October 11, 2015
Text: Mark 10:17-31
In today’s gospel we have a simple question: What shall I do to get eternal life? And we have a simple answer: You know the commandments. Do as they say.
But the man asking Jesus (in some gospels he is a rich young man) has a sense there must be something more, something he is missing that is causing this itching, gnawing feeling in his soul. He has kept the commandments since he was a kid. He grew up in Sunday school, went to youth group, learned the Bible stories, says his prayers, pretty much does all the right things. Yet he still feels out of alignment, unable to escape the restless feeling that there is something more, something he is missing out on. His inner peace doesn’t match up to what he thinks it should be given the fact that he already has the gift of eternal life.
Who among us hasn’t had this feeling? We’re doing everything we know to do, we’re showing up, we’re praying the best we know how to pray, we’re serving someone somewhere, but we still feel a lack of inner peace. We are out of sync with our souls. Do we have the courage to go looking for Jesus to ask him about it? It takes courage because we never know how Jesus is going to respond. He won’t just pat us on the back and wish us well. He won’t say, “Oh, you’re doing about as well as anyone can be expected to do.” He won’t just leave us in our current condition. Are we ready for that?
Usually, given this scripture to consider, I would try to talk about money and wealth and how we would be wise to reconsider our relationship with it. How we must be mindful lest our possessions become a stumbling block on our spiritual journey. But today, I’m going to invite us to think broader than only about money and possessions. Let’s consider the possibility that we are not only stymied by what we possess, but what we are possessed by. Including the people and activities and beliefs and strategies for coping with life that we depend on to the point of letting them dictate our actions despite what God might be wanting for us. These are, for us, the wealth we rely on and what Jesus is saying to “go, sell and give away.” It might be money that has me so fastened down to a comfortable life that I can’t take the risk of hearing a new call, but it might just as easily be my lack of money that becomes my good excuse for not following, or fills me with pride at how well I’m handling being poor. It might be that I listen too much to other people’s messages of fear, or it could be I get way too much praise so that I become less willing to take risks that might prove the praisers wrong.
What possesses us? Whatever it is, let’s invite God to show it to us this morning. If Jesus were to say, “You lack only one thing . . . get rid of ‘this’ and you will find freedom,” what would the “this” be? It most likely will be something that is so much a part of us that we will find it hard to imagine how to even begin to let it go, something we identify with, something at the heart of how we see ourselves and how others see us, something probably quite good and useful but that keeps us bound up in some way. Maybe it’s trying to please people, or working hard, or being dependable, or knowing a lot about certain topics, or advocating for certain causes, or some other admirable part of us. Something that makes us wealthier in some way.
I think all of us are in the predicament of the rich man in this story. He can’t help it that he was born into a wealthy family or has the gift of making money. He simply is who he is. He does well what he does well. And he genuinely cares about what God wants of him. He is sensitive enough to recognize that despite all the privileges in his life, he still is walking around with a fractured soul that even the thing he does well cannot fill. Maybe this is why Jesus looks at him with genuine love. (I know God already loves us totally, but when we can admit how fractured we are, how we’ve been drinking from the wrong fountain in our search for living water, I can’t help but think that God’s love expands even more.)
When Jesus tells the man the one thing he is lacking, it is not a criticism. It is an encouraging hug. It’s saying, come here, friend. I have some great news for you. You can be free of that empty feeling. You can have greater peace in your heart. Here’s how . . . just give away what you’ve been leaning on instead of leaning on God. I know, I know, you’re afraid you won’t know who you are without it. But not to worry! God and I will always know who you are. We can tell the man feels it deeply, the awesomeness of the invitation. If he didn’t he wouldn’t have walked away from it sadly.
Most of us are living in a continual state of grief for the very same reason—no matter how much we think we want to, we cannot say yes to the invitation to lay down whatever God is asking us to lay down. And we don’t have the courage to speak to each other about our sadness, our resistance, our anger at ourselves. We can’t name what it is that we want to be free enough to lay down, and we can’t challenge each other to this work of letting go. Most of us are bending over backward not to disturb anyone, not to come off sounding overly religious and self-righteous and hypocritical. Who are WE to tell anyone else what we see that might help us move toward greater freedom? But if we have thrown our lives into the chaos of community, who are we NOT to speak of this to each other?
This summer I saw an article in Christian Century called “Keep Jesus Weird.” The sub-title is “Discipleship isn’t supposed to be easy.” The author, Frank Honeycutt, writes about the tendency in churches not to say or do what we feel God wants us to say or do because we are afraid of turning people off. “Because of that,” he writes, “we sometimes bend over backward to please people, desperate to make them feel welcome and eager to postpone or avoid any conversation about what the gospel or a church commitment might require of them.”
We want to assure people that we’re not too weird . . . and that Jesus isn’t weird either. We are reluctant to talk about discipleship or spiritual practices in ways that might sound un-cool. Wouldn’t we cringe if we overheard one of us telling newcomers what they LACK in their spiritual journeys? Jesus can get away with it because he sees straight into the heart and feels, not aversion, but great love for what he sees there. He does not turn away. It is we who turn away from being so fully seen and so completely loved.
Jesus knew, first and foremost, that God is totally and irrevocably in love with us, and he himself was totally focused on God’s desire to know and love each of us personally. His primary work is to wake us up, to shake us up, so that we will turn around and rethink everything we think we know about ourselves, about each other, about the life we share on planet Earth. Jesus doesn’t care whether or not he is understood or appreciated or accepted or thought well of. He doesn’t care if people will think it is rude to mention things like our wealth, our divorces, our politics, our illnesses or our demons. He doesn’t care if people think he is weird.
The author of the Christian Century article says that Jesus often uses a teaching style that is about unsettling and challenging and stirring up people rather than settling an issue for them in a simple and concise way. He would rather we leave wrestling with our confusion than to get the idea that we have found some easy answers and can now return to our sleeping.
If we try to be too careful about how we represent Jesus so he doesn’t seem weird, and so that we don’t seem weird for saying we’re trying to be his disciples, we run the risk of being just another group that gets together for our own pleasure and that occasionally does a few good deeds for others. We lose our weird, radical vibe that is the mark of the Holy Spirit among us.
Wouldn’t you know, right in the middle of this article, the author quotes, of all people, Gordon Cosby, from an interview in Sojourners:
If a community is going to have a life which is an alternative life to the dominant culture and the dominant consciousness, then it must clearly define what its corporate life is and is not about. It must clearly prepare people who want to explore that life and who are making the transition from non-community to community life.
In other words, it’s only fair to warn people that there is an alternative life being offered in this community that will challenge anyone who comes close to it. We’ll be expected to uncover what we’re grasping too tightly, what we’re not holding tightly enough, to question all we possess and all that possesses us. Of course, whether or not we ever do this kind of soul-searching is totally our choice. We can give ourselves away, or not; we can step closer to Jesus and the people Jesus hangs out with, or we can turn away. Either way we are loved with a great love. But the path to more lighthearted living, the path to less fear and sadness and anxiety, is the path of relinquishment.
When I lived in New York at Providence House, where Catholic nuns and homeless women and children lived together, I saw this kind of lighthearted living in action. Sr Elaine, who founded Providence House, worked during the day at a women’s prison in upstate New York. She would come home sometimes without shoes on her feet or without her coat on the coldest winter days because she had given them to someone who needed them more. Sometimes she gave away our dishes and furniture to women moving into empty apartments. Once we received a generous donation of a freezer full of meat, and in the night all of it was stolen. Most of us were perturbed, but Sr. Elaine simply said, “It was meant for the poor, and the poor took it.”
No doubt about it, she was weird! And she was free. She possessed nothing and nothing possessed her—so she could freely receive whatever came and then freely let it go. When the rest of us worried about whether or not we were responding correctly in a given situation, whether or not we were following the rules, keeping the commandments of our life together, she would say, “Since we know we’re going to make a lot of mistakes, let’s make as many as we can on the side of reckless generosity.”
I think this is one of the gifts Jesus is offering us here. Yes, it’s hard to enter the Realm of God. We are so addicted to the realm of competition and money and power that we rely on these riches instead of God’s. Notice Jesus calls us “children” when he says a second time how hard it is. He’s reminding us that unless we become like children, lowering ourselves to our true height, realizing we don’t know everything we need to know, learning to laugh at our weirdness, we won’t ever find the entrance. We will end up walking away.
But don’t you think it’s likely that the rich man returns? How could he ever forget the way Jesus looked at him? We don’t forget those times we’ve been seen for who we really are and loved anyway. It’s one of the primary jobs we have in the world. To see others this way, and to let ourselves be seen. And to give away anything that gets in the way of seeing.