May 9, 2004

Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo

EASTER 5: CHRISTIAN FAMILY SUNDAY

Scriptures: Revelation 21:1-6, Acts 11:1-8

I remember when my kids were about seven or eight, their public school went on a church picnic and we went to this nice little park that had a wooded area in it and the teachers wanted to teach the children about the floor and the fauna that were there and get them to use their powers of observation. So they said go into what was a little forest and take note of everything you see there. Take note of the birds and animals that you see, any flowers and then come back and tell us about them. As adults we expected the children to come back and give us wonderful insights and details of course of some neat little flowers that were there. Perhaps a tree or two, a squirrel, whatever, a dog. This little boy came running out of this thicket of trees and said, "I saw a lion". Then another came out and said "and not only a lion, I saw a rhino". And by the time all the kids had come out of the thicket of trees there were rhinos and lions and boa constrictors and man eating plants, it was unbelievable and of course, we didn’t believe it. I thought about that moment as the seminal moment really for us all as parents because this is Christian Family Sunday and of course we’re called to love our children. That’s kind of a given and of course we’re called to love each other. We heard the words. Jesus said them over and over and over again. But he also said we’re supposed to listen to our children. He said that there’s something about children and visions that they have, the miraculous sometimes visions that they have that put us as adults closer to God just a little bit. That the purpose of family and family here means those that gather out of love to raise the next generation. The purpose of family is to love and raise and listen to our children and gather together waiting for a miracle. Perhaps a little different from definitions of family out there, but that’s why we’re together. We’re gathered waiting for a miracle. That’s what we do here on Sunday’s, we gather waiting for miracles and chances are, if we actually listen to our children, our children might tell us about the miracles that happen.

I remember when I was a child I thought adults were the stupidest beings on earth. I don’t know if you remember being a child, but when I was a child, I remember making a pact with a very close relative, also a child at that point that we would never become like them. And them were adults. That we would never become like adults, because adults seemed to have such a grim time. First of all, adults were always worried about something, they worried or were concerned about words we just didn’t have in our vocabulary, things like mortgages, money. Adults also didn’t skip. I never saw an adult skip. I always wondered about that as a child. Why don’t adults skip? I wondered about adults, too, in what they chose to do for a living because whatever it was they chose to do for a living, they seemed to come home depressed. It didn’t really matter what they did, but they came home depressed and I thought what a weird world is this world that is the adult world. I saw a news cast the other day and it was about what was happening in the West Bank and of course they had a Settler on one side and they had a member from Hamas on the other side and they had Sharon and they had Bush. But in the background behind the interviewer was a little kid just playing soccer with a stone. And I thought what might he say about the situation in the Middle East? I’d like to hear his viewpoint, I’d like to hear his take on the world political situation. What would a child say? What do our children say to us?

Gil and I just came back from a trip to Portugal. We arrived on Friday night. One of the places we went to was a place called Fatima. And Fatima is kind of a Niagara Falls of religious places. This was a place where a miracle happened. Now without the miracle, which I’ll tell you about, this town would be roughly equivalent to Kitchener. Nothing against Kitchener, but it’s not my favourite place to go or be and it’s not a tourist destination. Fatima didn’t have any cute castles like the rest of Portugal. It didn’t have any wonderful landmarks like the rest of Portugal. It didn’t really have much going for it at all until one day these three little children went out to an olive grove and there a miracle occurred. They saw something that they took back to the village and told the village about and of course nobody believed them. But they kept going back there and every month, our lady Mary, the original mother to Christians appeared to them and gave them advice. She told them some very practical things. This was in 1917 and Mary told them about the end of the Soviet Union. She told them that there was going to be an assissination attempt on the Pope’s life in the later part of the 20^th Century. She told them stuff that was more important and pertinent closer to home as well and she visited the three children over and over and over again five times and finally, these little kids (who had come back month after month), told their parents and others about what was going on in this area in Fatima. People actually began to believe them and one day in October of 1917, 70,000 people virtually the whole village gathered there and what they witnessed was the sun bouncing around and dropping out of the sky and it was said that all there who ailed were healed, all those that were there saw the same miracles. Now a skeptic might say, well how come people in the next town didn’t see the sun fall out of the sky and how come those that healed still got sick and died? But incontestable, were two miracles that happened at Fatima and this we could all agree on. One thing was that people heard through the voices of their children the possibility of a miracle occurring in their little hick town. And the second and the greatest miracle was that they believed them. They believed them!

Imagine if in Toronto, we believed our children when they told us tales of miracles? Imagine if we listened to our children when they told us what was really going on in their small lives? Imagine if we really listened to the childlike to tell us what’s happening in our city? How would this town change? It was pretty predictable what happened to Fatima of course after that. What happened is it became the major town in all of Portugal, everybody who went to Portugal who was a person of faith or wanted to be a person of faith had to make the pilgrimage to Fatima. It also galvanized a whole nation because remember it wasn’t only Fatima that was a kind of nowhere town on the map, but all of Portugal was kind of a nowhere European country. It was poor, it was third world, but in 1917 in October, something changed and the something that changed was that people got their true identity and they began to come together as a nation and they began to talk to one another in a slightly different way and talk about themselves to the World because after all, this was where a miracle happened. After all it was here in our town that something truly beautiful occurred, that three little children were visited by Mary the Mother of God five times and that three little children took this message to an unbelieving world. It sort of reminds of us of another little child about 2,000 years ago who took a message to an unbelieving World. And I think of that mother on Mother’s Day, Mary who listened to her son and actually thought that he was the Messiah. A Jewish friend of mine says you can tell Mary was a Jewish mother because she thought her son was the Messiah, but she did! That was the miracle and that she also was open to the true miracle of the message that he had to bring.

What are children saying? I listen to children in confirmation class and they tell me stories of the miracles that happen in their lives and I wonder if their parents ever hear them. I hear the stories of how (a family that had known divorce and separation) for just one night, one night at a grandmother’s prompting, the father and the mother came together across a crowded room of revellers and kissed each other. A child told me that, she said it was the most beautiful moment of her life. Another child told me that she prayed for her aunt to get better, to overcome a cancer and that guess what, the cancer was overcome. That’s a miracle. Another child told me stories of abuse, stories of torture and terror and also told me that nobody believed her when she told people at her school and nobody believed her when she told the people in her family. But then one person did, a miracle. Another child told me about how the child next to them where they lived is poor and their family doesn’t eat very well and that they’re really glad that our Sunday night dinner exists because at least the parent gets to come here and bring that food and prepare it at home. A miracle. Another child has told me about praying for a new place to live because the place that they lived was just a little too small. They were cramped into two rooms and that they got another place to live, a miracle. And also of course that they wish that everyone, you know all of those people that sleep on the streets, 5,000 in Toronto now, that they could have a place to live, too. And then that would really be a miracle.

I like to think that in this next year on this Sunday, Christian Family Sunday, that we finally get what our children are saying. Another child told me, the more I think about it, the more I think about all the confirmation classes over all the years and all the miracles that she thought she was gay and that she didn’t think her parents would accept that fact, but that first of all she told a trusted grandparent and the grandparent introduced her gayness to her parents in a way that her parents could understand and hear it. A miracle. A miracle. I’m waiting for a miracle to happen right now in this city at any time. I hope you are waiting for a miracle, too and chances are, if history teaches us anything in the history of our faith, teaches us anything, it will be a child who will point us to it.

Let us pray together.

Dearest God,

We sit of course in the midst of miracles.

You have gathered us here together each one of us and you have told us what true family is.

True family are those who love each other,

no matter who they are or where they are or how they find each other.

And true family are those who listen to the children,

who actually hear them when they speak of miracles.

Dearest God,

You also give us sacred tasks, the task is this, to go out and be family,

not only for those children that were given to us as ours,

but those children that were given to us as the world’s,

that you have entrusted them to us and each one of them is holy,

each one of them is precious, and we are called to listen to them and believe.

In the name of the one who came to talk to us as a small child and in whom we believe, Jesus Christ.

Amen.