I want you to know, I’ve tried to keep this fellow from showing up. I find him very disruptive when he insists on running into the sanctuary and asking Jesus this question, and forcing this issue for all of us here. I’m talking about this wealthy young man.

 

The Lectionary brings him up once every three years. Once every three years, it invites the wider church to read this story, and to think again about Jesus dealing with this man, with many things, who comes and asks the question. And I have tried hard to keep him out of the sanctuary. When I look back at my own notes, I discover I’ve been pretty successful at it. In fact, I haven’t had this guy find his way into the sanctuary for ten years now! Which means the last three times the Lectionary has given me the opportunity to have him come into the room, I’ve artfully done things like preach on the epistle text, or had an associate preach who wasn’t using a lectionary sermon, or had some special theme I have lifted up. So I have been able to keep him out of the room with some success.

 

But he found his way in this morning. And he’s troubling. Troubling to me, too. After all, everything that’s in the bag is my stuff! It’s my cell phone, and my hood, and my silver coffee mug.

 

The truth is that we read this text today with the entire Christian community around the world. And it’s difficult to see us, we American Christians, as anything but the man who has many things in this story.

 

While there may be relative differences amongst us, to the larger Christian world, in the context of the world’s resources, we must look to them like the Christians who have many things. Even as we meet in our fine sanctuary, as Christians around the city meet in sanctuaries much like this one.

 

This is a story for us. For all of us. And perhaps particularly for us. And it’s a hard story.

 

We come, finding Jesus hearing the question and loving the man, and suggesting, in asking the fellow to sell what he has and give it to the poor, that perhaps what he has violated is the first half of the Decalogue. He says to Jesus, “What must I do have eternal life?” And Jesus says, Well don’t you know the Commandments? And he lists many of them in the first half of the Ten Commandments. In saying that, it raises the suggestion that what the fellow is indicted for is idolatry. That’s what the first part of the Decalogue deals with, the sin of loving something more than God. Loving something more than God.

 

Ernest Campbell says, “The Bible says two things about wealth: it’s either dangerous or damnable.” I’m thinking about all of the stuff in my bag, too. All of the things that I have that sometimes get hard for me to carry around.

 

But some good news is that this story from the Gospel of Mark is a healing story. The rich man runs to up to Jesus and kneels, just as countless other Jesus-pursuers have done here in the Gospel of Mark, in the same way that they come seeking healing. The story sets up like the other stories of those who have come seeking healing. The word go is used here, and the only other place, almost, that it is used in the Gospel of Mark is when people have received healing.

 

But this is the one person in the entire book of healing stories who doesn’t receive the healing that Jesus offers. This is the person who turns and walks away.

 

Mark remembers what Matthew and Luke leave out. Mark remembers that Jesus looked at him and loved him. And I love Jesus for it. Because I love this fellow, too, because in many ways he’s so much like me.

 

Mark remembers that Jesus loved this fellow, and offered him healing. “You lack one thing; go, and sell what you have, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and then come and follow me.”

 

What he lacks is that he does not lack. Like other people in the gospel of Mark, this man is in need of healing. He is possessed. But here, he is possessed by his own possessions. Jesus is offering to free him of his possessions, to perform, if you will, a kind of exorcism, even as he has with others. But the rich man turns his back. And like him, as he walks away grieving, I grieve, too. I have accumulated so many more things since I first started reading this text. I have got more than one Cokesbury bag of stuff now. These are just the things I grabbed leaving my office. I could fill bags up with things.

 

What can I do to inherit eternal life? Nothing. For mortals, it is impossible; but not for God. To say we must give up our wealth in order to be saved puts the burden on us once again to save ourselves. Neither wealth nor divestment of wealth saves us. God does.

 

Even Jesus realized he couldn’t save himself. Those who think they can will surely lose their lives; but those who recognize the utter futility of self-reliance will realize that their self-salvation really is not possible. We are saved by God, who makes all things possible.

 

Part of what I think the story is teaching us, part of why I think the Church remembers it across the centuries and suggests that we come to it at least once every three years, is to help us remember that it is only God who saves us.

 

And yet, there is still the problem of having so much stuff. So many possessions. Part of what they do here is keep this fellow from realizing his own need. It keeps him from feeling needy or vulnerable. We use our things to fill the emptiness in our souls. We use them to help us feel less susceptible to life’s exigencies. We use them to help us keep from seeing how needy we are.

 

Part of the advantage, I think, in the sense that they have an advantage here, that Christians without very much have over us is they know they are needy. They feel their vulnerability every day through the growling in their stomachs, or the cold on their skin. But we can hide that from us, sometimes. We can keep this fellow from coming into the sanctuary. And we can live with the sense that we are able to do this ourselves.

 

What is it that causes you to say No to following Jesus? What is your idol? What is the one thing you love, or at least are tempted to love, more than God? What is the one thing that you have a hard time letting go of in order to follow Jesus?

 

Your responsibilities? Your treasure? Your time? Are these sentences out of your lives:

 

My dad’s in a nursing home, and I’d like to go and visit him every afternoon, but it’s pretty competitive at work, and if I start missing there….

 

I feel I have gifts for teaching, and the schools seem to need teachers, but you know, we couldn’t do this and pay off that retirement….

 

I’d like to teach Sunday School, but I’m not going to do it if I can’t do it right. And that would mean giving up a part of my Saturday afternoon to prepare. And I’d always have to miss the paper on Sunday mornings, and the coffee….

 

Our grandchildren are at an age where we could make a difference, but we would need to move closer, and that would mean selling the house, and….

 

Here are some mental exercises that you can work with this afternoon, as you wrestle with the text, like I’ve been wrestling with it all week. Where are you saying in your own life, “I love God, but….”

 

How are the things that you are holding on to causing you to miss Jesus right now?

So Jesus turned to John and said, “You must give up your calendar, and follow me.”

Or Jesus said, “You must give up your workout program, and follow me.”

“You must give up your love of college sports, and follow me.”

“You must give up your e-mail and follow me.”

 

Do you think a lot less about what you might be able to dispense with in order to position yourself to follow? And you think about the things you are interested in acquiring, whether it is more energy, more time, more funds?

 

Since you may not be prepared to give away everything you own, or even half a day, or a night’s sleep, in order to be prepared to follow God, can you this week think about any extravagant action you might take to allow God to come near you? Especially any action that at first glance might look to the world like a foolish extravagance.

 

What causes you to say No to Jesus, to turn and walk away? What is your idol? What is your one thing that you would have difficulty giving up in order to follow?

 

I think this is a story about healing. I think it’s a story meant to comfort. And that’s a part why Jesus says, “On your own, you can not do this; but with God, all things are possible.” Jesus knows we have to have help doing this. And that God is the only one who can help us.

 

One of the hardest things for me to give up ever was control of my own health. Being in charge of my own body. When I was thirty-five, I ruptured the fifth lumbar vertebra in my back (which is the right place for your lumbar vertebra to be, in your back). When I did, it hurt a lot. But because I could not acknowledge that I was sick, I could not allow myself to say I had injured myself, I just kept working. I kept showing up at work and walking around with a lot of pain. It made me a very irritable person. I kept insisting on trying to be in the house, being a father and a husband. I was in such pain that I kept having to lie down to try and relieve it. At all different times. I kept showing up on Sunday mornings and trying to preach, and it got so bad that I could come and lie down in the chancel, and then stand up just to preach the sermon, and lie back down again. After two Sundays of that, finally an orthopedic surgeon, a fellow named Dr. Bob Blake, came up into the chancel after the service and said, “I’m putting you in the emergency room now.” He called Emalee and said, “Take him over there, and I’ll meet you there in about an hour.

 

And so, we went. It hurt so that all I could do was lie on the floor in the emergency room waiting area. A petite nurse came out and said, “I’m sorry, you can’t lie here on the floor in the waiting room.” I said to her, “Ma’am, it’s going to take somebody a lot bigger than you to get me up off this floor.” And she went and got two nurses who were a lot bigger. The next thing I knew, I found myself on a gurney in a receiving area.

 

The doctor had ordered a pain medication, an injection. The nurse came up and said, “This is for your pain.” I said, “I refuse it.” I refused it. I said, “I’m not going to take it. I refuse it.” Because I was sick, you see. Because if I had said “I’ll take the pain medication,” then that would’ve meant I wasn’t tough, or that I wasn’t going to be well, or that I couldn’t be in control. At some level beyond my ability to even be intelligible about it, I knew that that was going to be a vulnerability. So I said, “I refuse it.”

 

About ten minutes later, Dr. Blake came into the waiting area and he said, “Did you give him the shot for pain?” She said, “He refused it.” I saw his face grow kind of determined. He had been a surgeon in a MASH unit in Vietnam. He came and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he kind of squeezed it, hard. He said, “John, in this hospital, I am the doctor.”

 

Then I gave it up. That’s when I started to get well, when I let go. By myself, it was impossible. But with God, all things are possible. And as far as I’m concerned, he was an act of God’s grace in my life. Nothing I had done to deserve it. Nothing I had been wise enough to do in terms of getting treatment. Just God’s grace sending me an angel who insisted on having me let go.

 

That’s comfort you, here.

 

This rich man’s secure status in life led him to keep asking the wrong question: What can I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus’ first response was that there is nothing he or anyone else could do. It’s a gift from God. Jesus told him to release his wealth, and to give it to the poor, as a way of his growing closer to the fragility of life, and making himself more vulnerable. Close to the poor and the sick and the demon-possessed and the children, whom Jesus knows are all close to the fragility of life.

 

I think it’s intentional that Mark remembers this story, following the story from last week where Jesus takes the children up into his arms and says, “Only if you become as a little child can you enter the kingdom of heaven.” And now, this story about trying to become vulnerable.

 

The disciples freed themselves. And they are quick to tell Jesus of it, of what would stand between them and that fragility. And somehow, through God’s grace they were able to find the grace and the generosity that let them follow the one whose life would be a ransom for many.

 

In many ways, we have to become like children, or like those who know they are really sick. Or like these disciples who have let go of all the things they once relied on in order to see how much we even need Jesus.

 

By ourselves, we cannot do this. But with God’s help, even letting go is sometimes possible.

 

What is it that you are having a hard time letting go of, that is keeping you from following God?

 

Irvine Williams, who was the preacher here from about 1958 to about 1980, was a braver preacher than me. He preached on this text quite a bit. Going back through old sermons of his, I found where he said this about Mark 10:

 

When all is said and done, all of the best things of life really come to us out of God’s generosity and ownership. The secret of a happy Christian life is to realize it is all from God’s grace, and to rejoice therein. When we have done all that we can, we are still unprofitable servants. A joyous and saving relationship with God comes to us not on the basis of our merit, but on God’s great love in Christ. God’s ways are not our ways, and thank God! For if they were, what one of us would be saved?

 

What is it you need to let go of in order to find a space to come closer to Jesus Christ?

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2006