What's the Point?

This is the sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, July 19, 2026, drawing from Matthew 19:13-26.

This week I’m starting from a kind of raw, personal place, following a very, very painful encounter with another church and their leaders, and their treatment of children - my own children in particular - in their church space.

I went back and forth a lot this week, wrestling with the Gospel text provided in the lectionary, which was Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, the parable of the weeds and it’s follow-up explanation from Jesus. But the more I wrestled, the more the pain of the last week kept coming back to me, and the more Matthew 19 kept jumping back into mind.

So, I took it as a sign from the Holy Spirit and switched texts. I don’t do it often, but I do do it occasionally!

The incident we experienced isn’t something I will go into detail about here, but I will go so far as to say that it’s indicative of a problem that has been present in many churches - I might even say most churches - for as long as I can remember; the sidelining of children, often in painful, sometimes even violent ways. When I was growing up it was not uncommon for adults to have the opinion that children should be “seen and not heard,” but only when you couldn’t stash them somewhere out of sight too. And as I grew up, went through seminary, and moved into ministry, it was with the expectation, or at least the hope, that churches had moved beyond this kind of palaeolithic thinking. However, as I went through church internships, positions in youth ministry, and even associate pastorships, I discovered that this idea not only persisted, but almost delighted in seeing how many different forms it could take, and yet each of these churches continued to wonder why it was that young people never seemed to come to church.

One congregation I worked with had a system - under which they had operated for decades, if not centuries by that point - whereby after the very first hymn everyone under the age of 18 would be invited forward for a brief message, and then escorted out of the building entirely, taken across the street to a different building, and taken to basement classrooms where they would remain until retrieved by adults after worship had concluded. Three years I sat with this congregation, who simply could not understand from where the youth of the community got the sense that church wasn’t a place where they could feel welcomed.

So…why do we do this? Why do we push the children away, and then wonder where they went?

The answer to that question is precisely why I think the Gospel of Matthew puts these two stories right next to each other. In the first pericope we see the interaction between Jesus and the children. The disciples, being very “on-mission,” and coming right from the much more adult conversation on divorce, don’t take well to parents with children rocking up to Jesus. In particular the children. Now the text isn’t especially clear on why exactly the disciples take to the children like this, and even though this passage appears in two of the other Gospel accounts as well, neither of them add anything substantial to the exchange. However, from what we know historically of that time and place, it’s likely that this wasn’t exactly an egalitarian haven, and both women and children were generally regarded as nuisances and/or property with an unfortunate penchant for getting awfully uppity.

At the same time, the disciples are working here. They’re trying to build a movement, trying to organize a major social and political organization around this up and coming rabbi who they strongly suspect to be the Messiah. And kids, well….kids have a particularly bad habit of not caring in the slightest about anything other than having fun. Kids will run around screaming during the sermon, kick balls through windows, climb on breakable objects and structures, and then scream even louder when said structures break violently. They have no conception of sacred objects or spaces, no sense of decorum, and are about as far from “peaceful” as somebody can get without a generous selection of firearms.

Just think of what could happen if there were children running around!

Of course, Jesus says his piece on this, emphasizing the central importance of kids, but it’s no coincidence that immediately afterward we have this rich young man so. locked up in his refusal to let go of worldly possessions, so locked in his fear of losing what he has, that the kingdom of heaven seems perpetually beyond his reach.

Think about those two ideas together, for a moment.

Kids - bane of breakable objects and treasured possessions everywhere - are those to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs. And the rich young man, desperate to be saved, desperate to find his way into that selfsame kingdom, can’t reach it because he’s so unable, so unwilling, to let go of his attachment to worldly possessions.

In all those churches I served at over the years, when I would inevitably ask why the children couldn’t be present in the worship space, I would always get the same kind of answers.

• “We don’t want the service (or the sermon) to be disrupted”

• “We have such a nice sanctuary. What would happen if a kid started running around and broke something?”

• “This is a sacred space. We can’t have playing, or yelling, or disorder here!”

But in all those responses, all I ever heard was the same thing, again, and again, and again.

The grief of the rich young man, who couldn’t let go of his ephemeral, worldly possessions, and embrace the real kingdom of heaven made manifest in the innocent, irreverent, playful joy of children.

A church that truly seek the kingdom of heaven, a church that truly wants to be as Jesus would have us all be, is going to be a truly messy place. There will be loud noises. There will be breakage. There will be stains, damage, and disruptions. There will be much disorder.

But there will be joy.

The kingdom of heaven belongs to the children because they aren’t wrapped up in things. Kids are only interested in playing, being happy, and loving each other, which is both joyous and messy in profoundly equal measure.

Which is why church is meant to embrace disorder. Not eliminate it, or sideline it.

Embrace it.

Churches that expel their children, or worse punish them, in order to prioritize the comfort of adults, the sanctity of church property, or the abstract idea of a peaceful, sacred space, will have exactly what they strive to get, as so many churches are finding today.

Great and beautiful buildings, filled with many well-protected items of sacred value, standing empty and alone.

As quiet as an empty tomb, because Jesus has gone off into the sunlight to play with the kids.

And what’s the point of a church like that?