A Meditation for Evensong: Mark 10:13-22

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark for Evensong, February 9, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

I always get a kick out of how our Gospel for this evening begins, “People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.” Here’s Jesus training his disciples in the way of radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality, and what do the disciples do? They act like bouncers at a night club forming a protective ring around Jesus in order to chase away the pesky little children.

This gets repeated again and again. Blind Bartimaeus is shushed at first by the disciples when he “sees” Jesus passing through town from his perch at the roadside. James and John, instead of welcoming passersby into Jesus’ healing presence spend their time arguing over who’s the greatest. But why is this?

I wonder if the second part of this evening’s gospel doesn’t give us a clue. The man who runs up to Jesus wants to know how to live a life of depth, meaning, and purpose. He wants to know where true happiness is to be found. He wants to live the abundance, flourishing,  and freedom he sees manifested in Jesus not at some later date, but here and now. “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus responds with what any first century Jewish person would expect: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honour your father and mother.” Nothing to see here. But he adds a twist at the end. Surrender everything and follow me. And the man goes away grieving because he has lots of possessions. 

Possessions come in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes they are actually material things—Imelda Marcos probably didn’t have lot of time for fasting, prayer, and almsgiving with the shoes she was piling up in her First Lady walk-in closet. But more often having many possessions is a more subtle process. We can be possessed by curating our online persona. We can be possessed by looking good in the eyes of other people. We can be possessed by always trying to control things. We can be possessed by safety and security which hems us in in a web of fear-driven playing it safe. We can be possessed by planning for the future or dwelling in the past. Indeed, more often than not I’d say that what possesses us is some thought, or pattern of thought, a way of seeing and being in the world, rather than some thing. 

Think about the disciples playing bodyguard to Jesus—the one who comes among us as vulnerable, risky, boundary-crossing love. What thought are they possessed by? Probably some version of, “This is the Messiah! Keep your grubby little paws off him! Jesus has a three o’clock sit-down with some major campaign donors, he doesn’t have time to kiss babies!” And the result of being possessed by, captive of, believing that (probably unconscious) thought? Inhospitality. Instead of being welcoming doorways to loving encounter with Jesus, they are locked gates barring entry.   

But Jesus will have none of it. He welcomes the children, takes them up in his arms and blesses them. He models for the disciples how they are supposed to be. Their lives are to be places of welcome where all are received without exception and without discrimination. Each person, just as they are, is to be welcomed in, held in love, and blessed. 

And then Jesus ups the ante even more (what did you expect?). Not only are the disciples to welcome the little children, they are to become like them. You’ve spent all your time trying to keep these children away from me, but if you really want to be my disciple, if you really want to walk the way of love, you have to become like the very ones you’ve be protecting me (and yourselves) from. 

And what might that mean—to receive the kingdom of God like a little child? It means dropping our prejudices and preconditions, letting go of our shoulds and all those ideas about how we think the kingdom looks, and stepping freshly into the effervescence of God’s presence as God is in the sacrament of the present moment. Children live in the eternal now which is the only place we can encounter God. They don’t mull over the past (they can barely remember what they ate for breakfast) and they don’t fret over the future (my youngest barely knows what day it is). They are like the lilies of the field clothed in the glorious splendor of God’s Now. Take a kid to the Aquarium and they are likely to be as fascinated by the elevator buttons lighting up as they are the humpback whale. God glimpsed in the elevator button. God glimpsed in the whale. That’s what it means to receive the kingdom not just at the end of our short span of days, but in every moment.

When the man goes away grieving it’s because he realizes that he squandered his precious life trying to get somewhere else than right here and right now. He’s worried about how to get eternal life and missed the astounding fact that everything his heart is restless for has already been gifted to him—the love of God has always already been poured into his heart by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5). He’s spent his life trying to earn some future inheritance and all along it’s been buried in the field of his heart if he’d only known how and where to look. 

So giving up our possessions is really about releasing our grasp and learning to dwell in the sacrament of the present moment. We leave our plans and our memories and come home to where God always is—here and now. We notice when we’re “possessed”—when our lives start to reflect the dull drabness of living in our thoughts about the future or the past—and we surrender in faith and trust to the beauty, the goodness, the mercy, that is always on offer.

I’m color-blind and I was listening to the radio recently about people who through using some new kind of prismatic lens actually saw color for the first time. You know what they talked about? Stop signs. Crossing signals. Leaves. Weeds. Blades of grass. Scraggly window box geraniums. That little change in the lenses caused them to see even the most mundane events in daily life as somehow sacred, somehow sacramental, some revelatory of the beauty, goodness, and truth of God. 

Learning to pay attention, practicing attentive, expectant awareness, opens this dimension of life up to us. God’s not absent, we are. And learning to come home, learning to gently lay aside our thoughts and come our senses like the Prodigal Son who comes to himself, is what opens the door to child-like awe and the splendor we swim through everyday unawares.

A parable from David Foster Wallace—There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”