Welcome the Children

Mark 9:30-37

September 20, 2015

St. Andrews Scotts Memorial Church

Jerusalem

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.”  Mark 9: 36-37

     Nine months prior to the outbreak of WWII, after Kristallinacht, The Night of Broken Glass in Germany and Austria, a delegation of British Jews and and Quakers appealed to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to allow unaccompanied minors to immigrate. This Refugee Child Movement, Kinder transport, went on for three years from 1938-1949. It involved both individuals of conscience and local groups, both Jewish and Christian. They rescued over 10,000 Jewish children.

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me...”

     The toddler Aylan washed up on the shore last week in his blue shorts and red t-shirt with his shoes still on and no life preserver. He looked more asleep then drowned. He and his brother died off the coast of Turkey. He and his family were trying to get to Europe. His family had fled first from Damascus then Aleppo then Kobani trying to escape the violence of the rebels and the bombs.

Jesus, our Refuge, came from a refugee family fleeing the violence of Herod. They fled to Egypt.

     Aylan’s father had applied for asylum in Canada for Aylan’s medical condition that needed attention and was denied so the family decided to flee to Europe and hope for the best.

     It was only four kilometers from Turkey to Kos, a thirty-minute trip. When the boat capcized his father held onto to him and his brother until he could no longer hold them.

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…”

      He couldn’t hold them any longer. They floated and drifted unto the shore for a photographer to see and make his cry heard around the world for as the Somali poet says,

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark…

You have to understand

no one puts their child in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land.”

     As it turns out the water is not safer than the land but when you are fleeing the mouth of a shark you have nothing to risk but your life.

     There are over 4 million Syrian refugees in five host countries and 15 million more in need of humanitarian assistance. Many of them are refugees from the Yarmouk Camp; refugees from 1948, from Palestine.

     A mother in Canada after seeing the picture of Aylan washed ashore that went viral around the world wrote:

You could have come. There’s room enough in our hearts.

 There’s enough room in this land, in our embarrassment of riches 

for us to imagine you growing up and opening up books 

and bringing creative ideas and forging fresh ideas. 

Our land needed the hope of you, 

Aylan, not a haunting of our collective nightmares.

     This mother saw Him, welcomed little Aylan but many more have not, including Hungry madly building a wall to keep the refugees out or the United States accepting precious few, Israel none.  Iceland said no but then 10,000 people opened their homes. Jordan has taken over 60,000; Turkey over 40,000. Germany is taking 80,000 and trying to encourage other European nations to take more.

     Faced with the tragedy of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers fleeing death (as) victims of war and hunger who are hoping to start a new life, Pope Francis recently reminded us all that “the gospel calls on us and asks us to be the neighbor of the smallest and the most abandoned, to give them concrete hope. He praised and acknowledged that initiatives across Europe had inspired him, comparing them to a biblical miracle in which Jesus heals a deaf and mute man.

     "We have been healed of the deafness of selfishness and the silence of retreating into ourselves," he said. "The closed couple, the closed family, the closed group, the closed parish, the closed country, that comes from us, it has nothing to do with God."

     There is an Irish Proverb that says, “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.” Those giving and offering shelter in 1938 and now are living the welcome that Jesus was trying to illustrate to his disciples.

     They didn’t get the spiritual logic of the last will be first so he grabbed the most vulnerable member of society, a child, and said,

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me…”

      So as we focus our attention now on the seas and watch nightly refugees marching across Europe looking for shelter let us also look to how we treat our children in our home countries.

     In my country, the US, violence against children is at an all time high as the poverty rate soars and schools close due to lack of money. Racial injustice has not diminished but rather increased as people of color especially African American and Arab children and young people continue to be racially profiled and assaulted by the police or like Amhed Mohammad are hauled into custody for the possibility of building a bomb.

     Children here in Israel in our Christian schools are being discriminated against by lack of funds for their Christian schools while children in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem are being targeted for throwing stones literally now by guns and mandatory jail sentences of up to 20 years. Others are kidnapped or terrorized in nightly raids and some even burned alive.

     And others in Gaza are sleeping on dusty mattresses in the rubble of what was their home or limping on their artificial legs or simply still shell shocked from 51 days of bombing. 521 children died last summer and many more are now the walking wounded.

     Jesus picks up all the children----no matter their religious background, income level, legal status, race, or skin color. He holds them close to his heart and invites us to do the same because this where we can find him, the refugee and our refuge; it is where we can find our better more loving selves; it is where we can find the One who sent him.