Nurture the Nature

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
September 21, 2008

Nurture the Nature
Mark 10:13-16
Isaiah 11:6-9

Is there a better sound than children laughing?
Giggles, squeals, shouts,
pure delight at even the simplest thing,
something silly,
something magical,
something wonder-filled.

Children show us how to live:
we adults walk,
children hop, skip and jump;
we adults jog,
children scamper, run, chase, and tumble.
Children show us how to live in their playing,
oblivious to differences of skin or ethnicity,
or neighborhood or finances.
Borders, fences, and property lines mean nothing to them.
And happily for them, neither do politics.

Put two children together,
strangers to each other,
and within minutes they will be best friends,
out on a swingset, each of them trying to
touch the sun with their feet
as they swing higher and higher.
Give them popsicles in the summer
and they’ll compare the colors their tongues take on,
and laugh because who would have ever thought
you could have an orange tongue?
Come autumn, they’ll compare contents
of backpacks that are as big as they are:
lunches, snacks, maybe a book,
a juicebox, a toy,
and probably something very old
and unrecognizable at the very bottom of their packs.

When winter comes, and there is even an inch of snow,
they will build a snow man, or possibly a snowwoman together
and then later spoon out the sludge of marshmallow and cocoa
from the bottom of a mug of hot chocolate.

In springtime, they will hold onto one another so tightly
so that neither of them is blown away by March winds
and ends up clear around the other side of the world,
or maybe even carried all the way to the moon.
But wow, wouldn’t that be neat?

Yes, children have their moments
of temper and tears,
but most of the time, differences are resolved quickly,
whatever caused the flare-up quickly forgotten,
because there’s too much playing to be done,
too many adventures still to be had.

Children show us how to live,
how to live as Jesus taught us how to live.
Is it any wonder that Jesus told his disciples,
“let the little children come to me;
do not stop them.”
Is it any wonder that when the disciples tried to
hold back parents from bringing their children to Jesus,
Jesus got angry.
“Indignant”, Mark tells us.

The Kingdom of God does not belong to a denomination;
it doesn’t belong to any particular church,
or pastor, or televangelist, or flock,
try as we Christians do, to possess Jesus,
to make him into our image,
rather than the other way around.

The Kingdom of God belongs to “such as these”
Jesus teaches us:
children in their innocence
and with their acceptance,
their tolerance, their openness.
Only as they grow do they learn to be close-minded,
Only as they grow do they learn not to be so accepting,
do they learn how to put people in boxes and categories:
based on ethnicity, or gender, or ideology.
the clothes they wear, the car their parents’ drive.

A bumper stick from the Civil Rights era
back in the in the 1960s, caught it just right with the words,
“no child is born a bigot.”
No child is born hating,
born intolerant, born with a closed mind.
We teach those bad habits to them.
We close minds when we should be opening them;
we close hearts when we should be opening them.

The path Jesus calls us to, of course
is to teach children goodness, and kindness
nurturing their nature of love and acceptance,
the nature they are born with.
That is what we try to do in Sunday School
with children of all ages.
And it is what we try to do
with our Early Learning Center program.

Every year for more than 40 years,
fifty, one hundred, now two hundred children
have come through our doors
Monday through Friday, September through May,
children ages 2 to 5,
children from throughout the community,
all coming here to be nurtured
as they play, learn, sing, and laugh.

More than 6,000 children have been part of this ministry –
and that is what our Early Learning Center is:
a ministry of this church, outreach to as many children
as we can fit in the space we have.

Our ministry is set in a Christian environment,
but we intentionally do not call it a Christian pre-school.
Our doors are open to all and we welcome all.
We want our school to reflect the diversity that Jesus found
as he traveled up and down the roads of Judea,
talking and sharing time, meals, and fellowship
with Samaritans, Romans,
Greeks, Nubians, and others
in addition to his fellow Jews.

We leave each child’s faith journey to their families;
our goal is to create a Christian environment grounded in
nurture, acceptance, responsibility, respect, forgiveness and love:
all those things that Jesus teaches us.

We do have a monthly Chapel Time, which I lead,
but I tend to focus more on God and God’s love,
to remind us that we worship the God of Abraham,
something we have in common with Jews and Muslims.

It is unfortunate that most of you don’t get the chance
to see our Early Learning Center in action.
Walk down the hall on a weekday morning,
and it’s a busy place, with classrooms bustling with activity.
The children come roaring in at 9:10 am
and the building is alive until noon.
By 12:15 they are gone as if swept up in a whirlwind with Elijah,
even if their chariot is a minivan
and they are destined for lunch at McDonalds.

Watch them come in, and watch them go out,
some from our own church family,
but most from the broader community.
Look at their faces,
each a child of God.
Will that she grow up to be an engineer?
Will he be a scientist?
Will she be a firefighter?
Will he be a carpenter?
Is there one, boy or girl,
just one, whom God might call to be a preacher?

In the classrooms we teach them what Jesus wants us to learn:
lessons we tend to forget as we get older,
especially the lesson that Jesus was trying to teach
his followers as he picked up one child after another.
The lesson of selflessness,
of service to others.
We don’t teach about Christ,
but we do teach Christ as we nurture the nature of each child.
And as we do that,
we fill the children with the lesson of hope,
the lesson of what God hopes for us, and all his children,
that one day we all will learn to live together
in peace and reconciliation and harmony.
That there will come a day when:
”The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.”

What a magnificent image God gave us through the prophet:
God’s hope for all his children.
Bickering, strife, war: all stopped;
This is a world we can create;
it is a world we are called to create for the sake of our children.
When we fail to do this, we fail God.

We know we each have a responsibility to every child in this church.
But we also have a responsibility
to every child in our Early Learning Center.
We have a responsibility to every child
who comes here for Vacation Bible School.
We have a responsibility to every child.
It was Marian Wright Edelman,
head of the Children’s Defense Fund
who first gave us the phrase
that no child should be left behind.
She was disturbed when the Department of Education
co-opted her phrase because,
while building an education system on that idea is fine,
it is much too limiting.
We are to leave no child behind anywhere.

Jesus says, “let the little children come to me”
And by that, he means all the children,
not just the children who are well-behaved, or
who come from the right homes,
or who have money or the right background.
Jesus means “All” children,
and “all” means “all”.

The next time you have an argument with someone,
get in the car and drive to the nearest convenience store.
Go inside and buy a package of popsicles
and then sit down with your adversary and eat your popsicles.
After about ten minutes, compare your tongues
and see whose is more raspberry red,
or orangy orange.
Giggle and laugh.

Do that and watch your differences melt away
as quickly as a popsicle in August.
Do that, and then you’ll be ready to take on the more serious work
of building the Kingdom for every child of God
that Kingdom in which the
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
[and] the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
that kingdom in which “a little child shall lead us,”
that kingdom which is God’s hope for all his children,
and that includes you and me.
AMEN