We are taught to be nice and to hold our tongue when we don't have something good to say. Which means when we see there is a problem with our friend or our family or our church or our school or our township we have a tendency to just sit there and shake our head about it rather than speaking up or even shouting about it if we need to in order to bring about change. I hope you see what I'm getting at here. Every system of values that human beings develop is flawed, deeply flawed, hopelessly flawed. We can't help it.
Flawed creatures produce flawed thoughts and behaviors and systems.
No set of human values can truly be called Christian values- unless they are constantly being corrected by the witness of scripture. Even the things we call Christian values can grow stale, can rot away and become far less than Christian, if we don't question them, reexamine them, read over them again in the light of the Word of God. Today's gospel lesson and that long lesson from Proverbs both were as challenging in their day as they are in ours. They challenged the dominant world view, the value systems that had become entrenched and petrified. Jesus walked in a world where children were non-persons.