Churches spend a great deal of time asking how they will raise faithful children. Ours too. We ask what they need to learn, which stories they need to know, and what will help them carry faith into the rest of their lives. These are important questions. But in today’s passage, Jesus turns the idea of what it looks like to raise faithful children by placing a children at the center of faith. What if raising faithful children and raising a faithful church are both part of the same work God is doing among us? Or even, what if raising a faithful church means letting the children be the ones who raise us?
Jesus and the disciples are traveling through Galilee when he tells them, for the second time in the Gospel of Mark, what lies ahead: the Son of Man will be handed over into human hands, killed, and raised again. But the disciples still don’t understand this. They believe Jesus is the Messiah, yet they still imagine power as rising to the top and defeating one’s enemies. They don’t imagine that God’s power might be revealed through humility and service.
When Jesus tells them about his upcoming death and the one who will betray him, the disciples are afraid to ask Jesus what he means, so instead, by the time they reach Capernaum, the disciples are arguing about which of them is the greatest.
Because if the disciples won’t admit they’re confused, they at least can make themselves feel more secure by deciding that they are more important than someone else. And if they don’t understand where Jesus is leading them, they can distract themselves by arguing about who gets to stand closest to him.
And let’s be honest, this still happens. When we are uncertain about our own value, we begin measuring ourselves against other people. When we are afraid that we don’t belong, it might be easier to look for someone we can place below us or outside of us. And churches aren’t immune to this either. Not even ours. We can quietly decide that one style of worship is more faithful, one generation is more important, or that one community is better than the rest.
But the church is God’s house, and it is Christ who meets us through those we didn’t think to place at its center. Everyone is good and faithful and loved.
So when Jesus asks the disciples what they were arguing about, they fall silent, maybe out of shame. And so Jesus sits down, calls them closer, and says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
In the world the disciples know and the world we know, greatness means having people beneath you. But in the community Jesus is raising, greatness means using whatever authority, experience, or strength you possess for the good of someone else.
Jesus then brings a child into the middle of the disciples. Now while children were loved in the ancient world, they didn’t possess the status of adults. A child could not advance the disciples’ reputations, offer them a better position, or repay their hospitality. In an argument about greatness, a child was exactly the kind of person that wasn’t considered great or wise or strong or faithful.
Yet this is the person Jesus places at the center. “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
So in other words: welcome the child, and you welcome Jesus. Welcome Jesus, and you welcome God. The person who seemed to hold the least importance becomes the person through whom God’s presence is received.
Jesus told the disciples that he will be handed over and made vulnerable before the powers of the world. Then he takes a vulnerable person – a child – into his arms and identifies himself with the child. The disciples are searching for God at the top, but Jesus reveals God among those who are not considered great or wise or strong or faithful.
This is how Jesus raises a faithful church. He changes who stands at the center and teaches us to recognize God’s presence in people we assumed were only there to receive something from us.
We often say that children are the future of the church, but Jesus asks us to receive them now in the present. Their questions, experiences, and relationships with God matter now. And their questions and stories can fill us with faith.
One time, while we were exploring the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, we asked people in worship what they would ask Jesus if they had the opportunity. We received many serious theological questions, but one child wrote, “Jesus, what is your favorite color?”
They wanted to know the favorite color of their friend Jesus. They wanted to know Jesus as a friend, because friends know those kinds of things about one another. A faithful church needs good theology, but it also needs that longing to know and be known by Christ; to be friends with Christ; to trust we are loved by Christ.
Another time, during a children’s sermon on baptism, one of our children stood around the font holding her doll as we spoke about how God’s love claims us and remains with us throughout our lives. When we finished, she asked whether her doll could be baptized too.
She heard about a love that lasts for our whole lives, and her first response was to want that love for someone she held close. If God’s love was this good, why would she keep it to herself? She understood that when we trust that God loves us, we begin longing for everyone we love to know that they too are loved.
Then there was the time I shared my Epiphany star word with our middle schoolers. My word that year was “approve,” and I told them I did not yet know why that might be my word. One of them answered immediately, “That’s an easy one. You just need to be reminded that we approve of you as our pastor.”
First, that’s good to know! I got their approval.
But that middle schooler also took a word I hadn’t yet understood and turned it into a word of grace. For a moment, the expected direction of ministry was reversed. I as the pastor was not the one offering the blessing. The middle schooler was. Sometimes the youngest person in the room speaks the word of grace the rest of us need to hear.
I see this in our youth all the time. One of my absolute favorite things about our youth is how kind and inclusive they are. They come from different schools, different parts of the Lehigh Valley, and different friend groups and interests. Yet whether they gather here on Sunday morning or spend a week together on a trip, they make room for one another.
Our youth show us that belonging grows when we make room for another person and discover that their presence gives the community something it needs.
And is that not the hope we have for the whole church?
A faithful church is not a place where one group stands securely at the center and invites everyone else to visit. It’s a community in which Christ keeps changing the center and drawing us toward people we might otherwise overlook. We need one another’s languages, memories, questions, traditions, and ways of seeing. We need adults who can tell the stories of faith and children who can help us hear those stories again with wonder.
Some of you know about our current partnership with Vibrant Faith. This partnership is a grant-funded initiative exploring how we are Raising Faithful Kids, which is also the name of this initiative. You can find more information about this initiative in our Faith Formation catalog. It’s important and really something special we are doing.
For the next ten weeks, we will include a simple intergenerational faith practice in our worship services; something a child of any age and an adult of any age can do together. We will take pictures that help us notice where God is present, have short conversations with others from another generation, tell stories, pray for one another, and reflect together on scripture and images. These practices will take a few moments in our worship services, but each one will help us connect what happens here in worship with the lives we live throughout the week.
Raising Faithful Kids may be the name of the initiative, but this work belongs to the whole church, because faith is formed through relationships across generations.
I have another story to share: There’s this activity we sometimes do with our children during our faith formation hour. We read a Bible story and invite them to finish the sentence, “I wonder…”
When we were exploring Jesus’ parable of the growing seed, they said things like, “I wonder what kind of seed it was” or “I wonder how long it took to become a plant.” And then one child said, “I wonder if the seed was happy while it was growing.”
I think about that question often. Was the seed happy while it was growing? Am I happy while I’m growing? Are we happy while we’re growing?
To be growing means to understand that we are unfinished. We say that we want the church to grow, but often we mean more people, more programs, or more ministries.
But what about growth that changes us, even if that change is uncomfortable? What about growth that begins when we admit that we don’t always understand? Or growth that happens when we listen to someone younger or when we learn from someone whose experience is different from ours? How do we grow when receive wisdom from someone who worships in another language? And what does growth look like when we serve neighbors we do not know?
Perhaps the seed can be happy while it grows because its joy does not depend upon being finished. It can be happy because it is surrounded by a community that waters it, protects it, makes room for it, and delights in every new sign of life. A seed can be happy while it grows because it knows it is cared for. We can be happy while we grow because we know we are loved.
Remember our mission statement: We are imperfect people striving to live God’s love in the way of Jesus Christ.
I want to be a part of a faithful church; not a finished church, a faithful church of imperfect people. I want us to grow and change and transform. I want us to ask questions and honor differences and make sure that no one is left standing alone. I want us to be a church where we help one another notice that God is present in every moment of our lives. I want us to be a church that strives every day to live God’s love in the way of Jesus Christ.
The stories I shared with you are just the tiniest glimpse of how God is at work through our children and youth here at FPCA. And they are testimonies. Testimonies we need to be a faithful church because through them, God has reminded us things like that Jesus can be known as a friend, that God’s love should be shared, that words of grace should be spoken, that blessings can be offered in all directions, that there is holiness in a community that makes room, and that growth can contain joy.
Faithful children are not only being raised by a faithful church. Faithful children are helping to raise a faithful church.
Thanks be to God. Amen.