Reading: Mark 10:13-16
Well, we have some children here tonight, so this reading about Jesus embracing the little children makes some sense. But not all of us are children, are we? We have big people and little people and every age, and that’s very nice. But you know, we are all children of God, aren’t we? That’s what our baptism service teaches us – it says right after the children are baptized: “they are now called children of God.” All of us are children of God our Father.
When you stop to think about it, this is so true. The nice thing about children isn’t that they are innocent and pure. Lots of little children sometimes do bad things. Any substitute teacher or mom or dad can tell you that! So I don’t think that Jesus was saying that children are special to God just because they are so innocent. I think children are special to God for the very reason that they are children. And children depend on their moms and dads for just about everything. When they are very little, moms and dads have to do everything for them, feed them, change them, take them to the doctor, entertain them. As we get older we need that less and less, but I think some part of us always depends on our moms and dads for support and love.
I think that’s what Jesus wants of all of us children of God. He wants us to depend on God for our guidance and for our needs. Because when we stop thinking that we need God, we run into all sorts of trouble. We get too full of ourselves and we look down on people and we treat everyone in our lives badly. We call that the sin of pride. We start looking at what God has given other people and we get jealous, and we call that envy. We start wanting everything that we can find, whether it’s good for us or not, and we call that greed. We start looking for love and joy in ways that are not healthy, and we call that lust. We begin to think we can slack off on doing good things for ourselves and others because no one is really watching us, and we call that sloth. We overeat or consume things to the point of waste, because we always figure those things will be there for us, and we call that gluttony. And when all of these things lead us in the wrong direction, we get angrier and angrier – we get angry at others, at ourselves, and even at God, and we call that wrath.
And we commit all those sins just because we think we don’t need God any more, that we have maybe outgrown God, or that we’re too smart to need God any more. And this makes God very sad. After all, it’s God that has made us, created us out of nothing, given us our families and our friends and every wonderful blessing that we have. So God really deserves all of our love and devotion.
Even when we think we don’t need God, we’re really wrong about that. Every talent that we have has been given to us by God, so it’s not like anything we do is all from our own effort anyway. Also, when we think we don’t need God, things start to go wrong at some point or another, and then where do we end up? If we’re really smart, we end up coming back to God and asking for another chance.
That’s where we are tonight. We have come here to ask for another chance. We have come to promise to be his children once again, to rely on him for everything we need, to give him all of our love because he gives us all of his love. And do you know what? He absolutely will give that love to us. He will forgive us of our sins, those times when we wandered from him and thought we were too big for him. When we confess our sins, those sins go away, never to be discussed again, because God’s love is bigger than our sins.
Jesus says to all of us children of God: “Let the children come to me! Don’t try to stop them. People who are like these little children belong to the kingdom of God.” When we remember that we are children of God, that we depend on God for every blessing of our lives, then we will receive what we need, then we will be blessed by Jesus and embraced as his loving family.