Tiny Images is an early childhood center in Fairmont, Nebraska that has a unique location. Tiny Images is nestled inside an assisted living and nursing home facility. Multiple times a week, the teachers at Tiny Images take the children on a walk through the building, with the youngest kids being transported in four- or six-seat strollers. They first take the children through the assisted living part of the building, where the kids and older adult residents greet each other. The kids and teachers continue their walk and enter the nursing wing of the building. The children smile and wave, and the nursing home residents feel a spark of joy as they see the children. It’s hard not to smile when you see a child. I experience this phenomenon myself whenever the Blessed Beginnings kids walk by the church office and wave at me. Something unique happens when people from a variety of ages–young and old–are brought together in the same place.

Tiny Images is one of only 150 centers in the United States with an intergenerational model like this. Researchers have found that intergenerational daycare and retirement or nursing home communities have benefits both for the children and for the older residents. Young and old alike experience greater health and well-being when brought together. Cognitive function improves or declines less rapidly for older folks. People in these settings experience less social isolation, and there are economic advantages to these mixed-age settings as well. Tami Scheil, the director of Fairview Manor (which houses the Tiny Images childcare center) said of having a daycare within the nursing facility, “Let me tell you, when you have kids in a building, and the kids are running around and providing that variety and that spontaneity, our residents are not bored…Kids are not predictable. They just provide that spark of life.” [1] The children and adults make “grandfriends,” as they decorate cookies together, share smiles, and learn that life is more than just the same old routine every day.

This morning, we have before us two Scripture passages I had never read side-by-side before: Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, and the disciples arguing about which of them was the greatest. In the valley, Ezekiel sees dead and dry bones. He sees hopelessness and loss. In the midst of the disciples’ argument about which of them is the greatest, Jesus brings a little child before them and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” As I have read, and re-read, and studied these passages, I have found myself asking what they have to say to each other. What might the seemingly hopeless situation of Ezekiel’s people in exile and the confusing instruction to the overly self-important disciples to welcome little children mean when we look at them both together?

As I hold these two stories next to each other, I am first reminded that there is a future hope beyond what we can see. Put yourselves in Ezekiel’s shoes for a moment. The mighty, oppressive Babylonian army had decimated Jerusalem and took the best and brightest into captivity. This captivity lasted for about 70 years. Ezekiel came from a prominent priestly family, and so he was one of the people who was deported to Babylon. He was in his mid-20s or so when he was taken, and he was in captivity for the rest of his life, about 22 more years. While in captivity, God gave visions of hope and encouragement to Ezekiel, and Ezekiel shared these visions with the people. One of the most famous visions takes place in a valley filled with dry bones. Every time I read this story, I think of that famous scene in the Lion King when the wicked Scar tells young Simba, “An elephant graveyard is no place for a young prince.”

Ezekiel looks out at the vast valley filled with so many dry, and brittle bones, and he must have felt hopeless to his very core. God asks Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel answers the question in a way that is hard to capture in English. He repeats the word “you” for emphasis, as though to say, “Lord, only you know, and I certainly can’t know the answer to that.” God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, and when he does, the bones come back together. Sinews and muscle and flesh re-form on the bones, and they resembled a vast multitude of people. Ezekiel is astonished, and yet, these reassembled bones are not alive. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the breath, and as he does, God breathes life into the once dry bones. Interestingly, the word used here for breath can mean breath, wind, or spirit. It’s the same word used in the story of creation to describe the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters.  

As Ezekiel looks at the newly reformed people, God promises Ezekiel that the day would come when God would open their graves and bring them back into their land. The day would come when death, destruction, and hopelessness did not rule. Instead, God would set things right. Hope and restoration would eventually come. I imagine Ezekiel was deeply moved as he heard God’s promises to open their graves and bring them home. At the same time, this promise did not erase the suffering of the present moment, and it was no guarantee that every person in exile would live to see the day of freedom and rejoicing. Yet, a brighter future was coming. There was a future hope beyond what they could see.

The second thing I notice as I look at these two Scripture passages together is the power of moving beyond ourselves. As Ezekiel looked at the valley of dry bones, God talked about graves and about new life. Ezekiel would not live to see the end of the exile, and yet he still held hope out to the next generation. He reminded them that God had not abandoned them and that the day would come when all things would be set right. In the same way, Jesus calls the disciples who were arguing about being the greatest, to stop worrying about being first, and start focusing on serving others. There is great power in moving beyond ourselves, in taking our focus off of our own selves and how we can be the best, or the most secure, or the most noticed. 

Right before the disciples argued about which of them is the greatest, Jesus taught them for the second time that he would have to suffer and die. He told them that the way of the kingdom was not the way of power and might, but the way of suffering and sacrifice. The way of the kingdom of God was the direct opposite of the way of the Roman Empire. The Empire was all about bettering yourself, about expanding, about being the smartest, the wealthiest, the bravest. But in the kingdom? The focus is on loving God and on loving our neighbors as ourselves. We aren’t called to neglect ourselves or put ourselves down, but we aren’t called to make ourselves our main and only focus either. We love ourselves because God loves us and has good things for us, and also so that we have the energy and drive to love others. 

In the book Meeting Jesus on the Road, Cynthia M. Campbell and Christine Coy Fohr write about what it means to decenter ourselves–to take ourselves out of the spotlight so that we can focus on others. One of the authors told a story about playing on her high school basketball team. Her team had a star player. Their focus was on the star player. Every drill, every pass, every opportunity to score points was about the star player. How do we get the ball to the star? How do we block the other team so that the star can shine? She writes, “Every pick we set, every pass we made, they all had that one end in mind: enable the star to shine. And it worked…until it didn’t.” The star ended up with a torn ACL. She continued, “Suddenly we were simply a team who could pass and run plays but not score.” 

That summer, she and her other teammates worked hard and developed a new strategy, one that relied on all of them. They had to learn how to pass to each other, help each other, enable each other to play to the best of their abilities. That star-less team felt magical to her. She writes, “Games became like a dance, like this amazing, connected flow, where together we worked to find who was best to set up, who had the best shot, and how we could support one another to make magic happen. It was a kind of decentering and recentering, away from the star, away from the greatest, and toward others, toward the team.” [2]

There’s a future beyond what we can see. It’s not about me–or our individual selves–but it is about we. And finally, these two passages call us to be neighbors, people who see those who are forgotten, ignored, or neglected. In Jesus’s day, this group would have included children. In today’s world, we might notice important and treasured characteristics about children, like their sense of wonder about the world, and their creativity. We delight in the humorous things they say, like the little girl who was typing furiously away on her dad’s computer. He asked her what she was writing about, and she responded, “I don’t know. I can’t read.” We see the fun and unique things children bring to the world, but in Jesus’s day, children weren’t viewed very highly. They were seen as “not yet adults,” as little ones who may grow up to help with the labor in the fields or to carry on the family line, if they managed to stay healthy and survive into adulthood. Jesus tells the disciples who had just been trying to prove who was the best and brightest, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” And then he placed a child in their midst and made the child the example to follow. He told the disciples, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

God promises a bright and full future. God calls us to decenter ourselves and lift up others. And God calls us to be neighbors who serve those normally overlooked by society. When we welcome others, we welcome the Lord. 

March 20, the birthday of Fred Rogers, is now known as Mr. Rogers Day. Mr. Rogers was an ordained presbyterian minister who never served a church. Instead, he made a neighborhood and invited people to join him there. On his television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he invited children to imagine a world where everyone is safe, where neighbors are kind to each other, and where imagination and music are celebrated. As we consider what it means to look toward a future with hope, to decenter ourselves and lift others up, and to become neighbors to those who are typically forgotten, I wanted to share the words to a hymn written for Mister Rogers Day:

Jesus, teach us to be neighbors, living, loving, side by side

Hands for helping one another, arms of welcome open wide

Ever learning, ever growing, Jesus teach us all to be

Children of the new creation, joined in true community

May we be people with eyes that see the future with hope just beyond the horizon. May we be people who love ourselves, but don’t center ourselves, but instead focus on “we.” And may we be people who look for those who are forgotten, so that we may listen to them, learn from them, and love them with the love of God. May God give us the courage and energy we need for the journey, and glimpses of the new heaven and earth to remind us that hope is on the way. Amen.

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[1] EdSurge article on Tiny Images daycare/nursing home arrangement https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-12-17-intergenerational-care-benefits-children-and-seniors-why-is-it-still-so-rare

[2] Cynthia M. Campbell and Christine Coy Fohr, Meeting Jesus on the Road, p. 71-72.