Grace and peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Caught in Her Own Web
In his book, Friedman’s Fables, Rabbi Edwin Friedman tells a fable about a spider. He writes, “One evening in late August a spider, named Ms. Mary Muffet spun the perfect web. Like most other webs of spiderdom, it was held together by radiating spokes, each angling out toward faraway points. But this particular evening the angles were all equal. And the distance between the threads that joined the spokes were also uniform. …Every side of the octagon was the exact same distance from the one across, whether measured toward the center or from above. Every strand between was perfectly in line with the next, creating a ladder of parallel steps. No thread slacked anywhere, so that the natural fluorescence designed to attract nourishment glistened with astonishing sparkle. …The overall effect was of extraordinary delicacy and ominous grace.” It was that incredibly rare thing: a perfect web. As she hung down from her web admiring it, something happened. A large fly hit the web so that the whole thing reverberated. The fly flapped his wings and shook in an attempt to get loose. As he shook, this perfect web threatened to tear apart. Ms. Muffet could not let this happen. So she carefully climbed up the web, released the fly, and repaired the web. This happened many more times during the night. One bug after another would land in the web, and each time Ms. Muffet would release it and repair the damage. This went on and on throughout the night. Despite the bombardment of flies, mosquitoes, and moths, the web remained perfectly intact. But the same could not be said for Ms. Muffet. For, in her zeal to keep her web just perfect, she cast away all her food – the bugs – and died of starvation.

Neighbors
This fable reminds me today’s Gospel lesson about Lazarus and the Rich Man. Luke tells us that whereas the rich man dressed in purple and fine linen and feasted sumptuously every day, Lazarus was covered with sores that were licked by dogs and went hungry, longing for even scraps from the rich man’s table. When I picture this scene, I imagine that the rich man, in addition to his fine clothes, had fine everything – a fine house with a beautifully landscaped yard, surrounded by an elegant and impressive gate. The rich man must have been very satisfied as he looked out of his front window. His home reflected his means and the honor and status he had in the town. It was perfect…all except for that beggar sitting there leaning up against his gate – sore covered, emaciated, talking to himself, smelly. His only friends, he thought, were some stray dogs. He dared not approach the man because he was so dirty and because giving him food or money would only encourage him to stick around, which was the last thing he wanted. And so he ignored the man until one day the man wasn’t there. And so, he thought his strategy had worked. He didn’t give in. He had won. Now he could look out of his front window and see only perfection.

That is, until he died. It was then that he learned that Lazarus had not moved on, but died. As in life, now again in death he looked out at Lazarus, but, in a reversal of fortune, Lazarus now rested comfortably with the angels and Father Abraham, while the rich man suffered in Hades. The rich man pleads to Abraham for himself and then for his brothers but to no avail. “They have Moses and the prophets,” says Abraham, “they should listen to them.”

And that is the key. The rich man didn’t go to Hades because he was rich. He went because he himself did not listen to Moses and the prophets. He did not observe the law. And what is the heart of the law? What is the greatest commandment? As Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The rich man did not love his neighbor, Lazarus, as himself. In his attempt to keep his perfect life perfect, the rich man died a sad but preventable spiritual death.

This fable of the spider also reminds me about church. In fact, the fable is about church. For, Rabbi Friedman was not just a writer of fables. He was an expert in congregational life. He wrote the seminal work on it, which every pastor reads (or should read) in seminary.

Friedman’s point in the fable (and, I think, one point of the Gospel) is that the church can see itself as a perfect web, that it has this impulse to want to keep everything just as it is, to keep it just so, to prefer the status quo far more than change, and it will go to great lengths to keep it that way – and in the process deprive itself of any new vitality, it’s very lifeblood, so much so that it dies – a sad but preventable death.

Take for example, children in our congregation. It is tremendous to see so many more kids at church. I get more comments on my children’s sermons that my adult ones. We now have 44 children and youth in Sunday School and Confirmation – not including the growing number of babies and toddlers. There are 17 youth in our youth group. The Christian Formation committee has done an amazing, amazing job of making things happen, pretty much behind the scenes. And so, the vision this congregation set out and I fell in love with almost four years ago is becoming a reality before our eyes.

But for all of this, for the growth we’ve had, our awesome formation program, you know the thing I have heard about most? Month after month, its kids in coffee hour – where they stand or sit, how much snack they take, various comments people have made to kids or under their breath to themselves, and on and on. And it’s enough.

I come at this, as with most things, from a personal perspective. I remember the day I personally knew I was ready to have kids. It was a Monday afternoon. I was on internship and it was my day off. We were living in a tiny apartment with a roommate outside Central Square in Cambridge. I was sitting at the computer in our bedroom. I remember thinking that I wanted more from life. I had accomplished some things. I had done some things. But now I had something to give. I wanted more from life. I wanted a purpose. Little did we know at the time that Jenny was already pregnant. Ellie was born in May. Then in that same room, our little Ellie slept in a basonet next to our bed. It was a hot summer with no central air. We had two air conditioner units, but the electrical system was so bad that you could only have one on at a time. And so, Jenny and I, our roommate, dog, baby all packed together in that small, sweltering apartment. And it was brilliant. While our accommodations are bigger now, we have two kids, and stuff everywhere, from Finn pulling open the cabinets, to Ellie’s princesses exploding all over the place. Just last night we hosted a cookout for Ellie’s playgroup. There were 12 children from 1-4. It was four hours of non-stop running, playing, reading, singing. To top it off, the kids ran laps around our first floor around the kitchen and living room for 5 minutes screaming at the top of their lungs. Their parents could only watch and laugh with them. And we just wouldn’t have it any other way.

Life with kids is full of chaos. That’s what makes it infuriating at times, but most times that’s what makes it great. In the midst of this chaos there are moments of pure joy, moments of tenderness, and moments of revelation. The best part is: you know you are truly alive.
Maybe this is what Jesus had in mind when we said that one must receive the kingdom of God like a child – with a sense of wonder, with energy and excitement, beholding God’s grace in the midst of the chaos of our lives – running and screaming at the top of our lungs with joy for just being alive.

Life with kids is messy and chaotic, but we are being too particular about our perfect little web of coffee hour. The point is that children must be active participants in the entire life of our congregation. Why? Because kids need to learn how to worship from you, kids need to learn how to fellowship from you, kids need to learn how to live a faithful Christian life from you. We make those promises to them at baptism. It is just part of the deal. It is part of the deal that kids can be loud, squirmy, and stinky. They can be disruptive, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It wakes us up to what is really going on around us. That’s what Lazarus’ presence should have done for the rich man – waken him up to the needs and realities beyond his perfect lawn and perfect gate. It should have moved him to care for his neighbors, especially the most vulnerable. The least he could do was give him a cookie and some juice!

And that means that our worship and coffee hour are not going to be just so. With so many more kids, they cannot be just the same – but it can be a different, deeper experience of worship and fellowship for everyone. We have some much to offer these kids and these kids have so much to share with us. We only need to allow our webs to be changed. It is time for us all to be caught together in the web of God’s grace.
I debated preaching about this because, in a way, this doesn’t seem like such a big thing, but it is. Because here, each Sunday, we are enacting a way of life, the kind of relationships that we would wish for the world. And so it’s not just about the kids; it is about who we are together as God’s people. Here we enact the kingdom of God. Just as these kids come to this table to be blessed, they should be blessed with they come to the fellowship table. They are guests of honor. This is so critical.

At the end of his fable of the spider, Rabbi Friedman asks a hypothetical question. He asks, “If the web had been destroyed would Ms. Muffet have started it over, become depressed, or rejoiced, saying ‘I’m free.’” For Ms. Muffet the perfect strands of that web became like the bars of a prison. The same can go for us with our perfect webs of congregational life. The thing is – they aren’t really perfect, they just make us feel safe. They are just what we’ve done and what we know. Like Ms. Muffet we are the ones that wind up getting trapped and we find ourselves all alone.
God invites us to let the myth of our perfect webs go not just for others, but for ourselves – to set us free. Imagine, if the rich man could have let go of his perfect life, his perfect house, what a different story his story would be. Amen.