There is an old adage I’m fond of quoting that says, “When you go to a school, how you can you tell who’s the Principal?”

And the answer is, “They’re the person who’s pushing the chairs back in place after the meeting.” 

Maybe it’s because I have known a school principal first hand, and she’s like that. 

I suppose I’m also thinking of Mrs. Maguire, the principal at Julian Curtiss, here in town, where our girls went to elementary school.  

For years, on Sunday afternoons, when I was out walking the dogs, on snow days when we went sledding on that hill by the little observatory, or in the middle of summer when we were heading over to my in-laws to grill burgers and swat mosquitoes, you could always see Mrs. Maguire’s car parked on the ellipse in front of the school, and lights in her office, shining brightly.

It reminds me of my father when I was young, who loved to go into the office on Sundays because it was the only time when the phone wasn’t ringing, and he could actually get things done.  

As many of you know, the familiar mental image many people have of being in charge – all the perqs and privileges and deference – are only a small part of the picture when it comes to being in charge.  

Mostly, it’s a lot less glamorous.  

Along those lines, it’s obvious enough what Jesus must mean when he says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” (v. 35)

The work to which he summons us is often far from glamorous, and yet, part of taking responsibility for the world means becoming someone who stays behind to push in the chairs. 

It is just one among all the other necessary tasks that quietly support the making of a life together. 

In fact, I wonder if Jesus’ even more famous words about children are trying to make the same point.  

You know this part.  

Jesus, frustrated with how the disciples don’t seem to get it, goes and picks up a child and brings it into their circle.  

Then he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (v. 37)

It is a beautiful, inspiring image, except for one thing.  

You see, I know children. Actual children.  

We have two of them, ourselves.  

Bear with me a second on this. 

The other day, I saw an online article about a panda bear being flown from China to Japan, where it was going to live in a zoo. 

And supposedly, rather than put the panda in a cage in the cargo hold, they put it in business class in a diaper, like any other rock star.  

Its handler clicked its seatbelt. Handed it some bamboo shoots to snack on.  

That was it.  

I think it is a hoax, though an appealing one, for sure.  

It made me remember the first time we were taking our own baby human on a plane. 

And our beloved pediatrician said to us, “Now, I’m not saying you should dose your infant with Benadryl to make it through your flight, but if I were saying that, it just so happens that the correct dose would be….”

We were horrified, of course, but we dutifully took notes and grudgingly packed the Benadryl. 

We got on the plane, and before the main door was even closed, we realized that our doctor hadn’t given us a prescription. 

It was more like a lifeboat off the Titanic.  

If your kids are different, and that sounds bizarre, God bless.  Truly. 

Now, getting back to Jesus, it may be that when he saw children, he imagined something like a bunch of pandas, sitting in business class, quietly enjoying their bamboo shoots as the plane wings its way east.  

But I take him to be making just the opposite point.  

Because what is it to welcome a child into your midst? 

It is to welcome joy but also chaos, profound fulfillment but constant need, aching beauty but more diapers than seem as if it could be biologically possible for one small human to require. 

And to whom does all this fall?  

To the one who welcomes the child, and who in that welcome, welcomes Christ, and then in welcoming Christ, by extension, welcomes the Creator.  

He means, again, that in taking on this care (which is what he means by welcoming a child), we take on all the necessary tasks that quietly support the making of a life together. 

This is what it looks like to build the Kingdom of God.  

With their focus on who among them is the #1 disciple, the likely successor, it seems as if Jesus’ companions are not really prepared for the work ahead. 

A lot of that work, he suggests, will be downright invisible in many circumstances and often thankless even when it doesn’t escape notice.  

Being in it for the glory is like being in parenting for the glory.  

What makes it truly glorious is very different than whatever it is they’re expecting.  

Writing about Florence Nightengale, the Anglican theologian, Rowan Williams notes: 

“…caring changes us.  Caring is not simply something that we do: put on, put off, switch on, switch off.  It changes us as people.  And one of the hardest challenges for those in the ‘caring’ professions is to know how to cope with that in ways that are not invasive and crippling or crushing; to let the reality of what is there change them and not to devour them.” 

He goes on to say that Nightengale “ought to remind us that it is quite simply possible, if your eyes are fixed on an uncompromising love, to see more clearly and to love more exactly; possible to be changed, and changed in such a way that everything is changed around you.” ^[1]

It seems to me that this is what Jesus is trying to invite the disciples to take hold of—a kind of caring that isn’t a pose or a strategy or an argument of some kind, but a way of life that can change us and the world around us.  

It is an invitation to the unglamorous work of making a life, and in time, a world, together, and learning to see how glorious it truly is.  

Amen.  

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^[1] Rowan Williams, Luminaries: Twenty Lives that Illuminate the Christian Way, 97-8.