Sermon for Chapel Divine Service on Wednesday of Week of Invocavit 2020
This sermon was preached by Revd Dr Harold Ristau at the Divine Service held in the Martin Luther Chapel of Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary on the Wednesday of the Week of Invocavit 2020. Dr Ristau is chairman of the Practical Department at CLTS.
Becoming Children (Matthew 8:1-10)
Our Lord says that getting into heaven requires us to become like children. How hard can that be? After all, really small children are known for doing, well, nothing. Just sleeping on their parents’ laps and nursing at their moms’ breasts: a reputation for sleeping and eating. How hard is that?
Being an adult, now that’s a different story! It’s hard to be an adult. Dealing with all the responsibilities and stresses of life. If you can make it as an adult, well, childhood is a piece of cake. Right? Wrong. Becoming a child is harder than you think!
Being an adult means being independent and self-reliant. A strong father is expected to show no signs of weakness. Admitting your errors: an acknowledgement of deficiencies. Trusting others: irresponsible. Life is one of hard knocks. If you are not suspicious of others, you are gullible, and will be taken advantage of.
Yet the identifying characteristic of a Christian, is faith, or trust: trusting God; trusting Jesus, because we’re no good on our own. Kids trust. There seems to be an inverse relationship between age and trust. The smaller and more childlike a kid is, the more they trust. Small children jump into their parents’ arms with blind faith firmly believing that they will be safely caught. But the older they get, the more hesitation they show. They know that the floor is hard and dad doesn’t look as big and strong as he used to. Younger children are used to being corrected, they know that they make lots of mistakes and that they’ve got lots to learn. So they repent. A child brought up in a healthy home, is not suspicious of their parents or teachers, but having an easier time holding their instruction sacred and gladly hearing and learning it. Older kids have attitude!
A strong mother needs to be in control, and keep the household together, avoiding too many displays of emotion, or other sentiments that she may regret.
But small children, they openly wear their hearts on their sleeves, without any reservation, or embarrassment. Again, the younger the child, the more innocent. They know that they can’t make it on their own. They expect correction. A diaper change doesn’t make them blush. But when the oldest of adults, the elderly, require a similar service, it is “naturally” humiliating and causes much shame and sadness.
Going back to being children, becoming children, for the aged and even for all of us here, is never easy.
The world tempts us to rely only upon ourselves. Its sermon is in dire contradiction with our Lenten one: “the fruit of your hands, labour of your feet, what you see, and can feel and can touch. That is what counts.” No wonder Jesus says, if these things cause you to stumble cut them off and throw away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire.
The ways of the world hail these unforgiving adult-like attributes. What kind of advanced education does not presume an exclusively adult-like reasoning? Why is it that for intellectual-type seekers, academics, or Muslim converts to Christianity, the Institutes of Calvin seem to be more popular than the works of Luther? Sometimes as a parent I get frustrated when my children don’t have more deeply theological questions during our family devotions. But why? Instead of praising this innocent belief, and even thanking God for their not stumbling over any seeming contradictions that an adult thinker would be sure to underscore in the Holy Bible, I assume they aren’t listening to the word. Yet just as likely, they are trusting it more than I. We believe in infant baptism, and yet, when it comes to faith, we see adulthood as the goal. Consider the resistance to younger communion in our confessional synods. “The kids don’t know enough yet. They aren’t smart enough. They haven’t asked all the right questions yet. They aren’t ready yet. They are unworthy.”
While deployed as a chaplain overseas in Afghanistan, I remember wondering why whenever there was a mass casualty, women and children were rarely brought into our medical units by the locals. I recall a bus exploding on a Taliban IUD device. When the dead and wounded were brought into our camp, I asked the question “Where were all the children?”… The answer: left to die on the side of the road. “They were just children” They weren’t important. Adults mattered. Children didn’t.
It’s hard to value what Jesus values. It’s hard to hear his words. It’s hard to be children. It’s not only hard, it’s impossible! We can’t make ourselves children. Sin is too deeply engrained in our adult-like bones. According to the Old Adam, we are paralyzed in a state of adulthood. The state of childlike innocence was lost by our forefathers and mothers, who applied their adult-like faith and reasoning to the critical incident in the garden, doubting their loving Father’s word and intent. We, here today, wouldn’t have chosen differently. Hell, not heaven, becomes the natural “resting” place for those who consider Christianity as an adult experience. Why? Because our Heavenly Father can only be a Father to, well, children. There is no room for more than one father, one adult you could say, in the household of God. And, so, the most perfect of prayers (The Lord’s Prayer) addresses God, not in terms fit for adults, but ones fit for children: “Our Father”. So too, there is no room for more than one mother as the Church of God. And, so, the catholic church has spoken of the baptismal font as the womb through which we have been reborn and knit together as God’s children. The altar is the place from which we nurse upon the breasts of holy mother church. We Christians go to church to do nothing else but rest in her arms as we are nourished from her table in the holy sacraments, as we listen to her voice repeating the Word, the divine story, the Gospel, as our source of peace, rest and comfort, as we are embraced by this mother and our Holy Father in the one catholic and apostolic holy family.
When we conceive ourselves in this way we implicitly confess we are sinners that know we have needs. We are by no means independent nor self-sufficient. We pray that we cease believing as adults, and repent of our misplaced humiliation of our sins, the kind of embarrassment that causes us to avoid, say, individual confession, where our holy parent gives us a continual spiritual diaper change through the words of holy absolution, directed to us, one on one, as if we were His only child, “Your sins are forgiven in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Brothers and sisters, the population of heaven consists only of children, for they are the greatest. After all, “behold what a manner of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God.” Right now we sit on the lap of Jesus in His Kingdom. The hymns of the Church are the lullabies that we sing. As the Psalter proclaims “Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger”. First Jesus, then us. For the King of this Kingdom, the only Son of the Father, came down from heaven, born of the virgin Mary, was made man, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified died and was buried, descended into hell, to rescue us from ourselves and give His life for every single one of His little children. Jesus preached a simple childlike message, to children. And those who weren’t able to receive it, the adults in the congregation, walked away sad and unchanged.
For every baptism, even when it happens at 80 years of age, is an infant baptism. Our Lord, the Child of God, was maimed, crippled and made lame, so that in holy baptism, we could be too, spiritually. That we could be recreated from the rubble of where our adult ways and patterns of thinking have left us. “Cut down to size”, so to speak: from big to small; adults to children. So that we would see ourselves as weak, helpless sinners cradled between the hands of our almighty and merciful Saviour. Its ok to be gullible when it comes to God. To trust God, the only truly trustworthy One. The Holy Spirit rescues us from our adult-like obsessions and reasoning when we babes are found in His home, like this morning. Here our hearts and minds are reshaped, once again, through His divine service. We adults become like children: resting in his peace, feeding off His love.
When I was young, I would fall asleep in the car ride home from my Oma and Opa’s place. It was always late. So my mom or dad would carry me up to my bedroom. Otherwise I would never had made it upstairs. Funny, it was as if I had no feet, hands or eyes; helpless, like I was maimed and crippled. Well, fellow children of God, we too are asleep, weak and helpless, (in spite of what we may sometimes think) yet Jesus carries us up the stairs of His Kingdom, and eventually into our final resting place. A life of repentance involves a deep acknowledgement of that to be true, and trying not to spring out of our Abba’s arms, because its “all rather humiliating and embarrassing, isn’t it, Christianity? We are adults, after all!”
Becoming children of God is indeed hard for us adults, we who from the moment of conception, at birth and throughout our lives, strive for adulthood, and instead, to rest in peace between the arms of God, with nothing else to offer but our open lips craving the pure spiritual milk of His Word, tasting that the Lord is good in His nourishing Sacrament; believing that that is all that we really need in life. It is, in fact, impossible for us. But not for Jesus—Jesus who, humbled Himself like a little child to make us a child of God. And that is what we are: children of God.