"Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”1
I must confess that nobody I know personally would ask such a question.
They might as in, “Good teacher, what must I do to make my life better, richer, fuller” but the matter of eternal life is not on their radar. They too are busy with their work, raising children, being good partners and persons now to worry much about the hereafter.
While, according to a 2021 PEW Research Centre poll found that “73 percent of Americans believe in heaven,”2 chances are we don’t think about it much even though every week we affirm our belief in “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” We probably speak of that belief to others only in a moment of loss and bereavement.
“She in a better place,” well say or maybe “He’s in God’s hands now” but that is almost as far as we’ll go. In countless years in the funeral business, then as clergy, and back in the funeral business again no one has come up to me after a funeral and asked “You look like a pretty smart fellow so “What must I do to inherit eternal life.”
But last Tuesday, over a very nice lunch at University Club of Chicago, I heard stories of women and men for whom life itself and eternal life is very much on their minds. At the Chicago Bible Society’s Guttenburg Award luncheon we heard stories about this very fine organization’s good work in gifting the inmates of the county jail systems in the metropolitan Chicago area with Bibles in English, Spanish and other languages and providing jail chaplains to meet the needs of those detained. “We touch the lives of thousands every year with the gift of God’s Word.” their website proclaims with justifiable pride. At lunch on Tuesday, we heard examples of men, woman, and their entire families who in the depths of trouble are asking not only “what must I do to get my life and the life of my family back on track but ultimately “what must I do to inherit eternal life.”
In that sense they are miles, light-years, away from the wealthy, I’ve got it all together, young man who runs up to Jesus on that fine day and asks the seemingly out of the blue question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
This guy is one of us. He’s a hard-working, jobs producer for goodness sake.
He thinks it’s a matter of doing. Jesus sets him up by asking about the commandments, prompting a funny (to us, not him!) reply: “I have kept all these since I was a boy.” Jesus doesn’t chuckle or admonish. Instead, “Jesus looked at him.” How tender, how personal. “And he loved him.” A total stranger, confused. “Jesus loved him.”
And because he loved him he says: “One thing you lack...”
"Whew!" The guy might have been thinking to himself. “Just one? Easy! Thought it might be a dozen or a hundred.”3
O, but that one thing is a doozy. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”4
So, we wonder why “at the very least, Jesus couldn’t work in increments, easing his new convert into the values of the kingdom: "How about you write a small check to charity this year? Nothing scary, nothing that will break the bank. Just a token?" Precisely because he loves the young man so much, Jesus tells him the truth. Not the half-truth, not the watered-down truth, but the whole truth.”5 He has to give it all up, give it all away, and follow Jesus.
“If this message does not take our breath away, if we are not shocked, appalled, grieved, or amazed, we have either not yet heard it or heard it so often that we do not really hear it any more.”6
However, this is one of those things, as they say on television, that you should not try at home. Don’t take this sermon so literally that tomorrow when your partner or spouse gets home there no furniture, no appliances, not even am an empty house because even the house has been sold. I don’t want you telling your loved ones that you took something Pastor Nelson said in a sermon to heart and liquidated everything. You’ll get us both killed!
When the rich man goes away with a frown on his face we may be led to ask the same question the disciples did. With the criterion that high who can make it? Eternity is going to be really empty if the standard to get in is unattainable.
At this point Jesus gives a really crazy analogy. “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.”
In a Christian Century article The Rev. Stacey Simpson wrote:
I remember the first time I read this story. I was seven years old, reading Mark’s Gospel in bed. When I got to verse 25, I was so alarmed that I slammed the Bible shut, jumped out of bed, and went running down the hall. I shook my mother out of a sound sleep. “Mom,” I whispered urgently, “Jesus says that rich people don’t go to heaven!”
“We are not rich. Go back to bed,” came my mother’s response.7
_What I think Jesus is introducing us to is his idea of God who is so gracious, and so winsome, and so powerful that God could, if God wanted, take a full sized camel (One hump or two, take your choice!) a drop that camel right through the eye of a needle and have that dromedary emerge dazed but unscathed on the other side.
If we continue to put our trust in what we have accomplished, or what we have – our houses, lands, and 401k’s, we are going to be on the wrong track but if we follow Jesus, things will be different.
Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor explained what we receive this way.
It is a dare to [us] to become a new creature, defined in a new way, to trade in all the words that have described [us] up to now – wealthy, committed, cultured, responsible, educated, powerful, obedient – to trade them all in on one radically different word, which is free.8
We’ll be free to serve Christ and our neighbours without any thought of reward. We’ll be free to serve Christ and our neighbours without any cost/benefit analysis. We’ll be free from trying to save ourselves by parading our good deeds before God.
When we forget about thinking about all we’ve done we’ll be free to follow Jesus wherever he leads. Jesus turned the rich man’s question about eternal life into a challenge to follow him.
Sometimes that challenge will lead us into strange and difficult places.
Ever since Hurricane Helene roared through and devastated the community around Black Mountain, North Carolina I have been reading the heart-breaking and heart-warming Facebook posts by my friend Greg Kerschner. He and his wife, Shannon, who I have often quoted from this pulpit as one of the finest preachers I have ever heard at Fourth Presbyterian Church here in Chicago and now at Central Presbyterian in Atlanta, purchased a getaway and eventual retirement home in the area. They named it “Blueberry Grove” and was a beautiful place but now it has been severely damaged.
However, what happened to my friend’s place pales in comparison to the losses suffered by the surrounding area. People have lost their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases even their lives. Greg has shared pictures and they are enough to break your heart.
Other stories were enough to cause one’s heart to sink.
When a few politicians tried to take advantage of the ongoing disaster by lying or, in the case of the really stupid, making stuff up like the government is causing these storms, there came a ray of light in the midst of the darkness.
It came from Dr. Scott Black Johnson, Senior Minister of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York, in his sermon last Sunday when he told his congregation about some very special people known as the Mountain Mule Packers.
.png)
Dr. Johnson reported that “the Mountain Mule packers are being housed at the Presbyterian Retreat Centre at Montreat, North Carolina.
The motto of the Mountain Mule Packers is “We train good people and good mules to go to bad places.” This past week the Mountain Mule Packers were the first to arrive in many remote valleys, and hilltops, places that are still unreachable by trucks, or four-wheelers, or even helicopters. They brought heavy packs of food, and water, and Insulin to people to people in desperate need.
These folk are easy to spot, these men and women riding mules wearing t-shirts blazoned with the words of Psalm 46 “God is our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble.”
These people don’t look at all like us – a little more hardened around the edges than we are. They may not worship like us or even vote like us but they have devoted their lives to doing Jesus’ work. In their case: Bringing “good people and good mules to go to bad places.”
I think that is what Jesus is interested in. He’s not so much interested in smooth words spoken at a safe distance, but he is interested in getting Bibles to people whose lives are broken. And I think he’s interested “in a faith that inspires people to train mules, pack them full, and trot toward places of need” 9
When that kind of faith is shown maybe not a camel but at least a mule might be able to pass through the eye of a needle.
_________________
1. St. Mark 10:17. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]
2. Jeremy Weber, “Heaven and Hell: Americans Answer 20 Questions on Who Goes and What Happens,” Christianity Today, December 12, 2023, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2021/11/heaven-hell-universalism-reincarnation-pew-afterlife-survey/.
3. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say October 13? 21st after Pentecost,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, accessed October 12, 2024, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
4. St. Mark 10:21. (NIV0 [NIV=The New Internation Version]
5. Debie Thomas, “What Must I Do?” Journey with Jesus, October 3, 2021, https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/3176-what-must-i-do.
6. Lamar Williamson, Mark: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, 2009). p 188.
7. Stacey Simpson, “‘Who Can Be Saved?’ October 10, 2021: 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time,” The Christian Century, September 22, 2000, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2012-10/who-can-be-saved?
8. Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life (Norwich, CT: Canterbury, 2013), 121-126.
9. Scott Black Johnson, “Shall the Christian Nationalists Win?” Sermon preached at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church of New York. October 7, 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment