THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

Welcome the Child

September 28, 1997
John M. Buchanan

As we face a new century and a new millennium, the overarching challenge for
America is to rebuild a sense of community and hope and civility and caring and
safety for all our children. I hope God will guide our feet — and America’s feet —
to reclaim our nation’s soul, and to give back to all of our children their sense of
security and their ability to dream about and work toward a future that is attainable
and hopeful. Let us begin by praying that God’s Spirit will be born anew within
and among us in our own family, our extended family, and in our community,
private sector, and public life.

Marian Wright Edelman
President, Children’s Defense Fund

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH

A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

Mark 9.35 -35
\O".\3" 16

WELCOME THE CHILD

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,”
Mark 9:37

| Do you ever find yourself feeling grateful that you have your growing up years behind you? That
you made it safely through the perils and dangers of childhood and adolescence? Do you ever
experience gratitude that you don’t have to contend with the very specific and oftentimes lethal
dangers which our youngsters confront every day of their lives?

I saw one of my oldest friends recently, a man I have known for nearly all my life. Our children
are all grown and we were talking about how different their lives are from our own. In the course
of the conversation, something came into focus for me that I hadn’t thought of before and which
we all had trouble believing, even though it was true about all of us. It was possible, I said, to
grow up and graduate from high school in a small central Pennsylvania town without ever once
encountering alcohol. It was such an astounding suggestion that it took us all awhile to assimilate
but we agreed it was true. Some people were drinking at parties but not much. Most were not.
Drugs were the stuff of remote myth. We never even saw any. Our only contact with addictive
chemicals sounds like a Leave It To Beaver incident, a stolen pack of Chesterfields taken into the
woods, distributed carefully and smoked with great determination and sophistication, one after the
other, until they were gone. I don’t recall that we ever needed to do it a second time.

Someone recently compiled a list comparing the top discipline and behavior problems occurring in
the California public schools in 1940 and then in 1990.

The 1940s list: The 1990s list:
1. Talking 1. Drug and Alcohol abuse
2. Chewing gum 2. Pregnancy
3. Making noise 3. Rape
4. Running in the hails 4. Robbery, assault and burglary
5. Getting out of turn in line 5. Arson
6. Wearing improper clothing 6. Vandalism
7. Not putting paper in wastebaskets 7. Gang warfare
8. Abortion
9. Venereal disease

You might conclude that never in history have childhood and adolescence been so treacherous as
they are today and there is a sense in which that is true. On the other hand, 2,000 years ago in the
Mediterranean world many infants never even made it to childhood because their parents simply
abandoned them as newborns.

One time Jesus confronted and challenged that ethos and that brutal custom in a most dramatic
\ way. He and his small band of friends were on their way walking from town to town in Galilee.

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. Jesus wants to say, apparently“about God’s kingdom

He was teaching in synagogues, healing the sick, encouraging the depressed and including into his
own circle of association many of the people who were on the margins of his own society and his
own religion. It was that inclusivity — his reaching across the societal and religious boundaries to
affirm and include and, most provocatively, to eat with, the unclean, the sinners — that perplexed,
distressed and then angered the guardians of public order and morality. They were beginning to
follow him around, asking him difficult questions of morality and the law, trying to trip him up,
discredit him, maybe even provoke him to say something blasphemous or seditious which could
result in his arrest and crucifixion.

Now they were on the road again, back to Capernaum where Peter lived and Jesus apparently had
a house, a home base. On the way, they argued. He could hear them, apparently. When they
arrived, he asked, “What were you arguing about?” They were silent. They were embarrassed.
He had been talking about the very real possibility of suffering, about self denial, about giving
your life away and they were arguing about who among them was the greatest. It is one of the
most human and most comic incidents in the whole story. He’s talking about self denial and
sacrifice and they’re arguing about who’s number one. And so, again, he sits down and uses the
moment to teach. “The one among you who wants to be first must be the servant of all.”

We’ve heard it a thousand times but it was, at the time, a stunning reversal of values. But then a
strange thing happens. Jesus, I think, is distracted and changes the subject. He sees a child. I
don’t know how old the child was, but in my imagination I see a two-year-old, a toddler, that
absolutely delightful age when children are never more beautiful, able to toddle about, reaching
out to touch and feel and examine everything, willing to stop whatever they are doing and gaze
intently, willing almost always to smile. You can’t resist waving or smiling or patting. I see a
two year old escapee from his mother, trundling through this very serious, very adult occasion, a
group of men standing around, shuffling their feet, heads down, obviously feeling some
discomfort and embarrassment, and in their midst, a man seated, looking at them intently, talking
to them — all very serious adult business. And right though the middle of it all comes a toddler.
The one teaching stops, maybe smiles, maybe greets the child and everything is now different.
The subject changes. He picks the child up and says, “Whoever welcomes one such little one
welcomes me.”
WY) iA perk a \ Skew

oseuf OmMIenit Orr this iit ries to yse his act of welcoming th fila as an illustration
of the point he was making about service. Aon’ on’t think it’s that at all.In fact, he will return later
to the subject of service and status and {He one who wants to be e first becoming the servant of all.
It’s a great point. It comes up again#f the next chapter and Life going to preach on it next month.
Today we simply have this wondgfful interruption — np the and a very important new thing

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he children.

Jewish culture valued children very highly. But the wider Greek-Roman culture in which Jewish
culture lived often did not. John Dominic Crossan explains that there was a brutal and
widespread custom in the Mediterranean world of “casting out,” abandoning infants who were
unwanted. You simply put the baby © out and it died of exPOSUTE, | or someone picked | it UP, T raised
it to be sold as a slave. Thereswas-eepioturednthe newop EStOVe ew baby beyawrar

a blanket,-abandened

was fairly widespread and it was based on the common assumption that a child was a non-entity, a

non-person until its father accepted it as a member of the tribe or clan. If the father wanted a son,

he simply didn’t touch his daughter and she would be abandoned. Crossan even cites a letter

written one year before the birth of Jesus from an Egyptian worker to his wife who was about to

give birth. It’s a chatty, loving letter and at the end the writer says, “If by chance you bear a son,
let it be, if it is a girl, cast it out.” [/esus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 62-63]

characteristics was the way it responded to this custom. Christians picked up the discarded
babies. The idea of adoption — the later idea of orphanages for abandoned, abused or unwanted
children — were Christian ideas, a Christian gift to the world.

In that environment and that world, what Jesus did by welcoming the child was dramatic,
revolutionary. Crossan says that the act of touching, cradling, scooping that two-year-old toddler
up into his strong arms and holding her — surely it was a little girl, just to punctuate the point —
that act, Crossan says, was “the official bodily action of a father designating a newly-born infant
for life rather than death, for accepting it into his family rather than casting it out into the
garbage.”

tHE SeTTT CP ETTEOINTOTTADTS DECaUSe Shy suggests that our nation is

ccsentially “casting out” its children and young people. What makeg/me uncomfortable is her _
suggestion that the religious’ community, Christians and Jews, have/the responsibility of naming it ~~"
and protecting the child anf welcoming the child, just like Jesus gid. Her name is Marian Wright
Edelman. She is founder/and president of the Children’s Defenge Fund. She is an unapologetic
Christian. She came to/Syracuse in June to address a pre-Genéral Assembly meeting on the theme

of Common Ground. ur children, their safety and well-being, is our Common Ground, Mrs.

Edelman contends, ghd she makes a lot of people uncomfoy able — including the President of the
United States. In #/now legendary incident, when she organized some poor people to testify to

his committee, DAn Rostenkowski called her a “bully.” Iirs. Edelman, a slight African-American
woman, says qufetly that she never remembers Rostenkgwski saying that about the lobbyists for

arms manufacglirers or the savings and loan industry of the tobacco growers.

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The mother of three, Mrs. Ede hea is an uncompromising advocate forthe well being of our
children. She has written twg books, The Measure of Our Successe“A Letter to My Children and
Yours and Guide My Feet:/Prayers and Meditations on Loving’and Working for Children.

Mrs. Edelman doesn’t pfill any punches. In the introduction’to her book of prayers she
remembers how at Spgiman and Morehouse Coileges young men and women were taught how to
dress neatly and inexpensively, how to sit up straight, logk people in the eye, speak clearly.
Morehouse men, i recalls wistfully, “were counseled with humorous seriousness — to woo

Spelman women by holding the door for them and gettjng up to give them their seats. What a

contrast to the fifthy, disrespectful and misogynistic lyfics of Snoop Doggy Dog and others who
shamelessly disonor our foremothers, grandmother
as ‘bitches’ and worse.” [p. xxiv]

sisters and daughters by referring to them

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That’s easy, of course. That’s somebody else. Mrs. Edelman makes me most uncomfortable
when she talks about public policy, politics and how we spend our money as a moral or religious
issue. She implies that how we deal with the children is everybody’s business.

“Why,” she asks, “is there still, in post-cold-war America, such unbearable dissonance between
promise and performance ... between our capacity to prevent and alleviate child killing, poverty
and disease and our political and spiritual will to do so.” [Prayers, p. 86]

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“What is wrong with us.” she asks, “when the morally unthinkable has become normal?” In the

next four years:

1,000,000 babies will be born at low birth weight
143,000 will die before their first birthday

15,800 children under 19 will die by firearms
2,800 children younger than 5 will be killed
135,000 American youngsters take a gun to school every day.

oe @ @ @

We live beside and within it and it happens almost every day ... 14 times a day in America, a
classroom of children killed every two days. It happens every few days here in Chicago. Last
Saturday, Metro Section, Chicago Tribune, Maurice Young, 16 months old, pushed by his
mother in his stroller, on the way to the grocery store at Chicago and Lawndale, caught in gang
crossfire, dead with a bullet in his chest. Gun deaths are actually down a little this year, but they
are still quite unlike anything anywhere else in the world. ,

And still we refuse to do much about it. It is, everyone agrees, a combination of factors over

which we do have some control. Availability of hand guns, automatic weapons, accessibility of be

drugs and the absence of jobs, which makes the drug trade a lucrative entrepreneurial option for “Ls

many city young people and provides the economic superstructure for gang culture. wrk
_

A few years ago the National Council of Catholic Bishops issued a report, Putting Children and ‘a

Families First, which cited the unfortunate and unnecessary polarization in our thinking on this
issue, as if it were a matter of either strong, autonomous families or goverment programs. The
fact is, it is both. The fact is public policy either helps or hinders the maintenance of strong
families. The fact is we know measures to take to give children a better chance and their families
the opportunity to sustain them. Winston Churchill said, “There is no finer investment for any
country than putting milk into babies.” We know that one dollar invested in prenatal care for a
poor mother results in a savings of three dollars later. We know that immunization prevents
disease, that routine preventive medical care and basic nutrition have a dramatic effect not only in
the physical health of children but also their mental capacity. We know that Head Start works —
but still — it touches not even one half the children who need it or are eligible for | As sb 4

What we need is the will, the spiritual courage, to do what we need to do now to savetwo Wet
generations of our children. Could we do it? Of course we can do it. We came up with $115
billion a few years ago to bail out the savings and loan industry.

One of the most important things Mf s. Edelman has to say is this: i. is one of the best
contraceptives to teen a and one of the best antidotes te violence. Children need to have

This might be a matter v4 f public policy or politics oy it weren’t for what Jesus said about and
did with that little chi 4 I interpret his words and acté as a mandate for his followers.

So what if each 6f us who are able, each of us
responsibility f raising children, stood a littl closer to those who are and si ply said, “We're
here to help jn whatever way we can.” 4
needs us. Fhis church provides toring r 500 city youngsters. It’s <vonderful program. It
assists children with basic academic skills but just as important, it cosfimunicates something about
a commfinity’s caring and that is as bed and source of hope a if character. So if you never
did it Yefore, how about talking tof ea Akbar about tutoring. Add if you can’t do that, perhaps
you’ like to take financial respghsibility for the cost of a childdn our Day Care Center. Day care
is sofcritical. Welfare reform Assures the ability to work anddhat means day care for children. We
inteyd to serve families whofheed day care but can’t affordAt. We’ve got the program and we are
beginning to help a few fayhilies, but we need more help fOr you might write a check to our new
scholarship program thajfs stands with older youngstersAvho need a little help and encouragement
in getting to college. Br you might volunteer wherg“you are by helping with scouts, teaching
Sunday school, helpifg with our youth program, gports teams, youth clubs. Or write a letter
every month, staring with school funding in Illinois, and moving to health care for children.

‘| “If the child is safe, everyone is safe,” someone wrote. Jesus picked up the child and held her in
his arms and in that eloquent gesture conveyed the wonderfully ing]ysive and unconditional love
of God. Children need to know that they are loved unconditionally. di etter to Tit

] The loss of a parent is so very painful, regardless of our age because it is the loss, for many, of a

source of unconditional love. Among the most precious blessings of my life was a father who
never gave up, who worked hard, supported his family without fanfare, and a mother who stood
beside him, an equal partner in making a home. They let me know about unconditional love. Even
if that is not your experience, you know the importance and blessing of that miracle of grace.

And that is what Jesus, I think, meant to convey. The children are loved by him even though they
have done nothing to earn his love. The children are loved unconditionally and so are we.

They needed to hear that. The people around him were working so hard at their religion — the
scribes and Pharisees — making sure that the rules were all obeyed and that everyone knew his or
her place. And the disciples were working so hard at the things adults work at — getting ahead,
succeeding, being number one. Jesus himself is in the middle of teaching an important lesson and
in the middle of it all comes a child and he stops, picks up the child and teaches the most
important lesson of all, says the word we most need to hear, a word which is the good news, the
redeeming, saving word of God’s unconditional love.

In Morris West’s novel, The Clowns of God, West portrays the return of Christ in which he holds
a Down Syndrome child, serving her the bread and wine of communion, saying,

“I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you — eternal innocence. She will never
offend me as all of you have done. She will never pervert of destroy the works of

- my father’s hands. She is necessary to you. She will evoke the kindness that will
keep you human. She will remind you every day that “I AM WHO I AM.” [Diane
M. Komp, Theology Today, “Hearts Untroubled,” vol. 45, p. 273-279]

Amen.

KKK KE

Dear God, we thank you for the reminder that all the children are your gift to us and that you
have given us all the responsibility for their protection and care. And we thank you for the

reminder of your love for each of us and that there is nothing we can do and nothing that can
happen to us that can separate us from your love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Cad