Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67; Psalm 45:11-18; Romans 7:15-25; Matthew 11:6-9, 25-30
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
In his book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum offers a list of sixteen things that he learned:
1. Share everything.
2. Play fair.
3. Don’t hit people.
4. Put things back where you found them.
5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS. (He puts that in all caps!)
6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
7. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody. (Again, his caps not mine.)
8. Wash your hands before you eat.
9. Flush.
10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11. Live a balanced life—learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
12. Take a nap every afternoon.
13. When you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
15. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup—they all die. So do we.
16. And then remember the Dick and Jane books and the first word you learned—the biggest word of all—LOOK. (Again, him)
“Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.
Think what a better world it would be if all—the whole world—had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap. Or, if all governments had a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”
Fulghum’s words are touching and endearing: Cookies and milk and holding hands—that does sound like a better world. Often, we look back upon our childhood and remember it with a certain nostalgia. Things seemed simpler back then. And maybe they were. We didn’t have the pressures and stress we experience now. The world was a bit smaller (in a good way) and a lot less scary. I wonder if the adults of my childhood felt the same way?
I remember participating in disaster drills as a child, learning about a frightening new epidemic called AIDS, my mother pointing out the fallout shelter at the county courthouse, seeing the Ku Klux Klan protesting the public swimming pool. Social Media did not exist, and the nightly news didn’t have such a catastrophic spin, but the world was still in turmoil than as it is now. Yet somehow, those fears didn’t seem to grip society the way catastrophes and wars, pandemics and violence seem to hold us today.
In striving for greater knowledge and better technology, how many of the lessons from kindergarten have we forgotten? We don’t seem to live balanced lives—we work too hard and spend way too much time on screens. We become obsessed with how many macros we’ve eaten and feel guilty when we splurge on a warm cookie. We’ve forgotten how to run and play, much less approach the world with wonder and curiosity. We don’t LOOK anymore, we just assume.
I wonder if this isn’t exactly what Jesus is trying to tell us this morning. “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants…” We are the wise and the intelligent. We have accumulated knowledge, mastered information, and tried to explain almost everything. Yet in doing so, we often miss the revelation of God unfolding all around us. We simply can no longer see it. We have hidden it from ourselves.
Jesus chooses to reveal himself as the way, the truth, and the life and it is children who receive it most willingly. Not because adults can’t, but because we’ve already forgotten almost everything we learned in kindergarten.
This Gospel passage makes me think of all the ways Scripture points us toward children: Jesus is presented in the Temple as an infant, inspiring hope and revelation in two of the oldest members of the community—Simeon and Anna; As a pre-teen he stays behind in the Temple because he cannot help but talk about his Father’s work; later, as an adult, he tells the disciples, “Let the little children come to me for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To truly know Jesus is not in the studying of doctrine and theology but in the embracing of the mystery of God just as a child might do.
It is about coming to this place as seekers, full of wonder and awe—not full of answers—because it is about resisting easy answers, especially the temptation to believe we’ve found the final answer, the perfect answer. And instead we are invited to wrestle with the world and the Word, recognizing that the way we understand both today may be very different from how we understand them years from now. When it comes to knowing Jesus, wisdom and intelligence will only take us so far. The deeper truth is much simpler. We learned it in Sunday School all those many years ago:
Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong
They are weak but he is strong
We can hear all the fancy words of Paul talking about doing the very thing we hate and sin dwelling in us, even calling ourselves wretched. “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” We know exactly what he means. We all carry that same struggle within us. We know what is right, yet we fail to do it. We know what is good, yet we fall short. Knowledge alone cannot save us.
Paul’s answer isn’t more information or greater wisdom. His answer is the same simple truth children learn in Sunday School: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” God rescues us because God loves us.
That is the mystery we cannot solve. We can spend a lifetime trying to reason our way into God’s love, but faith has never been about possessing all the answers. Jesus tells us that he has “hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent”. Faith is about trust. It is the willingness to look with wonder on the face of God in the world around us before we ever even try to explain it.
What a better world it would be if we had cookies and milk, took a nap every afternoon, cleaned up after ourselves, held on to one another, and trusted that Jesus really does love us. Just as we learned when we were children.
Amen