Who is the Greatest? Mathew 18.1-5, Romans 13:8-10   September 4, 2005

It was going to be one of Rabbit's busy days. As soon as he woke up he felt important, as if everything depended upon him. It was just the day for Organizing Something, or for Writing a Notice Signed Rabbit, or for Seeing What Everybody Else Thought About It. It was a perfect morning for hurrying round to Pooh, and saying, "Very well, then, I'll tell Piglet," and then going to Piglet, and saying, "Pooh thinks - but perhaps I'd better see Owl first." It was Captainish sort of day, when everybody said, "Yes, Rabbit," and "No, Rabbit," and waited until he had told them.

"After all," said Rabbit to himself, "Christopher Robin depends on Me. He's fond of Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore, and so am I, but they haven't any Brain. Not to notice. And he respects Owl, because you can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count. And Kanga is too busy looking after Roo, and Roo is too young and Tigger is too bouncy to be any help, so there's really nobody but Me, when you come to look at it.

It was a Captainish sort of day. The subject had come up. Presumably somebody feeling very Captainish decided to test his hypothesis about his own worth with his colleagues as they tramped along the dusty paths of Galilee. Who is the greatest? Matthew's version is discreet about why this question was asked but in the versions in Mark and Luke there is agreement that there was an argument going on among them about who actually was the greatest. In other words it was not just a philosophical debate.  

Rabbit had put it differently when he argued that he was the one most needed, the one depended upon but the argument is essentially the same. The Disciples could have been thinking that the greatest would be the one most needed, the one Jesus depended on the most.   What a shock it must have been when Jesus called a little girl over and said (never mind who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven) unless you become like this little girl you won't even get into the kingdom of heaven.  Now what is the essential difference between adults and children? Children depend on adults. adults do not depend on children. Children depend on adults for everything. Adults can take care of themselves. Children need help. Rabbit had it all wrong. Being the most needed was not the way to greatness. Rather, what is needed is knowing what is needed, what is needed is knowing how much we need God.

God does not need us. We already belong to God. Our lives are in God whether we know it yet or not. Children do not think about how their lives are a gift to them, they just live everyday receiving the gift. They live out the truth they do not yet know. Someone once said that we don't know who discovered water but we are pretty sure it wasn't a fish. It is a profound irony that the most essential reality of human life is the very thing we are unable to see. Buechner said one time the greatest mystery for us is us for no matter how much we examine ourselves there is always something missing. No matter how much of yourself you are able to objectify and examine, the quintessential, living part of yourself will always elude you, i.e., the part that is conducting the examination. Thus you do not solve the mystery, you live the mystery. And you do that not by fully knowing yourself but by fully being yourself.  

How interesting then that this is precisely what children do. They are fully being themselves. They don't know any other way to be yet. Perhaps Jesus wants to say that in the kingdom of heaven you will be who you are. And who we are is simple. We are children of God dependent on God for life. It is when we forget that that we get lost. It is when we forget this truth that is so basic that we overlook it that we squander the gift itself. I picked up a beautiful little book at the library this week. It is a recent collection of poems by Czelaw Milosz. (Poetry fans will probably recognize his name.) He has won many honors and prizes for his poetry. He wrote this poem in his 90th year still exploring the boundaries of the human experience not resting on his laurels. Listen to this:

Late Ripeness

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,

I felt a door opening in me and I entered

the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,

like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas

assigned to my brush came closer,

ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people, grief and pity joined us.

We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division

into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part

of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—

a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel

staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us,

waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,

as are all men and women living at the same time,

whether they know it or not.

Greatness comes from God. It is measured in human beings not by how much we are needed but by how much we know what we need. It is measured not by power or success or importance or status but by humility and humility is simply being who we are. Humility lives out a grateful and generous life because by God's grace we have become aware somehow (we know without knowing) that life is a gift and that everything we have has been given to us no matter how hard we worked for it. We are not humble when we say we are. We are humble when we are fully who we are—the children of God.

Paul said we owe no one anything but love. In the sacrament we bring the only thing we really have to offer God and that is our love and devotion, our gratitude and our hope. When God lives in us the love of God lives there too and the love of God will live in us only so long as love as practiced, used for others. Such is the nature of love and such is the connection between the rite and every day life. The only love we get to keep is the love we give away and the more love we do the more it becomes who we are. What we practice we become. We are what we love. In this holy sacrament we practice receiving God's gift of love and grace and if it is to go on living in us it will be because we offer our own selves as those who live graciously and generously love and serve the world in God's name. Our life is not our own. We belong to God. These are not just words. This is who we are.   

It is interesting that the more God lives in us and the more we live in God the more we are fully ourselves and the more God there is in us the more humble we become. This may be partly what Jesus meant when he said that the more we lose our self-importance the more we will find ourselves in God.  Who is the greatest? The one who needs God more.

One last story: The master told his disciple he didn't need God enough. The disciple said that he couldn't need God more at which the master grabbed his disciple and threw him in the river and held his head under water until the disciple was desperately struggling to free himself. Finally the master let him go and the disciple came out of the water gasping for air and the master said to him, "When you need God as much as you needed that breath of air then you will know what it means to need God."