"You lack one thing"-A Sermon for Proper 23, Mark 10:17-31
Particularly by people new to the Episcopal Church, but sometimes, even by those who have worshiped in the Episcopal Church for quite some time, I am often asked how we select or choose the bible lessons we read and hear and are preached on in church each Sunday. Well, the short answer is that we do not choose what we hear and consider each week, as we gather together in this place to pray, worship God in Christ, and be formed into people whose image reflects more and more brightly and clearly the God of love. Instead, they are provided for us by something we call the Revised Common Lectionary…it is a three-year cycle of readings from the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Psalms, and the four Gospels. Using the lectionary one can see what will be read in church on any given Sunday looking forward for time in memoriam. So, though one may reasonably think that I chose this particular Gospel Lesson from Mark, which sits before us, the perhaps familiar story often called the Rich Young Ruler, for the first Sunday of our Season of Giving Thanks at St. Julian’s…this time each fall when we enter into a season of thinking together about how God in Christ is calling each of us to share from our own abundance…from our many and varied resources and gifts…share from our time, talents, and financial resources to further God’s mission and ministry that is alive and active in and through our family of faith…but I did not choose this reading in particular. Instead, as it just happens, the lectionary has just smiled upon us and placed before us this familiar but challenging story about money, yes, but about much than that.
And I say the lectionary has smiled upon us, or us as a church, not because the passage is somehow suggesting that we give all our money…sell all of our possession and give all of those proceeds to St. Julian’s…because it’s not. Maybe when in late November when we are trying to figure out how in the world we are going to balance the budget and pay all the bills…I wish that was what the passage is suggesting…but, again, it is not. In fact, the great spiritual challenge laid before the rich young man who comes to Jesus is not to give all his earthly possessions to the religious institutions of their own day, to say the local synagogue or even the temple in Jerusalem…or even to the purse that supports Jesus’ own livelihood, furthering Jesus’ own personal well-being and, thus, his life-giving ministry on earth. Instead, Jesus tells the rich young man, who in my mind is more on a quest for meaning than a simple pat on the back, Jesus tells him to sell all he owns and give the money to the poor.
And I love…absolutely love…how Mark describes Jesus just before he shares with the rich young man the challenging call, which he must answer, if he is to discover the eternal life which is indeed his heart’s desire. Mark writes, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’” Jesus looked at him…he looked into his eyes…into his heart…he really saw the one who stood before him…a human of infinite worth and value, not based on the size of his pocketbook, but on his capacity for doing good, for being courageous and sacrificial, one genuinely desiring meaning and direction…a life of substance…a life worth living…an eternal sort of life. I think Jesus looked at the person standing before him and saw a human with a potential future full of possibility and good work and growth and challenge and opportunity. And Jesus loved him…loved this man from the top of his head to the bottom of his toes…loved him so entirely that he had to tell him the truth…for the truth would set him free.
Freedom from a life determined primarily by one’s own earning power. Freedom from defining success for his own life based on the world’s calculations. Freedom from having society determine his innate value by the privilege his wealth affords…rather than the quality of his relationships and the character of his words and deeds. Freedom from the struggle of fighting tooth and nail to maintain his wealth when the crops fail and the rains stop, and the bottom of the economy falls out. Freedom from seeing other people as a means to an end…a means of padding further his own bottom line. Freedom from the isolation caused by not knowing and loving and learning from those living without privilege, without wealth in a world that so profoundly builds a wall between the rich and the poor. Freedom from fear, that devours the soul, by placing our security and future and purpose…the weight of our own world…squarely on our own shoulders…a weight that we cannot and should not bare alone.
I believe Jesus really sees the burden this young man is carrying around with him…the existential crisis that stands just behind him…the soul crushing weight that really leads him to Jesus in the first place. Jesus sees the human being, created in God’s image, standing before him, and he loves him entirely…so Jesus tells him the hard truth, that his life, and the wealth and privilege it affords him, has him all tied up and is holding him back from experiencing the actual good, self-giving, love-life that his heart desires…and the only real solution is to cut himself entirely free from it all. A freedom not really from money…but freedom from something altogether more subtle and sinister…the corrupting influence of the world that he is so entirely enmeshed in, shackled by, which has so badly confused him and maybe all of us…a world that values a closed hand more than an open hand…a world that wrongly equates wealth with wisdom…a world that values like-mindedness over engaging and learning from diversity and difference…a world that honors individual accomplishment over the common good…a world that sees the accumulation of power as signs of strength and bravery…rather than naming courage when it really shines in our midst…which is each time, every single time, a person empties oneself, like Jesus, of power and privilege…making the necessary space and conditions in our hearts and minds to serve and come to know and connect with and learn from and stand alongside those who look, love, live and believe differently than we do.
You see, Jesus was not condemning the rich young man to a life of poverty or destitution. He was not asking the young man to become some sort of “beggar for Jesus”. But, the request Jesus makes of the rich young man is so radically contrary to how we have been formed by the world to think and calculate and discern right from wrong…good from bad…that it is easy to forget the very last thing that Jesus says to the man he sees and loves and who stands before him. For after Jesus, indeed, tells the rich young man that the one thing he lacks is to sell all of his possessions and give the money to the poor, he says to the man…then come follow me…come follow me…come and be with me…come and be my friend…come and share bread with me…come and join my ministry of love and light and truth and healing in and for the world. Join me in telling everyone who will listen that God’s ways are greater than the world’s ways…that our mutual flourishing is found in the care of and connection with others…all others. Jesus is not saying destitute yourself and then figure out what’s next for you now that you are homeless and penniless. Instead, he says, in effect, come live with me…dine at my table…I am the bread of life that feeds body and soul…come join me in the great and wondrous adventure of setting the world to rights. I still have good and meaningful work for you that will bear much fruit and make you richer that you ever imagined possible. For a human does not live on bread alone and the treasure that comes from seeing and participating in God’s work in the lives of those suffering and in need is much finer, much more rewarding, than silver and gold.
Mark tells us that when the rich young man heard what Jesus had to say he was shocked and went away grieving for he had many possessions. It is sort of a heartbreaking ending to the story. My own hope is that it was not actually the end of the story…but just where Mark’s telling ended that day. And, I find that hope because it is Jesus who goes on to say to his disciples who remain with him, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” In other words, as the young man moved through his grief…his grief that I think was born from both being disconnected from Jesus…from walking away…and from realizing that to follow Jesus he would have to really lose something…something few would willingly give up…make no mistake Jesus is confronting him with real loss….nonetheless my hope is that God’s light shined in the midst of his grief stricken darkness, and that he was reborn in a new day…as a new person…an eye witness to the power of resurrection that was soon coming into the world. I hope that he returned to Jesus after feeding a whole bunch of hungry people…becoming just one of the hundreds of unnamed followers who journey with Jesus to Jerusalem, the cross, and the empty tomb. I hope this for him. But I also hope it for me…for surely there have been times when I have walked away…surely I have been all tied up by the world’s notions of power and success…surely I have reveled in my own privilege as others suffered. So, I am very grateful to be reminded that for God all things are possible…that God can push me through the eye of any needle…of any size.
Which takes me back to where I began…with the lectionary…that has indeed smiled upon us today…for it has provided us the opportunity to think about how the world has tied us all up…how the world has profoundly and not always helpfully shaped our thinking about what is right and wrong…good and bad…how the world has badly misguided our understanding of what it means to succeed. Maybe it is time to rethink our relationship with money. Maybe we need to reconsider how we spend our time and with whom we spend our time. Maybe we need to reevaluate how we determine the value of our own and other’s lives. The invitation to follow Jesus, to befriend Jesus, to dine with Jesus…to walk in love as Christ loves us…remains ever before us. And, the Season of Giving Thanks is all about this, a special time for us to consider what sort of radical transformation in our own lives Jesus, who sees us and loves us, might be whispering in our own ear. And how that…becoming more and more the person the God of love has created us to be…might divinely shape…for good and for God, who we are, how we love, who we love, and, yes, how we give, in and through St. Julian’s…and well beyond. Amen.