Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church
September 19, 2021
"Faithful Children"
Rev. Hardy H. Kim preaching
Greetings!

We always talk about ourselves as children of God, because so much of our imagery around what it means to be connected to God puts us in child-to-parent relationship with our creator. Yet in the stories from the gospels where Jesus interacts with children, we see that there is something “problematic” with children. People seem to want to keep them away from Jesus, and his reaching out to them seems to shock or offend others.

The role that children played in the ancient world was probably very different from what it is for us in modern North America. So, this is another case where we need to dig beneath our everyday understandings of things if we want to really understand what Scripture is telling us. What did it mean that Jesus was open and accepting toward children? How might his actions and attitudes challenge some of the assumptions and practices we hold today?

I hope you’ll join me in worship for reflections on these questions. And we will also be celebrating the gift of children among us as we commission folks to ministry alongside them, and wish blessings upon our young people who are students in school. It’s going to be a joyful Sunday!

Faithfully,

Hardy


If you're worshipping with us online, please join us immediately afterward for the virtual Coffee Hour.


Theme for Sunday

“Against a market empire that constructs children as consumers above all else comes an alternative Christian perspective about the worth of children. Children are gifts and blessings not because they can add to the corporate profit margin. Children are gifts and blessings because in Christ they have already been added to the “Corporate Prophet Margin,” that small band of human beings who participate in naming, proclaiming, and enacting God’s reign of compassion, love, and justice for all people. Such a view of children as gifts positions them in the struggle of resistance to imperial forces of the market economy and overturns easy, comfortable notions of what it means that a child is a gift.”

      Joyce Ann Mercer, Welcoming Children: A Practical Theology of Childhood
Questions for Reflection
  • In your family growing up, do you feel like children were given a high or low status?

  • What does your experience of how children should be viewed do to shape your sense of being a "child of God?"

Mark 9:30-37

They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.

Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”