Mark 10: 17-31

When I was about 16, I came across probably the most desperately-sad person I've ever met in my life. He was the older brother of a high school friend of mine and he had just returned from a tour of duty with the Army on the front lines of the Vietnam War.

Now you wouldn't necessarily know how sad he was at first, partly because he mostly kept to himself and partly because on those rare occasions you might see him, you would probably find him sitting in some corner giggling to himself.

You see, from the moment he received his discharge papers, he made it his goal to never come down from a drug-induced high. Most of the time - perhaps all of the time - his drug of choice was marijuana. At least, that was my impression as a 16-year old. That impression was induced by an incident that happened the first time I met him.

While I was over visiting my friend, his brother came stumbling out of the house, quite obviously in some other world. He told his brother that he wanted to show him something and he led the two of us to the back of his car. Then he proceeded to scare me to death.

He opened up his trunk and showed us that it was completely filled to the top with large plastic bags of marijuana. Now we were standing maybe 4-6 feet off a very street and he was showing us something that I was convinced was going to land us in jail literally any second. He was incredibly proud of his stash, but all I could think of was that the police who would surely come to arrest all of us for his crime.

Not long after that, my friend's brother did go away for a long time. However, it wasn't due to the action of the police. Instead, it was a parent-induced stay at a drug rehab facility. I hope he got the help he needed while he was there, but I honestly don't know if he did or didn't since I lost track of him after that.

But thinking back on the incident, I can look beyond the fear I felt that day and catch a glimpse of what his motivations may have been. My friend told me that before his brother had gone to Vietnam, he was very much of a straight-arrow, do-things-exactly-right-and-by-the-book kind of guy. Yet there was something about what he did or what he saw done in Vietnam that radically changed him. Suddenly, he no longer cared about those things he had cared about before and his sole priority was to anesthetize himself from whatever pains he was carrying.

That's hardly a unique or even new story. Can you really think of anyone who - deep down - isn't searching for something, even if they're not totally consciously aware of their own search? The results of that search may come out in healthy ways or - like that of my friend's brother - they may break out in any number of unhealthy ways.

We just saw yet another tragic example of that a couple of weeks ago when a young man who was distraught over the death of his infant daughter and over some sordid events from his childhood that only he remembered, transformed his search for healing - by some kind of warped mental alchemy that only he could understand - into a deadly attack on a number of young Amish girls who had nothing to do with his problems, having never met or heard of him before.

But even in the aftermath of that horrific situation, there was still a search for some sort of positive meaning. And that positive meaning was there. It came out in the self-sacrifice of one of the young girls, who volunteered to be killed first to give courage to the younger girls. It also came out in the amazing levels of forgiveness offered by the Amish community - forgiveness so freely offered that served as an inspiration for the entire nation in the face of this senseless tragedy.

Our gospel lesson today is also the story of one man's search for meaning in his life. We really know nothing about this man except for Mark's editorial comment that this man had a lot of possessions and the man's own statement that he had keep all of God's laws since he was a youth.

Leaving aside the theological issue of whether someone could possibly keep all of God's laws perfectly, the key to the story is the fact that in spite of doing all that he could to live up to God's will, the young man still felt that something was missing. He was on a search for deeper meaning in his life. "Good Teacher," he said, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" That is, how can I fill this emptiness I feel inside in spite of continuing to do my best to follow God's will?

And Jesus' answer to him is one that has traditionally caused tremendous amounts of squirming in American pews, because Jesus tells him to sell everything he owns, give it to the poor and then come and follow Jesus.

The fact is that that young man - like most or all of us - had a great many possessions and the idea of giving them all up was simply too much for him. Or at least it was on that day. Since we don't know the man's name, we don't know if there ever was a second meeting between the man and Jesus.

Now, with absolutely no evidence at all for believing this is true, I like to picture that young man as being the same person who was with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Mark says that the young man in the Garden was following Jesus, wearing nothing but a linen cloth, and when the soldiers tried to grab him by his clothes, the young man ran out of his only garment and took off into the darkness naked.

Again, there is no literary or historical evidence to say that these two young men were the same. However, think what that would say about that man if it were true. He would have gone from having many possessions to having only the clothes on his back. Then, because he was a follower of Jesus, he was stripped of even that.

We tend to think of Jesus' followers as being something substantially less than courageous on the night of Jesus' arrest, but there are a few exceptions to that rule. And that young man - even as he's running naked for his life - is really one of those exceptions. Wouldn't it be great to think that he finally had his search for meaning answered by following Jesus to Gethsemane and beyond?

Whether that actually happened is not something we will know in this life, but we can find answers for our own searches for meaning. But first, let's deal with the unmentioned elephant in the room - money. Jesus told the young man in the gospel lesson to sell everything he had and give it to the poor. And when the young man was unable to do that, Jesus told the disciples that "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."

Let's be totally honest here. The poorest person in this room has more possessions and probably more money than that young man ever dreamed of. As a result, this passage is one that is often used as a text for sermons discussing our attitudes on finances. That raises the obvious question: Was Jesus' recommendation for that young man to sell everything intended solely for him or was it for everyone? And the answer is not quite as easy as a simple yes or no.

The heart of the young man's question was what must I do? That very phrasing shows that his focus was on his own actions, rather than on anything God could do. In other words, it's all about him. It's as if eternal life is something that can be owned and transferred like one more possession. And if he works hard and keeps his nose clean, maybe he can receive eternity as his severance package.

Therefore, in order to get the young man to lift his focus away from himself and his own actions, Jesus tells him to give away everything. The idea is get him to choose to have literally nothing left to count on in this world except God.

Does Jesus offer that same advice to you and me? No and yes. If we allow our money or our possessions or our power or our positions or anything else to get in the way of our whole-hearted following of God, then Jesus would tell us to jettison everything that functions as our own personal idol and throw ourselves onto the invisible, but dependable mercy of God.

The same thing is true of the saying about camel going through the eye of a needle. C. S. Lewis once wrote, "All things are possible. It is even possible to get a large camel through the small eye of a needle. But it will be extremely hard on the camel."

Much like that, many attempts have been made over the years to soften the impact of Jesus' saying, because people have misunderstood Jesus to say that the rich can't possibly go to heaven.

What he's actually saying - using the type of exaggeration that was characteristic of the culture of that time - is that no one can go to heaven on their own power. And the truth is that those who have lots of power in this world typically have a much harder time placing their full and unconditional trust in God than those who have little or no power to start with. And yet there is no where other than God in which we can find that true and lasting meaning for our lives for which we are all searching.

Jesus is telling us that God's love can't be bought with words or actions or even money. It's simply not for sale. And if we attempt to buy it - even with sparklingly good deeds and deeply holy words - we are doomed to failure, just as if we were trying to shove that proverbial camel through that tiny hole.

But the good news is that God's love never has to be bought. Instead, it is freely available - even before we begin to look for it. You can even see that truth acted out in this exchange between Jesus and the young man. We're told that Jesus loves him even as the young man is in the process of misunderstanding God's expectations, even as the young man about to walk away from Jesus' invitation to become a disciple.

Don Hoffman writes, "I'm thinking about the 'rubber people' of TV cartoons ([that is, characters like] Wiley Coyote [or] Roger Rabbit). Smashed flat, pulled through knotholes, frozen into perfect cubes, they always snap back. But real people aren't like that. Then Jesus says that we are supposed to turn into rubber people ourselves, so we can be squeezed through a knothole or something smaller - like the eye of a needle.

"[...So] Who can be saved? No one! We're not made of rubber. It's impossible for mortals. But not impossible for God. We aren't even flexible enough to crawl down a sewer pipe, but God can pull us through the needle's eye. We call this grace. The divine ability to do for us what we can't do for ourselves.

"[...] We used to live in Williamsport, PA, where Bethlehem Steel had a wire rope factory. They pulled steel bars through smaller and smaller holes - with lots of friction, heat, and noise - until each bar had been stretched and narrowed into a thin wire. Maybe that's what God is doing to us. With mortals it's impossible. We're not made of rubber or steel. But not impossible for God. We are going to be yanked into shape, whether we want to or not."

So maybe, just maybe, when we go through national tragedies like the one that struck the Amish community - or those much lesser personal struggles that wear each of us down day after day - we can begin to see that beyond the pain of the moment we will find the loving presence of God, who is actively transforming us and fitting us for a glorious future in heaven.

Beyond the impossibilities of this world lie the indescribabilities of the next. And they are God's free gift to us, if we have the courage to give up on our self-reliance and throw ourselves without reservation onto the invisible and unfailing love of God. Amen.