+ ‘I thank you Father, for you have hidden these things and revealed them to infants’
Today’s readings are full of children. The children sitting in the market place playing the flute, God revealing his truth to infants not wise grown-ups, Jesus being the Son who receives everything from his Father. Even in the first reading we have not a son but a daughter, Daughter Zion, a symbol of Israel, the Church and Mary, who is a young girl welcoming her king, who is Jesus; Jesus who is humble and rides on a donkey. God chooses children, sons and daughters.
We moan about the lack of children in our churches and this is true. Fewer children come to Church. Part of the reason is a general hostility to religion in our society, assisted by the misbehaviour of some church leaders, and part is the way children have been treated in British churches. If you have glared at a mother with a noisy child, you are part of the problem, you have contributed to the collapse of Christianity in Britain. At the altar we are all equal, king or beggar, baby or adult. If we are serious about the words we say welcoming children in baptism, we have to recognise that a child has no less right to be here than someone who has been coming for decades – and to behave in accordance with this knowledge. Now those of us who love silence and contemplation also have a right to be here, and that is why we have different types of services.
Last week we had to report to Vestry that changes in childcare patterns have meant that the playgroup and after school club in our hall have closed, losing us many thousand pounds in income. Vestry is working on that, but I was also able to report that average weekly children’s attendance at worship here over the last two years has grown from 2 to 8, a growth of 300%. You may wonder where they are. This is attendance at worship, so it doesn’t include the many children at our concerts and events, but it is important to realise that Holy Cross is not just this service, worship is not just something we do mid-morning on a Sunday. Those we may never see here, who come to Holy Communion at 9am on a Sunday, 10.30am on a Wednesday or 2pm on a Friday, are no less members of the Church as those who come here now. Likewise Toddler Church on a Friday morning is Church, especially now we did the scary but successful experiment of celebrating the Eucharist with the children.
Without the Eucharist there is no Church. Jesus told us to do it and gives us his body that we might become his body – the Bible tells us the Church is the Body of Christ. No Communion, no Church. And at the altar the little baptised boy at Toddler Church who decided at the last minute to receive Holy Communion is equally a member of our Church as someone in their eighties with a doctorate in theology who has served on the Vestry for fifty years. But it is actually more than that – what Jesus says suggests that God prefers children and wants us to be like them.
‘Except you become like little children you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven’. ‘Unless you are born again you cannot see the Kingdom of God’. ‘I thank you Father, for you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants’. If we are serious about our faith we need to become more childlike. That doesn’t mean we should be ‘childish’… but also notice how in our society, which traditionally hasn’t valued children as Catholic and Orthodox parts of Europe do, our main adjective which means ‘like a child’, ‘childish’, is negative, whereas the positive adjective ‘childlike’ is much more recent and probably influenced by Jesus’ words.
So how do we become childlike? A child comes from the security of its mother’s womb into a strange and dangerous world, where it clings to its mother. Some psychologists even say the desire for heaven is just a desire to return to the womb. You can understand the story of Adam and Eve in paradise as a symbol of the security of the womb, the great theologian St Irenaeus even saw the fall as a ‘growing up wrong’. The secular humanist would say this means religion is just a delusion, but, as always, they lack the imagination (and often the intelligence) to see that we are marked by the fall from the womb but that doesn’t mean there is no heaven and the first chapters of Genesis are just nonsense. Jesus Christ fulfils real human need. To be a Christian, to live by the cross and resurrection, is the most authentic way of being human.
And that is what it means to be like children. To recognise our need for comfort, rest and security. To recognise that nothing in this world, money, power, relationships, will give us that because all the goods of this world will be taken away, by death if not before. I don’t want to be hard on the older people here – you may remember the ‘comfortable words’ at Communion, I do, which began with Jesus words in today’s gospel after he speaks of children, ‘come to me all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest… for I am gentle and humble in heart’. Words of comfort, words of encouragement, words we need as children lost in a dangerous world.
We’ll soon sing the offertory hymn ‘be still my soul’, that speaks of the same thing which is why it is popular at funerals. The same humility and comfort is found in the last verse of our psalm and in our final hymn. Our faith can bring this comfort. Jesus said ‘let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for of such is the Kingdom of heaven’. Let us learn the honesty of humility, recognise our vulnerability and become like little children that we may set out on the path to heaven.
