Sermon: What Must I Do?

Texts: Mark 10:17-31

Date: October 15, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

            I had fantasies about preaching on this text all week that went like this: I’ll get up in the pulpit, wait for that moment of quiet that comes before the preacher starts to talk, and I’ll say, “I plead the Fifth,” and sit down.

            You know what I mean by “pleading the Fifth?”  This refers to the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  One of the sites I Googled says:

The key words in the amendment are: "nor shall be compelled, in any criminal case, to be a witness against himself." This basically means you don't have to incriminate yourself, and you can't be forced to testify at your own criminal trial. When you "plead the Fifth," the prosecuting attorney is not allowed to suggest to the jury that your lack of testimony implies your guilt. However, members of the jury may come to that conclusion on their own. In addition, if you are testifying in someone else's trial and feel that you might incriminate yourself in the process, you can avoid answering questions by "pleading the Fifth."

              Why  would I fantasize about pleading the Fifth rather than preaching about Jesus’ encounter with the rich man?  Why would I worry about incriminating myself if I were to preach about this story?  Well, if you’ve been to my house you might have an inkling.  My darling husband’s success in business has meant that we recently purchased and moved into a gracious old home that overlooks Seattle.  The taste of the previous owner who did extensive remodeling ran toward the extravagant; so we find ourselves with, among other things, a master bathroom big enough to hold a dance in with a heated marble floor and a sink with gold trim.  When Stephen Soderland toured our house he ribbed me about how a couple of Cambodian refugee families could live in our bathroom and closet, and he was right.  It’s a strange place for a Jesus enthusiast to live.

            I’m not here to talk about myself; if I were I would have pleaded the Fifth and sat down already.  But as you know, fantasies are usually more about what you want to do than what you ought to do.  I might want to “plead the Fifth” rather than preach about Jesus and the rich man, but that isn’t what I am called to do.  I’m here because you sent me to reflect on the gospel on your behalf, and this week it has been quite a wrestling match.  If I am to speak with any integrity, I want you to hear clearly from me that I don’t consider myself in any way wiser-than-thou about being a relatively wealthy Christian.  But you and the lectionary sent me to this text, and I am reporting for duty.

            Stacey Elizabeth Simpson wrote a piece on this text for the Christian Century in which she recalled the first time she read this story.  She was reading the gospel in bed with a flashlight at age 7 when she got to this story.  She found it so disturbing that she slammed the Bible shut and went down the hall to wake her soundly sleeping mother, whispering urgently, “Mom, Jesus says that rich people don’t go to heaven!”  Her mother responded, “We are not rich.  Go back to bed.”  But Stacey says she new better.  She knew they had all they needed plus plenty more.  That’s rich.  That’s the way Methodist pioneer John Wesley defined rich—you have adequate food, shelter and clothing and you have some left over.  So, in this congregation, we’d probably have to say we’re just about all rich, using that standard, right?  We’re not used to calling ourselves rich—it’s much more comfortable to deny it by comparing ourselves to the super rich—but we are.  Let’s admit it. 

So we just about have to identify with the rich man when we hear this story.  It’s easy to identify with his question.  It’s one form of the question spiritually sensitive people have asked themselves for generations: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  I don’t know if the rich man was concerned with the after life or not; I hear him really wondering, as I do, what constitutes the good life.  What must I do to be good, to please God, to receive the reward God offers?  What must I do?  Have you asked yourself that question at some point along the journey?

Jesus begins to answer by pointing to the Ten Commandments, whose purpose it is to help people live the good life.  I think of the commandments as the bumpers you put in the bowling alley if you’re a bad bowler—they keep you from going into the gutter.  The commandments are meant to help human beings stay on track on the journey of learning to love God and love our neighbors. 

I’m going to read between the lines here as we look at what happens next in this conversation.  There are hints in the story that “What must I do?” was not at all a casual question for the rich man.  After all, when he asked it, he ran up to Jesus—very undignified—and knelt at his feet to ask him—even more undignified.  The man is suffering; he really, really wants to know.  So when the commandments are laid out, I believe he’s disappointed.  He has kept the commandments, and they haven’t answered his aching need to feel he is at one with God.  There’s a sort of “Is that all?” implied. 

Jesus looks at him, and loves him.  The gospel of Mark is very spare with words, but it includes this detail of Jesus’ love that Matthew and Luke leave out of the story.  I think he feels the man’s pain.  He wants to heal him, and to give him an answer that will move him along toward being one with God and receiving the reward God offers, abundant life, eternal life.  This is the moment in the story when Jesus realizes that the rich man is possessed.  That’s right, possessed.  I’m grateful to Stacey Elizabeth Simpson for her insight about this in her Christian Century article[1].  She used that word writing about the rich man and got me thinking about it.  The rich man wasn’t possessed in the same way most of the people Jesus met up with in Mark’s gospel were—the sense that their personalities had been taken over by dark forces the first century Christians recognized as demons.  Jesus casts out a lot of demons in his career as a healer, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.  The rich man wasn’t apparently possessed by a classic demon, but he was possessed—by his own possessions.  His devotion to his many possessions was interfering with his spiritual journey.  His wealth had become a huge stumbling block in his quest for oneness with God.   

Jesus, because he loved him, offered him healing in the form of a prescription.  “Go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come and follow me.”  Jesus can’t cast this demon out with a word or a touch because he doesn’t have the key to the man’s safe deposit box.  The rich man is going to have to dispossess himself if he wants to take the next step.  He’s going to have to disenthrall himself from his very seductive wealth and take action.

We should not hear this as something the man has to do in order to earn the abundant, eternal life God wants him to have.  It’s not an earning thing, it’s not a prerequisite or a lump sum payment of membership dues.  The question “What must I do?” is, in fact, a little bit of a red herring.  We can’t do anything to earn God’s grace; it’s a free gift.  What must I do to inherit eternal life?  Nothing.  There’s nothing you can do.  Even to say you should give up all your wealth in order to save yourself is totally misleading.  We don’t save ourselves.  God saves us. 

So why would Jesus ask it as though writing out a prescription for the rich man?  Because wealth so often deludes us into thinking we can save ourselves.  Wealth makes us forget how utterly dependent we are upon God.  It cushions us from the vagaries of life.  Wealth can help us postpone our death in some ways, by buying adequate nutrition and good health care.  Wealth can make us forget about our mortality—witness the booming business of Botox injections.  Wealth can make us feel secure, even though soul security has nothing whatsoever to do with possessions.  Then there’s the problem of distraction.  Dreaming about, shopping for, paying for, arranging, maintaining, cleaning and insuring our many possessions can take so much time and attention that we could forget we are on a spiritual journey altogether. 

There is a story about a man who loved gold. Then he inherited a fortune. With joy he redecorated his bedroom. He put gold parchment wallpaper up, hung yellow curtains, had a golden colored rug and a yellow bedspread. He even bought some yellow pajamas. But then he got sick and came down with, of all things, yellow jaundice. His wife called the doctor who made a house call and went up to that bedroom for an examination. The doctor stayed up there a long while. When he came down, the wife asked, "How is he?"  "Don't know," said the doctor. "I couldn't find him." 

I think that is what Jesus was saying to the rich man.  “I can’t find you in all that stuff.  Come out away from it and follow me.”  The invitation to follow is an invitation to let God find you and save you. 
            You know what happens in the story.  The rich man is shocked—SHOCKED!--at what Jesus asks, and goes away grieving.  Because of his many possessions.  Because he was possessed by his possessions.  He is, I think, the only person in Mark’s gospel who is offered healing and turns away from it. 

We feel for him, don’t we, because any one of us might have done the same thing if we were in his soft and supple chocolate colored Italian leather loafers.  Don’t you just feel relieved that Jesus isn’t (so far) asking you to walk away from all your possessions?  Aren’t you glad that story is about some other rich person and not you?

It is about some other rich person and not about you, isn’t it?  It isn’t about me, is it?  Let’s just sit with that for a moment.

Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia comic strip on Friday pictured Sylvia in a sumptuous bubble bath with this caption that is supposed to be some kind of enticing advertisement: “Do you fear the day of reckoning, the day the chickens come home to roost?  Are you prepared to admit to your children that you spent their inheritance on a state-of-the-art home theater system or tell your husband there is no annuity and show him your shoe collection?  Join others like yourself and compose rationalizations and profound apologies over a long weekend in the Bahamas.”  There is something just so telling about that paragraph.  In a few short sentences it reminds us how easy it is to become possessed by our possessions and how tempting it is to compose rationalizations and profound apologies rather than dealing with being possessed. 

I am not going to suggest to anyone here that they must sell all their possessions and give them to the poor in order to follow Jesus.  You probably don’t need to do that (though I couldn’t say for sure).  You don’t need to do anything to inherit eternal life; just accept God’s free gift.  But if your hands and your heart and your time are too full of your many possessions to turn and accept that gift, to seek and appreciate abundant, eternal life, do not busy yourself with rationalizations and profound apologies.  If you sense that God wants to engage you on this topic in your personal prayer and study, do not “plead the Fifth.”  Do not turn away from the healing and the freedom that is offered. 

Do ask yourself if you have possessions or if you are possessed.        All that we cannot freely give away possesses us.

[1] Simpson, Stacey Elizabeth  “Who Can Be Saved?”  Christian Century Sept.27-Oct. 4, 2000, p. 951, linked at textweek.com