Message 07-01-07

 

Series:            Seven Serious Mistakes

Scripture:            Mark 10:17-27

 

Title:                                        Blessing or Oppressing?

 

This story messes with me. Does it mess with you?

 

Here’s Jesus talking with and then about a guy who has never used an ice cube, never ordered clothes on-line, never been in air-conditioning and he refers to him as “rich”. AND he says that its harder for a rich person to get into heaven than for other people.

 

I remember hearing a story about two men who die and go to heaven. One is rich and the other is poor. The poor man dies just after the rich man, so the rich man arrives at the pearly gates just ahead of the poor man. The gates swing open to the rich man and as he steps inside and onto the streets of gold a heavenly chorus of angels breaks out into song, the light swirls and a cloud sweeps him up and carries him in. The poor man is watching all this as he is coming up to the gates.

 

As he gets there the gates don’t swing open for him. Peter, the apostle who stands at the gates, comes over and opens it up for him, but the guy’s still excited. He walks in waiting for it all to happen and nothing does. It’s quiet, serene, but that’s all. So the poor man walks back to Peter and says, “Hey, what’s up with this? Where are the opening gates and the angel chorus and the swirling lights and the clouds that whisk you away? I’m feeling like the same stuff that went on down below is what happens up here.

 

Peter doesn’t seem to get it for a moment but then smiles and nods, “Oh,” he says, “I’m sorry for the confusion. I understand. Well, it’s simple really. People like you and me… we get in here all the time. It’s no big deal. But people like him only get in once in a thousand years.”

 

Am I making you uncomfortable?

 

I hope so. I’m trying. I want you dealing with this idea right alongside me. Have you seen the trailers or previews for “The Game Plan” that new movie coming out with The Rock. He plays a football player who suddenly learns that he is the father of a little girl. At the moment he learns this surprising news, as he reads his name on the birth certificate, his muscles so tense, his neck cracks. That’s what I’m looking for. I want you uncomfortable, right alongside me.

 

You know the stories in “little kid church” focus on how Jesus accepted everyone and loved everyone, but we’re in “big kid church” here and this is where we talk about what Jesus actually said.

 

It’s kind of fun. Gets us down to the real stuff.

 

And what Jesus talks about more than anything else, other than the Kingdom of God, is money. And Jesus doesn’t talk about money as a neutral element of life that can be used for good or evil. He talks about it as an alternative god. He quite explicitly says we can’t serve God and mammon. And the word he uses for money – mammon – right then is about evil. It means “wealth as an object of desire or false worship.” This is scary right? I mean, how do we in South Tampa talk easily about our friend Jesus to our friends in South Tampa?

 

I mean you’re out for the evening with some friends and the subject of faith or spirituality comes up and some one says, well you’re a spiritual person. Tell me about Jesus. I mean, how far would the conversation go if you said, “Well, Jesus has a wonderful plan for your life… as long as you don’t have any money in it.”

 

Are we all just hypocrites? Rich people playing church? You know whenever you come to this kind of question you want to make sure you know what the Bible says. What does Jesus actually say? Did you hear the words that Jesus said in the story? He said, “It’s hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of God.” But when his disciples, who are amazed at this because they think that being rich shows that you’re blessed, loved, by God, ask, “Well, then who gets in?” Jesus says to them, “It’s impossible with man, but it’s possible with God.” God can get rich people into heaven.

 

Okay… so now… how?

 

Let me talk with you about the efficacious use of money. Here’s how you find out where you stand with God and whether money rules your heart. Think of someone you love, anybody, but someone you dearly love. Imagine they have a medical emergency – God forbid. Now, imagine that you have a choice and the choice is whether or not to fly the person with an emergency, ambulance air flight to get the help they need. Would you do it? If it cost $20,000 would you do it? What if it made you dip into your retirement account? What if it meant you had to re-mortgage the house, or that it affected the total amount of your inheritance, or it meant working an extra couple of years? Would you do it? I’m guessing you would. Of course you would. If you had the chance to save the person you love and the choice was that they would be saved and brought back to health because they could be moved to the place that would help them, you’d pick life. And I’m betting that even if you did all that and the person couldn’t be saved you’d still think it was worth it.

 

You know what Jesus said about that? Jesus said, Of course you would. He said, Of course you would because everybody does that. Jesus said even “tax collectors and sinners do that” they take care of the people who they love and who love them. But Jesus then says, the way you tell if you’re a follower of mine is that you do it for people you don’t love, who can’t pay you back, who you don’t even know.

 

The efficacious use of money, the effective use of money, looks like “no holds barred” when we’re talking about rich people, who have money to get done what they need to get done. I have a few friends who have more money… well, these are people who when you think of people with money, you can usually say these folks have more. One of these friends, whom I’ve walked alongside through some really crushing times, said to me one day, “Being rich doesn’t protect from you what can happen in life. Sometimes it just makes it a little easier to handle it.” And that’s true. If you’re rich you can figure out how to take care of problems. You can reach out for support, counseling, medicine, almost whatever.

 

The effective use of money when it comes to the poor usually looks like people trying to “spread the money around”, to get the most “bang” for the buck, to make sure that its used to make a difference in the biggest number. Let me give you an example. A boy in Haiti has a life-threatening illness. It will cost $20,000 to get him a special plane flight to Boston, a flight that comes with a nurse and a doctor. He gets the flight. He gets his operation. He doesn’t survive it. He dies. Do you know how people respond to that story? They ask questions like, Do you know what you could do with $20,000 in Haiti? Do you know how much medicine you could supply, how many shots could be given out to help so many more people than this one child? Yes it is sad for the little boy, but is the most effective use of funds to spend it on one child rather than spending it on the whole community?

 

Can you see it? The effective use of money is how the world makes its choices.  But when the rich are talking about their own care it’s different than talking about the care of the poor. But it sounds right. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.” But Christ followers see it differently. You see Christ followers say that Jesus didn’t just die for the whole world, he died for you and he would have died if it was only you. The effective use of money, as the world sees it says that we don’t bring the best, the fullest, the most substantial support to the poor to help them get well and stay well. It says we’ll take whatever money we can gather and give it to the most people so we can at least say we’ve done something.

 

The effective use of money . . . who decides that?

 

You see if the answer to questions like “Can we do that?” is “We can’t afford it.” Then money is what we serve. If the answer to questions like “Can we do that?” is well, “let’s pray about it and ask God for his help in deciding that.” Now, if you’re going to start asking me whether we have to pray to God when our kids are asking whether we can go out for ice cream and we’re wondering if we have enough money in the budget or our pockets to do that. Well, then I’ll tell you, yes, sometimes, even then. Sometimes even then we need to turn to God and ask for help in deciding that.

 

Over these weeks we’re looking at seven serious mistakes we can make spiritually. These used to be called the Seven Deadly Sins because they come close to being able to remove you from your relationship with God. “Greed” is what we’re talking about today and greed is the sin we fall into, the serious mistake we make spiritually when we let money make our decisions.

 

When money rules who we are, when our hearts feel secure because of money, then it has become god above God in our lives.

 

It is not having money and it isn’t making money and it isn’t having or making a lot of money that removes us from God. It’s when we use money to decide whether and how to help the poor. It’s whether we receive money as a blessing and decide to use it as a blessing. It’s whether we say grace at our meals or before we begin our day of work, reminding ourselves that our jobs are a gift from God, our country is a gift from God, our day and our daily bread are gifts from God.

 

You see we can’t meet every need in the world. And we shouldn’t be giving up everything, quitting work so that we can live simply and be poor. Money gives us the power to make life a blessing and to stop the oppression in which so many live. Jesus said to one man sell all you have, give it to the poor and follow me. He didn’t say that to Nicodemus or to Joseph of Arimathea or to Mary and Martha. Making money gives us power to be a blessing and to draw closer to God as we bring him in on making the choices.

 

Greed is giving our worship to money. We bow to it, ask its permission, seek its power for our security. Greed is seeking to get “enough” so that we can “feel” like we’re okay. Jesus tells us to find that in God. He says don’t worry about what you’ll wear or what you’ll eat but to know that God provides all this. He doesn’t say don’t work. He says don’t worry about this stuff because life is more important than eating and drinking. The body is more important than clothes.

 

Jesus doesn’t call us to be poor. He calls us to be part of life, to be part of living with all people. Jesus tells us to use money wisely, to use it to make friends. You know what that means in Jesus’ terms? It doesn’t mean make friends who can benefit us. It means make friends. It means use money so that other people can become stable and secure and able to stop frantically trying to survive. When God directs our money and our money is used to create friends we don’t have to worry about greed.