A Beginner's Mind.

Luke 18:15-30.

I.

            Jesus says we must receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, or not at all.  He doesn’t mean that having faith is hopeless for grown-ups.  He means that the Kingdom of God is received when we have a childlike attitude of wonder, innocence, weakness, humility, play, openness, and joy.  He means that we have to cultivate what is sometimes called a beginner’s mind.  We have to have the approach of someone who is just starting out, and know so little in advance that they don’t even know what they don’t know.

            This is the mind we have whenever we embark upon learning something new.  Whether it is a sport, or a language, or a musical instrument, when we start out it is a mystery.  It seems hopelessly complex, extremely difficult, and we are invariably terrible at it.  We make mistakes.  We work on memorizing fingerings or movements, words and grammar.  To try and learn something new, to be a beginner, means looking at a vast and incomprehensible body of knowledge, and deciding to master it.

            Whatever you think you know is probably worthless.  Before we went to the Holy Land Susan and I tried to learn a little Arabic.  Believe me, our knowledge of other languages was just about useless.  Whatever we knew of English, or German, or Greek, or even Hebrew, did not help us at all.  A beginner’s mind means realizing that what you already have is mostly useless.  You have to be completely open to the new experience, completely willing to see and do new things, and welcome the unprecedented.  And you have to enjoy it.

            I know a few folks who have a hard time with this.  They seem not to want to do anything they cannot do well already.  They would not take a Spanish class because they do not speak Spanish.  They would not sign up for violin lessons because they can’t play the violin.  Training to run a marathon is out of the question because they have never done it before.  It is not an attitude that makes sense to me, but I do understand the insecurity and often humiliation involved with starting on a new thing from scratch.  Some people would rather just build on what they already know, and not start anew on something they have never done before. 

            But Jesus does not want us imagining that what we already know is going to get us anywhere spiritually.  He calls for a beginner’s mind, a mind open to the new and unfamiliar, the different, the unprecedented, the unexpected, the difficult.  When Jesus talks about repentance, the word he uses specifically means having a new, changed, open mind.  The kind of mind he is urging us to cultivate is the mind of a beginner, of a child.

            What he has to tell us is new, and he wants us open to the new, ready to receive with wonder and love, ready to put our heart into it, ready to play and to work.  Jesus sees little children as models for this.  So he does not want them sent away; rather, he wants his disciples to observe them and act like them. 

II.

            Jesus is then approached by “a certain ruler.”  That is, a man with authority and responsibility, and wealth.  The man is the opposite of a child.  A child is at the beginning of life’s journey.  This man, on the other hand, has great accomplishments.  He is a success.  Yet somehow he remains dissatisfied.  So he comes to ask Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Because clearly whatever he has been doing hasn’t achieved that.

            He calls Jesus “Good Teacher.”  And Jesus rebukes him.  Jesus wants the man to know at the start that flattery will get him nowhere.  Giving Jesus a lofty title will not win him a better hearing or a favorable answer.  “No one is good but God alone,” Jesus says.  He is not drawing a distinction between himself and God, but he is questioning the motivation of anyone identifying goodness in anyone else.  No one knows God’s mind that well.  Locating goodness in any particular person borders on idolatry. 

            Then Jesus tells him to keep the commandments, and he lifts up a few examples.  Keeping the commandments is a beginner’s mind thing.  It is the beginner in anything who has to pay attention to the rules, the grammar, the fundamentals.  For veterans these things are second nature and automatic, you don’t even think about them.  Jesus is telling the man to have that beginner’s mind, “keep measuring your behavior against the rule found in Scripture.  You will find you still have a long way to go.”

            But this is not good enough for the man.  He says, “I have kept all these from my youth.  I’ve done that already.  I am way beyond having to think about the rules, what do you think I am, a child?  A beginner?  Not me.  I am ready for spiritual meat.  I want the advanced, not the beginner’s, version.  I want a challenge.”

            Jesus knows that if he really has kept the commandments so thoroughly he probably wouldn’t be as rich and successful by the world’s standards as he is.  Keeping the commandments is anything but a way to make money.  The man clearly does not understand what the commandments are about. 

            So Jesus cuts to the chase, as it were.  He boils down the commandments to their essence.  He says, “There is still one thing lacking.  Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.  That’s what the commandments are really about, you know.  They’re not a hobby you can do in your spare time.  They are not something you accomplish by reading or talking or having an opinion about them.  Keeping the commandments demands your whole life.  Give away what you have and follow me, this is the true meaning of the commandments.  You asked.”

III.

            The man, of course, is not happy with this answer.  He was perhaps hoping for a minor adjustment.  He wants to be told he is close to achieving what he wants; he is near the top of the ladder.  He doesn’t want to be told that all his work so far has been in vain because the ladder he is climbing has been leaning against the wrong wall.

            This makes the man very sad; “for he was very rich,” Luke tells us.  He has a lot to lose.  He is probably not used to people telling his he is a failure or that he needs to do something he considers to be impossible.

            Jesus looks at him and says, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!  Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”  Make no mistake, Jesus is here categorically saying that it is impossible, even ludicrous, to imagine a rich person entering the Kingdom of God.

            A rich person is the opposite of a child.  The child has nothing and is open to everything; the rich person has everything and is therefore open to nothing.  You can’t take your stuff with you into the Kingdom of God.  Anything you keep, save, hoard, store, own, or carry, will have to be lost.

            This, of course, flabbergasts Jesus’ listeners as much as it disturbs us.  It ought to disturb us, too.  Because wealth is relative.  No, we’re not part of the 1% who own over half of the wealth in our country… but thinking globally?  Anyone in this room is far richer than at least 3 billion other humans on this planet today.  Jesus doesn’t say you’re off the hook if you have less than someone else.  He says if you have anything you’re too rich to squeeze into the Kingdom of God.

            “Who then can be saved?” ask Jesus’ hearers.  If the rich are not blessed, who is?  These are the successful people we have been taught to look up to and emulate.  Have we placed our ladders against the wrong wall as well?  Has our striving for success done us no good at all?

            “No,” says Jesus, “it hasn’t.  The more you have in this life, the more you are liable to lose in God’s reversal.  If in God’s Kingdom the rich are sent away empty, what is the point of striving to be rich?  It just gives you more to lose.

            “I have just told you to emulate children,” he says.  “They have nothing.  They have a beginner’s mind.  They have room to grow and receive something new.  You can’t receive what God has to offer if your house is already packed full of other stuff.  If you want what God has to offer, you have first to lose the piles of stuff you already have.  This is not possible for mortals to do on their own; but it is possible for God.”

IV.

            Then Peter says, speaking for the rest of the disciples, “Look, we have left our homes and followed you.”  I have always felt that Peter is asking for some kind of approval here, some vindication.  

            And he receives it.  Jesus does approve.  The disciples showed beginner’s minds when they basically abandoned everything they had – which, with a few exceptions, wasn’t much anyway – and chose to follow Jesus.  In terms of material possessions they had little to lose before, and now they have less. 

            Jesus says to the disciples, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the Kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.  You gave up what you had.  You have become like children in your openness and dependence.  You have taken on the minds of beginners, trying and working to achieve new things.  You have given up success and possessing things; you have even given up relationships. 

            “But you have received back even more.  You have exchanged the limited and often oppressive things and relationships of normal existence, for the unlimited and liberating encounter with the whole creation.  Now the creation is your house and all people are your family, and all children are your offspring.  Instead of looking inside to what you have and fear to lose, now you are able to look out on all creation as your home and family.  You have lost a few things; but you have gained everything.”

            Jesus here negates and rejects the idea of property as we understand it.  What we “get back” from God in him is not something we control, or possess in such a way that we keep others away from it.  It does not belong to us such that we can lock it up all for ourselves and no one else.  It does not become ours to do with as we please.

            Rather we get them back with their own integrity intact and their authenticity maintained.  We get them back by letting them be.  To possess something is to kill it.  But we are able to appreciate and love things and people for themselves, with a certain kind of equality, with the wonder and playfulness, the openness and curiosity of a child.  What we get back from God are not possessions or property, but partners and friends.

            In Christ the creation is not a dead object, an “it” for is to own and dispose of.  In Christ creation and everything in it, from rocks and bacteria to sequoias and humans, is a miracle sustained by God’s Word and filled with God’s breath.

V.

            Ownership and property are therefore murder and theft.  The one with wealth is told he is has excluded himself from God’s Presence and from life.  The one with nothing, the child, the beginner, is the one disciples are to emulate and imitate.  They are the ones who receive everything from God, even eternal life.

            Without any kind of equivocation on this, without any kind of watering down or rationalization of what is a difficult and demanding teaching, we do need to remember that Jesus admits that he is asking of us what is impossible… for us.  But it is possible for God. 

            This is not a matter of our doing something or acting in a certain way.  But it is more about not doing something.  Our separation from God is a project that drains us of prodigious amounts of energy.  Sin is hard work.  It is when we let go and let be that we allow God’s love to flow into our hearts.

           

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