Proper 23B. 10 October 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Job 1:1, 2:1-10. Do you still persist in your integrity?
Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12. Someone has testified somewhere.
Mark 10:2-16. Receive the kingdom of God as a little child.
O God of Possibility, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Last week I shared a question that I often hear from my colleagues, that is: “What are you going to do with those readings?” That question has been rolling around in my head and lingering in my prayer. A startling idea occurred to me this week that maybe the better question is: “What are those readings going to do with me or you?” Because as we just heard in Hebrews: [1]
Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before God no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.
In the passage we heard this morning, even while Job searches in vain for God, he knows that God sees him.
What are those readings going to do with me or with you? Because the word of God is living and active. It’s sharp and, in the wrong hands and mouths, it does a lot of damage. My awareness of that is particularly heightened as tomorrow is Indigenous People’s Day, a day in which we acknowledge the devastation wrought by Bible-toting, mission-driven European “Christian” ancestors, whose guns and germs enabled their land and labor grabs. With the express blessing or tacit consent of the Anglican and later Episcopal Church, the colonists and later the United States government displaced and eliminated millions of people who were living here first. [2] If you haven’t seen Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, I commend it to you. [3]
The devastation is ongoing, of course, both for indigenous people and for the rest of us. The intergenerational trauma is collective and communal; it affects us all whether we are conscious of it or not. A passage from the prophet Hosea, which my dad taught me when I was young, frequently comes to my mind:
God has an indictment against the inhabitants of this land…false testimony, lying, and murder, and theft and idolatry break out. Bloodshed follows bloodshed! Therefore, the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.
And the words of our old confession come to me right after that: “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness…against thy divine Majesty….The remembrance [of our misdoings] is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.”
Yes, the burden is intolerable, so we need help; and, help is available in the Most Merciful, the Most Gracious spirit of Love, the incarnation of Love and the creator of Love. The Most Merciful and the Most Gracious has a response, throughout scripture; the arc of the narrative, the compilation of many voices that are still speaking to us: “Turn away from whatever separates you from the most merciful, the most gracious Love of God.” I think that’s what today’s Gospel lesson is about.
According to the Gospel of Mark, as Jesus was setting off on a journey, a man ran up and knelt in front of him and asked what he had to do to inherit eternal life. Remember that eternal life always includes life before death; it’s not only about life after death. Jesus said, “You know the commandments.” The man replied that he has been careful about those commandments since he was a child. Jesus, looking at him, loved him. (Don’t miss that; that is good news!) Jesus responded that he should spend some time selling his possessions, giving the money to those who are poor, and then follow Jesus in the life of a wandering beggar.[3] (That’s the bad news.)
This is a Jesus who could never get a job in the Episcopal Church. The note in his file would say, “turned-away, wealthy prospect!” The late Episcopal priest Grant Gallup offered the sharp critique that the Church has been eager for centuries to get along with the ruling class and has frequently said about this story of Jesus and the Rich Young [man] that it really isn’t about the wickedness and the corrupting influence of wealth. Rather, according to this theory, we are told, it is about “detachment.” Gallup said: [4]
The wealthy can get into heaven if only they adopt an attitude like those of old wealth, those very rich who live Spartan and stingy lives, make wise investments, and eat sensible salads ….The goal is to live on a spiritual plane somewhat above earthly things, and not be conspicuous about your consumption.
But Jesus was not talking about being detached or inconspicuous here. Jesus is demanding relief for those who are poor through the redistribution of wealth. Both Torah and Gospel are abundantly clear about the sacred obligation of people who have more to take care of and share with people who have less. Now this is a fundamental, literal interpretation of a scriptural command (and not one, I might add, that I have ever seen Biblical literalists putting on signs at marches and rallies). Jesus’ instructions are extreme, actually against the grain of rabbinical teaching of the time, which held that a man should not give away more than one fifth of his possessions during his lifetime lest he become a public charge. This is still our concern about the risk of giving too much. We don’t want to become impoverished as a consequence of giving too much. We don’t want to risk giving away too much and becoming needy ourselves. Heaven forbid; well maybe not. Was Jesus using hyperbole, or was he really serious? If he was serious, does his instruction only apply to that rich young man or to all rich young men? Can those of us who are not rich young men relax (the hazards of literal interpretation)? Although we have a wide range of incomes at Emmanuel Church, I’m quite confident that I’m not preaching right now to the very rich; they tend to go to the parishes on my right and on my left. At the same time, I know that the majority of us are rich by the world’s standards, even if we are not very rich by Boston’s Back Bay standards. All of us are young in God’s time, and I’m told that men means everybody. You know, the Bible is full of instructions and examples to follow: in fact, a lot of conflicting instructions and examples. You have to be pretty chaos-tolerant to search the Bible for answers to questions about how to live an ethical life. One of the ways I discern which instructions and examples are binding and which ones are not, is to look through the lens of the love ethic exemplified for us by Jesus. Back to Hebrews: “Since, then, we have a great high priest…Jesus, the Child of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.” If we look through the lens of the love to try to figure out which commandments we should follow, what do we see in this one? Is it responsible, caring, mutual, non-exploitative, honest, with genuine concern for the best interests of the other and of society as a whole? Well, yes. The Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus loved this rich guy; and that when Jesus told him to sell all his stuff, give the money to poor people and then follow him, the guy walked away. Mark tells us the rich guy was shocked and grieving because he had many possessions. One of the things that I notice is that he didn’t respond, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, when Jesus’ response to her question was inadequate. She argued, “Yes, Lord, but”, but the rich young man didn’t argue. He just walked away, maybe ashamed, maybe angry or shocked, and deeply sad. When I look at this story through the lens of Love, I see what Jesus says next differently than I used to see it. I used to see that part about the camel and the eye of a needle as a judgmental reproach. Now I see it as a lament, Jesus’ own grief, his own deep sadness that the rich young man, whom he loved, just walked away. I have this sense that Jesus showed the rich man that the gates of heaven are so wide you can’t even see the sides of the opening; and all he had to do was put his stuff down and walk in, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t even want to continue the conversation; and I think that made Jesus so sad. The wide gates might as well be as narrow as the eye of a needle. Whether it’s an actual sewing needle or, as some teach, the nickname of the smallest gate into the City of Jerusalem doesn’t matter. The lens of Love makes it clear to me that Jesus was expressing his own grief. What I think Jesus knew then, and what I know now, is that the more wealth we have, the less we tend to need God; and the less we tend to need one another. Oh, I can worship God, do my best to follow the commandments, even give my life over to the priesthood; but I don’t behave as if I need the love of God the way someone who has nothing needs the love of God. I also know that I am wealthy by the world’s standards. I don’t like thinking about that, but I know it’s true. But I’ll tell you this: I’m not walking away. I want to follow Jesus; I want to participate in redistributing wealth; I want to alleviate poverty and provide relief to people who have inadequate food, shelter, and clothing, who search for food in the trash cans on Newbury Street and sleep on flattened cardboard boxes in our garden and on our steps, whose jackets are too thin for the cool fall days and the coming winter. I also want to offer reparations to those whose people were mistreated and whose land was stolen. I want to be a part of healing our collective traumas. I want to encourage you to do these things also. So what does that mean? It means for me, that my own giving is increasingly intentional, proportional, and sacrificial. I spend more time thinking and praying about my own access to resources, and figuring out how to use less and give away more. Each year, I give away a higher proportion of my income. Sometimes the increase is in baby steps , like a half-a-percent more than the year before; sometimes it’s a bigger step. I’ve lived through the very humbling experience of taking big steps and then falling short – that is, making a pledge for giving to the church that represented a significant stretch and not being able to meet it. I can tell you, that’s not the end of the world. My giving is increasingly sacrificial. What I mean by that is, if I can give away money and possessions and not even miss them, I’m sure that it wasn’t enough. Giving should change one’s life. It should matter.
I know I want to follow Jesus, and so I’m not walking away; I’m arguing with him sometimes, and I’m asking for help, but I’m not walking away. I know that as your priest, furthermore, it’s my work to be concerned for your spiritual health, which includes your financial giving; and it’s my work to encourage you to not walk away. As your priest, I’ve got to tell you that I believe Jesus really meant it when he sadly observed how hard it is for those who have many possessions to fully experience the Realm of God. But I don’t think it’s because the Realm of God doesn’t want or welcome us; I think rather that the more we have – that is, the less needy we are, the less likely we are to want to enter the Realm of God, which is open to all without exception. I also believe that Jesus really meant it when he said that for God, with God, in God, all things are possible. For today, that news is good enough for me. The writer of Hebrews concludes, “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
[1] Hosea 4:1-3.
[2] Stephanie Spellers, The Church Cracked Open (New York: Church Publishing, Inc., 2021), p. 59.
[3] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
[4] The late Rev. Grant Gallup, Managua, Nicaragua – taken from a blog post many years ago.
[5]Samuel Tobias Lachs, A Rabbinic Commentary on the New Testament: The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (Brooklyn NY: KTAV Publishing, 1987), p. 331.