The Possessed

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 10.11.2015

Scripture Lesson:  Mark 10:17-31

It is the first thing we ever owned together, and it’s finally dying.

Oh, I don’t want to admit it, I really don’t.  That old microwave, purchased way back when in 1991, has sat on the kitchen counter of every home my wife and I have ever lived in.  It’s popped our popcorn back before we had kids, before we’d even had the talk about being ready to have kids, back when she’d come back from class and I’d have put in a day’s work as a stock clerk in a little Williamsburg store, and we’d snag some pizza, some basic cable and chill, just the two of us.

We were past being boyfriend and girlfriend, and definitively fie-anced, that tiny little diamond on her finger having taken a huge chunk out of my meager savings.  We’d reached that magical point in a relationship where you’re buying appliances together, and it was the very first one.

It’s an 800 Watt Quasar, a long dead low end brand, wrapped all around with faux wood paneling applique, the kind of appliance that you’d find in K-Mart along with the tape decks and the cheap CD players.  It’s warmed up countless rushed meals for the kids, and surely, surely over the last twenty five years popped enough popcorn to fill our house several times over.

And now it feels like it’s failing.  Every once in a while, it’ll balk at starting, refusing to fire up, like my knees on the morning after a day when I’ve really pushed myself.  It just clicks, and fails, and clicks, and fails.  And then it works, for no reason, so we keep it around.  The old Quasar, perhaps finally dying, and I’ll admit to feeling this faint twang of loss, over this object that has done due diligence for so many years.  We can come to feel that way about our objects, about the things that populate our lives.  They become suffused with memory, rich with experience, even if those experiences are just of the most basic stuff of life.

It’s easy to feel that way about the objects that populate our lives, as they become part of the face of the world we encounter.  It’s almost like they take on a portion of our personality, like they become an extension of who we are.

I wonder, though, if it works the other way.  If we get too focused on the objects around us, if we allow our identities to be so wrapped up in the things that we own or desire, I wonder if something of their material soullessness bleeds out into our own identities.

Because the things we possess can easily become the things that possess us.

That warning comes to us bright and clear from all of scripture, but it’s particularly sharp on the lips of Jesus this morning.   The story, which is retold by Luke in chapter 18 of his Gospel and by Matthew in his 19th chapter, describes another question being brought to Jesus.   A whole bunch of folks would approach Jesus with questions that weren’t so much questions as traps, the theological equivalent of “does this dress make me look fat.”  This was not such a question.  It is posed, or so we hear, by someone who is approaching Jesus with a genuine concern on their heart:  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

The response from Jesus is to recount six of the ten commandments, the last six, the ones that have to do with how we relate to other human beings.   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.  

The man recognizes these commandments, and tells Jesus that he has kept every one of them his whole life long.

Of the three Gospels, Mark is the only one that capture the reaction of Jesus to this reply, 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.

Good job, says Jesus.  You’re doing great.  Just one more thing: Give up everything you own, and follow me.

Just that one little thing.  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 the Kingdom.  If you’re possessed by your possessions, if you serve Mammon as your master, the Spirit of God will have no purchase in your soul.

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.   I hear that story, over and over again.  It was in that book about quantum prosperity hoo-hah magic I talked about last week.  

And because that’s such a popular tale, I’ll repeat what I said the last time I preached on this passage: there was no such gate.  It never existed.  That story appears to have been made up at some point in the late 19th century, right about the same time some folks started getting very, very rich.

What Jesus is saying is exactly what he was saying.  In the absence of a teleportation device or a shrink ray, this is not easily done.

That’s not good news for us, because I think pretty much every one of us would have just as much trouble with that demand as the young man Jesus loved.  It’s just too radical, too nuts, too way outside of the ballpark, for us to seriously consider it.

I mean, seriously, check yourself.  Right now, imagine that there’s a sudden shimmer in the air, the sound of trumpets, and standing right in front of our tiny little , there’s Jesus of Nazareth himself.  What does he look like?  I’ll leave that up to you.  He can look any way you want.   He can be historically correct short Near Eastern Jesus.  He can be a radiant, glowing pastel heavenly watercolor inspirational poster Jesus.  He can be the Jesus of your childhood Sunday School coloring books.  He can be Ted Neely from Jesus Christ Superstar, or Willem DaFoe from Last Temptation of Christ.

But there is no question in your mind that he’s Jesus.  And he says to all of us, in a way that cuts directly into you, in English and not in Aramaic, exactly the same word that he spoke to that man.  “You are doing great.  Only one more thing I ask: give up all of your possessions, and follow me.”

And into the stunned silence that would fill this little room, you’d hear my faint voice from behind Jesus,  “Even the microwave?”

Yes, even the microwave.

Think of the things that consume your attention, that demand your allegiance.  Your car.  Your phone.  Your house.  Your gun.  The computers and consoles, all of the endless cornucopic vomit of our overproducing materialist culture.

And realize that our attachment to all of it is an impediment to our really engaging with the Gospel.  

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.