October 15, 2006 - Mark 10:17-27 Proper 23B - The Rev. Stephanie E. Parker

Newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck, who died some years ago of cancer, was asked if she had any regrets about things she had left undone as she stood at the edge of death and she replied:

I always had a dream that when I am asked to give an accounting of my life to a higher court, it will be like this: So, empty your pockets. What have you got left of your life? Are there any dreams that were unfulfilled? Any unused talents that we gave you when you were born that you have leftover? Are there any unsaid complements or bits of love that you haven't spread around? 

And, I will answer, "I've nothing to return. I spent everything you gave me. I'm coming back to you as naked as the day I was born."

In Jesus' interaction with this individual of great wealth we are given an invitation to struggle with this question of how it is that we "spend" our lives. Today we see a sincere and privileged person at the crossroads of his life and he's just chosen the path that leads straight to his spiritual death. Jesus knows this man has chosen badly and his heart is breaking as he watches him walk away. He will likely spend the rest of his life as a decent and moral man who knows the price of everything·..but the true value of nothing. 

This gospel confronts us with the call to invest our selves in something beyond the pursuit of material wealth and to shake our selves out of our slumbering sense of entitlement and awaken to see a world in need. Jesus asks us to spend the blessings that God has so lavishly bestowed on us in a world that is starving. In today's world our starvation seems twofold÷half the world desperately needs food and economic stability while the other half has great wealth, but seems starved for direction and meaning.

If we place ourselves beside this young man standing before Jesus we find that Jesus is calling us to cast aside all other dependencies and in radical trust stand bare before the God who gives us all that we really need. This is an invitation to discipleship. There is no praise of poverty here---Jesus teaches us time and time again that poverty is an evil we must eradicate. Nor is this an attack on the wealthy---Jesus confronts other people of wealth on his journey and never asks them to give it all away.[1] 

What we see in this man on the road kneeling before Jesus is a man whose life has been defined by wealth. We see a man so defined by his wealth that he cannot accept a new definition of himself ----a man who is rich before God.

Jesus looks straight into this mans eyes with a gaze that penetrates clear through to the young mans heart, and he sees that he is very sincere. His honest interest, and courageous vulnerability pierces Jesus' heart. Outwardly he has all the promise of a truly great one, but as this young man walks away, appalled and shaken by what Jesus has said, Jesus watches sadly and speaks of the treacherous ability of wealth to rob us of true abundance---abundance defined not by material possessions, but by God's grace.

So, this gospel, while it can teach us about the many different things that we might put before God in our lives, it is first of all, about money and the dangerous prison it can be for us. Money is a subject about which, Americans especially, have an unaccountable fixation. ****And though the accumulation of money and the desire to achieve the comfortable life drives many of our days, we don't want to hear about money in church. But today's gospel puts it right out on the table.

Jacob Needleman, while a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, published a book entitled Money and the Meaning of Life, in which he writes:

"We live...in...an Œaffluent society.¹ This means not only that we have much material wealth, but that we want this wealth more than we want everything else."7

But, says this professor of philosophy, it doesn't do for us what we want. It doesn't make us happy or free or immortal or even content. In fact, he proposes that our inordinate desire for money is a kind of self-imposed hell. In a chapter entitled, "The New Poverty" he writes, "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."[2]

Today Jesus delivers the hard truth that we cannot buy or work our way into God's kingdom. This notion, he tells us, is as impossible as getting a camel through the eye of a needle. ***But, do not despair he says, because admission is always possible because God will give it to us as a free gift. 

Jesus asks us to examine where we are investing our lives; to take hard look and discover what it is that we are really counting on to save us. Maybe it's our careers, our success, our influence, our power, or our social connections? Today Jesus invites us to release our grip on those thing that actually bind us, to open our hands to let them go so that we can come and really follow him.

Eternal life and true fulfillment is offered as God's gift to us. The radical personal implication, of course, is that we have to be able to accept the gift in order to receive it. Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way:

"You cannot accept God's 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."

The truth is that you and I really don't own any "thing" we cannot do without. In fact, there is a sense in which we are in bondage to anything we cannot give away. This kind bondage is what Jesus saw when he looked at this sincere young man, and this is the kind of bondage from which Jesus seeks to free us.

William Willimon recalls a discussion in church over the issue of opening a day care center for some of its young middle class members. Many of the members of the vestry were in favor, but there was one person who was not convinced. The pastor went back over how the center would utilize the empty building, provide revenue for the church, etc and these reasons were fine, but when the pastor said "our young couples must work just to put food on the table," she offered a reality check. "That's just not true," she said. "It is not hard for anyone in our church to put food on the table. Now there are people in this town for which food on the table is a real challenge, but they won't be allowed to use our day care, why aren't we ministering to them? Let's be honest, what's becoming more difficult for our members is having two cars, several DVD players, and a house at the lake. I just hate to see the church in effect telling these young couples that all that junk leads to happiness or makes them better parents. I think the church ought to have the courage tell them that's a lie, that "things" don't make a marriage or family. 

Through this woman's courage in speaking out, this church was able let go of it's desire to serve only itself and its members and look outward to those who need their help.      

Jesus invites us into the same kind of wisdom they found and that we witnessed in the comments of Erma Bombeck. We are invited to invest the best of ourselves in others, to empty our pockets and hearts and spend God blessings in a world hungry for God's love without counting the cost to ourselves. We are called to do this simply in thanksgiving for what God has done for us.  

I hope that one day we will all stand before God and say with joy, "I've nothing to return. I spent everything you so generously gave me and I stand before you now with my hands wide open and empty, holding onto nothing, except the promise of your love. Amen      

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[1] Craddock, Hayes, Holladay, Tucker
[2] John Buchanan