The Eye of the Needle, Kathy Hykes, Pentecost Proper 23---Year B---October 15, 2006

Mark 10:17-31
“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.”
 
You know how someone says something to you and it changes the way you look at the world? The idea changes your mind right away. As soon as you hear it you know it is right. It hits the mark. It finds the place in your mind that is fertile, that is yielding.
 
Often called aha! Moments, or epiphanies, these times can produce great healing, new inventions, greater understanding. There are other times though when an idea falls flat at first, falls on deaf ears, or is totally rejected.
 
Once in a while an idea sticks in your mind while you wrestle with it, until you come to terms with it.  I do not know what term is given to these ideas. I am going to call them converters.
 
The story of the rich man in Mark’s Gospel has the potential for a great converter, a catalyst, an idea that pushes us to consider our own lives, and to try to understand the difficulty of transformation and the promises of faith. It forces us to ask, what we are committed to? Where is our heart? And it does not have easy answers.
 
Marcus Borg in his book Conflict Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus talks about the situation in Israel at the time of Jesus. He uses the term, “spirit Man” to describe Jesus. A spirit man is one who is in touch with the spirit world, someone in his words, “trusting radically in the compassion of God and letting go of the self and the world as the basis of security and focus of concern.” So when the rich man met Jesus it was clear from his response to him that the man was secure in the things of the world, that he had internalized the cultural ideal, he lived up to what the community considered the standard: wealth, status, and observing the Torah.  He was just the kind of man Jesus might have liked to recruit as a disciple. Yet this man resisted. He did not accept the invitation; he did not wish to be transformed, ‘for he had many possessions’.
 
It is easy to find some things about this passage to make us squirm.  This event perplexed even the disciples.  It was not even easy for them to imagine that someone with status and wealth might not be ‘saved’.  The prevailing notion of who honored the God of Israel was someone who kept all the commandments and practiced “holiness”, lived a pure life, and gave away money to the poor.
If there is an ideal in this country today this is probably not too far from it.  Who does not love the stories of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett and Ted Turner giving away billions of dollars to fund worthwhile charities that may help improve the world?   These stories have become a new rationale for why it is a good thing to be rich and famous. Now rock stars, movie idols and football players are all publicizing their activities for helping others.  It is becoming the satisfactory life goal after you have “made it” to “give back”.
 
Journalists have found that stories of helping others sell magazines and newspapers. A recent Newsweek extolled the virtue of numerous everyday people, not famous, who give to their community and fellow man in amazing ways. Though most of these people did not say so, their work could come out of their faith journey. It is possible that giving away wealth is a natural negative reaction to the culture of “bling” and excessive consumption that have characterized the last few decades.  Or it could come from a religion of culture that does not have to have God at the center of it at all.  We cannot know.
 
So the apostles’ question is, will these people be saved?  Will they ‘inherit eternal life’? Will they make it through the ‘eye of the needle’?
 
I am not fool enough to answer the question, though we all are curious I suppose.  More importantly though, I think this text forces us to raise a question about what our present culture says about good. It asks us to consider, just as the apostles had to, whether the prevailing norm, the everyday idea of what was a good man, was necessarily a ticket to the kingdom of God.
 
Jesus’ teaching seems designed to make us wrestle with our ordinary judgments.  They force us out of our long held ideas and cause us to think about what is important to us, what is first in our hearts. It is an inner struggle to decide what our unique responsibility is to our own existence, what some may call God’s plan for our lives. We do know that these people are tackling those questions for themselves in their own ways.
 
What we do not know about these people of today or really anyone’s story is their faith, their reliance on God. Jesus tells us that that inner voice is what we must be alert for; it is what becoming a Christian means. It can be among the hardest work we can do, but it can be the door to the most joyful part of our lives.
 
I believe that when Jesus asked the rich man to sell his possessions and give everything away to the poor, some interpreters suggest[1] that this was a prescription for this particular man. It may be true that our possessions get in the way of following a life in imitation of Christ, a life of holiness, a life of meaning. It is also possible that there are other things we hold on to that are much bigger obstacles. We could be obsessed with finding love or security, a personal quest for knowledge or image, for acknowledgement or flattery; we might be bound by our ambition, even by tradition, by our worry about our health, our work, or our children. These could all lead us away from seeing God as primary in our lives, giving our hearts to this. There is much in life to distract us, and little in our world to keep us focused.
 
It is fitting that this is the gospel for Pledge Sunday. As pledge chair of course I have to mention this.  It would make it really easy for the pledge review team and the vestry if you all decided that you would give all your possessions away to the Church! We might not even have to have a campaign next year.  I have resisted the urge to focus on the ‘camel’ reading of this text and say that this passage is all about giving all your wealth to the church ( and I am dating myself here) causing you to put on your tie dye and sandals, climb into your old VW bus playing your 8 track tape of Jesus Christ Superstar and to begin carrying the gospel to the nations. It is only when this action to follow that urge is a response to God’s call to you, to play your role in bringing about his kingdom, then your heart is in the right place.
 
What about our church here at Holy Comforter? What are the transforming converter questions we should be asking of ourselves at this time of year? Pledge review is not just about how much money we give to the church but it is about stewardship of the gifts we have been given. Even if we did not need money to keep the church going it would still be important for us to examine how we are using our gifts. Just because we sing that all we have comes from God does not necessarily follow that we will all sign up to fulfill God’s purpose.  What it does mean is if in my heart I am signed on to do God’s work in our church and in our community, to bring about the elaborate plan of a restored and renewed world, then the assets I have temporarily under my control will get organized for God’s use.[2] 
 
What is God’s plan for our congregation? What is our purpose, our vision, our ministry at this time in the life of the church?  I can tell you what I think it is without looking at what has been written about it.
 
Since I have been working on the annual pledge review the last several weeks, I have been hanging around the church more than usual. David mentioned briefly a person who visited the church looking for help in his sermon a few weeks ago.  I thought as I listened to David that he was not even beginning to describe the picture around here. This church ‘leaves the light on for you’ as the old motel ad said. It is a light in this community.  Nearly every time I have been here there has been someone looking for something to eat, for transportation home, gas for their cars, a place to sleep, help with a bill. The sheriff’s department called with an emergency need, someone walked up to the front door after church and asked if the church could spare $8.00 for gas to get him the rest of the way home to Ohio. You don’t see all this but David and Charles and Ginny and Debbie handle these entreaties constantly.
 
No one mentions anymore the other ministries we sponsor without a backward glance. The narcotics, the alcoholics, the battered, the depressed, the hopeless and helpless that are ministered to in our buildings, that we take care to maintain and make available.
 
Bob and I were on a long hike with a group of pilgrims and the path was very steep, very narrow and rocky. Unsure of our footing we kept our eyes peeled to the ground. It was not until we were told to stop that we looked up, allowing ourselves to forget the danger and the challenge of the trail at hand. Not until then did we notice the morning light on the ocean and the beautiful shore of Scotland before us. I feel that sometimes I have been very busy looking at the rocky path of the church. Today I am making a commitment to begin focusing on seeing the light.
 
This church, this light is all of us. We are people whose lives have been shaped by our faith. We are people yearning for a growing and genuine relationship with God and as we have read and heard in the last few weeks from those who have written or talked at our services and in our video, we are a community of faith willing to talk of this experience with others.  That makes us the Church.  That makes us among the invited. And that must make us act.
 
The people who have spoken in church or written to us in Comfortable Words, or discussed the church on our new video, all gave us a glimpse of their genuine affection for this parish. For all of them the life of the church is very little separated from their everyday life. They are involved and committed, and the seasons of their lives are centered for the most part in the seasons of the life of the church. That is a life we would wish for others.
 
What do I want for our church here at Holy Comforter? I want it to be about more than self-preservation or tradition. I want all of us to feel genuine affection for the people of our congregation.  I always hope that our affection will become so great that it spills outside the door, down the steps and out into the street. I want us to have a genuine commitment on the part of each member to have compassion on all those who are oppressed, all those who have need, both inside our congregation and outside, and to act on it. The more action we take the more satisfied we will feel with the result.
 
So what happened to the rich man after this? Jesus made what I think is a call to faith, a call to discipleship and the rich man turned him down. We do not have anyway to know. I like to wonder if he regretted his response. Did he think back over the invitation and wonder what kind of life he missed? A good man would have to wonder if taking care of his possessions was the extent of his role in God’s plan.
 
The better question here is what am I willing to do? Jesus makes the same invitation to us across the centuries every time we hear this Gospel.  He calls us to transformation, to lose our own egos, to have the “aha moment” that begins directing our lives in a way that follows Christ’s lead. He tells us to forgive. He reminds us of his compassion, his inclusive message of justice and equity, and he invites us to work alongside him every time we hear his story.
 
Action is what Christ called the rich man to-- to be a part of the story.  He wanted him to learn about compassion, to feel serious affection, to join his small family of believers.  He wanted everyone to make their decisions while focused on what God wants from us, the one God from whom all things come.
 
Amen.

[1] Interpreters Bible
[2] Paraphrased from a Stewardship tract I found along the way by Mark Vincent.