Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Does anyone remember that old t.v. show, Mission Impossible? Every episode began with a similar scenario: a secret tape-recorded message would describe some dire situation in need of the spy team’s special services. And to top it all off, the mysterious voice also warned that the team was on its own—no one would congratulate them if they succeeded, nor would anyone come looking for them if they failed. At the end of the message, the tape self-destructed, and off they went…to save the world.
Now if you were to ask me what an old t.v. show has to do with today’s bible lessons, I’d say, “that’s a very good question.” And here’s my attempt at an answer: I chose Mission Impossible as my sermon title because today, in a very real sense, the Holy Spirit lays before us what appears to be an impossible mission.
Good old James gets us started by holding the mirror of the law right in front of our faces. His words are neither hard to read nor difficult to understand—in short, he commands us to cleanse our hearts and lives of our sinful wisdom, of everything that is earthly, unspiritual, (and) devilish (v. 15). That will make room, he promises, for the wisdom from above which is:
- first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy (v. 17).
Any questions here about what James expects of us? It’s pretty clear. Do you anticipate any problems carrying out his command?
I don’t ever remember a Mission Impossible episode where Peter Graves hit the stop button on the tape recorder…and said, “Nope, can’t do that one!” So, let’s turn to the Gospel to hear what Jesus has to say to us about all of this.
On their walk toward the town of Capernaum, the Lord shares with the disciples a second prediction of his death. Says Jesus, The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days (later)…he will rise again (9:31). It frightens them to hear him talk like that, but they’re also afraid to ask him to explain.
Maybe the disciples are anxious about these awful events that will unfold. Perhaps they are posturing, pushing each other to prove who is the alpha wolf behind Jesus. Who knows? But the Lord scolds them for squabbling about who’s number one, then launches into his object lesson by placing a child in the middle of the room.
Whoever wants to be first, he says, must be last of all and servant of all. In other words, whoever would be the greatest must do so by becoming the least. He also says something like it in Matthew 10:39—Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Jesus offers no “how to” help; he just pulls a kid into the center of the room, points at the child, and says, Do this! So, are there any questions HERE about what Jesus expects of us? Yeah, many of them. Do you anticipate any problems carrying out his command?
See what I mean? Mission Impossible!
How can we hope to become like a child and deal with adult issues like death and debt, disease and despair, disaster and disappointment? Here, we see the tortured beauty behind the question that Nicodemus asks Jesus.
You remember the Gospel story from last week—it’s the cradle for those incredible words: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16).
Nicodemus, a political leader, is intrigued by this Rabbi Jesus. He comes to see the Lord one night and tries to engage him in conversation. But Jesus cuts right to the chase and says some other famous words, Very truly I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again (John 3:3).
Nicodemus asks that focal, foundational, fundamental question that every one of us would have asked: HOW? How can a person enter their mother’s womb and be born again, born from above, born anew? It’s the very same question we want to ask Jesus today . . . HOW? How are we supposed to become like a child?
In a very real sense, Jesus has left us holding a set of impossible missions:
– become like a child…and
– be pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, and without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy…and
– do it, not to be first, but because that’s what God calls us to do.
The trouble is, we can’t “do” any of these—become like a child, be pure, be a true servant of God…nothing—not even a part of it, let alone all of it. But, thanks be to God, there are a couple of things we can do—stop doing one thing and start doing another.
The first may sound a little strange, but here it is, I think, God wants us to stop trying too hard to make sense out of life. In the movie, Hook, Robin Williams plays a grown-up Peter Pan who is faced with a similar crisis. His two children have been kidnapped and taken off to Neverland by the evil Captain Hook. Peter is brought there by Tinkerbell to save his children.
The trouble is that Peter is now a middle-aged lawyer. He can’t function in that dreamland using his imagination anymore—he’s far too sensible for that!
It’s a dilemma because he can’t save his children until he lets go of his rational grip on reality, until he lets a child-like faith help him fly, fight, and have fun. It takes some work, but the children prove to be great teachers!
So, STOP trying too hard. Work instead to let go and let God, to take one day at a time, to pay attention to all that good common-sense stuff we tend to forget. Then we can START doing something. And here Jesus is crystal clear about where we can focus our efforts. He takes that child in his arms and says, Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me (9:37).
Here’s a question for you: What does it mean to welcome a child in Jesus’ name? And how can I do that in my life? There are few greater joys in life than to receive/welcome a child and have that child bless you with a smile...and, if we can believe Jesus, then we can also picture God smiling whenever we welcome one of heaven’s children.
And here is the pay off: we’ll never succeed in our impossible mission to behave, live, even believe as we ought—such is the burden of being at one and the same time, sinner and saint. So we stumble around, at times trying hard to live as we should, and at others just living to care for ourselves—always a little lost, yet also trusting that we’ll always be found.
The good news happens when we stop trying to make ourselves right with God. For then, the Spirit sets us free to start welcoming the children whom God places in our lives—all people who are the last, the lost, the least, and the little. And what joy we’re blessed to know when we help a neighbor, pray for a friend, welcome a child—and through them, welcome our God.
So let’s do these two things—stop trying and start welcoming—certainly because God calls us to and because it’s the right thing to do…but do them especially because there is no better way to bless ourselves and our neighbors than to live as Christ’s servants. That is mission possible. Amen.
Pastor Scott Fuller