Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

October 15, 2006

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. (Mark 10: 17-31)

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before [Jesus], and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” They were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”

Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Let us pray. Our loving and gracious God, we come to you this day in need of your grace. Uphold us with your love. Remind of us that place of the soul, the reservoir of the spirit, reserved only for you. In your Holy Name, we pray. Amen.

Our Gospel lesson for today takes up the theme of attachment—the theme of attachment. Now, if you had been here last Sunday at four o’clock for our St. Francis of Assisi Blessing of the Animals service, you would have seen evidence of some wonderful attachments, loving attachment of creature friends for their human friends and human friends for their creature friends. We had everything from a cat named “Cookie” to a dog named “Mr. Beasley,” who, whenever they said “smile for the camera,” would tilt his head and his ears would go up. And we had a mouse named “Clara.” We heard the creation account in Genesis where we are invited to have dominion over all of these creatures, a word which Biblically speaking means to care for our animal friends like a shepherd cares for the sheep. Now, that is an example of good attachment.

Or, if you have been following the weekly stewardship Profiles in Ministry, all displayed by our stewardship committee on a tripod in the narthex, highlighted each week, you would be aware of all of the care and investment that goes on through various dimensions of our life together as a church, as well as ministry done in our community. That is an investment of ministry, of which we are proud. And if you are able to return for the Thanksgiving dinner today after church, you can join in a celebration of thanksgiving for our newly renovated space, for all of the ministry that we do for our people here at Immanuel never precludes having a safe and inviting facility where we can worship, sing together, learn together, gather together, as well as move out, serving in the wider community, and even as far away as halfway around the globe in Tanzania.

No, the kind of attachment of which Jesus speaks today is not the investment we make in the friends, family, and ministry we do together. The kind of attachment of which Jesus speaks today is the kind of attachment that is misplaced, attachment that is so severe that it stands in the way of life eternal in the future or even of life abundant in one’s life today.

A young ruler in our story from Mark asked the question about eternal life. Between the gift of eternal life and this sincere person lies a problem—wealth. Lest we jump to self-righteous judgment against the rich, Jesus does not condemn this sincere questioner. Instead, he gazes intently at this young person in a way that you might look at any young person about to throw their life away with the pursuit of anything futile. It could be money, but it could also be status, ambition, illusion. Jesus’ response is not an attack on the wealthy or a glorification of poverty per se. Let me say that again. Jesus’ response is not an attack on wealth or a glorification of poverty in and of itself. Goodness knows, there is no justification for those of us in the so-called first world to glorify, let’s say, the people of Africa in the so-called third world as somehow happier because they are poor, any more than there is justification for condemning those who, due to random luck, are born into the first world, and maybe due to a little bit of hard work and, more random luck, accumulate great wealth. The people who are rich enough to see Africa as a place you go to get off the plane at Kilimanjaro, leaving a sprinkling of travelers to go on to Dar es Salaam, climb the mountain, and then go on safari, and then fly back home, never having to see what life is really like in a village where the people live, never having to look at water that is not safe to drink, never having to meet someone orphaned because of AIDS, all of those people in their REI and Eddie Bauer paraphernalia are not bad people. They are blind people, sheltered people, who never have to see what the people of Mkimbizi have to see every day—reminding us once again that that which is deserving of judgment is always also, at some level, deserving of compassion.

Jesus’ response to the rich young ruler is not an attack on wealth. It is a loving attempt to reach someone defined by money before it is too late; someone who cannot let go and accept a new definition of themselves as someone who is rich toward God and generous toward the neighbor, for whom the kingdom of God is at hand.

Pondering this theme of attachment took me back to a major summer project of mine and one that, as always, is daunting—cleaning out my garage. Now, what is important about this annual ritual is not all that is pulled onto the pavement so you can sweep the garage clean, but what goes back in after everything has been pulled out to be given or thrown away. An old bike that no one ever rides—but who knows, one of the cousins or one of the neighbor kids might want to use it. This old lantern, it doesn’t work—but you never know when you might have time to fix it. A cracked sled—special! A Monet print rotting around the edges of the frame—well, you never know when you might want to put that up again. And on and on it goes, until when you are all done it hardly looks much different than before you started.

That’s all right. Whenever I hear a child cry, I’m always reminded of the old Pastor Berg at Augustana Church who always said: “There is more joy among the angels in heaven at the sound of one baby’s cry than at the quiet snoring of a hundred saints.”

This thing—back to my garage—about homeowner’s insurance, it is not a bad idea in itself. But think about it. The things that really matter could never be replaced in the event of fire or tornado. Take inventory of your house. Is there anything material, other than your cat or dog or albums of pictures, that can never be replaced, without which you could not go on?

I remember when I finished my three-years residence requirement for graduate school in New York, as a student I still owned so little that I offered space in my-U-Haul to two friends needing things hauled back to the Midwest. However, I did have a collection of hats that I had accumulated from sales at my favorite hat shop in Greenwich Village. And so when it came time to leave the only home I knew—my little student’s studio apartment—and not having yet seen the apartment waiting for me in Minnesota, the last thing I did before I climbed into the truck was to take one of my favorite straw hats, attach a button from a friend that said, “HOME IS WHERE YOUR HAT IS,” put it on my head, climbed into the truck, and feel quite confident and secure that I would be just fine all the way home. That was all well and good, until the next day when I was cruising along the Pennsylvania turnpike, singing out the window, when a sudden gust of wind picked up the hat and whooshed it out of the window and dropped it onto the pavement behind me. I can only describe what I felt at that moment as pure panic, for that hat was the only home I had. I did all of what the manuals tell you never to do with a U-Haul: I pulled it off to the side of the road, I ran back, I waited for traffic, I ran out, I got my hat, now smashed. I punched it back into a hat, straightened the button, put it on my head, got back into the truck, and drove on to Minnesota. What was it about that hat? What did it mean at that moment? What would make a hat with a button on it so central to my security that you would risk a trip, indeed your life, to save it?

Your life is what Jesus is talking about in our Gospel text for today—your life— ties so intense, dependencies so enslaving, that you would give your life to save them. If instead of owning things, we could learn to cherish them. To cherish is different than to own. To cherish is to treat some thing or someone with the utmost gentleness, with the utmost sense of regard, like a gift. I am always amazed at how people speak about their property—with a sweep of the hand, “My house, the yard, the trees, the squirrels, the begonias.” Imagine if the trees and the squirrels on your property could talk back to you. How do you think they would feel about being your tree, your squirrel? Biblically speaking, ownership is an illusion. All that we have is a gift from God. And isn’t autumn the perfect season for Thanksgiving, the perfect season of learning from the trees themselves something about the art of letting go. Oh, the things we cling to, the attachments we have.

It is not just the rich young ruler Jesus is talking about; it goes on to adult life. There is this reservoir of the soul that cannot be filled; a place reserved for the spirit that belongs only to God. And you know it is not just money, or hats, or possessions. It can be any thing: books, awards, status, promotions, degrees; it can be things that can hurt us, or others: alcohol, or drugs. But lest we point our fingers at the extremes that make news, let us not forget what we now know about the excessive use of cigarettes, nicotine, coffee, Mountain Dew, chocolates, the morning news, bad religion. I have a friend back in New York that used to say she read so many articles that said cigarettes and coffee were bad for her health that she finally gave up reading.

It can be anything to which we are attached that can never deliver on life eternal or life abundant now. “For what, after all, is an addiction,” the wise, old psychologist Carl Jung once said, “but a spiritual journey. It’s just that you got off at the wrong address.”

None of the things to which we cling are bad in themselves. It is the attachment, the clinging itself, the filling of that place—the quiet reservoir of the soul, reserved only for God.

How is it that some people manage to extricate themselves before it is too late and others spend their lives enslaved by some external phenomenon that cannot save is a mystery. But the clue in our text is in the picture itself, for the rich young ruler is on his knees out of reverence or regard, or maybe just out of a sincere recognition that there is no place else to go, that that which he is seeking is a gift that can only be granted by a merciful and benevolent God at the point where heaven and the human soul intersect—a God who yearns after us as much as we reach out in hope and in confidence that God will be there, indeed is there, every sleeping and waking hour of our lives.

Amen.