I want to try a little experiment with you this evening. It’s a series of questions devised by Anderson Consulting Worldwide particularly aimed at the so-called ‘professional’. I’ll read it out just as I received it:

The following short quiz consists of four questions and will tell you whether you are qualified to be a “professional”. The answers are NOT that difficult.

1.     How do put a giraffe into a refrigerator?

The correct answer is: Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and close the door.

This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way.

2.     How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?

Did you say, “Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant, and close the refrigerator?” (Wrong answer)

Correct Answer: Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant, and close the door.

This tests your ability to think through the repercussions of your previous actions.

3.     The Lion King is hosting an animal conference. All the animals attend except one. Which animal does not attend?

Correct Answer: The Elephant. The elephant is in the refrigerator. You just put him in there. This tests your memory.

OK, even if you did not answer the first three questions correctly, you still have one more chance to show your true abilities.

4.     There is a river you must cross but it is inhabited by crocodiles. How do you get across?

Correct Answer: You swim across! All the crocodiles are attending the animal conference. This tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.

According to Anderson Consulting Worldwide, around 90% of the professionals they tested got all questions wrong. But many pre-school children got several correct answers. This conclusively disproves the theory (it says) that most professional have the brains of a four year old!’

The readings we had this evening are not specific Harvest readings; they are simply the readings according to our lectionary and I decided to leave them as they are. How many sermons have you heard about ‘becoming as little children’? I’m sure quite a few. It’s always fascinated me, because little children can often be quite horrible! What about all these figures in the public eye who say they are giving it all up to spend more time with the family, when the truth is if you have a family that’s the last place you want to be! A member of our choir used always to say that ‘children’ should come ready-wrapped at 25 years of age! Maybe I’m being a bit facetious, but you get my drift! So, what’s Jesus on about here in Mark’s Gospel? Honesty and trust and obedience and innocence are all words which are thrown around at this point, when they’re not always the first words that come to my mind when I think about these precious little things!

First of all Mark 10: 13-16 says a lot about Jesus himself. He was ‘resolutely’ on the way to Jerusalem, and, indeed, the cross. He knew it. Its cruel shadow can never have been far from his mind. But it was at such a time like this that he had time to take the children in his arms and smile at them and play with them and bless them. ‘Let them come to me’…’cause they wanted to come to him! And Jesus is saying, how uncomplicated you are! We are grown ups in a crazy up-side world, we know what it’s really like, we’ve experienced life, but you, you are uncomplicated. How I wish you could stay that way.

When the scale of the Tsunami hit South East Asia and famine in Africa seemed to be worse than ever, and now an earthquake devastates the Asian continent, there are, and were, a lot of theological questions being thrown about. I remember Canon Tom Wright say here in Belfast, ‘If we think we have solved the issues raised by the tsunami, then we must have got the question wrong’. Which is really just a clever way of saying, ‘we don’t have all the answers’; we see through a glass dimly. Life would be so easy, wouldn’t it, if it were just black and white, but you know and I know that it is not? And, I’m sure that is exactly what Jesus was saying to these wonderful kids. I wish you would always be so uncomplicated; I wish we could all see the world through uncomplicated eyes.

I remember when ‘granddad’ (my father) died in our family, and even in the same year our pet dog was killed on the main road up there, the kids in our house, saddened as they were, just accepted that granddad was in heaven – there was no issue! No problem! Do we over-complicate things too much? Surely, however, we are meant to use the brains God gave us! But the problem there is that I think we can intellectualise things out of existence. We can delve so far in to different matters to the point that they become meaningless. That’s very Biblical, you know; just look up Ecclesiastes: the teacher or the philosopher!

If we all saw the world through the eyes on a child, whatever catastrophe may befall the world, or us, all we would be required to do is to know God, to love God and to follow God; ‘for this is the whole duty of man’.

The truth is that when it comes to trying to understand our world and the universe; we are only scratching the surface. Truly. We really don’t understand how things grow, how things work, we are not autonomous, we can’t control the hurricanes, the earthquakes, and to a very large extent, we can’t help ‘growing up’, for goodness sake! We start to want to have meat and not just milk, as spiritual food.

When it comes to Harvest, we realise how incredibly fortunate we are. Although we do not quite understand it, we know now that we receive a huge abundance of food when most of the world does not. That’s not just a matter of giving thanks to a wondrous God for what we have; it’s a matter of making sure that it is shared to those who have not.

That’s uncomplicated; that is the perspective of a child. I wish it were all that simple; I wish it were all so uncomplicated. Sometimes, do we not need to look at our world through uncomplicated eyes?