Mark 10:17-22
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost/ 14th October
2012
No, this
is not a stewardship sermon. This is not
a sermon about money and pledges and budgets.
But it does have to do with wealth and power and influence. It’s often called the parable of the rich
(young) man. You know the story. While Jesus was setting out on a journey, a
man ran up and knelt before him asking, “Good Teacher, what must I do to
inherit life?” After deflecting his
adulation, Jesus says, “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You
shall not commit adultery; …’” The man replies, “I have kept all of these since
my youth.” I’ve followed the rules, I’ve
been a good person, I’ve done what is expected of me by my family, my faith, my
community.
Then,
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.” Of course, we
know what happened. The man was troubled
by the answer and “he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
Jesus
looked around and said to his students, “How hard it will be for those who have
wealth to enter the kingdom of God.” And
then they were shocked and perplexed.
As we
hear this story, it’s quite natural to think Jesus is talking only about money
and possessions. And he is at some level. Because of the judgment Jesus makes against wealth
and possessions here, it’s easy to assume that wealth and possessions are inherently
evil or bad. But Jesus isn’t saying
this. There’s another level here. What he is saying is that if you have a lot
of wealth and possessions it’s just more difficult to be his follower, you have
more baggage, as it were, more weighing you down.
When we
focus on the wealth verses, it’s easy to overlook these words, which, I think,
really drives this text: Jesus, looking
at him, loved him and said… Jesus looked
at him, saw him, I believe, looked into the depths of his soul, and loved him, loved
him through and through, to the depths of his soul, and in love – true love –
said to him, You who claim to “have” so much, who “own” so much, “claim” to
have done so much, are lacking one essential thing. What you’re lacking is the ability to let go. What you’re lacking is the willingness to
release your grip, to relax your striving and your selfish ambition, your
fearful grasp after things, your obsessive compulsion to get it right, your
anxious worry about missing out on eternal life. Let it go.
“Sell it.” Detach from it.
For this
man, it was his many possessions and their death-grip on his life that needed
healing. It’s in love that Jesus invites
him “to sell,” not because wealth is bad, but because for him the wealth meant more
to him than eternal life, his wealth distracted him from life in the kingdom,
his identity was too wrapped up in what he owned, how much he had. And he looked for his security and assurance
in how much he had. You can tell how
much his wealth was connected to his fearful ego because the thought of
changing his status caused him considerable grief.
How
hard, indeed, it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus isn’t saying it’s impossible for the
rich to enter the kingdom. It’s just
more difficult. Not because wealth is
bad, but because we value wealth more than the kingdom. To truly be a child of the kingdom requires a
giving up, sacrifice, a dying and a rising into a new way of being in the
world. When we give up attachment to
wealth and power and possessions and, yes, even people, and focus on the
kingdom, on God, something remarkable happens.
We gain a different kind of wealth and power and things and even
people. “Truly I tell you, there is no
one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children
or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, who will not receive a
hundredfold (one hundred times) now in this age – houses, brothers and sisters,
mothers and children, and field, with persecutions – and in the age to come
eternal life.”
Like so
many other places in Jesus’ preaching, the world is turned upside and inside
out, and those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, let them hear and
see. For this is the truth that the rich
man could not bear to hear and what he needed to hear and what we need to bear
and heed and hear, “…many who are first will be last, and the last will be
first.” If this isn’t contrary to the
way most of us live in the West, I don’t know what is. This is the opposite of our Western values, our American values – where
we say that we must be the first, the goal is to be first, the best, and God
help, literally, the last, the least, the second-best. This might be the American gospel, but it’s
not God’s gospel, and it’s not the message of the cross.
It’s
striking that the Gospel lectionary for today, which includes these words, “But
many who are first will be last, and the last will be first,” comes to us the
same week that the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released its latest statistics on religion in
America. For the first time in our
nation’s history, Protestant Christians now make up 48% of the population. We are now a minority faith in the United
States for the first time. We were at
60% of the population in the early 1990s.
This is a dramatic shift. If this
doesn’t tell Protestants that we’re “not in Kansas anymore,” that we’re not in
the 1950s any more, that the church and the world around us have changed and is
changing, I’m not sure what will.
The Pew
Forum also cited that for the first time in our nation’s history the fastest
growing segment of our population are those who describe themselves as “nones”
– those with no religious affiliation.
Their number has risen to almost 20% of the population, which reflects
an increase of 15% in the last five years.
Now
before we respond to these numbers with doom and gloom, before we find someone
or something to blame for this change, we should probably take a step back and
take an honest, sober assessment of ourselves, and ask a few questions. And we must resist attempts to rush in to
“fix” the problem, because the problem can’t be easily “fixed,” if at all. There’s a question whether or not it should
be fixed. There’s the deeper question,
what is the problem?
The
problem might be that we Protestants are like the rich man in the parable. Maybe we have been seduced by our
“wealth.” By wealth, I don’t mean money
alone – although, historically, we Protestants have been and are among the
wealthiest in the nation. We have been
rich in financial resources, but we have also been rich in our influence, rich
in power and resources (such as education), rich with a cultural hegemony that
said, believed, acted as if this nation was ours, that ours was the true church
of Jesus Christ, that we knew how to do church, how to worship, how to preach
and live the gospel. We cannot
underestimate the enormity of Protestant power and dominance in our nation’s
history. We know the history: the
pilgrims in Plymouth were Protestants; most of the signers of the Declaration
of Independence were Protestants; our form of democracy, although inspired by
the ancient Greeks, was really channeled through the religious reforms of the
Reformation. The oldest and best universities and colleges in America were
founded by Protestants. When Alexis de
Tocqueville (1805-1859) of France traveled through America in the early nineteenth
century and described the people in this democracy, he saw a people shaped by a
Christian outlook. “There is no country
in the world,” he wrote in Democracy in America (1835/1840), “where the
Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in
America.” He was describing Protestant America. Until the large influx of Roman
Catholics in the late nineteenth-century Protestants were the unchallenged
dominant class, the dominant church, the dominant political force. And among the Protestants, Presbyterians were
among the most powerful, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. The American Revolution was
known in the Houses of Parliament in Westminster as the “Presbyterian
rebellion.”
But
maybe – just maybe – our wealth, broadly understood, is no longer a blessing
but burden. Maybe it has become a
distraction; maybe we have become so obsessed with our Protestant ideal and our
Protestant work ethic, our ambition, our pride, our drive, our desire to be
first, that we have lost the spirit and fire of the gospel. Perhaps we have become so obsessed with our
“possessions” that we’ve lost the purpose of our calling. Have we become so entrenched in our way of
doing church, in our way of having power, control, and influence, that we’ve
neglected the core mission of the gospel?
Have we attached our self-importance to dominance? Are we valuing the wrong things? Do we value the trappings of church and
culture more than the gospel?
The Pew
Forum found that among the 20% “nones” population that these people have not
given up on God, they have not given up on prayer, they have not given up on
spirituality, and they have not given up on caring for the least among us. These women and men are among the “spiritual
but not religious” category. They’re on
a spiritual journey, but they’re their path completely bypasses the
institutional church. The decline among
Protestants is also similar to the decline among Roman Catholics in this
country. And among Protestants, it’s
occurring in the evangelical and in the so-called liberal churches. It all points to the fact that something is
essentially wrong with institutional Christianity in the West. There are many reasons for this shift; however, the largest influence increasing the “nones” population, as the Harvard
political scientist Robert Putnam has shown, is young adults’ “reaction to the
religious right.” “The best predictor of
which people have moved into this category over the last twenty years,” Putnam
says, “is how they felt about religion and politics” aligning, particularly
conservative politics and opposition to gay civil rights.[1]
Yes,
it’s a little depressing to learn that we’ve lost our market-share of the
religious economy in America. It’s a
jolt to our Protestant egos. But maybe
it’s a gift. Maybe it’s a wake-up
call. Maybe it’s an opportunity for us
to re-examine what it means to be a child of the Reformation, of being
“reformed and always being reformed.”
But more than that, maybe it’s an opportunity to discover again what it
means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, what it means to live in and toward
God’s kingdom. Philip Jenkins, president
of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, said something similar in an interview this week. “It
may do us a lot of good as Protestants to lose dominance,” he said. “Instead of reaction, we need to listen to
this carefully. It could help
Protestants to reflect more critically on our purpose as people of faith.”[2]
Maybe
Jesus is looking at us and in love says to us, “You lack one thing. Go and
‘sell’ it.” Let it go. Let your Protestant “wealth” and cultural
dominance go. Instead of grieving over
the loss of our “wealth,” maybe we can detach from it, not over-identify with
it, shake off its weight and discover a freedom that we’ve been missing, a
freedom to really live the faith without all its cultural baggage. Let the first become last and as “last” we
might get to see what being “first” really looks like in the kingdom of
God. Then we’ll claim or reclaim our
“treasure” and value what matters most.
Not institutions and numbers and size and power and influence and
endowments. “It is easier for a camel to
go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the
kingdom of God.” Maybe trusting so much in our wealth, liking it so much, we’ve
lost the ability to value the kingdom.
All is
not lost, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things
are possible.”
So
here’s to discovering the blessing of minority status! Let us raise a glass to minority status! On the way to being last, may we discover or
rediscover all the more profoundly what it really means to be “first” in God’s
kingdom, rediscovering that this should be the ultimate concern for us as
individuals and as a church: being attentive to the deep hunger in the human
heart that can only be satisfied by the grace of God, the deep human hunger for
mercy, for justice, for healing, for love.
This should be our treasure that we are called to embody. This is eternal life. This is what God treasures. This is what
calls us to life!
[2]
Cited in the Louisville Courier-Journal, http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20121008/FEATURES10/310090020/Report-says-Protestants-no-longer-U-S-majority
1 comment:
well said!
Post a Comment