Faith Isn’t Complicated

Mark 10:13-16

If you were to make a list of the things that you think make life worth living, what would be on it? Would it be a relatively healthy body and a life that is for the most part free of deep physical and emotional pain? A lasting, loving relationship? A stable family? A nice home and some nice things? A successful and satisfying job? Influence in your community? Being seen by others as being important? What is it, for you, that makes life worth living.

Richard John Neuhaus, who is now deceased, was a pastor of what he described as a “very poor, very black, inner-city parish in Brooklyn, New York.” He’d read an article by a distinguished professor at Princeton named Ashley Montagu. Montagu listed the following qualifications for “a life worth living” – good health, a stable family, economic security, educational opportunity, the prospect of a satisfying career to realize the fullness of one’s potential.

After reading that article, he wrote these words:

I remember vividly looking out the next Sunday morning at [my congregation] and seeing all those older faces creased by hardship endured and injustice afflicted, and yet radiating hope undimmed and love unconquered. And I saw the younger faces of children deprived of most, if not all, of those qualifications on Professor Montagu’s list. And it struck me then, like a bolt of lightning … that Professor Montagu believed that the people of [our church] – people of faith and kindness and endurance and, by the grace of God, hope unvanquished – that, by his criteria, none of these my people had a life worth living.[i]

We live in a world built on prestige, power, influence, and the wealth and intellectual ability that get us those things. Jesus, however, stands all of that on its head. At this point in our journey through Mark’s Gospel, we shouldn’t really be all that surprised about that. As we’ve walked together through Mark, we can begin to feel the disconnect between life in this world and life as citizens of God’s kingdom. They aren’t just a little bit off. They’re diametrically opposed to one another. Jesus has already come right out and said, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (Mk. 9:35). If you want to be first, make yourself last. If you want to live, die. Diametrical opposition. The things you think are important aren’t. The things you think aren’t important are of highest importance.

And now, as he and his disciples travel toward Jerusalem and his betrayal and death on the cross, he hammers that point home with relentless enthusiasm, his teachings landing like the powerful body blows of a champion boxer who has his opponent on the ropes and about to go down. In this world, life in the kingdom of God can feel like you’re driving the wrong way down a very busy one way street.

Why would anyone want to do that? Because life in the kingdom of God is just that. It’s LIFE! As Jesus healed countless people who were blind, deaf, mute, and lame, or cast out of society because of leprosy, he was helping people to see and understand the deep, deep love and compassion of God. But he was also making the point that those who go through life opposed to God, outside of the kingdom of God, are living blind, deaf, mute, lives marked by hopelessness and lameness. But when that’s all you know, you’re comfortable with it. You just go with the flow. It becomes normal.

What Jesus wants us to understand is that he came to give us life – life as citizens of God’s kingdom – that is REAL life. Life as God intended it to be. Life that is filled with hope instead of hopelessness, joy instead of empty happiness, peace instead of chaos and anxiety, love instead of hatred and conflict. But that life feels so unnatural at first, so unreal, so new, that we reject it because it isn’t what we’re used to. We’re used to blindness. Like someone who walks into bright light after being in a dark space, we don’t want to see, because the transition is painful, and so we retreat to the darkness. Turn with me to Mark 10:13-16.

People are bringing their children to Jesus so that he’ll lay his hands on them and speak a blessing over their lives, over their futures. What normal parent doesn’t want their kids to live blessed, happy lives. That’s something we all want for our children. But his disciples, who have by now been with Jesus day in and day out for a couple of years, soaking in his teaching, marveling at his miracles, even joining in both the teaching and the miracles – they still don’t get it.

A friend of mine likes to call them the “duh-ciples” because of their propensity to miss the point. But remember, Jesus is shifting their world view, just like he shifts ours, and driving the wrong way down a one-way street isn’t usually a comfortable thing. And every time they think they have finally figured Jesus out – and to be fair they’ve had some brilliant flashes of insight – just when they think they’ve caught up and caught on, Jesus adds more to the mix and their confusion and misunderstanding come bubbling to the surface again.

So, still not getting it, they create a fence around Jesus. Maybe not a literal one, but a fence nonetheless. They keep these people, and their children, away from Jesus. In their minds, Jesus has more important things to do than bless some children. The Jews of Jesus’ day viewed their children as a blessing from God. The problem was that children couldn’t add to the family’s honor, although not being able to have children could, in that day, detract from it. And they couldn’t add to the family’s wealth and status. So they didn’t really count. Not until they were older.

Still, that’s way better than the view of children in the rest of the Roman Empire at the time. Israel placed a theoretical value on children, but they still didn’t typically treat them as overly valuable. The rest of the empire didn’t even get that far. They didn’t have a romantic view of children as wide-eyed and wonderous, humble, trusting, and full of hope. They viewed children as dependent, vulnerable, and completely subject to parental authority. They had no power, no status, and few rights. In fact, an infant could be literally thrown away, legally, if he or she wasn’t wanted. They were thrown away by exposure. The parent would take the infant out into the wild and leave it there to be killed and eaten by wild animals or die from lack of food and water and exposure to the elements.

Others would collect the exposed infants and raise them to be gladiators or prostitutes, or intentionally disfigure them to increase their value as beggars, and of course these unscrupulous “adoptive” parents would keep the money the children they had disfigured received as beggars.

One papyrus from Alexandria has been discovered that is dated June 17 of the year 1 BC. In it, a husband who is away from the home for an extended time is writing to his pregnant wife. This is what he tells here, and this is a direct quote. “If it was a male child, let it live; if it was a female, cast it out.” Exposure wasn’t outlawed by Rome until the year AD 375. That’s more than three centuries AFTER Jesus blesses the children on this day in Israel.

Even in the Jewish world, one rabbi voiced the sentiment of many of the people that “sages (in other words, wise and powerful teachers, like Jesus) should not bother with children.” They have more important things to do. And that is the attitude of Jesus’ disciples.

But the disciples want to create a fence, not an access gate. They want to keep these people away from Jesus. He’s on the move toward Jerusalem. In their minds, the rebellion against Israel’s corrupt leaders and against Rome was sure to begin when Jesus got there. And they were his inner circle. Their job was to keep the unimportant people away so that Jesus could deal with things of significance.

But when Jesus saw what was happening, he was indignant. Basically, he was ticked off. The word combines the ideas of irritation and impatience. He’d had enough. And then he lands another body blow to their view of how things work in God’s kingdom. “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” Children may not have been important to the disciples. They certainly weren’t important to the rest of the world. But then again, the kingdom of God belongs to the unimportant.

Do you see it? Jesus said, “To such belongs the kingdom of God.” “To such.” To people just like these children. To the unimportant. The ones who can’t do anything for anyone. The powerless. The ones who interrupt and don’t know how to act around church. Don’t keep the unimportant away, because in the kingdom of God, they’re the important ones.

Steve Sjogren founded Vineyard Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. One Monday morning he was feeling particularly discouraged and announced to his wife Janie, “I’m quitting the ministry! And this time I mean it.” Janie had heard this kind of talk before so she suggested, “Why don’t you go for a drive and think things through? Usually that helps when you’re stressed out. And while you’re out, could you be a sweetheart and pick me up a burrito?”

Steve drove around for about an hour, complaining to God the whole time. Finally, he was in the fast-food drive-thru to pick up Janie’s burrito when he sensed God speaking to him. He is very careful to say, he did not hear an audible voice … nothing came over the drive-thru speaker. In a subtle, quiet way he sensed the Lord impressing this message on his heart, “If you open your door I will give you a gift.” Even though he felt silly, Steve figured he had nothing to lose, so he opened the car door, looked down and saw embedded in the asphalt, a tarnished penny. This is what he wrote about the experience:

“I reached down to pry out the coin and held in my hand feeling less than thankful for this ‘gift.’ The Lord spoke to me again: ‘Many people in this city feel about as valuable as discarded pennies. I’ve given you the gift of gathering people who seem valueless. Though these are the people that the world casts off, they have great value to me. If you will open your heart, I will bring you more pennies than you know what to do with.”[ii]

We live in a world filled with bouncers that blocks access to the best, and the church is no exception. Being able to get into an exclusive night club or social group is, in this world, a sign that you’ve made it. You’re in! You matter! You’re significant! Access to exclusivity is probably the surest sign that you’ve made it in this world. But in the kingdom of God? Not so fast.

Look at V. 15. Not only are we to welcome the discarded pennies, just like Jesus did, we are to become like them! And remember, they didn’t have the romantic notion of childhood that we have today (momentarily frustrated and irritated parents notwithstanding, of course).

So what are children, and the other “discarded pennies” Jesus is talking about, like? What are the traits we are to look for in ourselves. First of all, they’re small, and they’re aware of their smallness. There are no delusions of being big and powerful. They know that there are things they cannot do. The word translated as children here could also be translated as “little ones.”

Successful adults, on the other hand, are big in their own eyes. And therefore, they don’t need to ask for help. Oh, we may be more than willing to help others, but we do it with just the slightest air of superiority. We’ll prepare and serve a meal to those who won’t get a meal otherwise, but we won’t go through the line ourselves and sit down and eat with the other “little ones,” will we. We’ll maintain just the subtlest, slightest air of superiority.

Children are helpless. There are things they really cannot do for themselves. Think about it. When a baby is first born, it can do two things on its own: cry and poop. He can’t go get mom and tell her he’s hungry. She can’t even roll over to look at something else when she gets bored. As the child grows, she can do more things for herself, but mom and dad still have a lot of control. Even into young adulthood, there’s a dependence on mom and dad. “Hey, can you send me some money?” “Did you pay for my car insurance?” “What’s the number on our insurance card? I need to go to the doctor.”

Adults won’t admit that they’re helpless, even in situations where they really are. We’ll beat our heads against a wall until we’re unconscious before we ask for help. As men we’ll drive 45 miles in the wrong direction before we ask for directions, and we’ll never, ever, ever admit that we’re lost. We value self-made women and men, even though the entire concept is a fallacy. There’s no such thing as a truly self-made person. Somewhere, in some way, someone helped us.

And children will receive a gift that they haven’t earned. In fact, they’d just as soon not have to earn it, and that attitude continues well into the teenage years. Children receive gifts easily, simply, and naturally.

Adults not only won’t but often can’t accept a gift without giving something in return. If someone buys us lunch, we buy the next time. If someone does us a favor, we buy them a Starbucks gift card. If someone gives us a gift and we don’t have one for them in return, we feel horrible. And we bring that attitude into our faith as a faith of achievement.

Oh, we may say that we’re all about grace and God’s unearned favor. But in our hearts, we think that there’s something about us that is deserving of God’s grace. We think that we can somehow pay God back. We cannot wrap our minds or our hearts around the concept of simply receiving God’s grace and humbly saying thank you. That isn’t the way the world works. But it’s the way of life in the kingdom of God.

Now, look at V. 16. All we can do is come to him in our smallness and helplessness, admitting that we can’t clean up the mess we’ve made, and let him lay his hands on us, and bless us with his love and grace. That doesn’t mean we won’t learn how to live in his kingdom under his grace, that there’s nothing for us to DO. Grace is opposed not to effort, but to earning. And there’s a galaxy of difference between the two.

In his book Imagine, Jonah Lehrer writes about the advantages that come with having a childlike attitude:

Take this clever experiment, led by the psychologist Michael Robinson. He randomly assigned a few hundred undergraduates to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions: “You are seven-years-old, and school is canceled. You have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?” The second group was given the exact same instructions, except the first sentence was deleted. As a result, these students didn’t imagine themselves as seven-year-olds. After writing for ten minutes, the subjects in both groups were then given various tests of creativity, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire, or listing all the things one could do with a brick. Interestingly, the students who imagined themselves as young kids scored far higher on the creative tasks, coming up with twice as many ideas as the other group. It turns out that we can recover the creativity we’ve lost with time. We just have to pretend we’re little kids.

American cellist Yo-Yo Ma echoes this idea. “When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them that the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner,” Ma says. “In order to become a professional, you need to go through years of training. You get criticized by all your teachers, and you worry about all the critics. You are constantly being judged. But if you get onstage and all you think about is what the critics are going to say, if all you are doing is worrying, then you will play terribly. You will be tight, and it will be a bad concert. Instead, one needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello. Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure. He is playing because making this sound, expressing this melody, makes him happy. That is still the only good reason to play.”[iii]

Jesus invites us to come to him as children, recognizing and admitting our smallness, our helplessness, and the truth that we can’t earn and thus deserve the gift he has for us. In this world, that feels like the opposite of success. But in the kingdom of God, it is the pathway to everything that God has for us. And then he requires us to welcome not just children, but all of the discarded pennies of this world, “for to such belongs the kingdom of God.”

[i] Ricard John Neuhaus, “We Shall Not Weary, We Shall Not Rest,” First Things (7-11-08)

[ii] Steve Sjogren. From the files of Leadership.

[iii] Jonah Lehrer, Imagine (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), pp. 110-111