A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

Sunday, October 15, 2006

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., DeWitt, NY  13214

Phone:  315-446-0960     FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com     http://pebblehill.presbychurch.org

            The story we read from Mark’s gospel, about a rich man coming to Jesus to ask what he must do to inherit eternal life, appears in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke - which means that it has always been an important story for Christians.  In the gospel of Luke, the man is a ruler; in Matthew he is young.  In Mark he is described in neither of these ways, he is just someone who runs up and kneels before Jesus as Jesus is setting out on a journey.  In Mark’s version we don’t even know that the man is rich until the last verse of Jesus’ interaction with him.  We learn some other things about him as well.  It seems that he was a morally upright member of his community, that he had not gained his wealth by deceitful means.  He kept the commandments of God since he was a boy.  But he knew he lacked something.  He wanted to know from Jesus what else he could do to “inherit eternal life” and Jesus told him, but he couldn’t do it, and he walked away sorrowfully.  We’ll get into that later.

            What has always struck me about this passage since I have been in the pastoral ministry is how Jesus let this young man go.  Yes, it was the man’s decision not to follow Jesus – but, man, we’d never do that!  In fact, he seems like a first century version of those folks Bob Wuthnow was telling us about last weekend at our Fig Tree Assembly.  You know, the “seekers,” those who have the questions but aren’t attracted to the old stock answers, who are searching for something more in their lives.  I couldn’t imagine turning them away.  We’d love to have our pews filled with them.  In fact, if I were Jesus, and the man couldn’t quite bring himself to sell everything he has and give the money to the poor and follow, I think I’d be a little more pastoral and say something like, “Well, think about it, pray about it.  Come along for a while and see if we’re a good fit for you.  You’re asking the right questions, you’re on the right path.”  I suppose it’s possible I might even be thinking about our upcoming stewardship campaign.  I mean, this guy has a lot to give and he is looking for ways to give it.

            Will Willimon tells about how we pastors try to affirm people who come to us for counseling or guidance, no matter what.  We’ve been trained, after all, to accept people as they are, to not be judgmental, to affirm who they are as a person.  But unfortunately, he says, a lot of the time such an approach “in the name of love does little more than help make people’s lives a little less miserable rather than a whole lot more redeemed.”  He goes on to say how “in the name of love and acceptance we bless all sorts of behavior.  Our goal is to help people adjust, accept, affirm, and live with who they already are rather than call them to convert to someone they could never be without the gospel.  Accommodation rather than conversion is the name of our game.  You don’t need Jesus dying on a cross for what everyone already finds easy.”

            “Good teacher,” he asks Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  By any standard the man already lived a “good” life – but he asks the “good teacher” to tell him what he knows inherently cannot come to him by his own goodness alone.  Jesus stays with it for a while.  He says, “Obey the law.  Keep the commandments.”  “I’ve done that all my life,” he says, “but (he didn’t say it but he meant it) I’m still empty.”  Now he was getting somewhere.  Jesus looked at the man again, Mark says, and he “loved him.”  Which is when he said, “You lack one thing.  Go and sell what you own, give the money to the poor, come follow me.”  Jesus doesn’t say that to everybody, but it is his spiritual diagnosis and his prescription for this man who, we might say, “has it all.”  Rather than accommodating to the man’s sense of “goodness” – that there must be something else he could do, something more he could take on to bring himself up to the next level of goodness – Jesus strips him of the illusion that God’s love and acceptance works that way.  When Jesus loves you, when God loves you, and you get touched with that love, it’s not about him accommodating to your life, but about bringing you into his life, into God’s life.

            For this man it was about money – which is an issue about Americans, in particular, have a great deal of ambiguity, which is why we have so much difficulty talking about it in the church as well.  Some years ago Jacob Needlemann wrote a book entitled Money and the Meaning of Life.  In it he wrote, “We live in an affluent society.  This means not only that we have much material wealth, but that we want material wealth more than we want everything else.”  But, he continues, it doesn’t do for us what we want.  It doesn’t make us happy, or free, certainly not immortal, not even content.  In fact, he proposes that our desire for money is a kind of self-imposed hell.  As he describes it, “Hell is the state in which we are barred from receiving what we truly need because of the value we give to what we merely want.”

            Of course this can also be true about things other than money or wealth.  Jesus had a particular prescription for this man.  What might his prescription be for you and me?  What would he tell you and me about what we need to do to inherit eternal life, which of course would mean also to be fully and completely alive now?  As he looks upon you and loves you, don’t you think he could identify whatever it is in which you and I have invested our hopes and dreams and are counting on to save us – whether it be our career, our success, our appearance, our influence or power?  And would he not tell you and me, as he told this young man, that we have to release our grip, to open our hands, to let it go and come, follow?

            This was the only invitation recorded in the gospels extended by Jesus that isn’t taken up by the person to whom it is made.  “He went away sorrowful” is what Mark says.  He was so close.  He was right there.  Jesus wasn’t unsympathetic.  “How hard it is,” he said as he turned toward his disciples, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God.”  How hard it is for anyone, who on their own merit, by the strength of their own abilities, or talents, or intelligence – to enter.  It is easier, as Fred Buechner has rendered it, “for a Cadillac to get through a revolving door.”  What we most need, truly need, eternally need, can only be received as a gift.  We can’t afford the price.  It can only be received as a gift – God’s love, God’s forgiveness, God’s present and eternal acceptance.

            The personal implication of this, of course, is that you have to be able to accept the gift in order to receive it.  This is how Barbara Brown Taylor puts it:  “You cannot accept the gift if you have no spare hands to take it with.  You cannot make room for it if your rooms are already full.  You cannot follow if you are not free to go.”

            You know, if you really think about it, there is nothing that you or I own that we cannot do without.  The faithful extension of that, the direction that Jesus pushes us, the direction that the young man who came to him just couldn’t go, is that we are in bondage to anything that we cannot give away, even, ultimately, our lives.

            “Then who can be saved?” is what the disciples say in response to Jesus – to which he responds, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God: for God all things are possible.”

            In the gospels the same word that is used for “healed,” as in healed from a sickness or a disease, is the word used for “saved.”  So, imagine that the rich man does not need to learn to let go, to share, to feel less attached to his wealth, but that the rich man needs healing.  He is a good man and something is keeping him sick.  He cannot save himself from his illness, any more than you or I could.  We need help from a doctor.  We need medicine, maybe even surgery, to make us well – something, someone to remove the toxin from our own environment.

            Being a “good” person isn’t enough to make us well, spiritually.  It may indeed be all we can do, but our own goodness can only take us so far – and most of us still have plenty far to go on that front.  You don’t need God to be “good” though it might help.  It won’t save you; it won’t heal the disease at the core.  It’s sort of like being backed up to the edge of a cliff.  I can stay there and build my world in that very precarious place.  I worry about the dangers of falling off the edge so I take every precaution to maintain my security.  I build a house with the strongest foundation possible – but the edge is still right there and I worry all the time whether my foundation will hold.  It’s scary to think of the alternative – to let yourself fall into the arms of God – which is why the young man walked away sorrowfully.  How hard, how impossible it seemed to him, the way that Jesus said he needed to go.

            There is another image, one that perhaps helps us better to see how what is possible with God can become part of our lives, how we can come to know God as the healer of our soul.  That is the image of opening my hands to release my grip on whatever it is I am clasping so tightly, so that I might receive God’s love and forgiveness – God’s amazing grace.  Like the hungry person who begs for food with outstretched hands, so we come to God with open hands, a sign of our desire to receive from God what we cannot gain for ourselves.  Not our own goodness, our own accomplishments or achievements, not our own intelligence or skills or abilities.  With us it is impossible – but not for God.

            This is, I think, the biggest move of faith – to face the uncomfortable prospect of releasing something of the life we’ve built to receive the life that God gives.  But yet even more do we know the sorrow of holding on to that which cannot give us true life.

            Let it go, whatever it might be, let it go today.  Come and follow.           

Return to Ministries/Study/Prayer