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The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 23 (B)

October 15, 2000

by Joe Parrish

The Gospel: Mark 10:17-27

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before Jesus, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.'" He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." 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." When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 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." They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."

We need your help, dear Lord, to give away all we own. Amen.

Writer Gerald Kennedy said there are only two questions asked in any American city. The first is, 'How can I lose weight?' And the second is, 'Where can I park?'

These two questions frame the illness that affects us Americans. We are too fat, and we own far too much. Overweightness has risen over twenty percent in the past five or so years. And who has not looked with at least a little covetousness at a gleaming new Mercedes or BMW or SUV? Excuse me if you happen to own one! And where to park that beauty is always a challenge to its owner.

We are indeed in a land of luxury. We are far beyond the imaginations of the children of Israel who wandered forty years in the wilderness just to be able to enter the 'land of milk and honey.' Today our only care is whether the milk has any modified bovine growth hormone in it and if the honey is from clover or something else.

Last Wednesday afternoon an elderly person who said he was a veteran 'on disability' and had walked to St. John's all the way from Roselle some ten miles away showed up in our Parish Hall. Someone had felt compassion for him and let him in. And seeing his emaciated state, I could understand why. He explained that he had a 'mental condition', although at that particular time he seemed absolutely normal to me. 'It was from the war and all the shelling,' he said. He had just come to get some food. I estimated he was about thirty to fifty pounds underweight for his frame. If he had walked in from Bombay, India, I would probably have not been especially surprised. But he was from an adjoining community, and his sixty or seventy plus years hung on him like an albatross. Poverty still stalks the cities of rich New Jersey. We gave him a generous bag of groceries, chocked full of protein foods and everything else. It was so heavy we gave him bus fare to get back to Roselle. He did not ask for anything more.

How many times have I encountered the elderly poor in our community. They are so embarrassed by their situation, but they are completely out of food. I shudder to think what will happen when their oil or gas bills double this winter due to the worldwide petroleum shortage. Will they simply die alone in an unheated walkup apartment? What will happen to them?

The issue of grinding poverty seems ridiculous in our land of plenitude. But many have limited or no Social Security benefits for one reason or the other--widows, and so on. And how they are able to get the necessities of life is always a near impossibility. Of course, younger folks can have equal problems--suppose you did not graduate from elementary school or high school, that your reading proficiency is low, and you have no living relatives. There is a huge and growing underclass in America today. Every sociologist I have heard of seems to agree that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.

About two or three years ago a retired minister who had had a large church in Elizabethport corresponded with the former mayor of Elizabeth. The mayor sent us clergy an appeal to help this gentleman and his elderly wife in their retirement home in Atlanta because they could not afford to live. I contacted one of the largest churches there based on a contact I had made earlier that year. They promised to help out, but I could never be sure they did. We sent a check directly to the family from our church. But the outcome I fear was less than ideal. The best we seemed to be able to do was to alert the council of churches there and hope for the best. Several minority denominations have very small if any retirement plans for their clergy. We Episcopalians are very fortunate we do have such a plan.

So Jesus was correct when he said 'the poor you will have with you always.' But the alarming impact of poverty is what disturbs me here. We who have enough just take for granted the well-being of all. But let me tell you, that is not happening. Every week we hear of new people being kicked off Food Stamps or having their Food Stamp allotments cut to near zero. How on earth do we think the poor will survive? Or is this a planned extermination? How dare we!

The man who ran and knelt at Jesus feet is said to have had "many possessions". That has been further interpreted in the gospel according to Luke, Chapter 18, to say he was (quote) "very rich" (end quote). But in Mark's gospel for today, he simply has "many possessions". I make a point of this difference because we quickly fob off comments made to rich people. In case you wondered, I estimate we call someone rich who has at least ten times as much as we do to spend. They seem just beyond our fondest expectations and means. And we cannot really identify with their problems in any way except to have some sense of awe and wonder. Our normal comment is about how their personal lives are falling apart, or something like that. But of course most Christian Americans of moderate means still strive for mammon and Jesus, probably in that order. We wince when the word, "tithe", comes up every year at about this time. And we make another bargain with the devil yet again! If you do not have a standard answer for why tithing is not really the thing to do, it probably means you have had some sort of 'cerebral accident' in the past year. We all have our little and big ways of weaseling out of what the Bible seems to indicate. I found the Old Testament directive of twenty-seven percent really ridiculous. We are all in the same boat, and the storm is a-rising. Loss of economic viability is our worst worry. And not having enough to retire on is a normal wage earner's nightmare. Having a child who wants to go to college is another. I am sure you could name a few other real doozies!

But into our comfortable little worlds comes this bolt from heaven telling us to sell what we own and give it to the poor. How much is a 1999 Ford Taurus worth? How can I justify keeping it? I guess I could lease it, and then say I don't really own it. I bargain, I bargain, so how can I expect you not to do the same?

Leadership is in the eye of the beholder. If we cannot lead, how can we expect others less well off not to do the same? And if we cannot lead, how can we expect others to follow?

I hate this story in the gospel of Mark. I would rather read this story in Luke and keep this rich young ruler 'ree-ly rich'. Then his quandary would not be mine. But in Mark he only has 'many possessions'. I look around at my library that contains some fifty dollar apiece Bible commentaries. My business skills allow me to depreciate them to perhaps forty dollars or so. But still, I must fall into the 'many possessions' category. This is a very uncomfortable gospel reading! I have other middle class friends who are collectors--rare books or magazines and so on. Perhaps you collect things as well. When I was young I collected matchbooks from all the restaurants my father had to eat in when he went on business trips throughout the United States. It was easy for me to get rid of that collection. But what about our precious 'things'? Are we willing to sell them and give the proceeds to the poor?

It seems to me we have an obligation to start a process of divestiture. However the gospel speaks to you, at least that is how it speaks to me. I guess in a way I am a little bit glad I do not own my apartment. Phew! Then I would have the anxiety of having to justify not selling it in order to comply with Jesus' hard dictum of today.

Enough of this meandering! We do have enough, we will have enough. What illness we have is the anxiety we will not have enough, and we can surely cite various instances of that. But what Jesus is trying to do is to get us to depend on him, on his Holy Spirit, on his heavenly Father, and not on our own means.

If I may coin a phrase, our means are mean.

Lutheran pastor Michelle Nickodemus has taken the time to actually count up the number of times words appear in the Bible. She says the word "pray" or "prayer" occur 227 times in our Bibles. The word "faith" occurs 264 times. And the words "wealth, money, possessions, and treasure" occur 331 times in the Bible. So by quantitative comparison, "wealth, money, possessions, and treasure" are spoken of 25 percent more often than "faith", and nearly 50 percent more often than "pray" and "prayer". The Bible seems to focus on our great weakness, our pocketbooks. As someone noted, our billfolds or purses are about 18 inches closer to our heart than to our heads. It is our hearts that move us far before our heads agree, if they ever do.

In practical terms, let me say we spend about ten percent of our pledge income a year on providing actual groceries to the homeless and poor in and around our community. But we are still not doing enough. And we give essentially nothing internationally where an average of 35,000 children die each day, 35,000 each day, of malnutrition and starvation. So if you increase you pledge this year by ten percent we could spend twice as much as this year, and we need to do that.

Pastor Richard Johnson said church statistics show 20 percent of church members give essentially nothing and another 20 percent give an average of 50 cents per week or less. So the remaining 60 percent of us have to make up the difference, and even some of us only average a dollar a week. It is indeed a difficult proposition to keep a church 'afloat' nowadays.

R.W. Church gave a sermon in about 1894, over a hundred years ago, in which he noted we all have a time "when He who gives us life calls for it again." We really "own" nothing ultimately. It all goes back to God.

Perhaps you have seen the cartoon where a group of dour and sour faces are looking on as a lawyer is reading a person's will. "It seems," said the lawyer, "that he really did take it with him."

The late Henri Nouen said we Americans live the (quote) "filled but unfulfilled life" (end quote). The playwright Oscar Wilde said, "There are two tragedies in life--not getting what one wants, and the other is getting what one wants."

Dean Howard Thurman of the Boston University Marsh Chapel made an impact on a group of adults taking his seminar titled, "Spiritual Resources and Disciplines". The Dean read from the diary of Admiral Byrd who was alone and near death at the North Pole. He asked his class, "If you were alone, a thousand miles from any other person, if it was fifty degrees below zero and you were dying, what would have to happen for you to die with integrity and a sense of completion?"

One way or another we all will have to mull that question near the end of our time on this planet. How can we die with integrity and a sense of completion?

The man who knelt at Jesus' feet and sought a way to "inherit eternal life" was probably contemplating just that. "Is that all that there is?" goes an old ballad sung by Peggy Lee. Have we done our best, or did we slack off in places? How can we become true followers of the one who has eternal life in his hands?

We are indeed possessed by our possessions. We somehow will someday be given an opportunity to crawl through the eye of a needle in front of a pearly gate. May we be carrying very little when that happens. And may what we did with what we had be responsive to Jesus' loving reply to the man with many possessions. He gave that man the formula for the life in heaven he was seeking. Give, and you will get.

Amen.