Sermon by:
The Rev. Pamela Dolan
“The Children are Watching”
October 22, 2024
Text: Mark 9:30-37
Once again in today’s Gospel passage, Jesus centers children, insisting to his frustratingly slow-to-catch-on disciples that it is to “such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” Throughout this ongoing dialogue that Jesus has been having with friends, followers, and even adversaries, it seems there have been children present, watching and listening, as children so often do.
It’s not all that long ago that there was still a lot of stigma around divorce and a very narrow definition of what constituted a family, and you can believe that children picked up on that. When my parents got divorced in the 1970’s, the word that was used for a family like mine was “broken.” Can you imagine? What nonsense to say we had a broken home because of one fact about us, without knowing anything else about our story. My family was and is complicated, messy, and wonderful. When my parents both remarried other people, I ended up with four involved, caring parents, all doing their best to put their children first. What’s so broken about that?
In his exchange with the Pharisees, Jesus makes clear that what matters to him far more than someone’s marital status or the makeup of their family is a widespread malady that he diagnoses as “hardness of heart.” Tackling this issue head-on, my mentor and friend Bishop Jake Owensby writes,
“A hardened heart is…a way of being in this world opposed to the way of love that is the Kingdom of God. A hardened heart inhabits a world of things that are useful for, or useless to, its own self-centered agenda. People, dogs, forests, and streams have significance only for the profit, pleasure, or status that they deliver. By contrast, God-given hearts of flesh inhabit a creation teeming with the beloved creatures of God. No one and nothing exists for my exploitation. Each being deserves my respect and invites my awe. Everyone and everything vibrates with the presence of our common Maker.”[i]
In my experience, children rarely suffer from hardness of heart, but we adults have to be on the lookout for it. It sneaks up on us, sometimes. We say we’re just being logical, or practical, or fair, but deep down there’s a hardness, a coldness, that has entered our internal controls and made it easier to say no, to turn away, to dismiss the concerns and perspectives that others hold. It makes it harder to feel the vibrating presence of our Maker in the other.
Hardness of heart encourages us to throw labels on individuals or groups of people and then use those labels as an excuse to marginalize or other them. Children hear the adults around them use those labels and children see how we dismiss or demean those who aren’t like us or don’t fit neatly into our worldview. And children learn to imitate the adults in their lives or to hide their true selves. Both the imitation of cruelty and the hiding of self are attempts to find safety in a big, scary world–and both do damage, to that child and to the adult they become.
Children are watching when we interact with our neighbors, with other church members, with our own family. They are listening to the words we use when we talk about other people and other families. Children are watching as we make decisions about how we treat our planet and the non-human community to which we belong. They see whether we are living out our values, walking humbly on the earth, and following the way of love, or whether ware encouraging them to do as we say, but not as we do.
When Jesus takes us to task for hardness of heart, he is doing so out of love for us. He knows that hardened hearts cannot fully receive the love and the joy that God desires for us, nor can they give it away in return. Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus is talking about and showing us how to be human, which means first and foremost how to be in relationship. We are made in the image and likeness of a God that is relationship, is love, is community, and so those things are part of our nature.
That relationship doesn’t have to look like something out of Ozzie and Harriet. You don’t have to be married or have children to have meaningful, loving relationships that are at the center of your life. You can be a monk or a nun living a life of celibacy in a monastery and be a generous, loving, presence in the life of everyone who knows you. You can be that funny old lady who teaches the neighborhood kids where to find tadpoles in the spring and how to catch fireflies without hurting them and who gives out the best candy at Halloween. You can be the guy who shows up at church early to make sure that there’s coffee ready for coffee hour and that the building is the right temperature, or who knows most people in our local homeless community by name. There is just no end to the ways we have to be kind, to be welcoming, to be in relationship.
We live in a time of an actual loneliness epidemic. This is no time for hardened hearts. This is a time for God-filled, generous hearts. Hearts of flesh, the Bible calls them. Soft hearts. Hearts that remember what it feels like to be a child, that don’t deny our own creatureliness and interdependence. These are hearts that trust in God and that weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who are rejoicing.
Sometimes our hearts will be broken open by the suffering of the world, which has been so much in evidence these past few days. But they will also find innumerable ways to delight in God’s creation with “perfectness of joy.” When we are really walking the way of love, “No one and nothing exists for my exploitation. Everyone and everything vibrates with the presence of our common maker.”This is the way children and saints see the world. And it’s the way I want to see the world, too. Amen.
[i] https://jakeowensby.substack.com
