Mark 10:13-16:
People were bringing little children to Jesus in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
A baptism is always a special moment in a congregation’s life. We have joined in a ceremony that dates back almost to the beginning of Christian expansion in the ancient world. It may be an extension of a Jewish family blessing, the day before Yom Kippur. Whatever its background, it symbolises the unity of family life and the way in which each of us needs to examine our love and our hopes for each other.
We set a child in our midst to bless her or his growing to maturity in our company and in the wider world of their discovery. We acknowledge our own limitations as they mark out their own destiny and choose their own distinctive pathways. We are guides for a small time and then we watch as the distance grows and as change identifies their uniqueness.
With water and the sign of the cross we embrace these children into our world-wide Christian family. Maybe one day they will choose how to shape their Christian belonging with some such label as Anglican or Roman Catholic. But today that is not our interest; indeed baptism reminds us to think beyond labels and celebrate that wide world of difference that marks our shared humanity. These children have been baptised into the universal Christian community.
I hope everyone can take from this service the challenge that parents and godparents singled out for these children ‘that we will be true to ourselves, respect life, love life deeply, respond with love rather than fear, embrace discovery rather than a limiting belief system, and explore life’s possibilities and opportunities with open hearts and minds’.
This special prayer stands at the heart of Jesus’ teaching about ‘the kingdom of God’. He used a phrase, conventional to his own day, to speak of your awakening to your own inner yearning for hope, endurance and courage. To enter the kingdom of God is to stand tip-toe on the edge of new discovery. You are there, said Jesus, ‘like a little child’ with your next step filled with possibility.
It is easy to bring you to this point. It is much harder to explore with you the passions and the pitfalls that follow. If you were to read the larger context in which the Gospel words were spoken you would sense the drama and hostility of people locked into tradition and unwilling to open their hearts to new people and new situations. You would sense the harsh world in which this blessing on child-likeness took place. Human relations fail and people remind you of your failings. Life draws serious shadows over our hopes and dreams.
The larger text explodes with stories of personal breakdown, threats and opposition, all to the dull treadmill of ‘this is the way things used to be, the way things ought to be’. In Jesus’ day, the then lawyers knew the arts of definition and avoidance. Their marriage rules, like their life rules, were grounded in a tradition that served power and convention.
In ancient time, the teaching of Jesus was about protecting women abandoned by men through easy divorce and often forced to become social outcasts. By drawing our attention to children as markers and models of the kingdom of God, Jesus emphasised that the vulnerable are central to God’s design.
Back then, children had few rights and virtually no social status. Jesus held them in his arms, blessing them, because he believed that the vulnerable and those open to exploitation should stand central in our life concerns. That, without specifically intending it, is a political statement – and it had the same meaning in Jesus’ time. If you read the Gospels with an awakened vision that sets the vulnerable at the centre of your concern, then the homeless, the refugees, the gay rights pleader will all be symbols and markers of an open and embracive kingdom of God.
And so today we hold our children as signs of what we all might yearn to be, ‘true to ourselves, respecting life, loving life deeply, responding with love rather than fear, embracing discovery rather than a limiting belief system, and exploring life’s possibilities and opportunities with open hearts and minds’.
A constant drum-beat of our age is ‘this is the way things used to be, the way things ought to be’: it should find no place among us. We are called to be people of new beginnings and fresh hope.
God bless your living and loving as you model generosity and curiosity – key marks of the kingdom of God – and build these on a faith open to fresh possibility. Our children are our sign that the kingdom of God is given to all who love with an open heart and a spirit awakened to life’s possibilities.
A brief Meditation Homily based on the Infant Baptism Gospel reading, Mark chapter 10 verses 13-16.
26 July 2013