Fourth Sunday in Lent
“The Alien, the Orphan, and the Widow” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Deuteronomy 24:17-22/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 19:13-15/NRSVUE)
Karl Barth was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church and is widely acknowledged as being one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century. He’s probably best known for his landmark commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans and for his multi-volume theological manifesto called Church Dogmatics (I still have nightmares about them after having to read them in school because they are incredibly dense and complex). Among big thinkers in the field of theology, Karl Barth is definitely one of the biggest.
In 1934 Barth also authored the lion’s share of a document known as the Barmen Declaration, which proclaimed that the German Christian movement had corrupted the Church by making it subservient to the state and by introducing Nazi ideology into the churches that contradicted the Gospel (as you might guess, that went over really big with the powers that be). I can’t even imagine what living in such a society would be like, can you? Some things never change, I guess.
As a testament to his influence on religious and secular culture over the course of several decades, Barth even ended up on the cover of Time Magazine in 1962, and that’s kind of a big deal — I mean it’s not every week that a theologian ends up on the cover of Time.
In that very same year, Barth embarked on a lecture tour of the U.S. During the question and answer session after an event at the University of Chicago, legend has it that a student asked Barth to summarize his entire theology in one sentence. And Barth, this intellectual titan of Protestantism, paused for a second and then replied with this famous line from a children’s hymn: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
And I think he was really onto something there. Look, I’ll be the first one to admit that theology can be complicated, but I wonder if we often make it way more complicated than it really is or needs to be. Perhaps seeing things from a simpler perspective — from a child’s perspective — can help us to refocus on what really matters.
In today’s short passage from Matthew’s Gospel, people are bringing little children to Jesus so that he might bless them. The disciples are apparently not very happy about having all of these kids around; indeed, Matthew tells us that they “spoke sternly to those who brought them,” which isn’t very nice.
Mark and Luke also include versions of this story, but Matthew’s is a little different from theirs. Mark tells us that Jesus was “indignant” with his disciples for acting so inhospitably, and Luke says that Jesus told them “unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” which is pretty tough talk.
But Jesus’s response to his disciples in Matthew is far gentler, he simply says to them: “Let the little children come to me and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” Yet the underlying message Jesus is trying to convey here is the basically same in all three gospels: the children aren’t the problem here, the disciples are. And it’s hard to overstate what a countercultural message this would have been.
The young definitely didn’t have an easy go of it back then. As New Testament scholar Michael Joseph Brown reminds us, in those days the mortality rate for children under the age of five was about fifty percent, and a vast majority of children would have lost one or both parents at some point during their childhood. At mealtimes kids were typically fed last and would have received the smallest and least desirable portions of food. A minor essentially had the same social status as a slave and wouldn’t have been considered a free person until adulthood.
Kids were generally the first ones to suffer from economic hardship, famine, war, disease and natural disaster. And calling someone a child or “childish” was seen as an insult. As I said before, some things never change.
Yet the children are the ones Jesus explicitly welcomes here; the children are the ones to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs in Jesus’s way of seeing things. And so the message to the disciples (and to everyone else) is quite clear: Check your adult privilege; because, to quote another Sunday School hymn, “Jesus loves the little children.”
And so you should not only love the little children as Jesus does, but also be as vulnerable as little children are yourselves. In God’s realm, there is clearly a preferential option for the vulnerable and marginalized — the poor, the widow, the alien, the orphan and the child. And, when Jesus reminded folks of this, as you might imagine, it went over really big with the powers that be.
But this isn’t anything that they (and everyone else, for that matter) hadn’t heard before; God’s been saying this kind of stuff for as long as anyone can remember. But who knows? Maybe they just weren’t paying attention.
In fairness there were a whole ton of commandments in the Torah. These first five books of the Old Testament contain six hundred and thirteen of them, give or take a few in either direction depending on how you choose to account for them. I mean, that’s a lot of stuff to remember. And while all of these commandments seem to matter to God to some degree and for some reason (otherwise why would God have shared them in the first place), when God actually lays down the same law multiple times, we should probably take this as an indication that the law in question really matters to God. A case in point resides in today’s passage from Deuteronomy.
“You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you do this,” is how it begins.
God goes on to tell the Israelites that when they reap their fields and pick their olives and harvest their grapes, the leftovers are for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, and then reminds them once again how God cared for them while they were in Egypt, while they themselves were vulnerable. I won’t speak for you, but it seems pretty clear to me where God stands on all of this.
But apparently it wasn’t all that clear to some of the Israelites because this is at least the seventh time God that has felt the need to say it. And unless you happen to have been hiding under a rock for the past couple of years, it doesn’t seem like it’s all that clear to some people these days either.
Feel free to check me if you wish: Exodus 22 and 23, Leviticus 19 and 23, Deuteronomy 1, 10 and 24; they all say the same thing: the alien, the widow, the orphan (the most vulnerable of children) all deserve justice and all deserve care because God — the very God who cared for us when we needed care — demands justice and care for them too. But, oh, how quickly we forget.
Is it that we feel we deserve God’s care and they (whoever “they” may be) don’t? Is it that we believe we’ve done something to earn God’s favor and they haven’t? Come on! Don’t we know by now that this isn’t the way it works?
“Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs,” Jesus says. Now what, pray tell, could a little child possibly do to earn their way into the kingdom of heaven? What could any of us do to earn our way into the kingdom of heaven. The answer is “nothing.” The whole point of all is that God’s grace isn’t something that can be earned; God cares for each and every one of us because we are all God’s beloved children.
Or is it that we just don’t want to admit that we actually need God’s care; that we need one another’s care; that we’re not as big and strong and powerful as we’d like to be; that we are vulnerable as a child is vulnerable? I don’t know.
But it is kind of strange that so many folks these days who claim to believe in God and in Jesus, who say they adhere to the principal of biblical inerrancy, who declare unequivocally that absolutely everything spoken of in the Bible is true, who assert that the Bible is the literal and infallible word of God, just seem to sail right by all of the stuff about justice and care for the alien, the widow, and the orphan — the poor, the marginalized, and the powerless — like it’s not even there.
Like I said earlier, maybe they just missed it amidst all of those other commandments (even though it appears in Old Testament over and over and over again, even though Jesus never stops talking about it).
I mean what other reason could there possibly be for people who claim to be believers in God and followers of Christ to see immigrants being detained without cause and denied due process in our justice system, to see struggling families (including children) being denied food and healthcare and education, to see our LGBTQUIA+ siblings being denied their basic human rights, to see a few people have so much while so many people have so little, and somehow be okay with all of that?
So maybe it’s time for some folks to stop just holding that Bible in their hand and actually read it. And maybe, just maybe, given the way religion seems to be becoming an instrument of government once again these days, it’s time for us to dust off Karl Barth’s Barmen Declaration and read it too — especially this part:
“We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message … to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.”
It as true now as it was back in 1934. Because some things never change, unless, of course, we change them — unless, of course we ourselves change.
As the words to yet another children’s hymn say, “Change my heart, O God, make it ever true; change my heart O God, may I be like you.” And that seems like a pretty good prayer for our place and time:
Change our hearts, O God, change our hearts.
May it be so. Amen.