Our scripture this morning is from Matthew chapter 18 verses 1 to 14. I welcome you to follow along in your Bible or you can find the passage printed on page 8 of your bulletin. This is God's word. At that time, the disciples came to Jesus saying, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me. But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world for temptations to sin. For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes. And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes, to be thrown into the hell of fire. See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven, their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if it finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than all the 99 that never went astray. So it is not the will of my father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever. I like it when Bobby reads, because we don't have to change the height of the stand. All right, if you're joining us for the first time today, or you're just now paying attention, we are in the middle of a sermon series on the Gospel of Matthew. So far, we have studied Jesus's birth, we have read about his ethical and theological teachings, we have watched as he has healed and fed those who come to him for need and guidance, Today we will consider a collection of Jesus's teachings about humility, social status, and greatness in the kingdom of heaven. Flannery O'Connor was a world-renowned author who wrote in the American South in the early 1900s. In her short story, Revelation, Flannery O'Connor writes about a woman named Mrs. Turpin. Mrs. Turpin is sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office, small town, because her husband has an abscess on his leg. But her mind begins to wander, and she starts to look at the people in the waiting room, evaluating them and ranking them in her mind. Here's how that will jump into the story now. Mrs. Turpin could not see the woman's feet. She was not white trash. She was just common. Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night by naming the classes of people. At the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them. Then next, not above, just to the side, were the white trash. Then above them were home and landowners, which she and Cloud belonged. Above them, her and Cloud, were the people with a lot of money, much bigger houses, and much more land. Now, I'm sure many of you are rightly appalled by Mrs. Turpin. She is not the kind of person you want to be, this gross classification of people by color and class. But here's the beautiful thing about Flannery O'Connor's writing. Whenever you're disgusted by one of her characters, she's really just holding the mirror up to you. All of us have a little bit of Mrs. Turpin in us. We walk around every day categorizing and classifying ourselves and other people. You see, we're uneasy with ourselves. We're uncomfortable with who we are. And so, we try to grab some semblance of control. We try to give ourselves some sort of value, some love, by classifying ourselves, and then classifying other people, and ranking them. And as long as we're just a little bit better than someone else, we think maybe we can matter. Maybe we're not just another forgettable face. We might not be the best at our job, but at least I'm not that guy over there, playing games on his work computer. I may not be the best student, but at least I'm not that know-it-all. I may not have the nicest house, but at least I'm not like the snobs over there in their McMansions. Living as if everyone around you is reducible to a social label or category, living as if you're constantly being evaluated in a social competition is exhausting. When we live in this way, our whole life is a competition with everyone else around us. Our whole life is a performance in which we must convince other people that we matter. And when we live this way, it is slavery. It is slavery to social status, and it is slavery to the self. But there is good news. Today in Matthew, we will see that God's love sets us free from slavery to social status and it empowers us to live a childlike humility. We will see that God's love breaks us free from slavery to social status and empowers us to live a life of childlike humility. Point number one, the kingdom of heaven is an upside down kingdom. In verse one, we read, at that time, the disciples came to Jesus saying, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? The disciples rightly understood that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was the king that God would bring to earth to establish a new kingdom called the kingdom of heaven. But they were wrong about the nature of this kingdom. They thought that the kingdom of heaven was kind of just like the kingdom of earth. with its same social structures, with its same pursuit of glory and competition. They thought the kingdom of heaven was like the kingdom of earth, just a bit nicer. You know, better roads, less potholes. In Jesus's world, in first century Palestine, when you went to a dinner party, you sat according to social ranking. If you were a person of high status, you sat close to the host. The lower your status, the further from the host you sat. And so just picking your seat at a social gathering meant having an astute awareness of your own social status and that of all the other guests. And so the disciples come to Jesus with these assumptions about reality. They assume these hierarchies. And so Jesus cannot just respond with a simple, be humble. He has to break their framework. He has to shake up their worldview with a revolutionary lens. And so he responds with a parable. A parable is a picture or a metaphor. In verse two we read, and calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like a child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. It is very difficult to determine exactly what this child represents. Does he represent curiosity, innocence? Does he represent humility? Does he represent a wonder or maybe even an aloofness to the social hierarchy? I think it's even more difficult to understand once we look at this word turn in verse two, unless you turn and become like children. In the Greek translation of this word, sorry, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, This word and its grammar usually mean return or turn again. So I think our best translation based on the context of what's going on here is that Jesus says, unless you become a child again, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. But how do we become children again? None of us own time machines, I think, and it would be difficult. Further, we can't just become innocent like children. We are adults, most of us. We have adult problems. We need to be aware of social categories. We have responsibilities and jobs. Jesus is asking us to do the impossible. Like unscrambling an egg or trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. This reminds me of another upside down phrase that Jesus uses about the kingdom when he says in the gospel of John, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Jesus speaks like this in these paradoxes, in these upside down pictures, because he's not trying to just give us new information. He's trying to tear down and build back up our worldview. Imagine the kingdom of heaven is like a new civilization we discover on Venus or Mercury, where the people sleep during the day and they work during the night, where they walk around on their hands and they eat with their feet, where no means yes and yes means no. How would you prepare for this trip? None of the books you have or the maps you have would work. Nothing from this current culture would translate. So you would have to use this language you know and this world you know to construct new categories for a world that you can't even imagine. And that's what Jesus is trying to do for his disciples with this metaphor, this picture of the child. He's trying to help the disciples break down these hierarchies, these things that they have in their mind of value and totally rebuild their sets of values. How are we supposed to imagine a kingdom where children are kings and kings are children? How are we supposed to imagine a kingdom where the first is last and the last is first? How do we understand an upside down kingdom? Well, the first step is humility. We must humbly admit that we cannot understand this kingdom. Sin has made our minds small. It has dimmed our imaginations. Rather, we must come to God, sorry, rather than come to God assuming we understand him, assuming we understand his value system, we must come to God saying, please bring me into your kingdom and teach me your laws, teach me your ways. We enter the kingdom as children, understanding that we do not understand. welcomed into the kingdom, not because we are of high status, not because we are skilled, but because the Father loves us. Point number two, Jesus gives us his status and his justice. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that you embraced this upside down kingdom, that you've joined a kingdom where children are kings and kings are children. You still might have some objections, though. You might say, well, yeah, Jesus, I get that, but I live in America, right? I don't live in this upside-down kingdom yet. I have a job, I have kids. I have to be aware of these things. I have to fight for social status. How else do I get promoted? How else do I pay my rent in Ann Arbor? I'll lose my friends if I start acting this way. Those are very real concerns, and I think that's why Jesus gives these promises. or I'm gonna call them gifts to children in verses five through six. First, Jesus gives them the gift of his status. Read verse five with me. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus makes it pretty clear that these promises to the little ones and those like children are also promises to his disciples. He'll call his disciples little ones. And so, if we take those promises and we consider the text today, we should note that this is a promise not only for literal little children, or the lowly and the humble, because it is that, but it is also a promise to Jesus's disciples, those who have made themselves low and humble like children. So Jesus says to them, you have no status to protect you in this world. So here, take mine. People will bless you because you know me. People will give you things, bless you in ways, even though they don't know that you're a Christian. They may not know that you come in the name of Christ, and they may not know why they're blessing you, but Jesus promises you those blessings. Second, Jesus gives the children his justice. In verses six and nine, we read, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believes in me to sin, It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. Throughout the Old Testament, both fire and water represent divine justice come to bear in human history. In Genesis, where the origin of these images appears, the flood is the key image of water, and fire at Sodom. But the Psalms and the prophets also pick up these metaphors, these images of justice, and develop them. And so really the whole Old Testament is soaked with images of fire and water, And Jesus is using these images, these visceral hyperbolic images to help his disciples understand the upside down nature of his kingdom. A kingdom where no amount of glory or prosperity or power is worth the life of a child. Jesus has totally identified himself with the lowly and the humiliated of this world in our text today. He says, I will give them my status. I will avenge them when people take advantage of them. When nations make military alliances, an attack on one nation is a declaration of war upon them all. In the same way, Jesus allies himself with the children, with the lowly, with his disciples. And an attack on them is an attack on the creator of the universe. A gift to one of these is a gift to the king of heaven. Becoming a child again has very real consequences. If we embrace this paradox of Jesus, if we become children again, people will look at us differently. we will lose status in their minds. Our refusal to play social games will probably hurt our careers and hurt our popularity. We will probably expose ourselves to harm and injustice. Children are among the most vulnerable in our societies. In order to grow into adulthood, they need the protection and provision of adults. So if we become children, if we stand alongside the most vulnerable and humble in our society, we will expose ourselves to harm and even destruction. We will ourselves need protection. People will take advantage of us. People will use our humility for their own advantage, and people will use us to do the dirty jobs they don't want to do because they will perceive childlike humility as weakness and ignorance. But that's why Jesus gives us these two gifts. The gifts of his status and the gifts of his justice. We will lose something when we become children, but we will also gain the blessings of Christ. People will bless us because of our association with him. They will bless us even if they don't realize that they are blessing us on his behalf. And when we receive violence, insult and injury, because we have lowered ourselves in status, because we have become children again, God promises that no injustice will go unpunished. In the end, there is perfect justice. And no violence done to us or to any child will go unanswered. But vengeance is not ours. That's part of what it means to become a child. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, to our Father. And so we give it to Him. Point number three, God's arbitrary love gives us absolute value. I recognize I'm on dangerous territory calling God's love arbitrary. So before you gather your torches and pitchforks, let me explain myself. You don't need to run me out of town just yet. In verse 10, we read, see that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven, their angels always see the face of my father who is in heaven. This thought in verse 10 links all that came before it, these teachings about childlike humility, these warnings about divine judgment and divine blessing. It connects all of that to what comes afterwards, this parable of the sheep. The parable begins in verse 12, where we read, what do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep and one goes astray, does he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? Notice that phrase, does he not? That's a common way in Greek to introduce a rhetorical question, a question in which you know the answer. Jesus is not saying that this shepherd is unique or heroic. The point is that this shepherd is normal. He's doing what every other shepherd would do. Of course, a shepherd goes after the one lost sheep. But isn't that silly? Isn't that absurd? Wouldn't the shepherd be better off like cutting his losses and building a better fence for next year? Why chase down this one sheep? And Jesus actually points out this absurdity. I'm not just making it up. And look in verse 13. And if he finds it, truly I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the 99 that never went astray. The shepherd's love is arbitrary. It is not based in the economic value of the lamb or in a careful calculation of risk versus reward. A shepherd loves his sheep because they are under his care. Because they are under his care. Then Jesus makes the jump from the shepherd to God. He says this, so it is not the will of my father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. Now only Jesus can say such an audacious thing. Only Jesus, who is God and man, can say that God's love for the little children, the low status people, is the same as a shepherd's arbitrary love for his sheep. Let me give you a real life example of this. This one, it was printed in the Christian Century Magazine in 2001. A young man was working for a company that operated a large, total confinement swine farm. One day, he detected symptoms of a disease among some of the feeder pigs. As a teen, he had raised pigs himself, so he knew how to treat the animals. But the company's policy was to kill any diseased animals with a blow to the head. The profit margin was considered too small to allow for the treatment of individual animals. So the employee decided to come in on his own time with his own medicine, and he cured the animals. The management's response was to fire him on the spot for violating company policy. Now, why did this young man risk his job to cure a sick pig on his own time and with his own money? That is not a rational decision. that is an arbitrary love. There's nothing lovely or remarkable about one sick pig that would demand a man's attention, let alone his job. And yet the pig was under his care, and he loved it because it needed him. We who have grown up in the age of economists and accountants and engineers, not picking on you, It's reality, we live in a math-based society. We have a hard time understanding the shepherd's love, and the young man's love for these pigs. We might think they are irrational, they don't make good business sense. But Jesus understood their love, and so does our Father in heaven. Because their love is arbitrary. There's nothing remarkable about you or me, or any human, that would demand God's attention, that would demand his affection. And yet, from all of eternity, the creator of the universe chose to love us. He loves us only because he chooses to love us. and he is not forced, he is not coerced. There's no social obligation on God to love us. He loves us because he loves us. And because God's love is arbitrary, there's nothing you or I can do to earn it or to lose it. If you become a child again, if you lose all of your status, if you lose your job, you lose your finances, your friends, your spouse, none of that can remove you from God's love. because none of that earned you his love to begin with. You could never be too immoral or too righteous or too self-righteous to lose the love of God. That love is what motivated God to become a man, to become humble and lowly in all the ways that humans are humble and lowly. To be born into a poor family, to an unmarried woman, in shame and social stigma. This love also motivated him to teach and to be misunderstood, to be mocked even. This is the love that brought him to the cross, where he was executed under false allegations to satisfy the crazed fury of a mob. And it is this love that held him on the cross when he could have called an army of angels to take him down so that he could bear our sin and shame and the wrath of God on the cross so that he could exchange his perfect life for our sinful life. It was that love, the love of an arbitrary shepherd that kept him on the cross. And it is this love today that calls to us, saying, so it is not the will of my father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. Jesus invites us to become children again and to enter his kingdom through faith. In the introduction, I said that God's love breaks us free from slavery to social status and empowers us to live a life of childlike humility. In verses one through four, we saw that God's kingdom is an upside down kingdom. And if we hope to understand it, we must embrace a new upside down way of thinking. In verses five through nine, we saw that Jesus assures us that we will expose ourselves to danger, but he gives us a promise of his justice and his status. And in verses 10 through 14, Jesus showed us that God's love is arbitrary. Therefore, our accomplishments and our social status have nothing to do with the ultimate value that God gives us as beloved children. I would like to now return to Mrs. Turpin. When we last saw her, she was in the doctor's office categorizing people by color and class. But after a rather nasty experience that shocks her, she ends up back home finishing her farm chores. As she washes out the pig pen, she receives a vision from heaven. She saw the streak as vast, as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from earth to heaven through a field of living fire. Upon it, a vast horde of souls were rumbling towards heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives. and bands of colored people in white robes and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Cloud, had always had a little bit of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity. accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. She could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment, the vision faded, but she remained where she was, immobile. We have not received a vision of heaven today, but we have received the word of God. May it make us children again. Please pray with me.