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When I was a small child, I began to contemplate the deep mysteries of creation. Specifically, I would gaze up at a wooden plaque hanging above our family’s kitchen sink. It was a decoupage, a plank of wood decorated with color crayons and construction paper, covered in clear shellac. I was the fifth kid in what eventually became a set of seven children, so it did not surprise me that this object was created by one of my older siblings. From my perspective, my older sisters and brothers loomed. They possessed many wondrous powers, including the creation of original art.
As I learned to read, I finally could contemplate this decoupage more fully. “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones…” it said. I think that’s all it said. (The plaque is lost, so we now know of its existence only through oral tradition.) The artist was my sister Anne, the eldest. (“Decoupage was THE thing!” Anne told me recently, when I asked about her work.) Maybe she only put the “cup of water” phrase on there because there wasn’t room for the whole line that Jesus says at the close of Matthew chapter 10. Or maybe she was just being literal and precise, pulling out the small portion of the Bible verse that connects directly to the kitchen sink below. In any case, this was an example of biblical interpretation: take the verse of the Bible you’re interested in, write it out alongside an illustration (Anne included a drawing of an older girl getting water for a smaller child), and hang it next to something. The kitchen sink draws the viewer in to the meaning of the verse. It … worked. It was a little sermon.
I was in the small congregation of children to whom my sister preached. She proclaimed a comforting message: the dominion of God is like an older sister getting a cup of water for her younger brother. This little domestic task of thoughtfulness and generosity is nothing less than the proclamation of the Good News, right here at this little kitchen sink.
I was an appreciative congregant. I needed caretaking, I often felt scared and alone, and I wanted my older siblings to pay attention to me, to be kind to me, to show me who I am, and who they were, and who we all were, and what the world should be like. I accepted all cups of water.
And now I want to add a few ideas to my sister’s interpretation of this Gospel, this Good News.
Jesus mentions “little ones,” and we rightly think first of children. The Australian feminist Germaine Greer does not mince words about the suffering of children: she asserts that we all live in—and we all co-create—a world that is hostile to children. Intentionally or not, we send children the hurtful message that most folks simply don’t like them. It is difficult to be a child, and particularly to be a child of color. So if we hear the words of Jesus this morning and stop at a literal interpretation of them—that he is telling us simply to be kind to actual children—that’s a good thing to do, a good thing to contemplate. My sister’s decoupage sermon is aging well.
But there is more to this passage. When Jesus talks about “little ones,” he is also talking about neophytes, newbies, people in our group who are new at this, who don’t know the ropes, who want to follow Jesus but don’t really know what that means, or how to do it.
And Jesus tells us all this at the end of his “Mission Discourse” in Matthew, that is, his big speech about the cost of discipleship, the tough road that he is asking his followers to walk, the challenge and grind of Christian mission. So the cup of water bit is not just a simple instruction to feed and water the kids in your kitchen. (It is that! That’s a great place to start!) But there’s more: we are to nourish and tend the newbies among us, preparing them for the hard work of following Jesus of Nazareth, who sends his followers into the tough places of the world.
The tough places of the world: places where injustice reigns; places where Black and brown bodies are broken and killed; places where young children are commodified and exploited, or simply ignored; places where creation itself is degraded and damaged. We are sent as Jesus-followers into all these tough places, and more.
We are also sent into tough questions, hard issues, difficult discussions. When we catch up with Paul this morning, we find him going on about sin, which is a challenging and touchy topic for contemporary Christians. Sin has been used by preachers of old to harm people, to scare the hell out of them (literally!), to send them scurrying into the fold by shaming them. We should never do that. But sin is something we should talk about from time to time, without all the unhelpful shame. Sin is a Power, a threat, a dreadful danger. Sin is placing something other than God on top as our ultimate concern. It is the Power that draws us away from that kitchen sink and into our own self-centered corners of the room. Paul is right to take up the topic.
But sin is a hard topic. We have to treat it carefully, and understand it well. Many of us, even all of us, find it hard to grasp at times.
So we see, then, that every single one of us, in one way or another, every single one of us is a neophyte, a newbie, a beginner at some part of the life we share as the Body of Christ. Many of us recoil at topics like “sin,” and we need to help each other unpack the meaning of these hard things in a helpful and life-giving way.
Others of us are new at other things: we don’t know the music, or we believe we can’t sing it even if we learned the notes. Or we’re long-timers here but are intimidated by zoom and all the technological barriers during this health crisis. Or we feel lost in this whole strange thing Christians call “liturgy” itself, not understanding how it all fits together, or why we do it.
Still others of us are new at deeper, harder things. Many of us are only now beginning to awaken to the comprehensive presence and power of white supremacy in our 21st-century world, and we are mortified by how late we are to really understand it, and recognize our participation in it. Or we are unsure of how we should interact with people who have very different political perspectives than our own, particularly when those perspectives seem to be mean-spirited or destructive.
But there are so many ways to be a newbie! One of us is a brand-new parent, or a brand-new orphan, or a brand-new spouse, or a brand-new divorced person, or a brand-new retiree, or a brand-new unemployed worker, or a brand-new college student… Each of us is a newbie at something, and all of us are new to Christianity in one way or another. I am a brand-new brother in Christ here at Grace Church. I’ve been in churches my whole life, but here, for the next few weeks or so, I am one of the “little ones” Jesus talks about: I do not yet know your ways. I can read whatever you hang above your kitchen sink, as it were, but I will rely on you to show me, in the coming days and weeks and months, what it means to be a Jesus follower in this good place.
Together, we will share many cups of water. They are drawn from (where else?) the font of Holy Baptism, the water of our identity in the death and resurrection of Christ. We will find that these waters never run dry. The fountain flows joyfully forever. Here at this font, even—and especially—little children will find an oasis of life, and love. Here at this font, everyone is invited to come home, to rest in the shade of liberation and justice, and to drink deeply from this shimmering pool of life-giving water. But then we must go back out, out into the tough places, and into the tough conversations. We must go back out because this water nourishes only when it is shared with all the people of the earth.
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Preached on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8A), June 28, 2020, my first Sunday at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Jeremiah 28:5-9
Psalm 89:1-14, 15-18
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42