Father in Heaven, today we humbly thank you for our very being, and ask you to forgive us when we have forgotten to be grateful unto you. Lord, we ask you today to equip us for the challenges ahead, and to sustain us in our growth in you. In your Heavenly name, Amen!
Message: Adult KinderCare, It Takes a Village!
You know sometimes life just floors me. I can be trouncing along on automatic, not thinking of anything particularly deep or insightful, just daydreaming on autopilot and get a thunderbolt from who knows where about something I wasn’t even thinking about to begin with. And Walla, were talking a piece of real insight.
Like the day I tried dill pickle on a peanut butter (Skippy on Dark Rye) sandwich. I guess its just a skill I was born with, being gourmet and all. I’ll just have to embrace the gift afforded my way. Some days everything just seems to come together.
I guess you could call it an epiphany, but that don’t sound quite manly enough. So, so let’s say revelation even though I’m not sure it’s as good as the Lord’s other gifts to humanity in this area. Items like the Reuben, BLTs, or the Submarine sandwiches. And I haven’t even mentioned more sophisticated items like the Club Sandwich at well, the Country Club. Well, you get the idea, I’m just a small cog in the development of culinary development. Ban-ap-pateet!
By the way, I made my discovery at 7 years of age. You could say I was an early bloomer in the culinary world, and like another child prodigy Mozart, I have my demons to battle. After success at such an early age, what is one to do, but forge ahead bravely. And so, I try. Like the rest self-involved people that make up western society.
And like the rest of you in this Sanctuary who have plenty to be thankful for, we are reminded today to be thankful like our Psalmist with today’s “Call to Worship”. And as we review the call again, it will be hard not to think of my sandwich when reading David’s words about being made just a little lower than the Angels, and being crowned with glory and honor. And yet we are called to be humble in the gifts and attributes the Lord has blessed us with.
From Psalm 8
1 Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
2 Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
3 When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
5 You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
7 all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
8 the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
9 Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Now before you completely go down the road of believing that I have become completely enmeshed in my own greatness, believing that I really am all that…
Let me reassure you that today is a good day and my delusions are somewhat in check. Actually, I am trying to make a point of just how extreme at times, we go off the rails on our own greatness. And if any of this sounds familiar it’s because many have been there. Its effect destructive, and it happens even to the faithful in Church.
When reading David’s words, we need to keep in mind as great as mankind is, it is still the Lord that has created all, and in our case in His image. But make no mistake, it is God the creator who is to be praised, glorified, and magnified. Not us! No, we get to be a part of God’s divine plan when we invite Him into our lives to share and work with Him in the development of His plans. Not our own ideas of perfection, order, or dominance.
But it seems that it’s human nature and a burden we all share in that we go through bouts of visions of grandeur, thinking we actually are the ones in life that are in control. That Mankind has replaced our hope in the Lord for ourselves in so many venues and ways to our mutual detriment is readily apparent when we look good and hard at our society yesterday and today.
Actually, believing that we are the cause for the goodness that exists in this life, and forgetting to give credit to God. A defect that is as old as humanity. And how is that working? How has it worked in the past? Not so great, in fact down right sad.
Just think about it. How many millions of people could have lived full, robust, and fulfilling lives in the last century if humanity had followed the Lord and lived God’s divine plan? Instead of stumbling after the warped ideas of people and their imposed man-made utopias of filth and death? The monsters that humanity has created in the quest to make mankind perfect in its own confused image of the moment, are horrific, and their legacy haunting and ongoing.
The same cycle seems to repeat itself over and again with people through time. It usually begins with a new idea of something that is intended to help humanity or the human condition. It may start out innocently trying to make things better, by helping others, ending injustice, hunger, exploitation, inequality. All important and reoccurring challenges for humanity to address. All of our challenges are magnified when we try to address any of those issues on our own without the Lord to anchored and filter out the extremes imbedded in our very natures.
Each time western society has decided to make the perfect society or the perfect human, starvation, depravity, hopelessness, and despair, have been visited on humanity. This is what happens when our Lord is left out of our thought processes, or when we try to strong arm the name of God for selfish reasons. Here are just a few examples:
- WWI; Just which Catholics was God favoring, the Austrian or Italian? Both professed God was with them.
- Northern Ireland, same question this time add protestants.
- Death Camps in Nazi Europe, Gulag Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
- Jim Jones’ Township,and Heaven’s gate California
- Tito’s Yugoslavia and it’s breakup.
Not to mention the current events taking place across the panoply that are our cities, and that are America’s world stage of the last two years. All seem to be ideas and movements that became monsters of our darker selves. Especially when we elevate our desires, needs, and demands, above the common good of others.
When we as people try to strong arm our own way (not searching for God’s Holy Spirit and His Plan), and impose our ideas of right, equity, or even holiness on others, we begin to go down that road of tyranny and collective misery. As reflected in the list of pain I just cited.
And so it is right and good to study and apply David’s Psalm, His love song to God as a working part of our own lives. We are reminded by David that truth is often found; “out of the mouths of babes”, and again Psalm 8:2;
2 Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
Our Lord quotes this passage from David as depicted in the Gospel of Matthew when He entered into the Temple Courts the last week of His earthy ministry. He had come first to cleans God’s House, and then to instruct the children of Israel in preparation for a new relationship possible with God. A personal life in and with the Lord that was now at hand and available to all who invite Him in. Reading from Matthew 21:12-16
12 Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. 13 “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”
14 The blind and the lame came to him at the temple, and he healed them. 15 But when the chief priests and the teachers of the law saw the wonderful things he did and the children shouting in the temple courts, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they were indignant.
16 “Do you hear what these children are saying?” they asked him.
“Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read,
“‘From the lips of children and infants
you, Lord, have called forth your praise
The Lord personally cleanses God’s house because once again people being people started out with a great idea to serve the Lord but it all went bad in time. There was a need to exchange regular money for blank Temple money so that no graven images on regular money would be used in the Temple offering. People travelling from other lands could also purchase items for sacrifice to God. In the beginning, all was to serve God and other people in their need.
You know… Loving God with everything you are, and loving your neighbor as yourself. (I’ve heard that before somewhere). At some point, God is left out of the formula and the Temple courts evolve into a “den of thieves”. When left to our own devices, and not considering and including the Lord in our equations, we turn beauty into dinge, every time. It’s just a matter of time, that becomes the inevitable question.
In all things we must include our God and not our egos for our way ahead. This applies to Church; day to day life, our communities and our schools. Plus, our governments that have been created by our faith-based understandings of self-government. Doing the right thing when no one is watching.
If we are doing the right thing, we are not imposing our form of tyranny on others, but giving others the free choice to decide how to think and believe for themselves. While we try to live our faith and come to our Lord as innocent children do. Honestly and open eyed.
The honesty and closeness children have with our Lord is a demonstration of what a pure and innocent relationship with our God must be like. Jesus teaches us further in today’s Message Reading from Mark 10:13-16;
13 People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. 14 When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 15 Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” 16 And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.
The Lord is being very consistent in His instruction on how we need to humble ourselves and stop being a hinderance for others in their search for our Lord. In another place (Matthew 18:6) our Lord specifically states;
6 “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
And really that applies to all those who search in the dark for our Lord. We must be conduits to God and not roadblocks. Regardless of if those people are babes in life or babes in Christ, our role is to help guide people, all people God places in our lives for His purposes. Walking with people and not for them, in their search.
For me our Lord has capped it all today’s message reading in Mark 10:15 when instructing us;
15 Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”
But what does that mean? Well today I want to share briefly with you what I think it doesn’t mean, and we can go from there.
Receiving the Kingdom of God as a Child does not give us an excuse to prolong our collective childhoods into our forties and fifties. One only need to look momentarily and you are inundated with a great number in Western Society emersed in childhood. Receiving the Kingdom is not an excuse for:
- Being pampered into co-dependance which in turn tries to excuse;
- Not trying each day
- Not producing
- Getting our way
- Not being allowed to fail in life
- A new reason to be a victim
When the Lord instructs us to receive the Kingdom like a little child, he is saying to trust in our Lord as a child (innocent, loving, and honest), not to be childish. And yet we are living in a society that hosts countless adults who want to revisit their terrible twos, because they can. And condoning bad behavior does not make us more Christian, just part of the problem.
Because it really does take a village to groom a generation for adult KinderCare. Accompanied with a lot of co-dependency, a whole lot of selfishness blindly rewarded, and virtually zero accountability in a society, makes for the right recipe to the disaster we now are witnessing.
It is a challenge to live in this world without being corrupted by it. It takes vigilance, study, honesty, steadfastness, and all with and in our Lord. It also takes being with other people who know they are flawed and have come to the Lord for help in their own struggles, and also to help in the struggles of others.
We must always remember that, we have come here today, not to do God a favor, but to thank Him for;
- Proving us a way to get well in His House
- Giving us to each other
- Loving us in spite of us
- Letting us serve Him by serving others
- Growing in and with Him together
May we continue to be that church on the hill, that doesn’t hide its light but projects it’s relationship to our Lord like a beacon in the depths. Leaving the warm embrace of KinderCare for our children. For the display of His splendor. Amen!