Poolesville Presbyterian Church
10.14.12; Rev. David Williams
Human beings are creatures of habit, and I am no different. As a connected pastor in this electronic age, I have a morning ritual. On waking, I pray first thing before popping out of bed, but unlike many of my pastoral brethren and sistren, the next thing I do is not to pop open the twitter app on my smartphone. That begins a day in ways that are unconstructive, in the same way that waking up and doing a quick hair-of-th’dog-that-bit-ya shot of Jim Beam is probably not the best way to get ready for a day at the office.
I generally forbid myself internet before the morning’s essentials have been completed. The boys have to have been gently or-not-so-gently encouraged to eat and double-check homework and school materials, and to wear clothing that at least gives the appearance of being clean. If it can stand up on it’s own, this is a sign that perhaps it should be in the dirty clothes hamper. The dog has to have been walked. The kitchen has to have been straightened up a bit. I have to have my own breakfast, usually granola and a cup of piping hot go-juice, which I sip while reading through the entire paper.
When I finally settle in for a morning of laundry plus study, or laundry plus writing, or laundry plus blogging, I have a similar pattern. I check my different email accounts. I check Facebook, scanning for things of interest across my social network. Then I read the sites I feed, which always somehow manages to include car sites. It’s an old habit. I’ve always loved cars, ever since I was a tiny lad with a boxful of Matchbox cars. The bigger and the faster and the more inaccessible, the better. Generally, though, this is a love that exists in the abstract.
As gorgeous as they are, I don’t really want a Maserati Grand Tourismo Sport or an Aston Martin Vanquish. Alright, well, maybe I want them a little bit. But the fact of the matter is, our lives and the way we use our cars bears no resemblance to the fantasy. This is particularly true where I live. In Annandale, it’s all stoplights and high density. Just pulling out of my neighborhood typically takes a minute or two, as a long column of cars whooshes by, each one perfectly spaced so that you could *almost* pull out...but not quite.
In fact, I think we long ago passed the point where cars set us free. They do not. We cannot live in our society without them. For a generation, our neighborhoods and subdivisions have been built not on a human scale, but on an automotive scale, and we’ve structured our lives around them...to the point where our cars define our existence. We do not own them. They own us.
I was reminded of this when searching the web for prayers about possessions this week. For some reason, I found myself on the website of Joel Osteen ministries, that big shiny happy teevee festival of Perfect Hair Glistening Teeth Name-It-And-Claim-It Best-Life-Nowness. There’s a page for prayer requests, with a hundred and fifty character limit. Reading it was...well...it was heartbreaking, and not just because I care about grammar and syntax. Every second, a new prayer appeared, and a frightening number of the prayers were for and about cars. These were not sixteen year old boys asking Jesus for Shelby GT500 Mustang Convertibles.
These were prayers from the desperate. These were people whose old cars were their failing lifeline to the world. They were struggling, and in debt, and the car that got them to work or to their doctor had broken down, and they didn’t have the money to fix it, and could Jesus please find a way to get the money or maybe fix it? One anguished prayer request, offered up in desperation, actually ended with the words “broken speedometer,” the AMEN chopped off by the 150 character limit. It was like Twitter for the damned, working under the assumption that Twitter isn’t hell already.
And it was a reminder, bright and clear, that the things we possess can easily become the things that possess us.
That warning is the entire point and purpose of the teaching we hear from Mark’s Gospel this morning. The story, which is recorded here and repeated in Luke 18 and Matthew 19, describes another question being brought to Jesus. Unlike the challenge from the Pharisees which we heard last week, this question comes from someone who is not challenging or testing Jesus. It’s from a man who is approaching Jesus with a genuine question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
The response from Jesus is to recount six of the ten commandments, more or less. The six commandments he recounts are the latter half of the Mosaic Decalogue, which is what scholars call the Ten Commandments when they don’t want you to know what they’re talking about. Interestingly, these are the six that have to do with how we relate to other human beings rather than how we relate to God. All of them are in essentially the same form we hear them in Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20...except for the final commandment. You know, the one about coveting and desiring stuff.
But the man recognizes these statements, and tells Jesus that he has kept every one of the commandments his whole life long.
Of the three Gospels that recount this story, Mark is the only one that capture the reaction of Jesus to this man, and it’s not a hostile one. Jesus recognizes the authenticity of his desire to live a good life, and as Mark says, he loved him.
The answer he offers up next is not intended to be a curse, or to set an impossible measure for this man. Jesus is simply telling him the one thing he was missing. All you need to do to follow me, says Jesus, is sell everything you own, give the proceeds to those in need, and follow me.
Ack.
The man goes away grieving, and shocked, and it is impossible, from an honest heart, to blame him. What is being asked of him? He’s being told to let go of everything he has, and to commit himself fully to Jesus. There’s not a one of us who’d have had a different reaction. Let go of everything? How could we even begin to consider it?
Jesus talks to his disciples as this good-hearted soul wanders away despondent, and his words to them don’t exactly clear things up. He tells them that it is immensely difficult for the wealthy to enter heaven.
Historically, this is where Christianity has begun to waffle.
Hearing from Jesus that it is harder for a rich person to enter heaven than for a camel through the eye of a needle, pastors like to comfort their congregations with a story they found in their collections of sermon anecdotes.
That story told how the “Eye of the Needle” is the name of a small gate into Jerusalem, which camels would pass through but it was sorta tight and you had to unload it and re-load it. If you’ve heard that story, let me note that it is completely and utterly without any basis in the historical record. There was no such gate. That story appears to have been made up at some point in the late 19th century.
What Jesus is saying is exactly what he was saying. It’s taking a thousand pound animal, and cramming it through a one/half-by-two millimeter opening. It’s not impossible. Given patience and a very sharp exacto knife, this is entirely doable, but it tends to be messy and time-consuming, not to mention extremely unpleasant for the camel.
That’s not good news for us, because we are a wealthy people. None of us live a life anything like that of a first century Judean. Even an unusually wealthy man would have had nothing like what most of us take for granted. I’m not talking about smartphones and nav systems and giant hi-def flat screen tvs and giving your daughter a BMW M6 convertible on her sixteenth birthday. I’m talking hot and cold running water, and lights that turn on and off at the flick of a switch, and access to antibiotics.
We are a wealthy people globally. If you look at the net-worth of the average American household following the crash of 2008, we went from having...on average...$126,000 in total assets to $77,000 in total assets. That may have been a forty percent drop, but it still meant that the average American household was in the ninetieth percentile of wealth globally. The truth of that is driven home by spending any time in the rest of the world. We are a wealthy, wealthy people.
And the habits and patterns of that life are difficult to let go. We like the power that comes with wealth, and the patterns of social relationship that come with wealth. It holds us, and it defines us, and it keeps us from seeing the world as Christ saw it. The great challenge, for all of those who encounter material prosperity, is how to prevent that from defining us, grasping us and keeping us from responding when Jesus asks us to put it all down, and to follow him.
That’s our struggle, and it’s a struggle worth having.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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