I had a friend once who unexpectedly and very late in life was blessed with children. He had spent all his life focussing on God without the distraction of children. But, he told me, he had found new ways of praying: being distracted by noisy children was in a mysterious way helping him to focus his worship and his prayers.
For a while now we have had many more children taking part in and enriching our worship, being noisy is how children worship. There is no doubt that this has an impact on how we can worship and how we can pray in this church. As so often we could do worse than listening to the words of Jesus on this matter: ‘“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them’ (Mark 10,14b-16).
The picture is actually a large and very colourful oil painting entitled with these words of Jesus (1910) by the artist Emil Nolde. The light emanating from the children hugged and blessed by Jesus mysteriously illuminates the darkness of the adults who are described as stern in their ignorance. The children reach up to him, excited and full of expectation. What is it that sometimes prevents us from receiving this cleansing illumination of God’s kingdom in our lives?
Bernhard Schünemann
25 June 2017
