9/11/16
Children gather Moonbeams while Grown-Ups Hide Inside. Gib Pellet
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In preparing for today I was visited many times by thoughts of children … something about children and God was rattling around up there ….
Finally, this morning, as I was rereading some things I might use, it came together.
Let me share a paragraph from Luke.
Luke 11:37-41
37 As Jesus was speaking, one of the Pharisees invited him home for a meal. So he went in and took his place at the table.[a] 38 His host was amazed to see that he sat down to eat without first performing the hand-washing ceremony required by Jewish custom. 39 Then the Lord said to him, “You Pharisees are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy—full of greed and wickedness!40 Fools! Didn’t God make the inside as well as the outside? 41 So clean the inside by giving gifts to the poor, and you will be clean all over.
Kids have the great advantage over us “advanced” individuals in that they aren’t hogtied by misbeliefs. They’re “empty vessels”. Of course, by the time we’re a year old we’ve been bombarded with images and sounds that might be called “perverse” but a child’s heart and soul are still pliable.
Jesus frequently alluded to the beauty of children and used it in His teaching / and often it while He was excoriating Pharisees and Disciples who were slow on the uptake.
What was the rub? The rub was and is that unless we maintain a childlike attitude towards the unseen and unexpected (which one might say includes our ideas about God) we become tombs… literally… we dry up and rot inside / we hide out in safe places while our childlike Friends are outside chasing fireflies.
A descendent of Pharisees, Albert Einstein, said: “At the end of my understanding there is God”. We put a premium on IQ while our imagination suffocates.
People who don’t believe in Jesus as the Messiah often like to fall back to the “He was a nice guy with blond curls” thing… but if you read the Bible that doesn’t really seem to be an option… Jesus was an ass scorcher – he was forever “going off” on His dummy friends and critics. Jesus was a mental health professional who specialized in reality checks. He wanted us to see that in spite of the horrors of whatever political nonsense was going on at the time there was this new, magic Kingdom waiting for those who were willing to take the leap.
In the non-profit some other Quakers and I have started we respect this teaching that to reach the world with a message of Hope we have to deny religious intolerance. As Jesus and Mother Teresa and a host of loving, selfless ancestors have shown us, we’ll find the Truth and be transformed when we take our first baby step in service. We need to stop thumping people, or worse, shooting them if they don’t dance to our religious dirge.
God has left us in a world that is half full of evil / but it’s also have full of enchantment waiting to be employed in our quest. It’s not over until it’s over and the best chance we have is to start again as children of the Light. People who are heart broken and afraid don’t need for us to be “sinless” they need us to be Friends.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.”