Naked Need

 Proper 22 • Advent 2021 • TSH 

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

What does it mean to receive the kingdom “as a little child” in order to enter it? This is a different saying about children, from the one a few weeks back, which was about welcoming children, in Christ’s name. Today is about receiving the kingdom as little children ourselves. So, what does it mean to receive the kingdom “as a little child” in order to enter it? If “little” is the rule, I guess I’m in, no taller than when I was 14, as I never did get the “growth spurt” they promised would come along. But surely Jesus isn’t talking about height. Short people like me have no advantage when it comes to heaven. We don’t even know what’s on top of the refrigerator.

So what is it about children Jesus wants us to copy? Is it their innocence? Well, some children behave as badly as any adult. St Augustine said, if you want proof of original sin, just spend an hour with a crying infant: that child reveals the root of human sin — a constant cry of “I need” and “I want” content only so long as its needs or wants are met.

So, again I ask, what is it about a child that Jesus wants us to copy? Wait a minute — could it be that very neediness and dependency? Could it be that St Augustine missed the point of a child’s needing and wanting — not as signs of sin, but of what it means to be human? One reason human families, across many cultures, are structured as they are is due to the fact that infant humans need lots of care for a long time: human childhood lasts for years. A young horse or cow is up on its feet within minutes of being born; but a human child will take months even to crawl, and many more to toddle or walk. Human children are dependent, and this dependency — this need for care — has shaped human families from the beginning, with not just parents, but often grandparents, aunts, and uncles; as the saying goes, “It takes a village to raise a child.” The long human childhood is intimately connected with human civilization itself. Perhaps Jesus’ teaching here is like his teaching concerning “the poor” — those in need who are always with you so that you can supply their need, as a good civilization should.

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Not that human civilization is always so civilized. How much over the last few years have we been treated to human inhumanity to fellow humans — to drowning boatloads of refugees seeking escape from the war-torn middle east; children separated from their parents as they seek refuge from murderous threats; children killed in drug-fueled crossfire on our own Baltimore streets? I would like to hope this suffering will not be in vain, and that the hearts of enough people will be moved to do all in their power 

to end these tragedies. But I also know that while people’s hearts are sometimes moved to sympathy, they are rarely moved to action.

Still, I refuse to give up hope. I know that while we all have that needy, self-centered infant deep within us, we also have within us the capacity to transform our need, not by losing it, but by presenting it to the one who can and will supply all of our needs. And this, perhaps, this is what Jesus means when he says we need to receive the kingdom as a child — to receive it as a child receives a gift, for heaven is a gift that none of us deserves, but which God is prepared to give to any who hold out their hands to receive it, as easily as the Bread of communion is placed upon the palms of our hands.

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Seven hundred ninety-five years ago tomorrow, a little man from the town of Assisi, Italy died. His name was Francis. He came from a wealthy family — his father sold fine fabrics, even more a luxury then than now. Francis was a trendy young man with a taste for the finer things in life; but he experienced a powerful conversion. He did a complete turnaround and rejected all that he had, all that his family wanted for him, all that they had given him; even some they hadn’t given him — for he took several bolts of expensive fabric from his father’s warehouse and gave them to the poor. His father hauled him up before the authorities and complained he was ungrateful. He reminded his son, “You owe me everything!” In a dramatic gesture, Francis called his father’s bluff and said, “You want everything? It’s yours!” and he stripped himself bare naked right there in the town square.

Francis went on to embrace a life of complete need: he refused to own anything, and lived as a beggar the rest of his life. He had learned the crucial difference between “I need” and “I want” — that what people need to live is far less than what they want to have. He learned how to receive everything as a gift, to receive as children do — children who receive care and nurture not because they earn it, but purely as a gift, because their family and society provide it.

Francis lived like this all the way to the end. Even as he was dying, frail and sick, he asked a hard thing of his grieving brothers: to strip him naked, and place him on the cold floor of his monastery cell. He wanted to die in complete need, without owning anything at all, not even the clothes on his back: naked as the day he was born, as naked as a new-born child. His Franciscan brothers could not bear this for long, seeing that miserable, shrunken body — marked as it was in hands and feet and side with the miraculous wounds that Francis had received when he begged God to let him share in Christ’s suffering. His brothers finally convinced him, to let them clothe him in a robe 

they insisted was only on loan, and didn’t belong to him. And so he died, in borrowed clothes, receiving Sister Death as he had received life — not as his own, but as one last gift from God.

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The New English Bible translates one of Jesus’ beatitudes as “Blessed are those who know their need of God.” Is this what it means to receive the kingdom as a child — a child who needs everything, and who can do nothing for itself; being able to be in need, to depend on God in the way we depended on others when we were infants? Perhaps it is the family of humanity that needs better to learn how to care for children, so that all can learn what it means to be a child — a child of God and of humanity — as Jesus himself is Son of God and Son of Man.

It is said that a society can be judged on the way it treats its children. I will go further and say not only its own children, but the children of others. Those two sayings of Jesus are tied together after all: we dare not expect to receive the gifts of God as children, if we fail to welcome the needy children of this world, recalling that as we welcome them, we welcome Jesus — all of those many children living in need: the ones towards whom we who have stand in the position of being able to give. +

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Things That Rise To the Top

Behold this, and likely be surprised.



It is a staggering display, but I'm equally staggered at the fact that most people don't realize how big the discrepancy is between the one-percent and all the rest.

This difference is most likely the result of undesign rather than design, of deregulated ambitions rather than plotted greed. Even Jesus observed that those who have will get more, and those with less will lose even what they have. Any "free" market will eventually produce disproportionate wealth for the very few. It takes regulation, planning, and will and work to produce a more equitable distribution of wealth. Left to itself, the stats behind these graphs show what happens.

Which is why I am at heart a Christian Socialist who utterly opposes the myth of "trickle down." Money does not trickle down, it floats to the top, where it attracts more of itself.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Getting What You Paid For

Wealth sticks to the wealthy like an acrylic sweater fresh out of the clothes dryer... a sermon for Proper 23b

Because you trample on the poor, you have built houses of hewn stone, but you shall not live in them; you have planted pleasant vineyards, but you shall not drink their wine.

During the economic boom of the 80s, someone came up with a T-shirt that read, “The one with the most things when he dies, wins.” This was the era of free-for-all speculation on Wall Street. Investments moved further and further away from actual commodities or industries, from real products or services, to speculation on commodity futures, and indexes, and margins, and even futures of indexes and margins. No longer were people trading just in pork bellies, or even in what pork bellies might be worth some day; They were trading in what the market might think pork bellies might be worth some day. People were trading not just in things, but in what people thought about things — and in what people thought about what people thought about things, if you can believe that — building on a very shaky foundation — if any foundation at all!

Some people managed to make huge fortunes in this rarified world: people like the fictional character Gordon Gecko from the film Wall Street, whose motto was, “Greed is good.” Governments were persuaded by this gospel of acquisition to repeal laws that had been put in place after previous economic disasters, laws designed to prevent a melt-down of the economy. Credit extended beyond the prudent , and people were sold mortgages they could not possibly afford, even in the best of times; and the value of homes came to be keyed not to intrinsic value, intrinsic worth, but as if they only could be worth more and more as time went on — no one would imagine that to be true of a car, yet people had no trouble thinking about it for a house! Meanwhile the distances between the salaries of workers and the wealth of the owners grew greater and greater. The rich grew richer and the poor poorer, and it really did begin to look like the one who died with the most things would win. The balloon kept getting bigger and bigger, and no-one expected it to burst.

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As we all know, this out-of-kilter pile of optimism came crashing down like a Jenga game just a few years ago. The chickens came home to roost to an astonishing degree, and the henhouse was full to overflowing. And sad to say, most of the chickens were dead ducks!

Some years on, it is still true a tiny portion of the population controls a disproportionate amount of the wealth of the world. And these days in the election season, who can turn on the TV without seeing a politician, or a surrogate, or a PAC, or a super-PAC, appealing to a particular worldview — either that prosperity will come by letting the wealthy trickle their wealth down to the poor who eagerly wait below like drought-stricken farmers able to receive this gentle shower of rain; or on the other hand that the government should take more from the wealthy so as to redistribute it more effectively — but still from above, as far as those below are concerned.

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Of course, as our Scriptures from Amos and Mark remind us, there is nothing new in this. There is nothing new about the magnetic attraction of wealth — how money wants to stay where other money is rather than trickling down to where it isn’t; how the rich always seem to get richer, taking advantage of the poor. And those who have the guts to challenge this, people like Amos or Jesus, get branded as malcontents or trouble-makers. As Amos says, those with power and wealth abhor the one who speaks the truth, and in times like these the prudent will keep their mouths shut; and we know what happened to Jesus when he upset the apple-cart of a society in which religious leaders worked hand-in-hand with the politicians to keep things profitable for the few at the expense of the many.

Even some with good intentions, like the rich young man in the Gospel, is disappointed when Jesus tells him what he needs to do for his own good, and the good of his soul — to say nothing of the good he could do for the poor. He could not have been the only rich person to go away sorrowful, wanting to follow Jesus but not able to do as he counseled: unable to break that magnetic attachment of wealth. The Gospel shows us how hard it is for wealth to trickle down — it wants to stay with the wealthy; and the wealthy want to stay with it!

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This is why greed, far from being good, as Mr. Gecko believed, is such a poisonous affliction. It’s an addiction that can never be satisfied — those who think having more and more is the point of life can never get enough to make that hunger stop. Because there always is more, isn’t there? It is like drinking salt-water when you’re thirsty — it will only make you thirstier, and in the end, it will kill you.

Greed is a thirst for the wrong thing, you see. No one really needs more money than it takes to live, to provide for those practical real realities of shelter and food and a modicum of comfort and leisure; and the money and the things left when they die, as indeed they must, is beyond their employment or enjoyment. While you live, your possessions and wealth can serve you and others, but the things you have but which you do not use serve no one — not even you. There is an old saying, “The second coat in your closet, the one you never wear, really belongs to someone else.” Hanging there in the closet it keeps no one warm, not even you. Yet, there it hangs.

Just as the financial markets moved further and further from reality, to focus on speculation itself as a thing to speculate about, so too the desire for wealth and possessions moves away from the good that wealth can do — to the wealth itself, and not to using it, but just to having it. Rather than a means to an end, it becomes an end in itself — a dead end.

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I mentioned politicians a moment ago and I’d like to end with not a politician, but with a First Lady. Mary Todd Lincoln suffered much in life — she lost three of her four sons to early death, at the ages of four, twelve, and eighteen; and she suffered the horror of her husband being shot as he sat next to her in the theater, her hand in his. She was far from a perfect person, and was what used to be called “high-strung.”

One of her great failings was her unrealistic relationship with money. When her husband was elected President, she went wild; she had no sense of proportion, and began to spend his new-found salary lavishly refurnishing the White House like there was no tomorrow. When tomorrow came and Lincoln was assassinated, and then with the death of her young son, Tad, just a few years later, she fell into a cycle of madness; imagining she was lost to the world, doomed to live homeless, out on the streets.

One day she was in fact found wandering in the streets of Chicago. And it was discovered by those who took her in that all the while she bemoaned the lack of money, living in panicked fear of poverty, she had over $50,000 in bonds sewn into the lining of her dress — a huge fortune in those days. But it wasn’t even enough to keep her warm. She died a few years later, never able to enjoy any of that wealth.

Julie Harris as Mary Todd Lincoln, and your preacher, in his former life as an actor, portraying Tad Lincoln, who died shortly after his 18th birthday. Photo by Martha Swope.

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It is painfully easy to say, Well, she was a bit crazy, wasn’t she? But isn’t anyone who hoards more of the world’s goods than he or she needs to live — even to live comfortably — equally out of touch with reality? How many are like the rich young man, wanting to be free but unable to let go of the very thing that holds them down.

The disciples ask, Who then can be saved? And as Jesus answers, the implication seems to be that all can be saved from possession by wealth — but not through their own efforts, only through the power of God. We all need help detaching ourselves from the goods we accumulate, the things that seem to stick to us like an acrylic sweater fresh out of the dryer, and God has shown us the way to do so — to use the power of God that is within us, God working within us, to open our hands to give to those with less, to grow accustomed to letting go and not grasping, knowing our needs will be met a hundredfold.

And just as wealth seems to attract more wealth and drag us down, so too once we start the practice, the practiceof generosity will make us more generous; the practice of charity will make it easier and easier to open our hands, and let go of the weight that keeps us from following the one who can and will free us from all such bonds, even Jesus Christ our Lord.+

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Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Post 800: From yesterday's sermon

What are the grapes or grain
that you could leave untouched
for others to be nourished by?
Perhaps it is the wheat and grapes you leave behind
that go to make
the bread and wine that will become
the Body and the Blood of God.

What extra miles have you trod down,
or coats or cloaks provided —
and has your cheek once felt
the sting of an unearned slap,
and yet you’ve not returned it
with a blow or protest?

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Taking Account

Look into your heart: that is where you will find what you treasure. And of that treasure decide what is really yours to keep, and what God wants you to give away.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
9.9.2000