Hard and Soft

Will you please join with me in a word of prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our rock and our redeemer.

Today’s scripture takes us into 2 entirely different types of encounters that Jesus had with the people around him, and present two stories  which seem, at first glance,  to have very little to do with each other. The first is a dialogue of Jesus with the Pharisees, on divorce, and in the second, Jesus is greeting little children.  And yet the lectionary serves them up in a single portion, and we are confronted with trying to understand their connection, if any there be. As well as understand how these two stories can join connect to the sharing of the Lord’s supper today.

In the first story, Jesus is discussing the question of divorce with the Pharisees. They try to confront him with a seemingly difficult problem. Is divorce allowed? Rather than go by the letter of the law, which in fact does allow divorce, Jesus sends  the issue back to them. He goes to the heart of the matter, by saying, yes, Moses did allow divorce. It was necessary compromise, because people have hardened hearts toward each other. When that type of polarization occurs in a couple,  it is hard to reconcile, it is hard to kiss and make up and be together again.  So divorce becomes inevitable  and laws to govern it become  necessary.  Jesus then poses a new standard, that divorce not be allowed, because God has joined the couple together, for life.   Presumably, the way of life Jesus is proposing can help believers soften their hearts so that divorce will not be necessary the way it was under the old covenant.

These phrases from the gospel are indeed a challenge. The church divided on this issue at the time of Henry the 8^th in Britain, rupturing the church of Rome and the Church of England. We trace our identity as members of the United Church of Christ from churches which go back to that time of Reformation.  The Orthodox churches do allow divorce. Some countries, those culturally Catholic like Ireland, forbade divorce until modern times. In the Philippines divorce is still not legal.     

Closer to home, who among us  has not been touched personally, or has had a family member or friend go through a divorce?   I think it is fair to say that we have not been able to live into the kingdom promise of soft hearts when it comes to our most intimate relationships. And I daresay that this is true of all of us, married, single, divorced, widowed. It is true of close relationships between parent and child, mother and daughter, sister and brother, aunt and nephew, uncle and niece.  We all have parts of  ourselves which are hard, hard to live with, hard to take, hard to handle.  Often these hard parts have been hardened into us by harsh and hard treatment by others, So we’re not only responsible for our hard hearts—we are—but we are also the inheritors of hardness, sometimes through the generations.

Whatever the cause, abuse, perhaps neglect, or the regular, ordinary hard knocks of life, we may be left  with a hard shell.  Maybe a great loss, a death of a parent or close loved one at an early, vulnerable age.  Or a lack of financial security or a failure in business or school has hardened us to the ways of the world. We’d like it be different, we’d like to believe in a better world, we’d like to be less cynical or skeptical, and yet these experiences are real. They have shaped us and formed us and we cannot simply slip out of them like we do our clothes at the end of the day.  They are like an armor we wear under our skin, sometime beyond our awareness.

On a practical level, relationships often break down because communication between humans is hard. It is hard to understand the mind of another and it is also hard work to go beyond our own ideas of how the world should work. We each carry into relationships a world view given to us by osmosis by our families of origin and it is hard to let go of the conditioning we have received.

One psychologist who has focused on marital relationships is Dr. Harville Hendrix.  He has written many best selling books on how to communicate with one’s spouse. One very pertinent comment he has made about love relationships is that we find partners who exhibit the best and the worst of what our parents taught us. Of course when we fall in love, it seems that the lover has only good characteristics. Only later do we see that the difficult traits are as tenacious as the adorable  ones. And often couples find that the very thing that seemed so adorable changes over time. I won’t go into details after 33 years of marriage, but you get my point.

It is hard work and it takes I think many resources as well as the gospel call to soften one’s heart. It a takes information, communication skills and also the willingness to see that while it takes two to tango, it takes one to take the first step. 

Given these realities of difficulties of maintaining and sustaining intimate relationships, over the centuries churches have found ways to help those broken hearted by the struggle of  a hard marriage.   Some churches, ours among them, understand the realities that lead to divorce, and seek to console and heal the hurts. This  acknowledgement of reality, and focus on healing, are gospel values.  We might even say that Jesus would understand, since he was not one to hold to literal readings of the law. After all , he criticized the Pharisees for being too harsh.  It seems to me that Jesus would be on the side of people, with forgiveness and understanding in case where reconciliation is not possible. 

 Into this picture of hardness and hard hearts comes our second story fast behind. Jesus and the children.  This time it is not the Pharisees who cause problems, but  the disciples, who want to shoo away the kids who want to get close to Jesus. The children want to sit on his lap and be held and get cozy with this remarkable man. The disciples say: go away, don’t bother him, we’re busy here. But Jesus rebukes the disciples and call the kids back to him. Even more strongly, he announces that one must be like a child to receive the Kingdom of heaven and reign of God. The children are not simply tolerated, but accepted and applauded.

One must become like a child in order to enter receive the Kingdom.  These are mysterious and enigmatic words. What can they mean? Where does this type of prescription leave us, the grown ups, the mature, responsible  adult Christians we are trying to be?  And how do you become like a little child ? What meaning can that have for a grown up men and women who go to work every day to pay the bills, and come back home to face the responsibilities of  parenthood, or taking care of elderly relatives,  or serving on a church committee or school board?

Perhaps a clue to what it means to be like a child has already been given to us, it means to be the opposite of hard hearted. Soft. Soft hearted. If you carry a little one around, you can  feel how tender she is. Watch a child sleep. Or play with a favorite toy. Or smile at a parent for the first time. These are all soft, sweet moments of childhood. 

Translated to our grown up world, it can mean something like being kind and tender, toward others and yourself. Not just others, because there is a place for yourself in God’s love. Not just yourself, because caring for others is essential to the gospel’s call. But Both.  Both ourselves and others deserve a softness, caring, kindness, understanding appreciation, whatever you might call this world view that is the opposite of hard hearted. 

Another aspect of childlikeness is found right within our story. The children are eager to simply be with Jesus to sit with him, relate to him.  They have no agenda, no load of questions to ask, no issues to debate. The presence of this person was enough for them, important enough that they clamored to be with him. They wanted a relationship with Jesus, not a theology. They wanted contact, not a discussion of a contract.  Again, the opposite  of the those who want to discuss the fine point of marriage contracts and the law. 

And the final aspect of child likeness that I want to highlight is dependency and the need to be fed and held by another. By definition, an infant cannot get or prepare his own food,  feed himself or hold himself up to eat She has to wait for a parent to notice the hunger, and even a piercing cry doesn’t necessarily make the food appear. There is utter dependence on others to care and feed and hold oneself, just as we are utterly dependent on God’s reaching out to us in grace and holding us in a loving embrace. 

Becoming like a child could also mean developing a willingness to acknowledge a real relational dependence on God. Certainly, Jesus is our model as a person who sees  God’s hand as a loving blessing hand which holds all creation with tenderness. Jesus called God Abba. Not just Father, but daddy, papa. Jesus saw all existence as a gift, a blessing, a connection with God.

Becoming like a child has also this component of seeing life as gift and recognizing that we have not created ourselves, but have been created in the image of God. We are God’s creatures, God’s handiwork.  And all that we have and all that we are God’s.

Still, it is one thing to describe some elements of child likeness, it is another to bring these qualities into our lives. You may be protesting inwardly—sure, I’d like to give up my responsibilities, be like a kid again, without a worry in the world.   Be taken care of by others with food and clothing  and nurture given to me. Put that way, childhood seems like a  dream filled vacation, that we wish would never end.

But childhood is not all innocence, and Jesus is not telling us to try to some supernatural time machine to take us back to 1918 or  1938 or 1951 or 1977. Rather, even as we age, let us not lose  the childlike soft heartedness. Nor  the desire to simply be close to Jesus.  And let us continue to acknowledge our dependency on God’s love, which makes every day, indeed every moment, a small piece of heaven.

Then we can see anew that we are all, God's children at God’s table, fed by God.

Today, when we celebrate communion, we are called to let God feed us, with the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.  At this table of blessing, our parent God, yes, our daddy God, abba, as Jesus called him, call us to a meal, and yearns to feed us. Can we come with softened hearts, in dependent love,   ready to eat, ready to be nourished , ready to be filled, ? God want to soften and bless us, forgive our hardness and create new heart in us, hearts of flesh.   Come to this table of blessing, ready to be receive God’s gifts. God is making everything ready for God’s children, us here this morning, through bread and cup and the prayers of our softened hearts.  Amen.