Radical Christian welcome

Radical Christian Welcome
Sunday 8 September 2024

A sermon by Canon Kenneth Padley

Reading: Mark 9.30-37

I’ve got the Power.

I know this because I shop in Tesco, and I am reminded repeatedly in store and on adverts that my Clubcard has the power to lower prices. But it’s not just in Tesco that I’ve got the power. Earlier adverts used the same song from the German band Snap! to publicise home improvements at B&Q, and Energizer batteries.

Living as he did two thousand years ago, Jesus did not have the power to lower prices, nor did he have to endure the same ear worms that we do. Nonetheless, his words in today’s gospel are all about power and its use in social and organisational settings. For Christians, how we use our power in relationships is an attestation to our faith and an expression of our ministry.

We heard in the reading how Jesus took a child so as to illustrate a deeper message. Setting it among his followers he said, ‘whoever receives a child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives not me but the one who sent me.’ So there are two subjects that we need to consider this morning in relation to power, children and welcome.

Children first. Children in the ancient world had no power. They were at the bottom of the social pile. They had no legal rights. Yet Jesus gave children purpose and value by placing one at the centre of his circle. Even more significantly, Jesus affirmed the dignity of every child through his own birth among us. In his nativity we see the Lord of all stooping to mortal vulnerability, lacking all influence and rights.

The incarnation of Jesus therefore reminds us that the value of every human flows not from our possession of power but from the fact that we are fashioned by our creator after his own image. Here is a fundamental theological truth which overthrows age-old assumptions that have led to domination and abuse. Here is a vision in which those who possess power bear also responsibility for its moral discharge in the interests of those who are more vulnerable than themselves. This should be a guiderail not only for our individual choices, but also for our collective behaviour, certainly in countries established on Christian values. To recoin the sentiment attributed to Ghandi, ‘the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its weakest members’.

One expression of this mindset is good safeguarding. Historically, some churches and Christians have regarded safeguarding as unnecessary, optional, or a secular imposition. On the contrary, if through the incarnation God in Jesus embodies our ethical duties towards the most vulnerable, then the foundational principles of good safeguarding are fundamentally Christian. Safety and respect in our human interactions must be a natural part of how you and I minister together as a Church, and an issue on which the world should rightly expect Christians to excel and to lead because it is part of our DNA.

Flowing from Jesus’ use of a child to illustrate our moral responsibilities is a call to become more humble and more attentive. Jesus says that we are to look for the things of God where we might not expect them. A few verses beyond today’s passage from Mark chapter 9, he rebukes those would prohibit children from coming to him, saying in Mark 10.14 that ‘whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’

So, not only must the powerful defer to the weak. There are times when – like the incarnate Jesus – we need to become weak, times when adults need to become childlike, to get off our pedestal and become ‘grown-downs’, if we are to perceive with joy and wonder the things of God’s kingdom. The Welsh priest and poet RS Thomas articulated this in a poem written from the perspective of infants. He called it ‘Children’s Song’.

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.[1]

In telling his followers to learn from children, Jesus also critiqued assumptions about adult-to-adult power dynamics. The disciples had been arguing about which of them was the greatest – but Jesus taught that ‘whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’

This, I suggest, means that the art of welcome is a duty which requires risky initiative from each of us.  Nowhere is this more true than the welcome which we offer in our churches. Here Christians have the power because our churches are our spiritual homes. Here the onus is on us to make the first step, extend the hand, prioritise the stranger before catching up with our friends. Here in the Cathedral, just as children’s ministry is not the sole preserve of the Youth Missioner, so the ministry of welcome is not only for stewards and clergy; children and welcome have implications for each and every one of us.

As flawed human beings, we don’t always get it right when it comes to welcome. I am acutely conscious of this as I enter this Cathedral through our north porch, an unlevel trip hazard culminating in a gloomy Victorian entry booth that slaps the face or pinches the fingers of the unwary. It will be a number of years before the Cathedral can emend these imperfections in the porch. However, let not such physical barriers symbolize or influence the human face of our common life. Rather let us strive under the grace of God for joyful interaction and a curiosity about otherness which is worthy of the magnificence into which we are called together.

One caveat: let us not fall into the bear pit of thinking that Christian welcome is about the home team drawing in new members – people ‘like us’ cajoling people who appear different into thinking and acting as we do.

The Church does not belong to us. But, together, we belong to Christ. Just so, given what Christ enacted with the little child about value and reciprocity, radical Christian welcome is not about getting others to do what we do or think what we think. Rather it lays us open in vulnerability to being changed by the difference of others. Boundaried by the framework of scriptural truth, radical Christian welcome is a God-given canvas on which each and every person shapes and is shaped through dynamic interaction with one another and with the almighty. It is not about us and them. It is a dawning awareness that Church is us and us, God moving in the midst of our manifold diversities like a little child.

[1] A rare recording of RS Thomas reciting his own verse can be found online here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDmWxZyXjSc