Sermon — November 5, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Amen.
(1 John 3:2)
You know that I love languages, English and otherwise. Clever wordplay, etymological trivia, puns; these things bring me really unbelievable amounts of joy. Some of you heard me expostulate just a few weeks ago on the distinction between “continuous” and “continual” in something C.S. Lewis had written; and yet I don’t get invited to parties very much…
English is full of odd little pairs like “continuous” and “continual,” in which changing a single syllable changes the meaning in a very precise way. (For those who don’t know, something is continuous if it forms an unbroken whole, without interruption; it’s continual if it occurs again and again, but with breaks in between.) But sometimes there are examples that are even better. Sometimes you get two words in which the literal meanings are exactly the same, but the connotations are completely different.
All of which is to say: “Beloved, we are God’s children now” — at our best, we’re childlike, and at our worst, we’re childish, and they are not the same thing. When we say “childlike,” of course, we evoke all the joy and innocence of childhood: the infant’s wonder at seeing their first piece of bark, the toddler’s excitement to go out playing in the snow, the inexplicable ability some elementary schoolers have to memorize details of paleontology known otherwise only to PhDs.
The Beatitudes, these words of blessing Jesus says to the crowd in the Gospel reading today, are the manifesto of a childlike faith. What is more blessed than being “poor in spirit,” holding adult possessions lightly but being rich in wonder and joy? Who are more blessed than “the meek,” who hide shyly behind a parent’s legs until you ask them about the firetrucks on their shirts? Who hungers and thirsts for righteousness more than the playground rules-enforcers, who insist that every child has a turn. (You know who you are, and we love you for it.) We adult Christians are at our best, Jesus says, when our lives are characterized by childlike simplicity, and innocence, and justice.
When we say “childish,” though, we mean the other side of children’s nature. The toddler’s refusal to allow any other child at the park to touch that toy, even though they don’t actually want to play it themselves. The preschooler’s hunger and thirst for more candy, from more houses, long after bedtime has come and gone. The older child’s self-confidence that they alone, and fourth graders like them, know anything about the world, and you know absolutely nothing, Mom.
And of course, we don’t blame children for being this way. (Well, sometimes we do. But we shouldn’t.) When a child is filled with childlike joy, we can rejoice with them. But when the same child, moments later, fills with childish rage, well… for a child to be childish is pretty much what you should expect, at least linguistically speaking.
In just a few minutes, we’ll welcome three more children into the Church through the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Abby and Nora and Bo will be formally adopted as children of God; they will become full members of the Body of Christ. They will become saints, in the oldest and best and most Biblical sense, members of the holy people of God, as when Paul called the members of all the local churches “the saints”; “for the saints of God are just folk like me,” as the hymn goes, “and I mean to be one too.”
But sanctity isn’t perfection, and we’re not perfect people. Billy Joel is right about many things, but he’s wrong about this. We don’t get to choose whether we want to “laugh with the sinners” or “cry with the saints,” because we are all mixed, every one of us. There is no child who is so childlike that they are never childish. And this is true for all of us, adults and children alike. The mixedness of our nature doesn’t change over time; the stakes just get higher, and we remain children at heart.
You may be a parent or a grandparent, a beloved uncle or aunt, teacher, mentor or friend. You may be wise; you’re almost certainly wiser than me. But in God’s eyes, every one of us is still like a little child; and in our more childish moments, we all sometimes act our age.
I don’t mean this as an insult! I mean it as an invitation to empathy, for one another and for yourselves. None of us ever become perfect, fully-formed adults in this world. We are all still growing up, still children of God, through our whole lives. And what a relief. God looks on our childishness like we look on theirs: with frustration, maybe; with impatience, sometimes; but ultimately, more than anything, with love.
“Beloved,” St. John writes, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Every one of us is, already now, a beloved child of God, valued and cherished beyond anything we could imagine. And every one of us is being transformed, growing into a maturity so incredible that its nature has not yet been revealed. Together, day by day, we grow together toward life in the world that Jesus describes in the Beatitudes, toward a world of righteousness, and mercy, and peace.
Today, Abby and Nora and Bo join a “great multitude…from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” (Revelation 7:9) who are being slowly drawn toward the God who loves them now and who love them all their lives. May God give them, and all of us, the grace to love in return; to serve God and our neighbors; to be patient with every childish moment and to share in every childlike joy.
Amen.