Advent II; Holy Communion, St. Andrew’s Pictou, December 5^th 2004

 

A Child Shall Lead Them

 

Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Romans 15:4-13

Matthew 3:1-12

 

“What is a child?” Each one of us will answer that question in our own way, according to our own experience. “What is a child?”

 

Now of course we could say that “a child” is a young person, a boy or girl between the age of birth and youth; a simple answer.

 

We could also say that a child is one who is under the influence of another person or thing:

-          a child of the manse,

-          a child of shame,

-          a child of his or her time.

 

We could say that someone is “a child of God” with all of the meaning and theology that surrounds that notion. There are rights, consequences, and a legacy of expectations that we assume for one who is a child of God.

 

What is a child?

 

A few years ago, a man in Toronto was telling me that one day he went with a buddy of his, in his friend’s truck, to pick up some cattle. They came to a farm and were greeted by a six year old boy. No adults were present at the farm other than this six year old boy. This six year old boy, this “child” handled the entire transaction. He knew the price, accepted the money, and helped move the cattle in question out of the corral and into the truck, and waved good bye!

 

Quite obviously the farmer, the parents, entrusted their 6 year old son to handle this transaction. Maybe the parents of this child have a different notion of what a child is than some of us might have.

 

This passage we just heard from Isaiah is known as “one of the great passages of human hope, one of the greatest pieces of visionary writing in the world.” O’Driscoll p. 16

 

While we don’t know if Isaiah is writing about an actual king or a king yet to come, but we do know that he pivots his words about a new kind of world order of peace and harmony on the phrase, “and a little child shall lead them.” Isaiah 11: 6c

 

Isaiah tells us of a new world order lead by a king:

“The spirit of the lord shall rest upon him

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord…

He shall… judge with righteousness… and decide with equity…

Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,

And faithfulness the belt around his loins.”

 

Isaiah gives us this vision of a new king and the harmony of a new world order, and yet he says, “a little child shall lead them.”

 

We have to stop and think what the prophet means about this concept of “child,” and to what it is that he is trying to express, because this is Advent and we are moving towards Christmas and our Lord coming to us as a child.

 

So what does a “child” mean?

 

Since Jesus looked at a group of children and said that the kingdom of God is like these children, we might assume that Isaiah’s notion of a new world order of harmony has something to do with you and I discovering the child like qualities within us.

 

We need to reclaim the deep trust that children have for all life and creation, the belief that all things are possible, an ability to accept rather than to reject, a natural spiritual self, and “an instinct that creation is essentially for us rather than against us.” O’Driscoll p. 17

 

Just think of past times in your own experience where greatly needed solutions are dismissed as being childish!

 

In calling for hope and harmony to the people of Rome, Paul asks for the same kind of child-like wisdom. Paul is trying to get the Jews to see the gentiles (non-Jews) as brothers and sister in Christ. This is an adult problem. Children play together, black and white, Jew and Gentile; they don’t care, they are just interested in their friend’s behaviour, not their race.

 

When you hear the Gospel reading about John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness, you probably don’t associate him with any kind of focus on child-like wisdom and behaviour: a half naked man, wearing a camel skin, with a leather belt, living in the wilderness and eating locusts and wild honey.

 

But first listen to what he was saying:

“But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of your repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as out ancestor’; for I tell you God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”

 

John the Baptist insults these eminent people, and goes on with a heavy message:

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals.

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

His winnowing fork is in his hand and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

 

Like Isaiah, John was trying to get people to think “out of the box.”

John was trying to get the people to have a new kind of awareness.

 

All seminars held for progressive companies trying to get production up and trying to get people to get along with each other, are always trying to get people to think and to be “out of the box.”

 

“You’ve got to get out of the box!” they always say.

 

Children don’t need to get out of the box, because they were never in the box in the first place. It is in the process of growing up that we shame people and make them jump into boxes. We confine them and try “to box” in their hopes and aspirations, their dreams and their feelings.

 

We don’t like the children how they are; we want them re-boxed!

 

Many of us here have all been baptized but John is calling us to a new kind of baptism of the spirit. John was not all nice and clean, in freshly laundered flowing robes, talking gently at the temple in Jerusalem with superficial platitudes. He was charismatic. He was outside the box. He was in the wilderness of Judea, wearing his camel skin with his belt, eating locusts and wild honey and preaching:

“Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,

‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

 

What new kind of baptism of the spirit, what kind of baptism of understanding do you and I need?

 

What new way do we need to understand what this bread and wine mean for us?

What new kind of awareness do we need to know about how God may feed us from this bread and wine?

 

People want to be spiritually fed, and yet as Christians and as a church we have to ask ourselves why people don’t go to churches even though they are still searching for God? Why do people not expect to meet God in Church?

 

People look for spiritual help in the tea leaves in their cups, their Tarot Cards, psychics, fortune tellers, and the like. Do you notice in the obituaries in the papers and see where the funerals are being held these days: community centres, museums, art galleries, rinks, golf clubs, recreation clubs, and sports centres.

 

What kind of new baptismal awareness do you and I need to make them feel welcome here? How will they know that God is here?

 

If a child is to lead, then we need to be child-like in out attitudes and most important of all, open, loving, and respectful of children.

 

The spiritual reality of children is like a lens through which we might view the kingdom prepared for us, created since the foundation of the world. Every time we have communion, we feel the infusion of life the children bring with their presence when they come into the sanctuary.

 

We adults think that we lead the children and in many ways, we do. But since Almighty God came to us as a child, humbly in a manger, we must consider that the path to God is to see how the children might lead us. They lead with their trust, their beauty, their hope for the future, their ability to forgive, their love, their spontaneity, their awe and fascination for life.

 

You have heard that the eyes are the window to the soul. Try looking into the eyes of a child with love and you will experience heaven meeting earth.

AMEN                     Rev. Alan Stewart