“Let the Children In” based on Psalm 8 and Mark…
Artistically, in Europe, babies and small children were painted as small grown ups for many centuries. Their faces don’t look like baby faces or children’s faces. The proportions of their bodies don’t like right either. It was apparently quite a revolution when someone ACTUALLY looked at a child and painted the child to look like they do. While some of this was about artistic development, a lot of it was about how children were seen. The most relevant thing about kids was that they might grow up to be adults, so that’s how people saw them.
The artistic transition happened around 1500 (give or take.) The concept of childhood itself is newer than that historically. The concept of children as valuable is even newer. Child labor laws weren’t consistent in this country until the Great Depression.
Not all children today are treated as if they are precious, but children as a whole are seen as having great value. Some of this is related to the availability of effective birth control. As much as I believe that parents of very large families are able to love all their children because they just DO, human beings are finite. The amount of attention and expressions of affection that can be given to a small number of children is more per child than the amount that can be shared among many. As people were able to control the number of children they had, many people decided to use their resources to give their children the best chance the could at life – and had less children so they had more to give each child.
As children have become less prevalent, they have become more precious. But that was NOT the case in Jesus’ time. Life expectancy was low, very low among the 97% of people who comprised the lower class. Survival to age 10 was about 50%, which led to a lack of investment in a person until it was proven they’d live for a while.1 As an agricultural society, children were of use as workers in the field, and as a society that also valued bodily pleasure between spouses, there were plenty of reasons to have children. There were many children in Jesus’ day, but they were not understood to be fully human. They were JUST children. As it is put in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, in the time of Jesus, “The child did not represent innocence but a secondary status, a lesser human.”2
The pope stopped his caravan to receive a child during his visit to the US, in a nearly perfect living example of Jesus’ words in this passage. It was different primarily in how children are seen. Pope Francis’ actions were consistent with his universal value on human life, and society’s understanding of children as people. Jesus’ words were an expansion of his value on human life. As the Jesus Seminar said in their conversation about this text, some think it is authentic because of“Jesus’ dramatic reversal of the child’s traditional status in ancient societies as a silent non-participant.”3 This fits with his “sympathy for those who were marginal to society or outcasts.”4
People knew Jesus was important, important enough to keep him from being bothered with “pesky” kids. Yet Jesus says, “let the children come to me.” And then he keeps going. He tells them that the kindom of God belongs to the children. Then he says something rather obscure, and it appears to be just as obscure in Greek as it is English: “Whoever does not welcome the kindom of God as a little child will never enter it.” So, what does that mean? Does it mean that you have to welcome the kindom of God as a child would welcome the kindom of God? Or does it mean that you have to welcome the kindom of God the way you would welcome a child?
We don’t know.
I always thought it was the first (the question frankly didn’t occur to me until a colleague pointed it out this week), but I never could quite figure out how a child would receive the kin-dom. Most commentators suggest that a child would welcome the kin-dom without reserve or judgment, but I’m pretty sure they’ve just never met kids. Others say that this reflects the lack of hierarchy among kids, I still think that perspective comes from an innocence about children. More likely, from having known a few children, I’m going to guess that they’d receive the kin-dom with a boatload of curiosity, exploration, and questions. Which, as far as I can tell, is a great way to do it.
On the other hand, if the goal is to welcome the kin-dom like one welcomes a child, it implies that we’re supposed to welcome children. It even implies that this is a moral imperative for following Jesus and seeking God. (Not at all subtle hint at the US government as well as all countries in the world who are limiting the number of Syrian refugees they’ll receive.) It implies that the people seen as irrelevant and replaceable in Jesus’ time are still of value to him, to God, and therefore to us.
This extends to imply that there is a moral imperative to welcoming all people whose humanity is in question. To take it a step further, this implies that we should extend protection and life-saving measures to all of God’s people. That is, we might want to take steps to prevent the ~30,000 gun related deaths in our country every year, about 60% of of which are suicide. This is a significant issue because suicides are often decisions made impulsively, and the presence of a gun makes it easier and A LOT more effective. (Threat of death from suicide goes up by 4.8 times when a gun is in a home.5)
We have a lot of guns in the United States, although the percentage of gun owners has been in decline the number of guns owned per gun owner has been on the rise. According to the Washington Post, gun sales in the United States are $11.7 billion, with $993 million in profits.6 I think it is interesting to note that gun companies make about as much money on ammunition over as they do on guns. More significantly than having a lot of guns, we have a lot of gun related deaths. These are correlated of course, but not perfectly, and it is worth looking at the impact of gun violence directly. According to the New York Times, “Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns than died in all U.S. wars going back to the American Revolution.”7 To be direct about children, “In America, more preschoolers are shot dead each year (82 in 2013) than police officers are in the line of duty (27 in 2013).”8 The majority of these are accidental, related to having firearms within the reach of children.
Yet if we look at our society, there is not political will to change our access to guns. In fact, over the past decade, the most significant increases in gun sales have happened around the election of President Obama and each mass shooting. The mass shootings seem to bifurcate us as a country, with some people thinking more guns would help and others thinking the opposite. Furthermore, many people believe they are safer with a gun than without one. (If you have a gun in your house, you are 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than if you don’t have one, after controlling for potentially confounding variables.9) Given all of these factors, it seems like it is time, as a country, to try a third way. Making guns safer is certainly better than just letting them run rampant, and I am grateful for those engaging the conversation by trying to find a way forward.
Since it doesn’t seem possible to decrease gun access in the United States, as determined by how votes in Congress have been going, other choices are necessary. An op-ed piece in the New York Times made some great suggestions, ones that could actually happen in our politically divisive political system:
Public health experts cite many ways we could live more safely with guns, and many of them have broad popular support.
A poll this year found that majorities even of gun-owners favor universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses.
We should also be investing in “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that fire only with a PIN or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability insurance for guns, as we do for cars.
It’s not clear that these steps would have prevented the Oregon shooting. But Professor Webster argues that smarter gun policies could reduce murder rates by up to 50 percent — and that’s thousands of lives a year. Right now, the passivity of politicians is simply enabling shooters.10
I don’t say this all that often, to my own detriment, but if the only way forward is compromise, then lets do it. If we can decrease gun violence by 50%, that’s a lot.
The text of the Psalm offers a perspective that seems to be almost 180 degrees removed from that of the news. It celebrates God, and God’s goodness. It suggests that safety itself comes from the “mouths of babes” and reminds us of the majesty and wonder of creation. Looking up at the night sky, filled with moon and starts, the Psalmist is amazed that God bothers to care for humans. (I had some of those thoughts as I watched the lunar eclipse.) Yet, the Psalms goes on to point out that God not only cares for us, God trusts us and asks us to be representatives of holiness itself in the world.
What a different view than the one we have when we look at violent deaths and the horrid debates that emerge from them. To be reminded of wonder in the midst of horror can put us in tension, but it is a healthy tension. The world is often a violent and unjust. The world is also a place of unparalleled beauty and wonder. As far as I know, it has been this complicated for quite some time. It never really stops being awful, and it never really stops being wonderful. Paying attention to the world can feel like a roller coaster ride.
And this world is what we are passing on to our children. Jesus said, “Let the children come to me” and he gathered them around him, pulled them into his arms, and blessed them. Dr. Seuss said, “Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”11 It isn’t always just about trying, it is about trying together. I hope and pray that we, as a society, care enough to work together to create change, so that world our children grow into has less fear and violence. May we be at work creating a world with more wonder than horror. May God help us. Amen
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1 Warren Carter, The Roman Empire and the New Testament: An Essential Guide (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2006) page 10.
2 The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79-80.
3 Robert W. Funk, Roy W Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (HarperOneUSA, 1993), page 89.
4 Funk et al, 89.
5 Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda and Marcie-jo Kresnow “Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study” published in the American Journal of Epidemeology (2004) 160(10): 929-936. http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/160/10/929.full#ref-2 Accessed October 3, 2015.
6 Brad Plumer “How the U.S. gun industry became so lucrative” in the Washington Post December 19, 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/19/seven-facts-about-the-u-s-gun-industry/ Accessed Oct. 3, 2015
7 Nicholas Kristof “A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths” in the New York TimesOctober 3, 2015. Found at: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-a-new-way-to-tackle-gun-deaths.html?referer= on October 3, 2015.
8 Kristof
9 Dahlberg et al
10Kristof
11Theodore Geisel writing as Dr. Seuss in The Lorax (Random House: New York, 1971).
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Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
October 4, 2015