In ancient Israel, if you were physically impaired, it was believed that this was due to either your own sin or the sin of your parents or even ancestors. The impact of a significant physical impairment in the ancient world was not only the impact on your ability to work and engage in other day to day activities, but exclusion from the community itself. If it was believed that God was punishing you or your family, through your impairment, then it was considered righteous to participate in God's punishment and exclusion.
By healing the sick and the blind, Jesus, as the one in whom God was revealed, rendered this entire way of perceiving the impaired. If Jesus revealed God's will, and if God was punishing the impaired, then the impaired would not have been healed because it would have removed a divinely brought punishment. On a more broader level, Jesus was destroying the very underlying understanding of God's nature. Rather than being a God of exclusion, God was one of radical inclusion. God's will was to bring those outside the community into the community.
The God who is reflected in the Church should be a God whose business is always to seek inclusion rather than exclusion. This is not to suggest that God does not demand holiness and righteousness; only that God's desire is to create a mechanism for the unholy and unrighteous to become holy and righteous through participation in the Body of Christ, the Church. And that means that we, as part of the Church universal, should be about the business of including, reflecting the nature of the God who seeks nothing but inclusion.
Supporting the work and mission of Caney Spring United Methodist Church and Berlin United Methodist Church, two churches partnered in the ministry of making disciples of Christ for the transformation of the world, located in Marshall County, Tennessee.
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Becoming Like Little Children
Jesus said that unless we become like little children, we will never enter the Kingdom of God
As always, our reading of the text is clouded by our own perception of children, which was very different than the perception of children in the ancient Middle East. Children were regarded, even until very recent times in Western culture, in a very negative light. They were, at best, seen as a burden, since they couldn't yet produce anything (i.e. they would work in the fields, but required more food than what their own labor produced). At worst, they were regarded as sinful and depraved.
Today, when we hear that we must become like "little children," we assume that this means we must become pure, trusting, and joyful, since these are the qualities that we ourselves associate with children. This association would have been incomprehensible to an ancient audience.
With the ancient perception of children in mind, the meaning of the text is revealed. In order to be part of God's Kingdom, living under the Lordship of Christ, we must recognize that God chooses to allow us to be part of His Kingdom not through our own merit or through what we ourselves "produce," but solely due to God's infinite grace. If we think that God is choosing to enter into relationship with us because we meet some standard of righteousness, we miss the very heart of what God's Kingdom is about, and we will never truly see it, and thereby never enter it
As always, our reading of the text is clouded by our own perception of children, which was very different than the perception of children in the ancient Middle East. Children were regarded, even until very recent times in Western culture, in a very negative light. They were, at best, seen as a burden, since they couldn't yet produce anything (i.e. they would work in the fields, but required more food than what their own labor produced). At worst, they were regarded as sinful and depraved.
Today, when we hear that we must become like "little children," we assume that this means we must become pure, trusting, and joyful, since these are the qualities that we ourselves associate with children. This association would have been incomprehensible to an ancient audience.
With the ancient perception of children in mind, the meaning of the text is revealed. In order to be part of God's Kingdom, living under the Lordship of Christ, we must recognize that God chooses to allow us to be part of His Kingdom not through our own merit or through what we ourselves "produce," but solely due to God's infinite grace. If we think that God is choosing to enter into relationship with us because we meet some standard of righteousness, we miss the very heart of what God's Kingdom is about, and we will never truly see it, and thereby never enter it
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