The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Series: Pentecost
Speaker: The Rev. Deborah Meister
11 October 2015; Proper 23B Rev. Deborah Meister
Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Ps 22:1-15
Heb 4:12-16; Mark 10: 17-31
I’ve spent the last few days in Ireland, tracing the steps of men and women who went there to seek the most remote places at the edge of the known world, because they had a sense that God was to be found there. As early as the sixth century, they would travel to islands, to bogs, to mountain heights, praying, learning, making things of beauty. And then some of them would leave, either in bands like the one led by St. Columbanus, or alone or in pairs. They would get into tiny boats called currachs and float where the tide would send them, preaching and teaching until they found a piece of land and a group of people who called out to their hearts, a place of deep belonging, something they called “the place of their resurrection.” And then they would root there, building churches and tiny huts, and giving themselves to those people and to that place until Christ called them home.
You may, perhaps, have found that here: that sense of deep belonging -- and if you have, you know what it is worth at a time of constant mobility. It is the unspoken truth at the heart of the encounter between Jesus and the rich young man. The great Southern novelist Reynolds Price, who taught Scripture classes for many years, worked out his own translation of Mark, and in his words, the young man “was shocked by the word and went away grieving since he had great belongings.” (Mark 10:22)
Do you hear the tension in that last word? Jesus invites the man to belong, to be part of his chosen band, but the man is hindered by his own belongings. That is the exchange the world asks us to make: to sell out our relationships with people, with places, with God, and with ourselves, and to accept instead the cheap coin of stuff, of things which break and bend and rust and crumble to dust in our hands. I do not mean that things are useless, or that each of us is called to sell everything and live in a grass hut. Christ made each of us differently, and there are not many who could flourish in such a path. But honesty compels most of us to admit that we have too much. We live in time of superfluity; I hear you talking about it all the time, and I feel that way about my own life as well. If you come here midweek, you will see an endless stream of discarded stuff that pours into the Opportunity Shop: coats, sweaters, dresses, suits, pots, pans, knives, china -- all of it things that were once treasured and now are tossed off like chaff. Things priced at three dollars that once cost a hundred. Think about that. Are the things which you strive to acquire things of lasting value, or will they lose their worth in a year or three, when your mind turns to what is newer, faster, more stylish? What are the things whose value lasts?
In my mother’s display cabinet, there is a white teapot painted with roses; it’s striking mainly because it does not fit in with any of the objects around it. It is an older style, and, in fact, it belonged to my mother’s grandmother, Rose, who helped to raise my mother as if she were her own child. That teapot is the physical manifestation of a deep connection, of my mother’s rootedness in her own family -- but it is more than that. It comes out at every Thanksgiving, every Passover, not to be admired, but to be filled with tea. It allows my mother to welcome others, to drawn them into the circle of family, into a place of belonging. In that, it serves the highest purpose of tangible things: they allow us to welcome others.
But possessions -- belongings which are out of balance -- come to possess us. They are the manifestation, not of welcome, but of fear: of our own fear of not being enough, of not belonging, of not being welcome where we are. We pile them up hoping that they will be keys to unlock doors: that the Gucci suit, the Prada handbag, the Rolex watch, will signal to other that we are like them, that we belong in the closed club, the gleaming boardroom, the party where all the chic people are. Drink Doctor Pepper, and you’ll be part of “an original crowd.” Apple urges us to “think different,” as if owning one of their computers will make us fit in with Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, all the other world-makers who are featured on their posters. Well, I have a confession for you: I have several Apple products that I use every day, but those luminaries are not knocking on my door!
And they won’t, because too many possessions, to much focus on our belongings, impedes the very belonging we are hoping they will bring us. Having too little to get by on eats away at our peace, causes us to live in constant anxiety, knowing that if the car breaks down or if the child needs medicine, we may not be able to pay the rent or keep the lights on in our home. But it turns out that having too much does the same. A recent study by the Gates Foundation surveyed 165 families about how their extreme wealth has shaped their lives, hopes, and anxieties. These families, whose average wealth was about $78 million dollars, experienced a constant fear of scarcity; each felt that they needed about 25% more than they had in order to be financially secure. But the coin was more corrosive than that: many of the respondents spoke of how their freedom from the need to work ate away at their motivation to live lives of purpose, and almost all spoke of money as a force that divided them from others and caused them to question the motives of those who sought their affection.[1] They were all experiencing the truth that Jesus points us toward: it is hard for those who have too much to experience the quality of relationship that constitutes the Kingdom of Heaven.
But here, in this place, we have our chance: to try to form relationships of lasting trust, to open ourselves to one another’s joys and sorrow, to offer our gifts to the needs of our neighbors, to find the place of our resurrection. Think about that phrase for a moment: resurrection is what happens after we die. And so the place of our resurrection, the place of our deep belonging, is the place we enter daily as we die -- inch by inch -- to what holds us back from others, and learn to give ourselves instead. It is the place of our dying to what strangles our life.
Today is stewardship Sunday, the first day of our annual campaign, when we ask you to make a financial commitment to the future flourishing of this community, as so many of you already make daily commitments of your time, your gifts, and your love through our common efforts to break open the kingdom of God upon all who most need a saving word or act of mercy. St. Alban’s would not exist without the pledges of our members; your faithfulness in this allows us to worship, to sing, to care for one another and for others, to raise children and teenagers who have a strong sense of who they are, and to open our doors to seniors who need food and community, to men and women wrestling with addiction and the legacy of abuse, to prayer groups and choirs and to men and women who simply have no other place to be.
What I have been trying to say today, in all of this, is that your pledge to St. Alban’s is more than an act of generosity: it is a way of life in which we claim our essential freedom to welcome one another in God’s name. It is a cornerstone of our work of paring down what impedes us from fulness of life. It is a practice that allows us to step beyond our anxieties, beyond our fears, and into a life of trust and faithfulness and kindness.
On the night before he died for us, Jesus gathered around him the friends of his right hand, including the one who would betray him, and whom he still loved, and he gave them of himself: his body, his blood, his words, his tenderness. And in so doing, he gave them one another. He knew that they would have need of friendship, of community, once he was gone, because no one can last long in this life alone, not with a living heart. And so Jesus gave them a place of resurrection, a place to be born anew. Can not we, who have been given this place, these people, this faith, this space to wonder and to dream and to act together, can not we give one another one thing more?
[1] Graeme Wood, “Secret Fears of the Super-Rich,” The Atlantic, April 2011.