Margie Quinn
It is April 3rd and from the Capitol to Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet and Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet high schools, students walk out in protest or hold classroom "walk-ins" where they express sorrow, disbelief, and anger with educators. These protests follow the incomprehensible shooting at the Covenant School just days before. You can hear their screams downtown, “Children are dying! Don’t you care?”
It is June 4th, and I am in Atlanta, watching my friend Jenn’s kids dance with a Drag Queen. She is singing along to Beyoncé, the Prophet of Pride, who beckons children to wiggle their bodies and laugh with glee-who toss their hair in the air as a crowd of adults look on from the bleachers, including myself, too inhibited and embarrassed to get up and join them.
It is June 19th of this year, and a young climate activist named Greta Thunberg is dragged away from a climate protest by police in Malmo, Sweden. She is accused of disobeying law enforcement because she refuses to leave the scene of the protest. Thunberg may face up to six months in jail for this. Thunberg is known for her unshakeable, wild commitment to climate justice. She wears her light brown hair parted in the middle with two braids on either side. Perhaps she retains a youthful look on purpose as if to say, “Take us seriously!”
Thunberg, who has said, “We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.” A pastor from Colorado says that Thunberg is filled with “demonic spirits.”
It is the year 28 AD and an insect-eating guy named John who wears scratchy shirts and speaks with a sense of urgency has been thrown in prison and accused of having a demon inside of him. He is no reed shaken in the wind as Matthew 11 states. He is no leader dressed in soft robes, living in a royal palace. No, this man is a voice crying out in the wilderness with a crazed look in his eyes, a prophet of his time.
Our passage this morning begins with the children of the land whose song is never quite understood. When they played a glad song, no one danced; when the song became a dirge, no one was moved to tears. They were no better understood than John the Baptist, no better understood than Jesus.
And Jesus isn’t happy about it. He calls out the generation of his time. “Biblical scholars believe that when Jesus says, “This generation,” he is referring to the Pharisees, the religious leaders who claim to have wisdom and intelligence, who pride themselves on religious sanctity and priestly purity. In essence, they were those annoying kids in class who know every answer (and brag about it) or those fellow parents who can’t believe that you let your kid watch that tv show; or those ministers who guard biblical accessibility for the sake of seeming all high and mighty. Those people who will never be satisfied with the varied responses to the injustices of our time.
Well, Jesus has something to say about it. You “wise” leaders, what do I compare you to? Children sitting in marketplaces calling to one another, We played the flute for you, and you didn’t even dance. We wailed and you didn’t mourn. We wanted a sensible, rational, submissive follower and you gave us this weird guy who eats honey and is filled with demons. We wanted a pious, solemn prophet who distanced himself from the sinners, the outcasts of this world and you came in turning water into wine at a wedding and having a bunch of meals with fishermen and lepers; you glutton, you drunkard.
People in power will never be satisfied with the radical ways we resist empire, that we denounce dehumanization that we condemn violence.
In fact, these resisters, denouncers, condemners are the very ones being handcuffed at protests and dragged through the mud for their glitter and glam, for reading books to children in libraries…all because we don’t trust the wisdom of their ways.
But Jesus does. Jesus turns to God and in usual fashion, as Mihee Kim-Kort writes, he flips the expectations of where wisdom is located and found, and how it is acquired or cultivated; that is, wisdom belongs to the little ones; the “infants,” to children, to the descendants, because it is given and revealed to them, specifically, by the Son.” Did you catch that in the scripture? Jesus, in this verse, is not referred to as the Christ, as the King but as the Son of Man, the child of a Parent. Thank you, Jesus says to his holy Parent, for hiding your wisdom from the powerful and haughty and revealing it to infants. Infants—the vulnerable and lowly, who have something to say about how God is best revealed in the world and in very beginning of the gospel of Matthew, how God is first revealed in the world.
In fact, Mihee Kim-Kort goes on, the book of Matthew starts with Jesus as a child. “Jesus blesses the children (Matt 19:13-15), references Children of God in the Beatitudes (5:9), heals a young girl (9:18-25), uses children as an example in the discourse on welcome in (10:42), heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter (15:21-28), cures the boy with the demon (17:14-18) and the list goes on. Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Children, he says, children! Watch me watch them. Watch me heal them. Watch me kneel at their feet. Let them lead us.
So if Jesus is in fact insisting that his blessing is known, not by the mighty and powerful, but by the infants and the lowly, then this is a time for us too to identify with the plight of those who live on the fringes of our society and the fringes of our lives. Jesus is not just addressing the failure of individuals to respond but the society as a whole, a whole generation actually, who aren’t listening to a song that is utterly clear, who aren’t grieving with the little girl that I saw at the Link Arms for Change event back in April, pigtails in her hair like Greta, who wrote in chalk on the sidewalk, “Protect us, not guns!”
It is the infants of this world, the innocent and naïve (or are they?), who somehow understand best the ways of God. That God shows up as a young woman who takes a boat to climate conferences to keep her carbon footprint low; whose curious way of being in the world, with an Asperger’s diagnosis and an odd demeanor to some, scares people in power so much that they accuse her of being filled with demons.
And finally, after Jesus condemns those of us who are apathetic and indifferent and after Jesus prays to God, thanking God for instilling wisdom in the infants, Jesus speaks to the people with words that are often misinterpreted by our generation. “Come to me all who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” When Jesus says this, he’s addressing those who labor desperately to keep themselves alive in the economically oppressive and destructive system of Roman imperialism, the daily reality of most people in the late first century,” writes Warren Carter. He’s talking to the people who are down and low. He says, Take MY yoke upon you, not the oppressive yoke of status quo, of scoffing indifference or disgusted disdain…MY yoke, the gentle, humble child-like one, that flips the script and makes your burden light.”
Whereas Jesus describes the Pharisee’s teaching in Matthew 23:4 as heavy, says Warren Carter, his yoke, which may feel heavy to us at times, that we are carrying a cross that we don’t want to carry…it makes me and maybe you, follow a guy who makes it pretty clear that it’s always and has been and always will be bout love. And who teaches us better about love than kids?
So church, if we are looking for rest, we need look no further than the face of a child who beckons us toward justice, holding chalk in her hand. We look no further than a prophet named Jeremiah, called by God when he was 10 years old who yelled, “They say peace when there is no peace” and people thought him crazy. We need look no further than the gleeful uninhibited dancing of kids and Drag Queens, who don’t consider hate but consider the tune of a vibrant song. We need look no further than the urgent call of a man named John sitting in prison, committed to his “demonic” beliefs that, as Philippians says, preached that “for freedom, Christ has set you free. Are you ready for freedom? I don’t think you’re ready.” We need look no further than the rest of a tender healer, who eats and drinks with us, who reveals to us wisdom in the most unlikely of places.
So, will you try to mourn with our children, as I try? Will you try to dance with them, as I try? Will you choose action, not apathy, as they lead us toward a radical, revolutionary, Christ-led way of being in the world?
Ditch your soft robes. Get in the boat with Greta. Dance in the streets with Queens and kids. Pick up your chalk and scribble on the sidewalks. Come to Jesus if you are weary, and you will find rest for your souls.
Amen.