One of the things I hear a lot in the business world is that if you want to be successful, you need to hang around successful people.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of the concept of the ‘Mastermind Group’, but I’ve been encouraged repeatedly, over recent years, to join one.
The concept of the ‘Mastermind Group’ is a simple one. They are a group of motivated, successful, go-getter sort of people. And if you want to get somewhere in business, it is considered to be a fundamental strategy that you surround yourself with these sorts of successful go-getter kind of people.
The idea is that you meet with this group at least once per week - pool ideas, share stories, and spur each other on. And it makes a lot of sense, that if you really want to be a winner, that you should immerse yourself in a social environment where the dominant mindset is progressive, challenging, and intellectually stimulating.
The other side of this of course is that if you really want to be a winner, you need to drop the losers out of your life.
Negative, unmotivated, go-nowhere type of people are only going to pull us down - so the philosophy goes. If we surround ourselves with people who are failing in the business of life, we can expect that our mindset will be determined by them, and that in the end we will become one of them.
Of course, this probably sound harsh, and as Christian people, we probably feel that a somewhat more tolerant and inclusive approach to life is required. Even so, I suspect that those of us who are parents take exactly this approach to our children.
Those of us who are parents want nothing more than to see our children hanging around with the right kind of people. When they become teenagers in particular, which parent amongst us does not yearn to see our children hanging with peers that are motivated, accomplished, and committed to their studies?
We know that if our children are part of a peer group where the other children are successful, accomplished, highly motivated and studious, that our children are very likely to turn out to be successful, accomplished, highly motivated and studious! Conversely, we know full well that if our children hang out with kids who use drugs, get involved in criminal activity, hit the unemployment line from an early age, and generally prove themselves to be carbuncles on the backside of humanity, that our children are also likely to turn out as ... carbuncles.
If you want to move forward in life, hang around with people who are going places. If you want to go nowhere, just hang around with a group of people who are going nowhere, and you’ll get nowhere fast! It makes good sense. Why is it then that the Lord Jesus modelled for us a lifestyle where He spent an inordinate amount of time with the very sort of people we want our children to avoid, and why did he urge us to model our communal life along exactly those lines?
“What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he is happier about the one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in Heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.”
Matthew 18 is the passage - the story of the lost sheep, though we’re probably much more familiar with the version of this story that turns up in the Gospel of Luke.
In Luke’s version, the story comes as a response to criticism Jesus is receiving for hanging around with tax-collectors and other undesirables, and he’s trying to explain why he bothers. Here in Matthew’s retelling of the story, the discussion is about relationships within the church.
The application of the story is different, but principle is the same - we are encouraged to focus our time and our energy on the least prominent and least successful members of the community. In Matthew 18, Jesus calls them the ‘little ones’.
At the beginning of Chapter 18, Jesus told us that we all need to become like little ones, and he brings forward a child as His model.
On another occasion we might argue over exactly what He meant by this. Did He mean:
* That we need to be more trusting?
* The we should have a simpler faith?
* That we should cry more?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter, for as the dialogue progresses, it becomes clear that the distinguishing mark of the little ones is that they are vulnerable.
“If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a large millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned at the bottom of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)
Jesus is very protective of these little ones. He does not want any of the clever or powerful members of the community of faith to take advantage of them. And if one of these little ones stuffs up - wanders away, gets back on the gear, or in some other way causes trouble for himself and for the rest of the community, we are to pour our resources into trying to help this guy get back on track.
“What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it … Your Father in Heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.”
We know the people that Jesus is talking about. They are the people we get impatient with. These are the people that we make an effort with because we know we have to make an effort with them. When we think about getting together with our friends from church, these are the people who don’t immediately come to mind.
When professional clergy persons like myself get together, as in the business community, we speak of the 80/20 rule.
* 80% of your time is going to be spent on 20% of your people.
* 80% of your resources will get chewed by only 20% of the community.
* You can count on 20% of your congregation to supply you with 80% of what you need to keep going, but it’s the 20% of persons you work with who ensure that it is going to be a continual effort to keep going.
Did Jesus really endorse the 80/20 rule? Well … he gave us the 99/1 rule:
If 99 out of 100 in your community are doing just fine, but one person wanders off, you need to pour in whatever time and effort is necessary to seeing that this one person gets back on track.
From a logistics point of view, it’s a rather crazy use of your resources, and of course there’s no guarantee that it will even work.
That possibility is certainly envisaged in the parable, and it’s fleshed out in the concrete example that follows. Straight after the parable, we’re told:
“If your brother sins against you, go and confront him while the two of you are alone”, and we’re given this strategy for dealing with one of these little ones who has gone and flogged your wallet while you were giving him somewhere to stay.
The temptation is to write him off, or even to seek retribution against him. But no, he’s a member of your spiritual community, and you’ve got to pour your energy now into helping this guy get back on track and rejoin the flock!
You go and have it out with him privately, we‘re told. If that doesn’t work, you gradually start to bring in other members of the church to help bring him around. If the entire community can’t bring him around … OK. In the end you accept that he is no longer part of the community. It happens. We know that. But not until we‘ve made that sort of effort that we know the Good Shepherd makes when He’s looking for that lost sheep.
If the shepherd finds the lost sheep, he comes home rejoicing. If he doesn’t … well, he goes back to the ninety-nine, one sheep poorer, and focuses the bulk of his energy on the other little ones who are left. That’s the pattern - the pattern laid down for the church - though we have to be honest, and admit that from a normal human point of view, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to bother with these ‘little ones’.
This isn’t the way it works in the animal kingdom.
A herd of buffalo, I am told, can only move as fast as the slowest member of the herd. When predators attack, they pick off those slow members first and, ironically perhaps, this is actually beneficial to the herd as a whole, which can now move faster.
This is the way it works in the wild, and we can see that it makes a lot of sense in the human community too.
It makes sense to abort deformed foetuses, and even to expose deformed children, as the Spartans used to do, for the sake of the strength of the community as a whole.
It makes sense to move all of our elderly people straight into nursing homes, frankly as soon as they reach retirement age, and keep them drugged up and happy, for the sake of the productivity of the group as a whole.
It makes sense to imprison (or in other ways get rid of) all those who do not make a meaningful contribution to the community as a whole.
It makes sense, if you have one hundred sheep and one of the little ones goes wandering off, to write off that weak sheep and concentrate of building up the healthy ones.
What does not make sense is to leave the ninety-nine while you go off looking for the one. What does not make sense is to pour your time and energy into people who are always going to have problems, always going to suck up your time and your energy, always going to drain and frustrate you while making sweet little progress, of the type that you can one day look back and say, ‘ah … they turned out OK. It was all worthwhile’.
Hanging around with winners - that makes sense. Going places with the go-getters - that makes good sense. Creating an environment where we and our children are surrounded by good people, who are highly motivated, industrious, and stimulating - that makes good sense for us and for our families.
Hanging around with people we struggle to get on with, pouring time into people who may never get much better, and making yourself vulnerable to people who may well take advantage of you - this is not likely to help you get ahead. It is more likely to keep you poor, humble, and who knows, it may even get you crucified. Jesus says... ’welcome to the church!’
As you know, I love boxing, and one of the things I love about boxing is that so much of the time it works contrary to common sense.
Now I know that there will be some of you think that it is entirely contrary to any good sense to get into a boxing ring in the first place, but what I’m thinking of here is rather the way in which, when you’re put under pressure in the ring, you have to discipline yourself to do what does not come natural.
When someone throws a punch at you, the natural human reaction is to lean back and pull away, so that they can’t reach you, whereas in boxing, normally the safest thing to do is to move in.
I have a group of Pakistani students here at the moment who have travelled a long way to improve their fighting skills under the tutelage of Kon and myself. This is the biggest problem I have with them at the moment. When they are put under pressure in the ring, they keep leaning back and trying to get away from the person who is throwing punches at them - being controlled by their fear - whereas the goal is to move beyond fear, and do what you know you need to do, rather than what you naturally feel like doing.
This is what makes boxing a great training arena for the life of faith too, for as spiritual people we too must continually move beyond our fears and beyond common sense, to do not what comes natural, but what we know we need to do as members of a spiritual community.
The herd of buffalo might indeed move forward by dropping off its little ones, but the church moves forward by nurturing and supporting it’s little ones, knowing that ’their angels always behold the face of their father in Heaven’.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to bother with the little ones, I know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to waste resources on people who are difficult and unresponsive, any more than it makes sense to leave ninety-nine healthy sheep grazing while you focus on the one who wandered off. But this is what defines us as a Christian community - our love for the little ones, our refusal to be dictated to by common sense, and our knowledge that when we do it for the least of these, his brethren, we do it for Him!
