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Ordinary 28
by Jim McCrea Mark 10:17-31 There was a cartoon one time in which a group of dour-looking faces are gathered together in a lawyer's office for the reading of a will. The lawyer is shown looking down at the document and saying, "It seems that he really did take it with him." Perhaps a better story for our purposes today comes from a book called Jacob the Baker: Gentle Wisdom for a Complicated World by Noah ben-Shea. That book has a scene in which an elderly woman approaches Jacob and says, "I want to ask you something. I heard you talk about dying, and I am going to die soon. I have a great deal of money. If you are so smart, why not tell me how I can take it with me? Well? Well? What can be carried to the other side?" Jacob answered, "Everything of value" as if that insight were common knowledge. At that point the old woman's greed was aroused and she fairly shouted at Jacob, "How? How?" to which Jacob calmly answered, "In your memory." As you can imagine, that wasn't the answer this old woman was looking for. So she sneered at the word "memory" as if it were something obscene. And she added, "Memory can't carry wealth!" Then Jacob looked her straight in the eye and said, "That's only because you have already forgotten what is of value." We live in a world that is heavily focused on wealth and status. Certainly, the rich young man in our gospel lesson is far from being unique in being torn between the things of this world and his faith. There is even an industry that was created to combine the two. As one writer puts it, "Books urging readers to look out for number one make the best seller lists. Dallas-based firms sell success in three-day seminars costing participants $900 apiece. These seminars teach self-confidence, enthusiasm, and goal setting. There's nothing wrong with drive and objectives, but the success is financial, and goals are defined by dollar amounts. In the words of one of the success merchants, 'God created Cadillacs, Lincolns, and Mercedes for His followers, not for sinners.' When challenged with 'But I thought the meek were to inherit the earth,' he replied, 'They may inherit it, but they'll have to work like hell to gain title to it.'" According to Business Week magazine, the average chief executive of a major corporation in 1960 earned as much as 41 factory workers; by 1993 the average executive earned as much as 149 factory workers. And the gap between the rich and poor has grown even bigger since that time. Fred Kane offers the following summary of recent U.S. financial news: "A while back the Chief Executive Officer of American Airlines, convinced American Airlines pilots, mechanics, flight attendants and baggage handlers, that they had to accept major pay cuts ranging from 15 to 23 percent to help the airline avoid bankruptcy. At the same time he secretly created retention bonuses for American Airlines' top seven executives that would reward them for staying at their jobs until 2005. All but one of the bonuses were set at twice their annual executive salaries. The CEO's bonus was $1.6 million dollars. "At the same time that he was telling pilots that the company would eliminate their pension plans if it had to file for bankruptcy, he secretly created a special pension trust for the company's top 45 executives that could not be touched even by bankruptcy. He and three other executives were to be paid extra for administering this trust. American Airlines will receive a $410 million emergency appropriation of our federal tax money. "Under attack, the CEO resigned from American Airlines. He is just one example of leaders who have been attacked in the media for their attempts to take more money for themselves at a time when the economy has turned sour for many people. "Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch has a fortune estimated at $900 million. He was paid $16 million in his last year as CEO of GE and now receives about $2.5 million a year in lifetime retirement perks from GE. "The Tyco company agreed to pay a severance package of $45 million to an executive even though he was already under criminal investigation by a grand jury. Tyco also covered the cost of fixing up the former chief executive's Fifth Avenue apartment at a cost of $14 million, including a $6,300 sewing basket, a $2,200 gilt metal wastebasket, two sets of sheets for $5,960, a $445 pincushion, and a $15,000 antique umbrella stand in the shape of a three-foot-high poodle." Clearly those people have crossed a line somewhere into a place of excess and greed and exploitation. Not to mention simple bad taste. But I suspect all of us can understand at least a little of the impulse that led these people to do what they did, because in our culture it seems as if we don't value anything higher than money. Survey after survey of Americans has discovered that no matter what our circumstances may be, we are never satisfied with the amount of money available to us. The typical response for how to improve the quality of life is to get "more money." A Gallop poll discovered that four out of five people who were currently earning more than seventy-five thousand dollars a year said that they wanted to be rich. There probably isn't a person in this room who doesn't understand what they mean although, judging by the standards of the world as a whole, that group is already rich. How many other places in the world is going shopping considered a form of entertainment? How many other places have access to those well-stocked temples of consumerism we know as shopping malls? How many recent immigrants to the U.S. - not to mention American missionaries returning from overseas - have had an emotional crisis simply by seeing the amazing quantities and varieties of food in our grocery stores? Given our standards, it's clear that out of all the characters in the Bible, the rich young man in our gospel lesson today is perhaps the one with whom we can mostly easily identify. And, on the face of it, that doesn't sound much like good news. Because this is a man who seemingly has everything - wealth, respect in the community, a vital faith - and yet he walks away from Jesus, shaking his head in sadness over his inability to meet the standard Jesus set for him. And the reality is that if any of us were to be asked to give away everything we owned as a pre-condition of following Jesus, we wouldn't do any better than he did. Christian history is graced with a handful of people who embraced that standard - people like Francis of Assisi who took this passage very literally, so that even though he came from a wealthy family, he gave any everything he owed and spent the rest of his life in voluntary poverty. Or like C. T. Studd, who was one of the richest young men in Great Britain in the 1880's, not to mention being the captain of the national cricket team, and yet he gave it all up to be a missionary to China, India and Africa. Here's what he said in a letter he wrote to his girlfriend when he was proposing marriage: "It will be [...] no life of ease which I could offer you, but one of toil and hardship; in fact, if I did not know you to be a woman of God, I would not dream of asking you. It is to be a fellow soldier in his army. It is to live a life of faith in God, a fighting life, remembering that here we have no abiding city, no certain dwelling place, but only a home eternal in the Father's House above. Such would be the life: May the Lord alone guide you." Just before the two of them were married, they gave away Studd's entire fortune to various Christian charities and then set out for the mission fields. Not many of us could do that, and perhaps surprisingly, I think that that is the point of Jesus' conversation with the rich young man. In effect, Jesus is asking the rich young man to do what he knows will be impossible. Remember the context of this conversation. The young man comes to Jesus asking, "[...] what must I do to inherit eternal life?" This is a person who is used to earning what he had and he wasn't afraid of hard work as evidenced by the strict way he followed the Ten Commandments. Jesus' answer says, in effect, there's nothing you can do to earn eternal life. It's totally beyond human ability. But God chooses to offer it freely to everyone as a simple gift out of his love for us. And then Jesus underlines that point by the use of exaggeration with his image of a camel going through the eye of a needle - that is, it is a physical impossibility for us, but nothing is impossible for God. The Talmud is an ancient Jewish collection of rabbinic commentaries on the scriptures and on life. It makes the same point as Jesus in a couple of different places. At one point it says, "The Holy One said, open for me a door as big as a needle's eye and I will open for you a door through which may enter tents and [caravans]." In other words, if you simply allow God to get a foot in the door, God will take care of the rest. In another place, one of the Talmudic authors is writing about the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the lessons that they can teach the faithful. For example, there's a letter in Hebrew known as qof. It looks a lot like a capital "P" in English except that it has a small opening where the upright portion of the letter meets the curved section. Qof happens to be the first letter in the Hebrew word for "holy," so that letter represents divine holiness. Similarly the letter resh, looks kind of like a backwards lower case "r." Resh represents evil because it is the first letter in the word that means "evil." The Talmudic author points out that the qof has that tiny opening so that, if the sinner represented by resh should repent he may still enter into God's holiness through that small opening. The Talmud's point about God's constantly-available grace is the same as Jesus', although the Talmud emphasizes the repentance of the individual to begin the process, while Jesus emphasizes the grace of God itself. That's a significant distinction since Jesus is trying to get the rich young man - and us - to quit trying to seize control and to simply turn everything over to God. Ultimately, isn't the issue of control what our focus on money is all about? After all, the more we have, the more we're able to feel that we're in control of our own destiny. Henri Nouen once said that we Americans live the "filled but unfulfilled life." And the point of this passage is that we can find fulfillment only through God, not through possessions. An ancient church legend says that the rich young man in this story was Mark, the author of this particular gospel. Mark has also been identified by tradition as being the young man who ran away from the Garden of Gethsemane naked when one of the arresting officers tried to grab him by his cloak. Now there's no way to verify either of those legends, but it's interesting to think that, if they're true, he literally ended up with nothing at all - not even the clothes on his back - and yet he was able to build a new and far more fulfilling life in Christ after he had given everything over to God. Perhaps if we learned to open our hands and give the control of our lives to God, we could find the same sort of fulfillment as well. Amen.
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