A couple of weeks ago, I saw a news report out of the state of New Hampshire. An Episcopal Church in a town had offered to pay the school lunch debt of students and was apparently turned down by school administrators. Instead, the school planned to take the families to small claims court. Of course the story incited outrage and eventually the school decided to accept the money from the church and to refrain from pursuing court action.

Earlier this week, we heard about the horrific exploding pagers and walkie-talkies that Israel unleashed in Lebanon killing innocent children alongside Hezbollah members. We are all too accustomed to school shootings by now, and the mantras from politicians in their wake: “Thoughts and Prayers” and “There’s nothing we can do.” We claim to honor children, to cherish them, but our actions, our culture puts the lie to those empty words.

Another news story this past week. The remains of three more Lakota children who died at the Carlisle Industrial School were returned to the Pine Ridge Reservation and interred in cemeteries there; 132 years after their deaths. Three of hundreds of children who died in Boarding Schools; of the thousands who were torn from their homes and families, stripped of their culture, language, and identity, over the decades.

In today’s gospel reading, we are introduced to the second of Jesus’ three predictions of his suffering and crucifixion, as well as the disciples’ response to it. There are some interesting differences between these two episodes, the one we heard last week and this week’s. First of all, where they took place. Last week, Jesus and his disciples were in the area of Caesarea Philippi, gentile territory. And it seems to have taken place in a public place—Mark says that Jesus called the crowd with his disciples to him before saying “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross…”  

This week, they’re back in Capernaum, which has served as something of a home base for Jesus, in Jewish territory. And they’re in a home, a private, rather than a public place. We’re told that he called the twelve to him, so this time, his teaching on discipleship is directed only to his closest friends. Intriguingly, there are others in the room, including children. Jesus brings one of them to him and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me.”

Children—scholars struggle to understand the changing attitudes towards children throughout human history. There are those who have argued that in the pre-modern world, parents didn’t love and care for their children as they do today. The argument being that high infant and childhood mortality rates led parents to be more detached from their children than they might be today. They may have been perceived as property, as non-entities, until they became old enough to contribute to the economic well being of the family. In the Roman world, children had no legal standing. But at the same time, it’s hard for us to imagine how parents might not have loved their children as deeply and intensely as most contemporary parents love their children, and there is ample historical evidence of such love—the grief expressed by parents at the deaths of their children, for example.

We see evidence of that love and concern in the Gospel of Mark itself. Remember the woman who pleaded with Jesus to heal her daughter two weeks ago; or earlier, the ruler of the synagogue who came to Jesus in hopes he would heal his daughter. In fact, the children in Mark’s gospel are doubly vulnerable—they are sick or possessed as well as being of minor age.

So what might Jesus mean when he says that, “whoever welcomes one child in my name welcomes me?” Perhaps it’s not the saccharine sentiment we thought it was but rather something deeper, more radical. Such a move might be anticipated by Jesus’ previous statement: “Whoever wants to be first must be last and servant of all.”

One of the key notions in the reign of God as Jesus is portrayed proclaiming it in the gospels is that of reversal. We see it here: the first will be last and the last will be first. We saw it in last week’s gospel: “Whoever would save their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will save it.” 

Here, Jesus is advancing an understanding of God’s reign in which the world’s values, the values by which we operate, on which our culture is dependent and constructed, are upended for another set of values. The first will be last and the last first. Here, Jesus goes on to say,” Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” And then comes the bit about children. It might seem something of a non-sequitur to us, but in both Aramaic and Greek, the same word can be used for “servant” and “child” which underscores the overall attitude towards children in those cultures.

A couple of decades, we heard a great deal in the church about “servant leadership” which I always thought was little more than an attempt to obscure power and privilege behind the guise of humility. Fortunately, we don’t hear to much about that any more but it’s still easy to draw similar conclusions from this text. While Jesus is upbraiding his disciples for their concern about their standing in the community (and their standing in God’s realm), the real point of this saying is different—it’s not about the disciples, or about us. Once again, it’s about the community welcoming and embracing the weakest and most vulnerable. 

It’s a message that bears repeating because it is one that is difficult to accept, to embrace, and to enact, because it runs so counter to culture and to ordinary behavior. How many times have you been at a gathering of some sort, talking to someone, and constantly looking over their shoulder to see if there’s someone more important, more interesting with whom you might connect. We do it in business gatherings, at conferences, and certainly we clergy do it at clergy gatherings. Like the disciples, we’re always jockeying for position, trying to figure out how we might climb the ladder of power and prestige.

But Jesus is teaching us something different—not to look for ways of advancing ourselves but to look to those who are marginalized, powerless, to the child and the servant. 

And who are the most vulnerable in our society right now? With healthcare out of reach for so many, with the skyrocketing numbers of elderly people becoming homeless; with the vicious attacks on immigrants, asylum seekers—the list of the vulnerable grows ever longer while the attacks on them become ever more shrill and violent. We may decry such attacks and attitudes but is it enough to speak out? Is it time for us to match our actions with words, to lay aside our assertions of power and prestige, and welcome the child, the stranger with open arms and open hearts.