Children of God

First Sunday After Pentecost
Trinity Sunday


The Epistle:  Romans 8:12-17
Life and peace.* Good life.  We are invited to access it by freeing ourselves to be open to and led by the Spirit of God to become children of God (Romans 8: 14 NRSV).  Through our Western lens, to become spirit-focused seems to ignore the real world and to become a child almost seems to be a condescension, but are either of these fears accurate?

In our culture, we tend to see childhood as the time to learn to be an adult, as if adulthood is the apex of life.  We may see childhood as a time of innocence, of naughtiness and/or of incompleteness.  The Bible has a distinctive understanding of childhood:  Surely there are ordinary children who walk through the pages of the biblical stories (White) but many spirituality movements in the Old Testament began with a child:  Joseph, Moses' sister, Samuel, Naaman's wife's servant girl, David, Daniel, to name a few.  In the New Testament children is a common motif of Christian believers;  We are taught to pray, beginning, "Our Father..."

Perhaps the greatest question to ponder is the destiny of a child?  Is it to become an adult?  Or, according to the Bible, here, is it to become in close relationship with God?   Is the child an incomplete adult or is the child an image of one in closest relationship with God in Spirit?  Here in Romans, we are invited to become as a child to enter into the Spirit of God.

As a teacher, I often sense the younger the child, the more quickly he or she is willing to listen to me, to seek what I have to share, to take my hand, to build a relationship with me.  They seek what character I will model, what matters to me;  They try to sense the world through my eyes and ears.  And, most daunting, they seek to please me through their words and deeds.  That can be almost too great a responsibility for a mere human.  But what if God is the teacher?

If we enfold such receptivity to relationship with God, we are drawn to the Spirit of God and the natural reaction is to act, here and now, in this world and beyond, from the Spirit of God, serving those around us.  In the field of child theology we speak of "child capacity"--- here, the capacity to love and serve God.  In the Bible, many children's stories speak of receptivity to relationship with God. In what ways do we support, sustain and enhance a child's tendency to be with God?  In what ways do we set aside the reservations we have gathered along our life's journey to trust God fully, to be receptive to relationship with and in Him?

* Romans 8: 6
White, Keith J.  Childhoods in Cultural Context.  Malaysia Baptist Theological Seminary, Compassion International and the Global Alliance for Advancing Holistic Child Development. 2011.  Accessed May 29, 2012:  http://www.hcd-alliance.org/resources/lang/sp/doc_details/126-childhoods-in-cultural-contexts-keith-white