As [Jesus] was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him 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.
Mark 10:17-31
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.”
My sermon from the 21st Sunday after Pentecost (October 13, 2024) on Mark 10:17-31.
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So as the candidacy coordinator of the New Jersey Synod. I, along with the Bishop and the Candidacy committee, journey with people discerning if God wants them to serve as a pastor or deacon in the church. My primary responsibility is to keep track of the paperwork as they move through a process that can take up to six years. It’s always exciting to be with these diverse individuals from many different backgrounds who believe that Jesus matters. And once they’re granted entrance into the process, each candidate takes a unique path that involves earning a graduate degree, working as a chaplain, and serving as an intern in a congregation, while also living out their vocations as parents, spouses, grandparents, employees, and more. The work they do is often difficult since they need to unwind their prior thoughts about God and discover a more fuller picture of what the life of faith is all about. So one of the metaphors I’ve used to describe this work is by inviting each candidate to build a kind of spiritual house that informs their identity as an ordained leader in the church. But every once in a while, the person entering the candidacy process has already been ordained in another flavor of Christianity. Rather than asking them to build their spiritual home from scratch, these leaders tend to go through a kind of renovation that involves putting up a metaphorical and spiritual scaffolding around the life they’ve already lived. These temporary and imaginary structures of wood and metal provide a platform for these folks to futz, fix, and reshape their own assumptions, expectations, and views of Christian faith so they are better rooted in what makes Lutheran Christianity distinctive and cool. It would be easy to act as if only those ordained or who had grown up in other flavors of Christianity should do this kind of work. But I think all of us would benefit from a little time recognizing how our spiritual homes need some renovation too. Not everything we consider to be part of the faith is truly faithful. And when we listen to Jesus loving people by telling them to give all their wealth and money to those without enough, we’re not always sure how to integrate Jesus’ words into the homes we’ve already built.
Now when Jesus says something hard, I like to climb up my own spiritual scaffolding to find the spot where my thoughts, fears, anxiety, and worry about money and faith meet. I tend to think that at this point in my life, I approach the concept and reality of wealth in a rational and constructive way. But the truth is that regardless of how wise, common-sense, or intelligent we think we are, wealth is something we don’t handle in a spiritually healthy way. Wealth is defined through the experiences we had growing up as well as influenced by a culture where the display of all kinds of financial excess are very important. In Jesus’ day, more than 90% of all people lived at a subsistence level which meant that having a comfortable place to lay your head and knowing where your next meal was coming from was basically an incredible wealth in itself. But here in Woodcliff Lake, surrounded by million dollar homes that some purchased this week while others bought those same homes for a fraction of the price decades ago, we don’t always realize how wealthy we truly are. It’s much easier for us to recognize what we don’t have since there’s always that one neighbor posting on social media pictures of their new car, their new vacation home, or their next over-the-top vacation. It’s also become almost second nature to complain about how expensive things are rather than admitting we’re keeping up with everything or maybe even doing better than we did in the past. We’re very good at not recognizing our own spending while, at the same time, paying way too much attention to what others do. That’s why, I think, so much of our Christian tradition has spent their energy managing Jesus’ words rather than fully integrating them into what a life of faith can be. Rather than hearing Jesus, we act as if the young man couldn’t possibly be good so Jesus was simply calling his bluff. Or since there’s always someone who is richer, we pretend as if Jesus’ words were really only meant for those who we don’t think deserve their wealth in the first place. And if we’re feeling a bit more spirited, we might partner with Peter and name all we’ve given up to receive some kind of material or spiritual payoff from the divine. Now – I want to be clear that I’m not trying to minimize how devastating not having access to money or wealth can be. Losing a job, receiving a life-changing medical diagnosis, losing ourselves to addiction, or having to feed our family with the help of a food pantry can not only derail our lives; it can also fill us with incredible shame. Some of us know exactly what that is like and we shouldn’t let potential fears and worries dismiss those very real experiences. But when we choose to manage Jesus’ words rather than carry them up onto our spiritual scaffolding, then our view of Jesus and faith becomes distorted. Wealth has a habit, for better or worse, of being how we define who wins and who doesn’t. We can, in the same breath, demonize those who we think have too much while praising others who have much since we think they’re on our side. We use wealth as a kind of tool to validate who wins since money pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is limited to whatever money someone makes. And even though we say God is impartial towards all, we assume God is obsessed with winning as we are. The young man has to be some kind of loser or Jesus wouldn’t have said what he said. So we do our best to give the problem of Jesus’ words a faithless answer rather than taking them up our spiritual scaffolding to reflect, wonder, and sit with what it all might mean.
Leaving Jesus’ words in today’s reading as an open-ended story can make us feel pretty uncomfortable. Yet Rev. Sarah Wilson, in a commentary about this passage, noted how the open-endedness might be the point of it all. “We have no idea what became of the rich young man [since he] simply vanished from the scene. Maybe he got more tight-fisted as he aged. Maybe he even gave up trying to keep the law since it was all rendered useless in the face of his greed. Or maybe he was in the crowd at the foot of the cross, or a hearer on the day of Pentecost; [or[ maybe he became an unsung evangelist” that this church in Woodcliff Lake could trace its ancestry to. Letting the rich young man’s story stay open reminds us how renovating our spiritual home is what a life with faith looks like. Each of us knows how much – or how little – we give. We carry our own histories with wealth, poverty, wants, and needs informing what we trust as being enough. Our time with Jesus – in worship, through His story in the Bible, and with His presence in every aspect of our daily life – is the foundation and what we use to reform the life we get to live. And when we recognize how our faith isn’t already finished and complete, we aren’t downplaying the life and peace and struggle and work that comes with following Christ. We are, instead, living with the One who the world tried to put last but who, through the Cross, made everyone first. Struggling with wealth, money, what to give, and how to live in a world where wealth defines so much of who we are is something we’ll always struggle with. But when we trust that Jesus is on our spiritual scaffolding with us, the limits of this life will be overcomed by the limitless of the One who knows how priceless you already are.
Amen.