I
love movies . . . and the best way to see them at home is on DVD or Blu-Ray,
those little disks the size and shape of a CD that a whole movie – and more! –
can fit on. I love to sit with my feet
up, put a movie in the player, turn the stereo sound up – Pam says too loud –
and get lost for a couple of hours in the story of Butch Cassidy or ET or
Saving Private Ryan . . . and I’ve got quite a growing collection of DVDs, let
me tell you . . . over a hundred of them, all lined up nice and pretty on a
living room shelf, all alphabetized, protected, and on display, and woe betide
anyone who leaves one of them sitting around OUT OF THEIR CASE or SCRATCHES ONE
OF THEM or . . . well you get the picture, and so there they are, and I can
look at them and count them and watch them over and over again . . .
And
then I read this morning’s passage and – Oy Vey! – I see a lot more of the rich
man in me than I’d like . . . like him, I love things, I love my stuff
much more sometimes than I ought to. Is
it the same with you? Are there things
that you love a lot? Maybe a building, a
house or a church, that you take great pride in, that you guard with your life,
you make sure it stays in great shape . . . or a car, it’s gotta be polished
and buffed, and shined and kept in tip-top shape . . . or maybe it’s money,
a savings or retirement account . . . God help the wife who scratches or
dents the mint-condition 1998 Dodge Ram Quad Cab, or the youth group who
doesn’t vacuum the fellowship-hall floor, or the child who breaks a piece of
treasured, heirloom dinnerware. This
kind of thing damages friendships and church functioning . . . it says to other
people – our loved ones, our youth, our brothers and sisters in Christ – “Our stuff
is more important to us than you are.”
Love of things gets in the way of relationships, in the way of
mission, in the way of life . . .
And
Jesus is saying in our passage that possessions have a way of getting in the
way of our relationship with him.
This man – over in Luke, he’s called a rich ruler – this man falls on
his knees in front of Jesus, so we know that his problem isn’t that he’s proud
– kneeling, after all, is the universal sign of submission, of humility . . .
he looks upon Jesus as his superior, and he calls him “good teacher,” a formal
address of student to rabbi, and he asks him what he must do to inherit eternal
life. And immediately, Jesus
disabuses him of the notion that anyone but God is good – and of course, as
Christians, we believe that he is God, and so there’s a double irony at
play here – but Jesus says “You know the commandments . . .” and the man with
many possessions says “Yes, and I’ve kept all of them since my youth”
And we have no reason to disbelieve him, he’s a good man, reverent and faithful
. . .
Then
Jesus, who sees into the heart, who knows what is inside of us all looks
upon him and loves him, and I can imagine the intimate, compassionate, penetrating gaze . . . and as he looks upon him with love, he
tells him what he must do: give up everything, all he owns, sell it and give
the money to the poor, and then come follow Jesus . . . and the young man’s
face sags in realization, as he comes to understand what discipleship will
entail . . . for he has many possessions, and he loves them well, and he
grieves for his lost dream of the Kingdom of God . . .
Saint
Benedict, in his Rule for communal living, forbids his monks to own anything .
. . he felt so strongly about the subject that he wrote an entire chapter on
it. He says “Those in monastic vows
should not claim any property as their own . . . absolutely nothing at all, not
even books and writing materials.” He
calls personal ownership of property a “wicked practice” and that “everything
in the monastery should be held in common,” as in the early church described in
Acts. And although Benedict doesn’t
say, I imagine this passage was one he had in mind . . . that, and his own personal experience
in community life, how it could be poisoned by possessions, tainted by personal
stuff . . .
After
the rich man goes away, Jesus uses the episode as a teaching moment, an object
lesson for his disciples . . . “How hard it will be for those who have wealth
to enter the kingdom of God,” but the disciples are perplexed, they don’t get
it, even after the rich guy’s refusal to give up all he owns costs him
everything . . .it kinda reminds me of today, when we don’t get it either . . .
so we spiritualize this passage, interpret it to mean give up spiritual baggage,
or we say it’s an ideal, one to aspire to, but in Jesus’ context,
he meant exactly what he said . . . give
up all you have and follow me.
So
Jesus gives them an analogy, a visualization: “It’s easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for someone who’s rich to enter the kingdom of
God.” And now they get it, it becomes
crystal clear, and they all have this mental image of somebody pushing on a
camel’s behind, trying to shove it through a needle . . . and they ask in
despair “Then who can be saved?” And
Jesus looks at them – the same way he looked at the rich man, and loved him –
Jesus looks at them in love and says that “for humans, it’s impossible . . .
but for God, all things are possible.”
Humans
cannot save themselves, but God can . . . God can make it possible, God can
reach down and redeem anyone God pleases, just like that . . . this statement
is rich with nuance, rich with the stuff of God’s kingdom . . . in a sense, all
the Good News is wrapped up in it . . . our God is a God of the possible, a God
of the infinite, a God who is doing something new, something powerful, day by
day. For us, it is impossible, but for
the creator, all things are possible.
Do the disciples get the depth, the rich, nourishing stew of hope
contained in that statement? God can
save whomever God wants, whether she lives in Palestine or not, whether she
gives up all she has or not, even whether she follows Jesus or
not, if God wants to . . . and case in point, the rich man couldn’t give up his
stuff on his own, but God can.
And you can see the root of profound
tension here: the rich man is told to give up all he owns, but he can’t
do it, only God can do it . . .
And
perhaps Peter senses all of this, for he says “We’ve done it . . . we’ve given
up all we’ve got, and we’re following you . . .” And that’s opening for one last lesson, the
most astounding one of all: “there is no one who has left house or brothers or
sisters or mother or father or children or fields” Jesus says “who will not
receive a hundredfold now in this age – houses, brothers and sisters, mothers
and children, and fields, with persecutions” and the disciples look around at
each another, and wonder what he means.
Aside from the persecution – and they’d had plenty of that – where were
all these things? Where was even one
house, one brother or sister, one field – much less a hundred-fold – to replace
the ones they gave up? What’s Jesus talking
about? And Mark doesn’t say if they get
it or not, but we do: Jesus isn’t talking about personal possessions
here. Remember – they just get us in
trouble. He’s talking about the
world-wide community of Christians . . . every Christian, world-wide, is the
brother and sister of the disciples and the houses and fields of every
Christian are theirs also . . . and the persecutions of every Christian on
earth are theirs persecutions as well . . . what Jesus is talking about is the
coming Kingdom of God, which is here right now in the persons of Christ’s body
on Earth.
The
rich man couldn’t participate in the kingdom, he couldn’t partake of the
radical sharing community of Christians unless he gave everything up, unless he
quit making his things the center of his life, and focused on Jesus
instead.
And
right after our passage – but interestingly, not in the lectionary – Jesus
predicts his death once again – “the Son of Man will be handed over to the
chief priests and the scribes . . . [who will] hand him over to the Gentiles;
who will and kill him . . .” And once
again, the link is made between Jesus’ radical life, his radical economics
and his death . . . is it any wonder they killed him? Is it any wonder that a system where the
accumulation of wealth is based on barter and trade and buying and selling
would kill somebody who advocated that his disciples own nothing?
And
of course, the message is every bit as radical today as it was back then . . .
our economic system is every bit as dependant on owning and buying and selling
things as the one in Jesus’ day. Even
more so, actually . . . there was no middle class in those days, just the
wealthy who fed off the lower classes . . . today, the vast majority of wealth
is still accumulated by a small percentage of our population, and it’s still
built on the backs of the poor, but now there’s the middle class as well, with
enough money to feed themselves, and disposable income as well . . . and our
insatiable desire for things is amplified by Madison avenue, which
exists to create a craving for goods and services, and our love of possessions
is cynically exploited and fed by the Powers that Be to increase their wealth.
What
Jesus is preaching here is not some denial for denial’s sake, not some
half-baked, hair-shirted scheme of personal penance, but liberation . . .
liberation from the rat-race, the tread-mill of work, work, work to acquire
more and more stuff, so we can work and work and work some more to feed and
maintain this stuff, so we can get more stuff to poison our relationships and
our minds and our souls, to alienate ourselves from our families and friends
and brothers and sisters in Christ.
Chuck
Campbell, one of my old preaching professors, has written that preaching this
kind of thing is tough, because every middle-class preacher in America
is caught right up in this stuff, we’re all right there with our
congregations, right in the middle of it all.
And that’s perhaps as it should be . . . after all, Jesus surely
experienced what he preached as well, he surely experienced the glittering call
of things, of little idols we buy and sell to replace God . . . and the
question is – and this is the hard part – the question is, does this passage
call us to do it? Does it call us
to give up everything we own, to divest ourselves of all but our clothes, all
but the shoes on our feet? Remember that
Jesus was talking to disciples, who were on the road with him, who were to be
stripped-down, lean-and-mean evangelism machines, who had to travel light . . .
does it apply to us?
Well,
God may not be calling us to give up our televisions or our cars or DVDs
– after all, recreation is not a bad thing in and of itself, we are
expected to rest the mind and body, it’s essential to our well-being – but the
trick is to not let our stuff rule our lives, ruin our relationships, or be
substituted for God . . . and one way is to take our minds off our
stuff, and put them on Christ instead.
There’s an old hymn that says Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full on
his wonderful face, and the things of the Earth will go strangely dim, in the
light of his glory and grace” and of course, prayer is the way to do this . . .
prayer develops an ever-deepening, on-going relationship with God through
Christ, and an ever-decreasing distance between ourselves and God . . . through
regular prayer we learn to keep our eyes on the prize, our eyes on the kingdom
of God, where they belong.
Oh,
it’s not particularly easy, disciplined prayer never is, it’s not a happy-magic
pill, one day we’re ruled by our stuff and the next by God, and there’ll be
times when we are absolutely in thrall to the world, and our lives will feel
desolate and magnificently messed up.
But Jesus promised it in the great commission – lo, I am with you
always, always, and when we’re discouraged and weak, when we think we
can’t do it anymore, that we’ll always be slaves to our desires, Jesus
will look upon us with compassion – like he did the rich young man – he’ll look
on us with sympathy and empathy and commiseration, and we will know we are
loved. Amen.
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