Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 25, 2021 – Acts 4:8-12; 1 John 3:1-2; John 10:11-18

Although this is Good Shepherd Sunday, I was drawn to the opening line of today’s second reading, because it’s one of my favorites. “See what love the Father has bestowed on us, that we may be called the children of God, yet so we are.”

I wanted to put a picture on the front of this week’s bulletin that reflected that line in scripture, and thereby hangs the tale. This is the cover I came up with. It shows people of every ethnicity. I didn’t want to use photographs, because photographs are too particular. I wanted an artist’s rendering. And I didn’t want all little children; I wanted people of various ages that represented pretty much the world as we know it today.

So I typed into the search engine, in Google, simply the words “children of God.” And up came a whole bunch of images. There were actually 395 of them. And as I scrolled through them, I noticed a pattern. Of those 395 images, only 62 of them - that’s 16 percent - only 16 percent of those images had people of different races and ethnicities gathered together. The vast majority of them were all white people. A small minority of them were all people of one ethnicity, but mixed together, there were very few. One of them was a picture from the 1950s, just a woman’s head. But I recognized it as the type of woman that used to be used in magazine ads to sell refrigerators and frozen dinners and cigarettes. She was very pretty, in a bland sort of way, with real, real blonde hair. Her mouth is in a wide open smile. She’s wearing little tiny discreet earrings. And even though she’s smiling, her mouth indicates that she’s speaking in an authoritative voice. In this one image that I came up with, that looked just like that, the woman is saying, “All of us, children of God? Heck no!”

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever looked closely at the little pictures on Google, but under each one there is a little tag. If you click on that, you get to the site that Google took the picture from. Google takes its pictures, in religious themes, primarily from four sources. They take church bulletin covers. They take contemporary religious art sold in religious bookstores and online. They take old masters that are in the public domain. And they take either the covers or the inside pages of religious textbooks. That’s where they get their religious pictures from, basically.

So I went online to the site where this picture came from, and it turns out that the purpose of the author of this site was to insist that Christians, and Christians only, are children of God. As a matter of fact it says, “Those who are not Christians, are children of Satan.” And it spends four pages giving quotes from the New Testament and the Old Testament to prove its point.

Now I know what this person was about theologically, because I know the source of today’s quote in the letter of St. John. And that is the distinction between the baptized and the non-baptized. It had to do with a particular controversy in St. John’s church. But it is used quite frequently to suggest that only Christians are children of God. What is true, is that people who were baptized have sanctifying grace, unless they throw it away by mortal sin. That sanctifying grace creates an intimate personal relationship between them and God. Because we cannot choose relationship with God. God has to give us that as a gift.

That being said, I can match quote for quote with this guy, passages in the New and Old Testament where both Jesus Himself, and others among his followers, and among Old Testament prophets have insisted that although there was a unique special people of God, all the people of the world at all times are God’s children, and that God loves them all. So this was a real twisting of the original intent of the quotation.

So as I was going through, I noticed that, for whatever reason, the person who posted these pictures decided that “children of God” was equal to the story, in the New Testament, where people are trying to drive the kids away from Jesus, not to bother Him, and Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me.” So I looked at these 395 pictures, and I found only 26 pictures of Jesus and the little children. Of those 26, 16 of them had children of missed race dancing around Jesus.

So then I decided to do a second search. I went back to the search engine and I typed, “Let the little children come to me,” cause all I wanted was pictures of that bible story. What I got, then, was a very different experience. I found, again, 395 pictures of Jesus and the little children. But of those 395 pictures, only 50 of them showed children of mixed ethnicity sitting around Jesus. Now you would say, well of course, in the Bible story Jesus is Hebrew, and the ethnicity of the Hebrews of Jesus’ time were sort of like what the Syrians are today, so why wouldn’t they be all the same? Well, you would think that, except that almost all of the pictures did show children in modern dress sitting around Jesus. But, of those children in modern dress, only 50 out of almost 400 pictures showed children who were not white.

Now, I’m not judging anybody. Because Jesus is very clear in saying, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged.”  But it does seem to me that, as children of God, this should give us pause.