Is your relationship with the risen Lord infantile or childlike?

By Fr. Joseph Neiman

Is my, is your, is our relationship with the risen Lord childlike or childish, mature or infantile? That's how I would characterize the question which I believe arises out of the teaching of Jesus presented to us by Mark this morning.

Let me tell you another joke that illustrates something of what I am talking about in this question. I've told you this one before, and perhaps you question why I tell jokes when I preach. It is because there is so much fear and dread in the land that only humor can help us cope with it. Victor Frankl in that profound little book, Man's Search for Meaning, tells that there was even humor in the Nazi concentration camps as they sought to cope with the horror of that life.

Johnny and his little brother, Mikey, were arguing over a toy that belong to Johnny. Mikey wanted to play with it and Johnny didn't want him to. Mother hears the children arguing and asks them: "What did you learn in Church school? How would Jesus act? Wouldn't Jesus share things with others? Johnny listens for a moment and then says to his younger brother: "Ok, Mikey, you be Jesus."

Johnny was being infantile or childish. His desires were more important than Mikey's anyone else's. They were infantile. The Dictionary defines "childlike" as "innocent, trusting, natural, undeceitful, open, unassuming, guileless, and unaffected." It defines "infantile" as "immature, unformed, undeveloped, childish" and self-centered. Infantile faith, therefore, is like general infantile behavior: selfish, self-centered, always wanting to be first or better than others, seeking praise above all, wanting things, fearful, afraid to try or to trust, demanding, and throwing a fit when we don't get our way.

From the Wisdom of Solomon this morning we hear that "short and sorrowful is our life" and so we choose "to enjoy the good things that exist." "Let none of us fail to share in our revelry; everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment....., let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow or regard the gray hairs of the aged. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless...."

James asks: "What cause wars, and what causes fightings among you? ...You desire and you do not have, so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and wage war....."

A PBS show a number of years ago stressed that we as people in North American are infected with the disease of Affluenzia. We must have, and we must have more. Shop until you drop. Feel bad? Eat and spend money. Get things now even if it means going into debt. As I have told you before, Thomas Merton says we wrap things around us like bandages around an invisible mummy. We fear without them we are nothing, and we fear that others will take our things away. If anyone tries, we fight even to death. Others have defined Affluenzia with the compulsion to keep up with the Jones as the old expression goes. We must be first, best, successful, powerful, productive, and we even pray that God will make us so! How many people do you know that wear a cross around their neck but don't seem to have any understanding of what it stands for?

Henri Nouwen wrote: "If there is anything that has struck me while traveling throughout this country to speak and teach, it is that we are a fearful people. We dread physical need or discomfort. We fear for our safety and our jobs. We even grow fearfully suspicious of others and hoard our belongings. On the level of international relations, well-to-do countries... build walls around our wealth so that no stranger can take it away from us. We build bombs to protect what we become convinced we must defend. But in a great irony, we thereby become captives of our own fears. Those who make us afraid have power over us. Those who make us live in the house of fear ultimately take our freedom away" (Turn My Mourning into Dancing, p. 32).

Mark tells us that Jesus, when He learned the disciples were arguing over who among them was the greatest, He taught them (and us): "If any would be first, they must be last of all and servant of all." Then Jesus took a child and placed the child in the midst of them, and taking the child in his arms, he said to them: 'Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but the one who sent me." It fascinates me to know that the word in Greek for "child" here is paidion, which can also be translated "servant". In many cultures in the first century, during the Middle Ages, and even in countries around the world today, children were viewed as property, so-to-speak. They had or have no rights. They are totally dependent upon the will of the parent, especially the Father where there is one in the home. A child is powerless. A child has little knowledge of the past and few aspirations for the future, but lives in the present moment. A child produces nothing, except perhaps a full diaper or a messy bedroom. A child having little power must trust that the parents will care for them, that out of their love for them the parents will provide what they need, such as food and shelter and clothing.

This innocent, trusting, unassuming, guileless attitude is what I believe Jesus is telling us should characterize our relationship with Him and with the One who sent Him, God. We are taught to live in love and welcome others in Jesus' name, even children who can do nothing for us, who can give us nothing in terms of things.

Nouwen wrote: "When I lived among the poor in Latin America some years ago, I say a people who lived in a different way. They had learned that fear need never rule. Amid torture and oppression and poverty were people living in gratitude and peace. I found less fear than in those living in countries such as ours, where so many possess so much..... Wherever we live, the invitation of Christ beckons us to move out of the house of fear into the house of love: to leave our possessiveness for a place of freedom."

Right now we are living in the house of fear in our Church and in our Country. Some in our Church believe we are falling apart because we have welcomed in the name of Jesus some who seek Him even though they find themselves to be gay or lesbian persons. In writing to the Romans, Paul says: Rom 8:35 "(NRSV) Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" Will the fact that the Episcopal Church welcomed the Bishop of New Hampshire, whom the clergy and lay leaders elected as their bishop, will this fact separate us form God's love for us, from our love relationship with the risen Lord which we nourish in daily prayer, in regular worship, and in loving service?

In our country in September of 2001 we were struck with evil which terrorists inflicted on the very symbols of our power and affluence: the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We responded with unreasonable fear and began a war against terror which is now consuming us. We furthermore defined the leader of another country as evil and believed him capable of hurting us with weapons of mass destruction, so we responded with power, with bombs that killed men, women, and children. True, many people in Iraq were suffering under the dictatorship, but were there not other ways to change the situation?

We must move out of the house of fear into the house of love. Nothing helps us make the movement from our infantile self-centered possessive lives into childlike mature trusting in God and in the right relationships with others than remembering God in gratitude for life, for health, for those who love us and those whom we love, and for all that is given to us in our daily bread. Gratitude "puts God in view of all of life, not just in the moments we set aside for worship or spiritual disciplines. Not just in the moments when life seems easy."

As Henri Nouwen puts it: "To be grateful does not mean repressing our remembered hurts. But as we come to God with our hurts - honestly nor superficially - something life changing can begin slowly to happen. We discover how God is the one who invites us to healing." With a childlike faith, let us turn to the Lord and ask Him to heal us of our fears, of our remembered and imagined wounds. The boggy-man hidden in the dark of our lives will be dispelled by the light of Christ's love for us if we open up our hearts and realize that we, like our children whom we love and cherish, are also beloved of God, precious and irreplaceable, totally loved and called to walk trustfully into the future to which God calls each of us.

Proper 20-B, Wisdom 1:16-2:1-22, Psalm 54, James 3:16-4:6, Mark 9: 30-37