Soul Force

Suffer the Little Children

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

October 18, 2009

Readings Mark 10:13-16

“Children’s Sabbath,” Marian Wright Edelman

“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” [Mark 10:14] I chose to read from the King James translation of this scripture this morning because of the ambiguity of the term “suffer.” A more contemporary translation – the New Revised Standard Version – reads “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” “Suffer” in the first translation might more properly be defined as “allow;” but I’m intrigued by the double meaning in the authorized version, because of course children do suffer in many different ways.

You have may heard the story of young Zachary Christie and his recent brush with the authorities. Here’s how the New York Times reported it:

Finding character witnesses when you are 6 years old is not easy. But there was Zachary Christie last week at a school disciplinary committee hearing with his karate instructor and his mother’s fiancé by his side to vouch for him.

Zachary’s offense? Taking a camping utensil that can serve as a knife, fork and spoon to school. He was so excited about recently joining the Cub Scouts that he wanted to use it at lunch. School officials concluded that he had violated their zero-tolerance policy on weapons, and Zachary was suspended and now faces 45 days in the district’s reform school.

“It just seems unfair,” Zachary said, pausing as he practiced writing lower-case letters with his mother, who is home-schooling him while the family tries to overturn his punishment....

[B]ased on the code of conduct for the Christina School District, where Zachary is a first grader, school officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, “regardless of possessor’s intent,” knives are banned.[i]

In the event, the school district ultimately decided to reduce the mandatory 45 day suspension to 3-5 days for children in Kindergarten or first grade, and they let Zachary return to school given that he’d already served that much suspension.

I mention this incident not to critique zero-tolerance policies at our schools – though rigid application like this is rather striking – but to consider the innocence of children. Under the common law, seven years of age is considered the age of reason – the point at which children become capable of knowing right from wrong, the point at which they can be held responsible at law for wrongdoing and also permitted to testify in court. Sending a child to reform school prior to this age – at six, like Zachery, for example – seems simply egregious. As it happens, one of the reasons for the extraordinary rigidity with which school officials apply zero tolerance policies in cases like Zachery’s is to avoid discrimination; as the reporter of this story notes that prior to the imposition of no-discretion policies: “Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses.”[ii]

Part of what strikes me about Zachery’s story is that it reminds me of the wonderful innocence of my own sons at that age. As they grow, of course, children become more and more worldly wise and lose some of that early sense of complete trust in their parents and the world around them. We were discussing the story of the Garden of Eden in our class on Genesis recently, and we recognized something in the account of Adam and Eve that seems to reflect what happens to each of us as we grow to know the difference between right and wrong in our very earliest years. The story of the Garden doesn’t have to be literally true to reflect an experience each of us and each of our children in fact go through as we mature.

I have a particular image of our son David at around age three – about three feet high, wearing glasses, a wonderful combination of curiosity, trust, and love of the world – which gets triggered whenever I see children of about that age alone with a parent. That’s an image which invokes something like the words of our opening hymn: “How could anyone ever tell you / you were anything less than beautiful. How could anyone ever tell you, you were less than whole. How could anyone fail to notice, that your loving is a miracle. How deeply you’re connected to my soul.” In short, I melt. I think that’s somewhat similar to what Jesus means when he says of the children who come to him, “... of such is the kingdom of God.”

The kingdom of God, in this telling, would include those who can put away suspicion and anger, who can be trusting, expectant, curious and open. We as parents and elders then feel impelled to protect the children, to maintain places of safety for them where their innocence can’t be exploited, where they can’t run into danger because they don’t yet know better than to avoid it. At the same time, we don’t want to be so protective that they have no room to try out their growing faculties, no opportunities to try things out and learn to fail and do better. When our sons were about six and nine, Deedee & I moved from New York City to Ridgewood, NJ, in part because we found that we were forced to restrict them too severely in the city. We had a wonderful park outside our window in New York, but the boys couldn’t go there unless one of us or a babysitter could go with them. At an age when I was exploring the world freely, our sons could only explore in the presence of a grownup. The move to the suburbs for them became an opportunity to become acquainted with neighborhoods, small woods and streams, other people’s houses, and the whole world around them. Similarly, our kids here at Second Parish have a wonderful world of nature around them to explore and learn from, and we are fortunate as part of our primary curriculum to be able to take our youngsters out each Sunday morning to explore the web of life all around us.

Children’s Sabbath offers us an opportunity to remember being children, to bring to mind the children we hold most dear, those growing in the midst of our congregations and our families, and then to extend our empathy to those children a little farther from us, of whom equally the kingdom of God is made. Our reading from Marian Wright Edelman this morning reminds us of two of the victories people working together have won – women in Liberia over the tyranny of Charles Taylor and children in Birmingham over segregation and the inequality it automatically perpetuated. She goes on to pose these challenges for us:

Now it’s our turn. We don’t face cruel, heartless, lawless dictators like Charles Taylor and Bull Connor, but instead the domination of poverty that is crushing the lives of 13.3 million children in our nation and the lack of health coverage that means nine million children in our nation may not be able to see a doctor when they need to, resulting in unnecessary illness and even death. We no longer face the systemic, codified evil of legal segregation, but we face the crisis of a pernicious pipeline to prison, with its confluence of poverty, racism, lack of health and mental health care, abuse and neglect, failing schools, and other disadvantages, that places an 8-year-old Black boy at a one in three risk of imprisonment and a Latino boy at a one in six chance of imprisonment in their lifetimes. As in 1963, our school buses are loaded with children being driven to jail—not now willingly for the pursuit of freedom and justice but because of the pipeline to prison’s injustice and preventable poverty and racial disparities.

Adults! Will we stand up to break up the Cradle to Prison Pipeline and replace it with a pipeline to college, productive work and healthy family formation? Will we stand up in our places of worship and declare that now is the time for the next civil and human rights movement to rescue our children from poverty, illiteracy, sickness and denied health coverage? Will we march out of our places of worship, determined to end the growing apartheid of incarceration that is undermining the past 50 years of social and economic progress as young people are put on the path to successful futures?[iii]

There is a risk of feeling overwhelmed by the problems Edelman poses here. We might easily come to feel that the challenges are too great for any one person or any one congregation to take on in any case, and that is, of course, completely true. The first step, though, is to become aware of the nature of the challenges which face some of our children and then to realize how a failure to include all of our children in a positive future affects us and our own children. It is sometimes easy for us to feel overwhelmed by our own problems and to be consumed by the issues which arise in our own families, especially in difficult economic times when it seems we’re doing all we can just to get by. The problem is that when we limit our scope only to our own immediate family, we neglect responsibilities which will ultimately come back to affect us. A simple illustration comes from the control of epidemics. If we try to aggressively withhold any healthcare whatever to undocumented immigrants – refusing, for example, to vaccinate them against the H1N1 virus, the swine flu – they may come down with the flu and then infect others. In the same way, if we allow some children to fall far behind others because they or their mothers lack adequate healthcare, or if we look the other way as some children are put on a pipeline to prison at a very young age, we thereby lose some of the potential capacity latent in the world our own children and grandchildren will inherit.

There are many small ways in which each of us can reach out to ensure that the children – all the children – can be protected from the corrosive effects of growing up too soon or of being unable to grow in good health because of a lack of food, of medical attention, or of emotional nurturing. As we consider specific ways to refine our outreach as a congregation, caring for and about the children has a special place.

Zachary Christie, the first grader with the cub scout utensil, will probably come through the experience of suspension little worse for the wear. He was fortunate to have a parent who could take the time to home school him rather than allowing him to go to reform school, and who was able to advocate for him and convince the authorities of the error of their ways. Many children are not so fortunate, and so they suffer indignities which deprive them of innocence and curiosity and hope. In small ways, we can find opportunities to stand in the breach, to make food available, to make attention available, to tutor and babysit.

For so the children come, year after year, seeking and offering a newer world than we can see quite so clearly.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.”

Amen