Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world;
red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight:
Jesus loves the little children of the world!

Those words, by the American evangelist Clarence Herbert Woolston, were first published in 1913. Woolston, the Minister of Philadelphia’s East Baptist Church was an interesting character: his speciality was using what he called “Object Lessons with Magical and Mechanical Effects” to present the Gospel and he claimed to have “addressed more than a million children” during his lifetime. His obituary noted that he was known as “a pastor-magician who used sleight-of-hand to demonstrate features of his sermons with which he wished particularly to impress his congregation”. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’ll tell you now that you won’t be seeing any of that in my message today!

But let’s get back to those words. On the one hand they are inclusive: they reflect Jesus’ rebuke to the disciples who thought that children shouldn’t be allowed to take up the valuable time of such an important person as their Teacher; they also reach out to children of all races. On the other hand some people feel that the words are uncomfortably patronising or even racist. They have therefore suggested alternatives such as: “Every colour, every race, all are covered by his grace” or “Fat and skinny, short and tall, Jesus loves them one and all”. There’s even been a humorous interplanetary parody: “Pink and purple, green and blue, Jesus loves the Martians, too” – I’m not entirely sure of the theology that’s being taught there! The song is apparently still popular in America but I’d never choose it these days.

I suspect that many people never even thought of a huge, even tragic, inconsistency as they sung that song. For this was the time when the Western missionary movement was at its most confident peak, with women and men leaving Britain and America to take the Christian message to all people, children and adults, in the remotest parts of the world: they saw it as their God-given duty. (I don’t intend this morning to ask how much this may have gone hand-in-hand with colonialism and empire-building). However, back home in America, inequality and racial segregation were very much the order of the day, especially in the southern states: black and white children may have been precious in Jesus’ sight, but many white people, even Christians, would have been horrified by the very idea that they could mix as equals! St Paul’s comment that “there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free people, between men and women [because] you are all one in union with Christ Jesus” seems to have been almost totally forgotten – or, worse, deliberately ignored!

Our reading from Revelation began with a wonderful vision of heaven, a scene in which a great, indeed uncountable, multitude of people drawn from every nation, tribe, ethnic group and language is standing before God’s throne and offering their praise in words which will be familiar to anyone who knows Handel’s “Messiah”: “Blessing and honour, glory and power, wisdom and might, be given to our God for ever and ever”. We are told that the people we can see are in fact saints who have been persecuted and suffered because of their faith – which should make us stop and think how easy it is for us to be Christians.

We should also realise that this vast crowd is merely a fraction of the people, saved by Christ, who will be worshipping him in heaven: a truly international and all-encompassing community of the redeemed. We may think that cities such as Cardiff or London are cosmopolitan, certainly you get that impression if you use public transport: but their mix of ethnicities and cultures will be as nothing compared to the amazing variety of God’s people in glory. The early Church may have been little more than a middle-eastern Jewish sect, but the book of Acts shows it starting (not without difficulty) to discern a much bigger picture which burst the bounds of nationality and race to potentially include every person on God’s earth. This glorious scene in Revelation is the end-product of that process.

You could at this point be thinking, “It’s all very well to look at Bible passages which deal with ‘pie in the sky’ – but what relevance do they have to the here-and-now?” That’s a fair point; and one answer lies in the realm of missionary work which I mentioned earlier. For of course this crowd drawn from every language, race and nation will exist as a direct consequence of the many people who were serious about Jesus’ “Great Commission” and took his message to “all nations”. From its start the Church has been committed to spreading the Gospel although it took a long time for it to realise that its outreach had to be truly global. The Church of today lives in the most remote and far-flung places, and this means that the locus or epicentre of our faith has moved southwards: Christians in Europe and North America are now vastly outnumbered by their brothers and sisters in Africa, Asia and Latin America where churches are growing rapidly.

Now this has several knock-on effects which we may (but should not) resist. One is that missionaries are now coming from Nigeria, Brazil or Korea to Britain, rather than travelling in the opposite direction. Another is that the newer churches are offering fresh insights about Christianity which the older churches should humbly accept. And our churches are inevitably changing as they become more multi-cultural: we need to recognise that ‘the way we do church’ isn’t set in stone (and, in any case, is very different from the way it was done back in the first century!) The ‘World Church’ is a reality; at its best it offers us a taste of heaven here on earth.

All this leads me to something that’s basic but important. We humans generally like to mix with people who are similar to ourselves. I believe you see this in pubs (not that I go to many!): each hostelry has its clientele and people who don’t “fit the mould” struggle to join in the camaraderie. And you can certainly see the same thing in churches, where it’s uncommon (please forgive me stereotyping here) to find (say) young people from the Council estate mixing freely with middle-aged professionals: their life-experiences are so different that they find they have little in common to talk about and merely end up annoying each other! Churches develop what’s called a “monoculture” and it’s been suggested that evangelism needs to take note of that: it’s hard enough to come to faith in Christ and this shouldn’t be made more difficult by asking people to adapt to an unfamiliar church environment as well.

This issue has particularly come to the fore in matters of race. Charmaine Pruitt lives in Fort Worth, Texas. For years she worshipped regularly in a multiracial church – but she hasn’t been to any church since 2016 when she concluded that it simply wasn’t meant for people like her. Black Christians had become uneasy when their white pastors had failed to address the injustice of African-Americans being shot by police officers. But then came the Presidential election, with many ministers openly endorsing Donald Trump and especially his claim that Barack Obama wasn’t a true American. That was the last straw for many; and despite ministers insisting that the Church is colour-blind, 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is once again becoming the most segregated hour in American life. Many Christians of colour who had deliberately joined mixed churches have quietly left and, not wishing to return to black-majority churches, now no longer know where they really belong. What a tragedy.

I hope that things are better in Britain, with our very different politics; I also hope that we’ve moved on from the 1950s when black Christians arriving at some churches were told, “We’re sure you’d be happier with your own people. They worship at the school down the road”. But there can still be tuttings and whisperings in churches when people from different backgrounds don’t behave in the way that’s expected – tuttings and whisperings which are wrong and sinful. The Church should be a community of people from many different backgrounds; indeed, in a world that’s being torn apart by nationalism, gender and race it should be crying out: “Look and learn! We’re all so different; in human terms we’d never meet together – in fact we’d be at each others’ throats. But Jesus helps us to get on with each other and to love each other”. What a fantastic witness our churches could be!

That brings us back to Revelation and its picture of Jesus in glory. For, if heaven is going to be a glorious mixture of God’s people who have been redeemed from every race, then the Church here on earth should reflect that. And if we’ve all going to be mixing together for eternity, we’d better start learning how to do it now, even with our differences and our habits and our foibles. It won’t be easy; there’ll certainly be tensions and tussles along the way. But we must always allow that future vision of glory to challenge our life together today.