talked about how it has been forgotten during the pandemic, but it has somehow gotten worse.  And then marijuana came up.  How it is being legalized.  In short order we all confessed that we don’t really know anything about this either.  We have ideas, but we don’t really know anything with certainty.

I believe a church is best when we begin confessing what we don’t know—we’re not sure.  Here is a chance to live the teaching Jesus. Demanding people believe what we believe, a demand for confession, is this not what creates strife and division and hatred?

Since the decision about Roe v. Wade last week a number of people have reached out and asked questions or expressed heartbreak.  For many women this is a crushing sense of defeat, being cast aside.  There is a call to action, a call to speak up, speak out.  That is not hard for me to do.  I can speak up.  What is hard is the depth of bitterness, being a refugee in your own land, in your own skin.  How much greater will our division become?  This will push our nation even further apart.  Hatred.

One of the few certainties I possess is this: there is a child of God in each of us.  Buried, yes; tattered, yes; neglected, indeed. Forgetting this child, forsaking this child, this cuts to the core of so much of our strife.  To not trust each other, to not listen to the needs of the other, to demand a certain path for others, this is where our union dissolves.  

Pray for our nation today and tomorrow.  Ask God to give us humility, to see the child of God in each of us.  May we seek a more perfect union beyond false certainties and fear; may we find a more perfect union trusting one another in humility.  Amen.