Jesus and the Rich Young Ruler, Heinrich Hofman, 1889

Proper 23
21st Sunday after Pentecost
October 14th, 2018

Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
Psalm 90: 12-17
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

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           Two summers ago, I met a guy while doing my hospital internship.  He was one of the other chaplains and was a Roman Catholic seminarian.  And this guy, Matthew, had a pretty interesting story.  He grew up as a Presbyterian and, in his early thirties, converted to Roman Catholicism.  And for a while, Matthew served as a Franciscan monk in New York City.  There he heard a call to the priesthood, but even when I met him, a few years after he left the monastery, he still had those usual monkish qualities to him: he was calm, quiet, and yet with a powerful presence.  And he was incredibly intelligent, too.  But, unlike most people who are bookish, Matthew didn’t have any books.  In fact, Matthew only had, only owned, as much as could fit in a small cardboard box.  This was a discipline of his, and he kept it pretty strictly.  Once, he brought over two books to give to me, out of the blue, because they wouldn’t fit in the box anymore.  And once, when I saw his rosary and showed some interest in taking up the practice, he frowned, looked at it, and gave it to me.  It was from Jerusalem, he said, and I could tell that it meant a lot to him.  I tried to give it back, but he put up his hands and said, “No, you keep it.  If the Spirit has guided you to an interest in it, who am I to keep it for myself?”

            Now, when we hear the story in today’s gospel reading, where Jesus tells the young rich man to “go, sell everything you own, and give the money to the poor…then come, follow me”, when we hear this story, I think we all wonder if we have to be like my friend Matthew.  Imagine taking everything you own, every single thing that you can’t throw on your back or, at least for my friend, in a single, small cardboard box, and giving it all away.  Helene and I had to do this once when moving from Georgia up here to Eugene, though we came with as much could fit in a little Dodge Neon.  A different friend of mine, whose parents were in the military, said that whenever they moved (which was a lot) they threw out everything they owned and bought new things wherever they landed.  It was cheaper that way, he said, than to haul tables and chairs and clothes and nick nacks all the way across the country.  And, anyway, it helped you keep from getting attached to things.  Imagine doing this yourself, and you might have a sense of why this rich young man may have balked at what Jesus asked him to do.

            But, if we were simply to sell everything we had, to give it away, I think we’d be missing the point of our gospel reading.  Few, when we go to the Bible, we don’t find a list of things to do but a collection of stories about people.  And not just any people, but stories about people who meet Jesus, who meet God on earth, face to face.  And in these stories, Jesus challenges people to examine their lives, to look at who they are in relation to others, to the world around themselves, and to God.  And what we have here is a story about a man who is ready to give up everything for God, except  – and it’s this “except” that is the important part of the story.  Jesus saw this man’s “except” and he brought it forward, not to scare the guy off, but to challenge him to a deeper faith, and to show the man what it really means to seek after eternal life.

            And this is our challenge as well.  For what my friend Matthew did when he gave me his rosary, and what Jesus is calling the rich man to do, is a bit deeper than just giving your things away.  Anyone can do this, and some of us can do it very easily.  We’ve all got a bit of clutter in our lives that we could easily (and happily) do without.  Even after moving and paring down, I can look around our house and find quite a few things that I don’t really need: books, clothes, even furniture.  I just keep it around because I like it, and it’s nice having things.  If I met someone who needed them, really needed them, I don’t think it would hurt me much if I gave them away.  And in this gospel reading Jesus is saying, yeah, sure, but what about those things that you feel you couldn’t live without.  What about all your books on Tolkien that you love so much and put in special boxes when you moved?  Or that nice red stole you have that says so much about your love of medieval Britain?  Or those pictures of Gwendolyn and Fiona when they were just a few days old?  What if I asked you to give those things up to be my disciple?  Would you still stand up, drop your nets, and follow me?

            Since I’ve gotten here, over the past three months I’ve been preaching on the Christian life, of what it means to be disciples of Christ.  For our soup suppers I’ve called this “ever-deeper conversion”, for we are always seeking to deepen our relationship with God, always trying to become better disciples.  And we need to reflect in this way because we humans are so good at putting up road blocks on our own walks with Christ.  We take things in our lives – or not just things but people, or titles, or ideas – and we think, “This completes me.  This is who I am.”  I am a father, or a priest, or a friend who listens well.  This photo of Gwen, or this beloved book, or even this collar, defines who I am as a person.  While in academia, I remembering thinking to myself, “I am a scholar, and I can’t imagine myself as being anything else.”  I thought I had figured myself out, and before I could really do discernment for the priesthood, I had to remember that what I really was was not a Scholar but a Child of God.  Everything else flowed from there.

            What are those stumbling blocks that we have put between ourselves and God?  What are the “except”’s that we cannot put down and that Jesus is, even now, challenging us to see for what they are?  What are the idols of our own making in our own lives?  These are difficult questions, but there is a freedom in these questions that we don’t often see.  For we are bound up with these idols.  Idols aren’t just bad and sinful because they are not God and it’s bad not to worship God.  Idols are sinful because they control us, they make us think that they encompass all of reality, that they, in their limitedness, are actually ultimate.  We clutch on to them and fixate on them, as if they were all in all.  But God reaches out, and he takes our trembling fingers, and opens them up with his own firm hand.  And we turn, ever so gradually, often resentfully, but ever so gradually, to a larger and more beautiful world.  Here we are given the freedom to love things for what they are, and not for what we force them to be.  Here we see that the thing that defines us, the thing that is truly ultimate, is not us, but God.  For in God, everything is in their proper relationships.  In God, we may give with hope, receive in love, and walk ever in the light of salvation.

The Queen Mary Psalter, 14th century

Proper 20
18th Sunday after Pentecost
September 23rd, 2018

Jeremiah 11:18-20
Psalm 54
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37
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We’ve come over a sort of hill in our reading of the gospel of Mark.  We’re in the ninth chapter now, and we’ve made a sort of turn.  In the beginning of Mark’s gospel, Jesus is teaching and he is working miracles.  And there’s this latent question: who is this guy?  Who is this Jesus who does all these wonderful signs, and who is this man who teaches with such authority?  And last week this question came to a head, and we heard the answer (Jesus is the Messiah), even if the disciples didn’t understand fully what that might mean. 

And now here in the ninth chapter, things are a little different; they’re going to be different, all the way until Jesus’s final days.  He’ll still be teaching, he’ll still be working miracles, but something about Jesus’s ministry has changed.  He talks more and more about his own death (which is something the disciples just don’t want to hear about), and he talks more and more about discipleship.  What does it mean to follow Jesus?  What does it mean to live a life to God? 

Last week, we heard Jesus answering these questions in a sort of paradox: whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; and whoever will lose their life for my sake – for Jesus’s sake –  and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  This week, we heard something else: whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.  Hmm.  Now we might, along with the disciples, want to press Jesus and ask, “Well, which is it?”  Is following Jesus about losing your life, or is it about welcoming little children?  Is being a disciple – a real disciple – all about giving up ourselves, or is it about treating little kids well?  Which is it, and how to do we do it?

If Jesus were to hear this question, he might, characteristically, not just give us a simple answer, but instead he might tell us another parable.  For although God is one, and our relationship to God is singular, discipleship can be explained in many, many different ways.  This is why Jesus uses parables instead of bullet points.  We can’t wrap our heads around what the kingdom is, or who God is, or the perfect way to be disciples with just one story.  Otherwise the Bible would be really, really short, and it wouldn’t lift our hearts as it does.

For an example, think about how the Bible describes God.  In the gospels, Jesus describes God’s relationship with us as a father to his children; Isaiah describes this same relationship as a potter to his clay.  God is the shepherd of the sheep, a mother bear, the light of the world, a rock and a fortress.  The prophets even describe God as a woman in labor.  And all of these images, even though they seem so different, all point to one, true reality: that God loves us, and loves us so much that he would come down and sacrifice himself for our sake.

Discipleship is not just one, single act.  It’s not just one thing we do; it’s a whole life lived to God, and so we need many different images of it and many different ways of thinking about it.  And here, Jesus gives us one such image: welcoming little children is welcoming Jesus himself, and welcoming Jesus means welcoming the one who sent him: God the Father.  And what is a child?  Well, for the ancient world, not much.  Children in the Greco-Roman world were “little adults”, people who were not fully people just yet.  They needed to be trained, educated, and brought up so they could help out on the farm, or with trading, or in some way help their community.  They received tradition and learning, until they could work on their own.  They were like empty cups, ready to be filled.

Children in the ancient world did not have the freedom that our children know today.  They didn’t know Saturday morning cartoons and lazy days along the river, and they certainly did not know the freedom of summer vacation.  And yet, even so, they knew a certain freedom that is, often, foreign to us: they knew the freedom of giving without expectation.  Now, we adults give for many reasons: we take someone to lunch because he took us to lunch; we give to those in need because we ourselves have been given so much; and when we’re not really following God enough, we give because we really want to look good, or to get a gift in return.  But children in the ancient world had nothing to give, and so when they did give, there’s a pureness to the gift.  And when we welcome a child who has nothing to give, when we receive a gift from someone who has literally nothing, then we may catch a glimpse of the gift of grace that God gives to us.

For Jesus gave a gift when he had nothing else to give.  Jesus hung on a cross, was nailed to a piece of wood and left there until he died, and people looked on and said, “He promised so much and look, he gave us nothing but his own body hanging from a tree.”  His life was useless, they said, a dead-end, a false hope.  But in that sacrifice, in that death of a man stripped of everything, in that body hung from the cross we have received the greatest gift: our salvation and the love of God.  Whoever saves his life, will lose it; and whoever loses his life for Jesus’s sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

How, then, are we to be disciples?  What are we to do if we want to live a life to God?   Well, here, I think Jesus is saying that the first step isn’t to do, to act in some way, but to receive.  Discipleship is certainly about doing, about going out into the world and spreading the love of God – eventually; it’s certainly about giving of ourselves in the way Christ gave of himself – but not first, not initially.  First we are to welcome, first we are to live with open hearts, to love without any thought of return.  For that is how God loves us, and how Christ loved us up on the cross.  And is from such love, such selfless love, that all good discipleship flows.