The Rev. Katharine Flexer, Sunday October 6th
Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
One of my clergy colleagues pointed out to me that
over the last three Sundays, Jesus in our gospels has
talked about children and little ones every week. So
isn’t it wonderful that these last few Sundays we’ve
had children and young people actively involved in
our worship, leading us in the psalm one week, the
procession and the gospel last week, and singing for
us two weeks in a row? We have Mary Ellen and
Laura’s amazing creative work to thank for that. It is
good to have all of our members represented in what
we do up front on Sundays. (And yes, guys, we will
also let you just sit some weeks – we won’t always be
throwing you up front, we promise.)
But there it is, three times in a row in Mark’s gospel.
Jesus taking a little child and putting her in the midst
of the disciples, saying, “Whoever welcomes one
such child in my name welcomes me.” Jesus saying,
don’t you dare put a stumbling block before one of
these little ones – it would be better to be thrown in
the sea than to do that! And today, Jesus saying, “Let
the little children come to me; do not stop them; for
it is to such as these that the kingdom of God
belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive
the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter
it.” And he dispenses lots of hugs and blessings on
the children as he says all of this.
Children as objects of our care; children as worthy of
our protection; children as models and witnesses to
us of how to receive God’s love. Pretty clear, isn’t it.
How we got from this to ‘spare the rod, spoil the
child’ and ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ I
don’t know – but it wasn’t because that’s what Jesus
was teaching us.
It’s important to highlight this not just because our
kids are great (and they are). But it’s also that Jesus is
in his usual disruptive way taking the most
overlooked and uncared for members of society of
his time and saying, take care of these people, and be
like these people. All of our greed and worship of
power is dead wrong – the powerless, the childlike,
the heart open and ready to receive, that is where
God is to be found. We have such a hard time
hanging onto that truth.
This weekend we are celebrating the feast of St
Francis, the saint who most clearly represents this
truth to the world. Lots of movies have tried to make
Jesus into a macho figure (Mel Gibson), but no one
has ever managed to do that to St Francis. He’s the
little friar, the one whose statue is in countless
gardens, the one who preached to the birds. His
followers renounce everything and live in poverty,
serving the poor. (Mostly. Not every Franciscan,
obviously.)
Like most saints, there are many stories about
Francis, most of them wonderful and far-fetched, all
of them told to show the miraculous goodness he
embodied. My favorite is one we had in a children’s
book our kids loved when they were small, St Francis
and the Wolf, about Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio.
(Gubbio is a town about 100 miles southeast of
Florence.) The wolf was a fierce, awful wolf (huge in
the book’s illustrations), who attacked and ate the
livestock of the people of Gubbio – and then attacked
and ate some of the people too. The town was
terrified, living under the siege of this horrible wolf.
In the book, they send out knights, then an army,
then a terrible war machine, to defeat the wolf, but
the wolf just destroys (and eats) them all. (We often
had to skip those pages, they were so scary.) So St
Francis announces to the town’s leaders that he will
go out and see the wolf, and try diplomacy instead.
Obviously no one thinks this will work, but they let
him go anyway, and Francis goes off to find the wolf.
When he finds him, he addresses him in the wolf’s
own language, which Francis somehow knows. As the
early 1300s version of the story tells it, Francis says:
"Brother wolf, thou hast done much evil in
this land, destroying and killing the
creatures of God … All men cry out against
thee, the dogs pursue thee, and all the
inhabitants of this city are thy enemies; but
I will make peace between them and thee,
O brother wolf, if so be thou no more offend
them, and they shall forgive thee all thy
past offences, and neither men nor dogs
shall pursue thee any more."
Having listened to these words, the wolf
bowed his head, and, by the movements of
his body, his tail, and his eyes, made signs
that he agreed to what St Francis said. On
this St Francis added
"As thou art willing to make this peace, I
promise thee that thou shalt be fed every
day by the inhabitants of this land so long
as thou shalt live among them; thou shalt
no longer suffer hunger, as it is hunger
which has made thee do so much evil; but
if I obtain all this for thee, thou must
promise, on thy side, never again to attack
any animal or any human being; dost thou
make this promise?"
The wolf gives Francis his paw in promise, and
returns to Gubbio with him, where he lives two more
years in the town, being fed by the people. (The book
showed a magnificent plate of spaghetti and
meatballs being offered to the wolf, which
immediately made my kids crave spaghetti and
meatballs every time we read it.) The wolf died and
was buried, and later a church was built over its
burial place – and it is said that in 1872 during
renovations, a large wolf skeleton was indeed found
buried under a slab in the corner of the sanctuary.
There’s a statue in Gubbio of St Francis and the wolf
to this day, with the wolf standing on its hind legs,
looking deep into Francis’ eyes.
Maybe you can see why I love this story so much. It is
such a beautiful story of making peace, of loving the
other, even when that other is a terrible threat. And
it’s a story of choosing the way of vulnerability and
love rather than war and violence. It is a children’s
story that’s really for everyone, one of those
wonderful children’s witnesses that Jesus talks about.
St Francis goes out alone to meet the wolf, risking
annihilation, because he trusts in God to go with him.
He speaks in language that the wolf can understand,
the nature of true communication. He imagines what
is going on for the wolf, that it is hunger that is
driving the wolf to prey on the town, and so proposes
a solution that will take care of the wolf instead of
destroying him. And he risks believing the promise
the wolf makes in return. And so everyone gets to
feast together. There’s deep truth in us for our time,
for how we live in this world – and with ourselves.
We’re on the eve of one year since the horrors of the
October 7 attacks in southern Israel – and the
launching of the horrors that have left some 42,000
people dead in Gaza and a war that is spinning out of
control in the Middle East…as well as a terrible rift
between people of faith in this country, and a rise in
both antisemitism and Islamophobia. We’re a month
away from an election that carries the very real
threat of violence, something we have not faced in
modern times. The wolf is out there. There is real
danger in a time of too many guns and too little
mutual understanding, and real threat when people
have been led to believe that the faith of Jesus is one
of violent nationalism and white supremacy.
But the wolf isn’t just out there – the wolf is in here,
inside of us, too. It is too easy to close ourselves off
against each other and justify violence and hatred. It
is too easy to forget the way of love Jesus showed us,
the way that people like St Francis lived out. Too easy
to forget that we are all brothers, sisters, siblings –
Jesus said, Receive the kingdom of God as a little
child; welcome the weak and vulnerable in Jesus’
name. Care for the least among us; be gentle with
one another; be gentle with ourselves. Seek peace
and pursue it, starting with those we know in our
own lives and families, and working outward to those
we don’t know, who differ from us, maybe even
threaten us. All of this is the essence and core of our
faith, the way of integrity, the way to live. Because
how can we live, any other way?
And Jesus took the children up in his arms, laid hands
on them, and blessed them. As he longs to do with
us, every one of us. As he longs for us to do for
others in turn. God’s love magnifies when we know it
for ourselves, and when we give it away, freely. May
God help us to do all this and more, in Jesus’ name.
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