Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost 2006, Proper 23B

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Montevallo, Alabama

Psalm 90:12-17 Amos 5:6-7,10-15 Hebrews 4:12-16 Mark 10:17-31

Beloved sisters and brothers, let us look to the Lord. May only God’s word be spoken, May God’s word be heard. In the name of Jesus, I pray. Amen.

This morning, I’d like to explore this image of “the journey” in Mark’s gospel. This theme of following Jesus.

For me, this is the meaning of the question “Why do you call me good?” that is addressed to the person whom Matthew calls only “the young man”, but whom for both Mark and Luke, seems to be a somewhat older person. Jesus begins his response by referring to God, whose goodness is at the root of everything. Then Jesus summarizes the first part of the commandments and includes an important addition that is found only in Mark, “you shall not defraud.” The word translated as “defraud” in this verse is from the Greek àpostéresiz which literally means, “withholding what is due.” So, Jesus is telling the rich man, “you shall not withhold from persons that which they are due.” The phrase seems to summarize the list just mentioned “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness.” Oh, and let’s not forget to “Honor your father and mother.” The rich man responds by saying simply, without any arrogance, that he has kept all these precepts. This was the conviction of the well-educated; that it is possible to observe the law in its entirety.

However, following Jesus is much more demanding. Lovingly, Jesus invites the man to become one of his followers. In addition to giving up his wealth, the man must give it to the poor and the needy. Jesus is letting the man know, not to withhold what is due. If the man will do this it will enable him to follow Jesus. It is not enough to respect justice in our personal attitudes; we have to go to the root of evil, to the basis of injustice: the desire to accumulate wealth. But we know how this story goes; giving up his possessions proves to be too difficult for this person. Like many of us, he prefers to live his faith resigned to comfortable mediocrity. He does believe, but not that much. We human beings can profess our faith in God, although we refuse to put God’s will into practice. Jesus takes advantage of this opportunity to make some things very clear to his disciples; attachment to money, and to the power it provides, is a major obstacle to entering the kingdom. The “eye of the needle” comparison that follows is pretty rigorous. I’ve read and heard some who have tried to lessen the impact of this parable by focusing on the likelihood that in the city there was a small door called “the eye of the needle” and for that reason, all a camel had to do was to bend over to be able to go through.

The disciples, on the other hand, understand the message perfectly well. This whole thing seems next to impossible for them. There would have been no mistaking that “to go through the eye of a needle” means placing all our trust in God and not in the material wealth of the culture. It is not easy either personally or as church to accept this challenge and, like the disciples, with would-be realism, we wonder, “Then, who can be saved?” We claim that money gives us security and that it enables us to be “effective.” Jesus reminds us that our ability to believe in God alone is a grace.

So, on our broader journey together through the Holy Scriptures this morning we hear the prophet Amos thunder against the unjust practices of his society: “you turn justice to bitterness…because you trample on the poor and take from the levies of grain.” He tells us in no uncertain terms to hate evil, love good, and establish justice. The prophet warns that those who oppress the poor will ultimately reap disastrous consequences; that life lies in pursuing good.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews offers us encouragement; aware that we are weak, aware that there are hard times when we will be tested and that we are indeed in need of God's grace.

And then, in the gospel of Mark we find ourselves face-to-face with “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven!” and then Jesus reverses the social order; in his Kingdom the first are last, the last first, and wealth is an impediment. The rich man goes away empty, while the disciples, who have left everything, gain everything.

These are challenging passages, and they are as relevant today as when they were written. How do – how can – those of us who live in this culture, and comparatively with such wealth, respond to these passages?

We know that poverty, injustice, and oppression abound in our world. Some of the current facts regarding World Hunger and Poverty include:

• 852 million people across the world are hungry, up 10 million more people than a year ago. Hungry not for just an hour, not for just a day, but always and in every moment
• And today, more than 16,000 children will die from hunger-related causes – one child every five seconds
• And this year, another 5 million people will become infected with HIV and more than 3 million people will die of AIDS
• And this from last week, on the ground, in Haiti, a country of 8 million people of whom 2 million live in Port-au-Prince where the average income is $1.00 a day and gasoline is $6.00 a gallon because it is 100% imported to one location. At the six churches and five schools visited, only one has water and lights from a generator that also pumps the water. The other five churches and four schools have no electricity and no water, and the only nutrition sites are at the churches. The Diocese of Alabama is planning to fund a well at one of the churches from our MDG funds, beginning in about two weeks. It is what the gospel for this Sunday tells us to do – to share justly what we have. The people of Haiti shared with us what they have – coconut water so that we could have pure water to drink one day up the mountains. A bag of coconuts is worth a week’s wages at market. And theirs is the kingdom of God.

When poverty kills millions of people, when the rules and practices of international trade are so unfair, it is time to stand up against the crushing realities of poverty. It is time to make life-changing choices and put our faith into action.

Yes, it is a lot to ask, to not withhold what is due. In this journey, we share in the disciples' confusion and dismay. But the truth is that this dilemma is the center of the Christian life. Will we trust the security of the culture, or choose to risk accepting God's covenant? With the disciples we find ourselves asking, "How is this possible?"

In this important little book "What Can One Person Do?" two accomplished economists, Sabina Alkire and Edmund Newell, who also happen to be Anglican clergy, have outlined seven simple steps that we people of faith can take to heal a broken world. They are (1) pray for the healing of the world, (2) be informed by study of the realities of global poverty, (3) give 7/10ths of 1% of our own incomes for international development, (4) connect on a personal level with those who are poor and marginalized, (5) get active in events addressing global poverty, (6) become vocal about these concerns, and (7) get political and advocate for the poor in our governmental processes. If you want to know more about how you can become engaged with this work, then getting a copy of this book can be a good place to start, and you can also either talk to me or Father Tuohy, or to Judy Quick who is our parish coordinator for Episcopal Relief & Development.

So, as Rowan Williams tells us, we can give thanks today for truths we did not want to know; for the Savior who saves by telling us how the world is, not by pretending all is well – because if we cut ourselves off from the reality of the suffering and excluded child, we are refusing to learn some aspect of the life we need to receive and understand and love, for our own souls’ sake. We are given a chance to see, to learn the habits of attention.

In the simplest terms, by the gift of Christ’s truth, we are given some of the strength we need for love. The child we leave “on the edge”, unheard or unnoticed, is, if only we knew, God’s gift for our growth, as we can be God’s gift for theirs.

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter (B)

at Trinity Episcopal Church, Clanton, Alabama

Acts 4:32-35 Psalm 133 1 John 1:1-2:2 John 20:19-31

I am a real fan of our reading from Acts for this Sunday; it's one of my favorite passages in the New Testament. And perhaps it betrays that my mama was an English teacher, that my appreciation for this particular passage in Acts is in large part a declaration of my affection for a well-chosen conjunction, and my abiding resentment of those who left that crucial conjunction out of the translation of Acts 4 that we heard earlier this morning.

It's true, and I’m sure that you'll share my indignation when I tell you that Acts chapter 4, verse 34 is probably missing that conjunction in your bibles.

Or maybe you won't initially, I understand.

But what if I told you that the missing conjunction was "FOR"? OK, maybe no recipe for instant empathy with me there. But let me put it another way.

Acts, like Luke (which makes sense given that it's a two-volume work by a single author), makes a very important point about something core to the order of the world as it is – namely money; and about that part of ourselves that is both the most sane and most imaginative (these things go together, I believe) and that anticipates the coming of God's kingdom. And Acts 4 puts it together for us very neatly – which seems clear to me once we've put back the missing conjunction that was part of the original Greek. Let me read it again, and if you would look at your copy of the Acts 4 reading you’ll be able to see where the change occurs.

Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all, FOR (onde gar = for-not) there was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

In the translation that we have in our lectionary reading today, Acts 4 sounds too much like an idealized story of how things were in the "good old days"; not a recipe, but rather a status claim. "Things were great in the early days of the church … we had unity, and testified with power … oh, and there weren't any poor people then."

Of course, that wasn’t the case. Luke-Acts repeatedly makes a direct causal connection between community of goods and unity of spirit. In other words, all of this "we are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord" stuff of youth group songbooks of the 1970's, and all too much rhetoric elsewhere, is just so much theological muzak if we don't live out what that crucial missing (in most translations) conjunction tells us, which is that the power of the apostles' testimony, the experience of grace in community, even the unity of the Body of Christ has a direct relationship with the extent to which all of those of us who call ourselves Christians share what we have with those who don't have it.

The whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of anything, but they had all things in common. And in great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all, FOR there was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold, laying it at the feet of the apostles, and it was distributed to any as had need.

Oh, for the recovery of that lost and much-needed "FOR" and the resulting understanding in both the church's imagination and the popular imagination! And what an experience of God's power and of the reconciliation for which the world was made and for which it and its Creator longs, that we could have IF (to use another important conjunction) we had not a needy person among us.

People say that could be, you know – not crazy dreamers like me, but people with degrees in important and useful fields like economics at big and well-respected institutions like Harvard and Oxford. We really could have not a needy person among us – not through some imposition of gated so-called "community" shutting out the poor – but by seeing that every person on earth has a chance, has clean water and some education; a chance of surviving to build communities and families of love.

Our own Bishop Andrus serves on the board of Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation. He lives out, and has asked us to join him in, a vision for ending extreme poverty in our lifetimes. It wouldn't take us all selling all we had, but sharing a mere 7/10ths of one percent of what we have. Less than one percent of our treasure shared, and we'd know to the core of our being that about which the psalmist sang and many dreamers dream:

How good it is when sisters and brothers in the human family live together in unity! For there the LORD has ordained the blessing: life forevermore.

We miss that aspect of Jesus' message, of the prophets' message, of God's own heart all too often. There seem to be many Christians who proclaim a Jesus who is all about taking people from earth up into disembodied heavens, like some kind of transporter from Star Trek. The theology of the Gospel According to John is sometimes caricatured along those lines too: Jesus as some kind of E.T., come down from the heavens, recognized as the force of love by only a few and even then misunderstood by those closest to him, dying solely as a means to more efficiently "phone home" and ascend into the heavens, leaving humans amazed or ashamed, but in one way or another, behind in all cases. Left gaping at stars they can't reach or seeing the world that gave them birth as just a pit of cruelty and death.

That's not Jesus' message, in John's or any canonical gospel. And as much as John emphasizes Jesus' crucifixion as being "lifted up", John drums into our head perhaps more than any other gospel where Jesus' heart is, FOR even as Jesus is "lifted up," even after Jesus, having been faithful to God's call, is raised and qualified to ascend to the heavens to the fellowship of the Trinity whose love is so great that a universe was made and is being redeemed and sustained, Jesus keeps coming back to those he loves.

And Jesus is engaged with the world. He is the Word who was with God in the very beginning, and whose love was present in the birth of creation. He is the peasant child who knew and loved the earth he walked and all those who walk with him. He is the naked, vulnerable and tortured man nailed to immovable wood and still moved with compassion for his torturers. He has died, and he is risen, and yet he comes again, to touch doubters and healers, soldiers and peasants, persecutors and apostles – who are sometimes the same people, after all… especially after Jesus' touch.

Jesus comes to the women at his tomb and his followers huddled in fear. He comes to those who confess him and those who grieve him, miss him, or doubt him. He comes to those who love him and those who hate him. Jesus comes and he comes and he comes to this world because he is not done with this world, no matter how many times people of this world say they are done with him, or with the way of peace and compassion he walked and walks. Jesus is not done with any of us, and never will be, until we know in our heart of hearts, experience in the deepest part of ourselves, and are bursting alongside the whole of creation to share the wealth of love and generosity for which we and the world are made.

We may grow weary, but Jesus will not grow weary of us. We may close our eyes and forget to dream, but Jesus is alive, and still dreams with and for as well as through and among us. God is redeeming the world God made and loves, and we may as well let ourselves get accustomed to this love that is the most basic force of the universe. The Christ has died, the Christ has risen, and the Christ WILL come again. Let us rejoice now with all whom Christ loves in celebration and anticipation!

The Lord is risen! Alleluia – and thanks be to God!