Every year our preschool holds two President Day parades and many of your children were part of this year’s flag waving throng! After all was said and done, an annoyed Pre-Ker named Jack announced, "We had two HUGE parades for the President …and he didn't even come! (We didn’t have the heart to tell Jack no one thought to invite him).

We talk a lot about what we need to teach our children, but today’s Gospel reading flips this question on its head and instead asks, “What can our children teach us?”

Our New Testament reading comes from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 19, verse 13-14. If you have your Bibles turn with me to this morning’s reading. As you are able, please stand for the reading of the Gospel this morning.

13 Then little children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them; 14but Jesus said, ‘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.’

"Dear God, please let all people live safely. Let all people sleep with dreams of happiness and love. Let all people have what they need." Amen.
– Caitlin, age 6, baptized member of the Virginia Annual Conference UMC

We’ve been talking about Spiritual Habits:
1. The Spiritual habit of Courage.
God calls us out of the safety of our “nets” and “boats” and into the world; to be the live bait of God’s grace, dangled before a hungry world.  

2. The Spiritual habit of Centering. God calls us to live from a deeper center and Jesus shows us how; by practicing God’s presence through:     
•    Silence,
•    By noting the ways God has been present in our lives,
•    By cooperating with the movement of God through lifestyle simplification and service to others.

Today I want to talk about the Spiritual habit of Simplicity. God calls us to become like little children, so that we might inhabit the playground called “God’s Kingdom.”

Verse 13, Then little children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray.

A little context: In 1st century Palestine, children were at the bottom of the pecking order, about one step up from indentured servants. No wonder the Disciples try to run the neighborhood kids off. Surely their rabbi-teacher had more important things to deal with.  Jesus’ response is both unexpected and culturally subversive.

“Let the little children come to me,” to which he adds the qualifier, “To such belongs the Kingdom of heaven.”

It’s a play on his teaching in Matthew 18:3, “Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.”

What do “YOU” think that means? I used to think Jesus was speaking metaphorically. You know, God requires of us humility and obedience. But think about it. Humility and obedience of God may identify us as children of God, but they do not make us children of God. According to I John 3, we already are children of God:

(beginning at verse1), See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
    
Like the literary character, Jason Borne, we are on a journey to recover our true identity. Victims of spiritual amnesia, we wander the Earth seeking to rediscover just who we are. And Jesus’ cure for this loss of spiritual identity is, of all things, a child! He is saying, “Here, let me jog your memory! This is who you are!”

To truly practice the spiritual habit of Simplicity, we need to reclaim such childlike qualities as wonder, joy, and compassion.

1)    First, wonder.
Acts 3 tells the story of a man crippled from birth who every day begs at the temple gate. Instead of money, Peter and John command him (in the name of Jesus) to walk. The man jumps to his feet and follows them into the temple courts jumping and dancing and praising God.  

Verse 9, When all the people saw him walking and praising God, 10 they recognized him as the same man who used to sit begging at the temple gate called Beautiful, and they were filled with wonder…

Wonder recognized God’s unseen hand at work in the world.
“Prepare to be amazed!” That’s the attitude of wonder.

In the movie, the Spiderwick Chronicles three children, through the use of an eye piece called a “seeing stone” discover a fantastic hidden world filled with incredible new creatures. Wonder is the “seeing stone” that allows us to glimpse the movement of God in our lives and in the world.

One of my favorite memories is of a child’s first communion. His mother, Teri, was a flight attendant with American Airlines. Her son, Drew, was allowed to join his parents for the first time to take communion with them. I handed him some communion bread, and following his parents’ lead, dipped the bread in the juice and ate it. He turned to his mother and said, “Mom, that was really good! Can I have some more?” To which Teri replied, “Honey, you’ll have to ask pastor Don,” thinking he’d do so after worship. Then Drew shouted out, “Hey Jesus, can I have some more?” Now, that’s wonder! And we can reclaim this sense of wonder by learning to recognize God’s unseen hands of God at work in the world.

Wonder is one of the qualities of the spiritual habit of simplicity.

2)    Secondly, Joy.
What’s the difference between joy and happiness? I “Googled” the word “happiness” and learned that the root of happiness is hap, meaning chance (as in happenstance or haphazard.) In other words, happiness depends on things going our way.
Joy, on the other hand emanates from within.

I’ve always loved the definition of joy as “The divinity dancing within us.”

ast Wednesday, my son Chris and I went to the American Airlines Center and watched our first Dallas Stars Hockey game together. They were playing the Calgary flames and yes the “Flames” did “burn us,” scoring the winning goal with just 2 ½ minutes left in the game.

Despite the Star’s loss, Chris and I had a blast. In the first two minutes, we witnesses our first fist-fight (I hear its part of the game); watched as Mike Mondano artfully sailed around the rink making some great assists; saw Stars players Hagman and Norstrom score, and goalie, Marty Turco, make some amazing saves.

At some point in the first quarter my son did this, he reached out and hooked his hands around my arm, like this, and hung on to me; and stayed that way for the rest of the game. If you watched the game on TV, I was the father with the dorky looking grin on his face!

As I looked down on my son I had one of those “aha” moments. It was as if God pointed at my son and said, “See, this is how I feel about you! I love you and I am so proud to be with you.”

I can’t even begin to describe how all this made me feel; sitting there with my son’s arm hooked on my arm, just being together father and son, holding on to each, experiencing God’s presence in that moment, watching those hockey players beating the stuffing out of one another!

Joy is the discovery that the God who promises to be there for us, in fact really is.

Frederick Buechner writes: "God created us in joy for joy…”

Bill Moyer’s documentary film on the hymn “Amazing Grace” includes a scene filmed in Wembley Stadium in London. A concert had been organized to celebrate the changes taking place in South Africa, featuring some of the biggest names in rock music. Well, someone decided that it would be a good idea to have opera singer, Jessye Norman as the closing act.

The documentary shows Moyer interviewing Norman about the composer of Amazing Grace, a former slave trader by the name of John Newton while rocks bands like Guns and Roses stirred the crowd into a frenzy, many clearly on something. So imagine the crowds’ response with this opera singer walks out on stage, no back up band or musical instruments, and beings to slowly sing Amazing Grace. There are cat calls and several voices yell out for more Guns n’ Roses. The crowd is clearly restless. But Jessye is unflustered.

Amazing Grace, how sweet sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I am found.
Was blind but now I see.

Then a remarkable thing happens. Seventy thousand fans, fall silent. By the 2nd verse, the soprano has the crowd in her hands and by the 3rd, fans by the thousands have joined her song, taping some long ago, nearly forgotten memory.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less says to sing God’s grace
They when we first begun.
(see Philip Yancey’s book “What’s So Amazing about Grace)

Joy says that the God who promises to “be there” for us, in fact really is. Joy is a quality of the spiritual habit of simplicity.

3)    Finally, Compassion.
 The author of Psalm 103, describes God this way:
The LORD is compassionate and gracious,
       slow to anger, abounding in love. (v. 8)

The word compassion means literally, “To suffer with.”
Listen to this prayer written by Stephanie, a fourth grader in the Virginia Annual Conference, UMC.

"Dear Lord, I hope the sick and homeless are okay. I wish they lived with us so we won't have to listen to any sad stories. I'm sorry to interrupt you but this is important to me. Thank you. Love, sincerely, your friend."

A fourth grader might not understand the complexities of homelessness or disease. She probably cannot identify with social mores that govern our treatment of the social lepers of our society. Or even that her parents will likely dismiss her prayer as well meaning but unrealistic, after all, who opens their home to the homeless or AIDS patient? Stephanie just knows that when someone is suffering, God within tells us to do something about it.

I was at a meeting last week when a woman and her young son knocked on the door of the room. I went out to see what they needed. She told me, in broken English that as she drove by the church, she saw a teenager standing on the street corner sobbing.

Now I don’t know what made Evita stop. Maybe it was because she is a mother; maybe she feared for this child’s safety. Maybe it was because she knew this child was just a stone’s throw from a place of safety and warmth and welcome (Evita is one of our ESL students). And I wonder how many drivers saw this young girl but drove on. I’ve done that before, drove by someone in need. Haven’t you?

Apparently this teenager had been staying with her aunt, and they had had an argument and the child was forced out into the street with nothing but the clothes on her back. She had no family in the area, no money and no place to go.

I looked over by the entrance to the Covenant Center and saw this young girl still crying, scared and in shaking. She was cold, dressed in a tee shirt, jeans, and flipflops. Her name was Elizabeth. With Evita translating, we were eventually able to help her reach a friend who agreed to come pick her up.

I believe Evita demonstrated this child-like quality of compassion. We raise so many reasons why we shouldn’t care. Jesus places a child before us and says, “Here, let me jog your memory. This is who you are!”  Wonder, joy, and compassion are qualities of the spiritual habit of simplicity.

The Spiritual habit of simplicity calls us to become like little children, so that we might inhabit the playground of God’s Kingdom, and Jesus invites us to come play with him!
    
I want close with a prayer by 6 year old, Justin:
"Dear Lord, I wish no one gets hurt. Please help everyone. Please help people find their way home if they are lost. Please give people homes that don't have homes. Let people that are scared not be scared. Amen.”

*Next week, the spiritual habit of prayer.