Children in the Marketplace

Pentecost 3 Sermon

July 3, 2011

I stand before you today, a sinner among sinners, a child among children in the marketplace. 

So let words of my mouth

and the meditations of all our hearts,

Be now and always acceptable in your sight,

O God our strength and our redeemer.

Amen

Introduction

            When Jesus gets frustrated, look out.  This is when he gets right to the point and challenges us most directly.  In today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus bemoans the generation that fails to hear the prophetic authority of John the Baptist, fails to see the divinity of Jesus himself.  Jesus compares the society of his time to children in the marketplace calling, ‘We piped and you did not come, we mourned and you did not wail.’ 

We recently saw more than we’re really comfortable with of children in the marketplace – broken windows, burning police cars and all the rest. We hear of instigators (those infamous “Anarchists”), but perhaps that was just an example of a famous line from Hunter S. Thompson – ‘when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”  When things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, there will be folks who take advantage. But through our tears of frustration and disappointment, over the riot, we struggle to understand the more fundamental causes for this tragedy. Mob mentality? Youthful excess? Too much booze and not enough police?  And certainly, we can see the recent violence in light of Jesus depiction of children in the marketplace, crying for attention.  Getting one’s name and photo on Facebook even at the price of destruction and mayhem. 

But suppose, that when Jesus speaks of the faithless generation whose human self-obsession clouds their vision of the Divine, these are words not just of challenge and critique but also words of compassion – remember how Jesus loved children especially.  When Jesus compares his generation to children in the marketplace, perhaps he reminds us that we are all children in the marketplace, lost and adrift before the forces of the world.  For the marketplaces – the agora - of Jesus’ time were the centrepieces of society. Places of commerce and conversation, business and the bustle of life, the marketplace stood juxaposition to the Temple – the marketplace was the pole of the world if you will that contrasted with the pole of faith. 

Seen from this perspective, can we not begin to sympathize with those to whose cries the markeplace is indifferent indeed. Just as the crowds were indifferent to the lttle children who kept trying to see Jesus).  Just as the Roman rulers of the world were unmoved by the cries of Hosanna that greeted Jesus’ triumphal entry to Jerusalem (recall how Herod and Pilate became friends over their shared contempt for this rabble-rouser from Galilee).  Just as the authorities were dismissive of the cries of the faithful receiving the Holy Spirit on Pentecost (‘drunk,’ they said). The ‘normal’ stewards of the marketplace in Jesus’ time, the ‘normalcy’ of the world, simply had no time or interest for the people to whom Jesus brought salvation, the people crying like children in the marketplace.

And do we not find in our world, a marketplace that seems similarly indifferent to the genuine needs of people, even as it exercises an hypnotic, almost gravitational pull on us, on our values, our priorities, our daily lives.  Even as it is unable to provide full opportunity – or even food - for our brothers and sisters in the developing world who have to find a way to live on a few dollars a day?  Are we not confronted by a marketplace that seems unable to provide secure housing (how many of our homeless neighbors are there who rely on shelters or even the shade trees in our parks - not to mention the challenges of young families seeking a home in a city where the average cost is well over $1/2 million), health care (emergency patients waiting in Tim Horton’s?), or even stable employment (how many of our urban poor are laid off forestry workers or mining or industrial workers?). Are we not confronted by a world that fails even the comfortable among us by marginalizing our faith, by discounting the value of our communities, by overlooking the foundations that make us human – not goods and creature comforts, but relationships, love, peace.  

And when we consider our children, are we surprised that they cry in the marketplace. Our children, who face a future of environmental challenges, wars and insurrections, critical shortages of food and fresh water, and the uncertain prospects of lifetimes without security of employment and retirement, do they not call and the world fails to attend to them, do they not cry and the world fails to comfort them.  Children in the marketplace indeed, as are we all – piping and wailing before an indifferent world.

Wisdom and Our Children

So what are we to do?  Perhaps we might consider what Jesus shows us is the alternative to lives in the marketplace. Jesus tells us that Wisdom will be justified by her deeds (in some translations ‘justified by her children’). Wisdom will be justified by the deeds that honor her and by the children of God who carry out those deeds.  

Drawing on the richness of the Judaic tradition (Sirach and Job and the rest of the so-called ‘wisdom tradition’), Matthew’s Gospel invests in Jesus the cosmic Wisdom (Sophia) of God.  This kind of wisdom, the Wisdom of God in Christ, is contrasted quite specifically with the conventional wisdom of the world.  In today’s reading, Jesus thanks God for hiding Wisdom from the wise and understanding of the world.  Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians echoes this theme:

“The foolishness of God is wiser than men . . .  (1 Cor. 1:25).

“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.” (1 Cor 1:27A).

Whereas the wisdom of the world - the wisdom of the marketplace – remains indifferent to the cries of children, to the cries of us all, God’s Wisdom invites us to the embrace of love. God’s Wisdom invites us to a place where the cries of children are heard. God’s Wisdom invites us into the relationship of faith, where we find a new ‘normal’ that is about love, and peace, and fellowship with God and each other. Less like the experienced and learned managers of the world and attuned instead to the Wisdom of John the Baptiser who preached repentance, oriented instead to the Wisdom of Christ, who offered salvation to outcasts and sinners. 

Hidden from the wise and understanding of the world whose knowledge and expertise clouds their perception, but revealed instead to babes, God’s Wisdom can speak to us all if we would but quiet ourselves enough to hear.  Rather like babes open to all the glory of the senses, open to hearing and seeing what Louis Armstrong called ‘that wonderful world’ – trees of green, skies of blue. Appreciating the beauty of creation with the wonder of an infant.  Receiving God’s message of Wisdom with the open eagerness of a babe.  Jesus invites us to become like children - freed from conventional thinking bound by values and perspectives of the marketplace that is our world.  And instead to hear the quiet still voice of God, to receive God’s Wisdom.  

And so we are invited to be foolish, and so to confound the wisdom of the world.  To appreciate the importance of the Wisdom that links God and Christ, and which invites us to look beyond beyond the artificial priorities of the marketplace that is our world. To turn away from the authority of socio-economic and political convention, and to turn instead to God’s unconventional presence in our lives.  To turn away from the wisdom of the marketplace and turn instead to the Wisdom of God in Christ.  A Wisdom of God that transforms us from children crying in the marketplace to brothers and sisters in Christ ministering to each other and the world so that no one cries without being heard or mourns without comfort.   Transforming our world into a Kingdom of love and peace.

Let us pray:

Holy one, in whom we live and move and have our being, grant us the grace to hear the quiet voice of your Wisdom, grant us the character to understand what your Wisdom asks of us, and grant us the courage to live out your Wisdom in our lives.  In Christ’s name we pray.  Amen