Tuesday, August 12, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Army of children … No right
Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.
In the gospel Jesus insists on humility and the innocence of children, after the first reading blesses the preliminary military movements of Joshua.
Be brave and steadfast; have no fear or dread of these nations before you. The Lord your God marches with you, and he will never fail or forsake you.
Moses speaks of entering the land of plenty, the Promised Land, Canaan. God’s chosen people have come at last to home God has chosen for them. This is Israel by the sea, full of milk and honey … and also full of people. Joshua and his army must move the people out wo are already living there to make room for their own families and insure a safe haven for future generations.
In the hundreds of generations since those days, nothing has changed. Today’s weapons, wielded by today’s Israelis, insist on making room.
The Nazis called it lebensraum, literally “living space,” an ideology crafted to justify their territorial ambitions. But Germans rarely felt the insecurity of living as strangers in strange lands with no place to call home, no safe haven, nowhere to raise their families as citizens or bury their ancestors in graves they could freely visit years later. Not so the Jews, and those who claim Zionism as their ideology will have none of that ever again. (And of course, not so either the Palestinians.)
During the Civil War, forcefields of violence crushed men and animals, buildings and crops. What was God thinking then? What is God thinking now? Where have all the flowers gone? In fear-ridden judgments leaders mostly turn away from gentility, generosity, gratitude, and grace. They lead their “chosen people” from hearts and minds closed to the message of Jesus.
Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven. And whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me.
In our small Austin world two things happened yesterday: school started for our boys Miles and Jasper, and Andi spent the day teaching art classes there as well. About 30 minutes after school was dismissed for the day, four miles south at a Target store parking lot, two adults and a child were shot and killed by a 32-year-old man who then stole and wrecked two cars before he was tazed and arrested by Austin police.
On Sundays Austin police officers patrol our Grace Covenant Church parking lot, while two security guards stand along the walls inside the services. A friendly armed guard watches over Austin Classical School during days when school is in session. And of course, there are the angels.
Whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me. I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.
Guardian angels do not guarantee protection for our bodies, nor do Austin police. Always, however, there is more, and we know it, when we too “look upon the face of our heavenly Father,” on the face of the Father of Lights, the One who makes us to love us. Forgetting that face is all too easy when wars and shootings, floods and famines catch any available headline. Our God just seems too small.
But we are wrong. What is God thinking? This is a question we have no right to ask, not until we “become as little children.”
Teach us your ways, O Lord, guide us to choose the way of truth. Water new seeds inside us of a rebirth of wonder and lead us in the way everlasting.
(Deuteronomy 31, Deuteronomy 32, Matthew 11, Matthew 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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