"WELCOMING DIAMONDS"
Mark 9:30-37; James 3:13-4:3

If you're driving west on I-10
down in the Hill Country,
you go out past San Antonio and Boerne
towards Kerrville
on your way to Mo-Ranch.
But before you get to Kerrville,
you'll see an exit for my two favorite little towns:
Comfort and Welfare.
I've always loved it
that those two towns were right there together,
listed on the same exit sign.
And I love the fact
that when you're going west,
you have to go through Comfort
to get to Welfare.
Somehow it loses something coming back east.
It also occurs to me that Comfort and Welfare
are actually not that far from Utopia,
but I think I'll save Utopia for another sermon!

I couldn't help but think this week
when I was studying today's scripture passages
that when Jesus said
whoever welcomes a child welcomes him,
he must have been going west on I-10.
When we think of welcoming someone,
we have been conditioned to think more of their comfort.
Jesus' idea of welcoming
involves the fuller notion
of the other person's welfare.

What do you and I usually do
when we are planning to welcome someone?
Maybe we put out a new Astroturf doormat
and get the tennis shoes off the front porch.
We keep "party food" on hand
and keep the family away from it
so that we can whip up some appetizers
at the last minute.
Maybe we keep the front bathroom off limits
so we'll know that it's clean.
Those are all things
that would make our guests comfortable.
But at that point, they're still guests.

We tend to treat people differently
when we consider them to be company.
But welcoming someone only as a guest
is not what I think Jesus is talking about this morning.
There's a big difference
between greeting someone as a guest //
and welcoming them in Jesus' name.
I think the difference
is between merely good manners
and true hospitality.
Civility acknowledges other people,
but it keeps the white gloves on.
Hospitality, on the other hand,
includes other people.
It seeks their welfare, not merely their comfort.
It is willing to learn from them
and to be changed by them.
Greeting another person as a guest
allows us to stop at just being concerned
with what we have to offer them.
But real hospitality
is not about giving in benevolence.
It's about receiving in humility.
Welcoming someone in Jesus' name
requires that we get vulnerable.
This kind of welcome makes the other person a part of us.
Welcoming someone with true hospitality
means that we treat them not as impositions,
but as treasures.
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That's exactly what makes it so hard for us
to fully welcome someone who is different from us.
It means that something about us
might have to change.
It might be the balance in our checkbook.
It might be the free time we thought we had this afternoon.
It might be the way we have always looked at things.
But if change is involved,
we'd usually rather not try it.
Do you know how many Presbyterians it takes
to change a light bulb?
"CHANGE?!"
When it comes to those things that we least prefer to do,
change falls right there
with bill paying and dental extractions.
If the grass is always greener over there,
you'd think we'd be more receptive to change.
But we're not.
We don't want
to change or to be changed.
We like things just the way they are,
even if we're unhappy with it.
  
The disciples gave up their lives as they knew them
in order to follow Jesus,.
But even so,
they didn't like change any better than we do.
They liked traveling around with Jesus
and watching him make wine out of water
and feed five thousand people
with five loaves of bread and two fish
and make people well.
That was all great.
But Jesus introduced a fairly radical change
by telling them the real plan.
It wasn't all going to be about healings ands miracles.
It was also going to include betrayal,
and suffering and death.
When Mark said that they didn't understand him
and were afraid to ask what he meant,
that was an understatement.
Perhaps it was because
they didn't want to look ignorant.
Perhaps it was MORE because
they were afraid he would tell them
exactly what they thought he said.
So they did the only logical thing
that twelve disciples could do;
they started trying to decide who was the alpha disciple.
Clearly,
they had made a conscious decision to not change!

This must be at least one of the reasons
that Jesus chose to make his point to the disciples
in the company of a child.
If you decide that you DO want to change,
just hang out for awhile with children.
Before you spent some time with a child,
I bet you never knew that a dead branch off the pecan tree
could be a sword,
a walking stick,
a baton,
a microphone,
a machine gun,
a pirate ship,
a submarine
or a javelin.
And that's all within forty-five seconds!

My husband Paul always says
that people told us our life would change
once we became parents.
But he says that our life didn't change.
It's more like someone took our old life,
set it over here,
and put this new one in its place.
It didn't change -
it's just something totally other than it was before.
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Children aren't always exactly on the top of everyone's list.
Being a child is not as easy as you might think.

During the year that Marj Carpenter
was moderator of our General Assembly,
she and my friend Rodger Nishioka found themselves in Africa
at a gathering of Presbyterians. 
They were standing together on a platform
overlooking children as far as the eye could see.
Rodger turned to Marj
and commented on how well behaved they were.
He thought someone had coached the children for hours
about how to behave for their guests.
Marj said to him, "Rodger, they're not well behaved,
they're hungry.
They're sick.
They're not supposed to be that quiet."
Rodger said he would have given anything to hear them cry.

Back in the day, during Jesus' time,
children were routinely abandoned at birth.
We find it horrifying when a child is found neglected
or left for dead.
But in Jesus' time
it was considered to be a postnatal method of birth control,
Infants might be abandoned for a number of reasons,
but usually they were simply the offspring of parents
who didn't have the resources to feed them.
And so abandoning children was socially acceptable

When a woman bore a child
in those days before birth certificates,
a child was considered legitimate
only when a man would pick it up -
and in so doing,
claim paternity.
If for some reason the man refused to pick up the child,
it would be considered abandoned.
Most of the time, though,
abandoned children survived
because others would come along to pick up the child
and claim it in adoption.
Everyone knew that practice.
And so when Jesus brought a child
into the inner circle of the disciples
and picked it up and held it,
he wasn't just using the child for a sermon illustration.
It was as though God himself
were claiming paternity of that child,
ready to seek not just the child's comfort
but its welfare
for the rest of the child's life.
This child,
which could rightly have been considered expendable
by reputable people in a good society,
was taken up into the arms of God, 
named and claimed.
Jesus was going beyond modeling charity.
He was linking the acceptance of such abandoned children
with acceptance of himself.
The disciples were told
that whenever they showed this kind of costly hospitality
with one who was considered easily expendable,
they would be extending the same rich hospitality
not only to their Lord and Savior,
but also to the One who is the parent of all.

And by extension,
the same promise is made to you and me.
We all know
that God works through whomever and however God will work.
If we reject others,
we reject the good that God has for us.
But if we want to come close to God,
if we want to worship and serve the Creator of all,
we can do so
by claiming the same kind of responsibility
for one of God's most beloved children.

Mark is telling us
that we are more likely
to find God down rolling around on the carpet
or doing cartwheels in the front yard
or playing with finger paint
than we are to find God sitting alone in the sky.
Mark is telling us
that God can make more things out of an old pecan branch
than we could start to imagine.
Mark is telling us
that we can find God
as we make ourselves vulnerable
and realize that we have more to learn from the least of these
than we do the most learned believer around.
If that's so,
why are we not all fighting to teach Sunday School?
Why is there not a line to volunteer in the nursery?
Why are we ever short on chaperones
for MIB or youth?
Why are we not busy
making sure we get to sit near a young person in worship
so that we can hear the good news of the gospel?

Menachem Schneerson
was a famous rabbi from Brooklyn.
Even when he was in his eighties,
he was known for standing hours at a time
as thousands of people filed through the temple
to receive his blessing
or ask his advice on something,
big or small.
One time,
someone asked him how,
at his age,
he could stand for so long without getting tired.
His answer was this:
"When you're counting diamonds,
you don't get tired."

Friends,
the abandoned baby on the street,
the stranger at the door,
even our own husband or wife or child,
is a diamond.
And in receiving and treasuring these diamonds
we are moving from comfort to welfare.
We are going beyond merely offering good manners;
we are offering our best,
and putting ourselves in a position to be changed
by the creator and redeemer of all.
The stuff that we consider to be a hassle,
which is frequently other people,
is God at work in our lives.
Open yourself up to being changed
so that God can work God's wonders in you.

Amen.

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Barbara Brown Taylor quoted Nancy Mitford about children crying and being taken away in her sermon "Last of All," which can be found in her book of collected sermons Bread of Angels.

I am indebted to Joel Marcus and his sermon "Counting Diamonds" for the story about the rabbi as well as the information on child abandonment in earlier times. It can be accessed at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1995