Sermon Title: “Sell Everything?!?”
This Monday, some of the folks in the congregation are going to be
painting my office, while I’m out visiting some of our folks in nursing
homes. This afternoon, I’m going to start taking stuff out of my office
and, of course, most of what is in my office is books—lots and lots of
books. I admit that I have an odd fetish for books and Douglas gives me
a hard time about it. I love reading, but I think I love owning books more
than I even love reading them, which is hard to admit. Every book on my
shelf is full of my good intention—I “intend” to read each and every one
at some point, but there is a good chance that I won’t get there anytime
soon, and the recent blossoming of all these huge bargain bookstores
has not helped my addiction. Even beyond the promise of new
knowledge, new wisdom that can be found within the pages of each of
my books, I admit that I even love the feel of books, the way a book feels
in my hand, how the pages feel in on my finger tips when I flip through
the pages of a book—it’s a sick, sick disease, I tell you, but I love ‘em like
I love few material things in this world. Some of us have our struggles
with cars or bank accountants or homes, or clothes, or whatever our
particular demons: my demon is found within the pages of too many
books on my shelves, and no possible time to read all of them, at least
on this side of eternity!
So, I admit it—I have a personal problem with materialism and sometimes
envy for other things in this world—a friend of mine a few years ago
bought a beautiful new condo overlooking the city of Dallas and we were
checking it out, and I was struck by how much envied him all that he
owned, how I wished I had as much as he had. It was not one of my
prettiest moments, to be honest. But I was reminded again how much I
have bought into the values of our culture—that what I own defines me,
or what I don’t own defines me, and what kind of car marks me or places
me somehow in our culture—all of it, I’ve certainly bought into it. And I
think most of us already know, if we were to be honest with each other,
that we place a higher value on stuff, on things, then we’d like to or we
ever should.
I mean, we all know the statistics about how many people are living this
world in complete poverty, about the number of people who are going to
die in this world this very day from hunger or from some preventable
disease, and knowing all this, we are also pretty self-aware that our big
concern at this moment is how we’re going to make our payments on that
new car we might just have brought, especially in this shaky economy.
We know the pull of stuff, of things, in our lives, we know the power of
buying and buying and buying until our houses are full to the brim with
more stuff, and so we have to get a bigger house so that we can store
yet more of our stuff. It’s not a revelation to most of us that we got a
problem here, in this country, with materialism, this belief that what I own
is who I am, and that to be more of who I am, I must own more and more.
We get it already, we get it. And I just don’t want to feel guilty again,
about it, and I certainly don’t want to be the person who preaches a
sermon where we all feel half-guilty about owning the stuff we own, and
half-realizing that we really don’t care all that much about people on the
other side of the world—leaving from a worship service with that kind of
feeling is not my idea of having a good time either.
And yet, of course, Jesus never was all that worried about our feelings,
but I also don’t think that the reason he told us to beware of the pull of
stuff, and he warned us about the dangers of building your life and your
personhood based on what you own, I don’t think that sharing that word
of caution with us he was trying to make us feel bad. Yet this topic keeps
coming up for a reason, it keeps coming up in the Scriptures, especially
in the Gospels, because Jesus knew what we know in the deepest places
in our heart, that our attitude toward stuff, toward the things we own in
our lives, it is important, perhaps more we can ever know. In the story
that we heard earlier from the Gospel of Mark, we have his version of a
story that is told in both Matthew and Luke, but the way Mark tells the
story is different: it is more tender, more understanding, more gentle
than the way Luke and Matthew tell us the story.
The story goes that Jesus is asked by a young man what he needed to
do to inherit eternal life, what did he need to receive salvation? And
Jesus replies simply with a shortened version of the 10 commandments,
sorta of hitting the highpoints, so to speak. And this young man replies
that he has done all of these things, that he has followed ALL the laws of
Israel. And Jesus seems to understand, that indeed, this guy really is a
good man, that its he’s not lying or blowing his own horn. I think Jesus
saw before him a man that was genuinely good, he really did try to do
right by God and by other people. But it’s at this pivotal point in the
story, that Mark veers from Matthew and Luke—the tenderness of Jesus
comes out in Mark’s version of the story. “Jesus looked at the person
with love 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.’” It’s that look of love that is so stunning here, so tender, and
which is different from how the other two Gospels that tell of this
encounter. It’s almost as if Jesus looked into this man’s soul, and saw
what he was really asking for, what was missing in his life, and that what
he was asking about was not about getting to heaven or being a good
man—he was asking Christ to tell him what it will take for him to be the
man he really wants to be, to be the disciple that goes beyond the rules,
because he was already a good man, he obeyed the rules, he played
the game fairly and honestly—and yet he lacked something, something
that was stopping him from being wholeheartedly a disciple of this Jesus
that he wanted to follow, that he believed in. And Jesus could see it, he
could see what was stopping him—and it was the stuff around him, given
to him, perhaps, or maybe he had worked hard for it all his life. Either
way, it was in the way, this stuff, and Jesus asked him to give it away so
that he could get to what really mattered, to that “something” he could
carry with him into eternity.
And to be honest, his reaction to what Jesus asks of him, shows how
much of good man he really is—he was shocked, he was stunned,
because Jesus had nailed him, he saw him for who he was—a good man,
a man so loved by Jesus that Mark himself records it, records this love,
and yet he was a man who would not and could not give up what he
loved the most. What he lacked, oddly enough, in his case, was a lack
of stuff, of things, of possessions. And yet he couldn’t do it—“don’t ask
this of me, not this—everything else is fine, my time, my effort, my
morality, my goodness, whatever, but I can’t give this up, he seems to be
saying to Jesus. I can’t sell everything!” Jesus struck at the core, and he
knew he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t follow this Jesus, not on those terms. I
mean, Jesus is not making a statement about things, or possessions—
possessions in and of themselves mean nothing, if they mean nothing to
us, but, like this young man, we know that our possessions situate us,
they define us, they mark us, they give us prestige and power and
attention and security—if we allow them to, and I have met very few
people in which that wasn’t the case—that’s why Jesus keeps bringing up
this issue over and over again, he knows what we humans ultimately
struggle with. Things—stuff— are not bad in and of themselves. The
Christian and Jewish traditions declare all of creation to be good, but we
humans have the awful habit of confusing the creation with the Creator,
making what God has created as good into Goodness itself, which is
God alone.
And I must admit that I can imagine Jesus watching this man leave his
presence, this man’s heart a little shattered, a little stunned, certainly
saddened, because the term can also be translated as sadness,
stunned and saddened that someone got him, that someone saw what
really held him back from completely being the man God wanted him to
be. It had come down to the stuff he owned, because someone, perhaps
for the first time, saw that his stuff, his things, really owned him, they
possessed him. There is a scene from the movie THE FIGHT CLUB in
which one character speaks to the other about an explosion that
destroyed all of his belongings, and the need to blow it all up because
what you possess ends up possessing you. And the thing about it is that
God does not compete, and will not compete with anything, especially
that which is not even alive—that is the definition of idolatry itself. The
Jewish tradition reminds us that God is a jealous God, and that God
demands from us the whole of us, our complete attention, because that
complete attention is what God has given us, to each and every one of
us. How incredible to be loved, how incredible to have the attention of
the God of the universe! And yet is so hard to respond to that love and
attention and grace with our own attention to the God who has loved us
and made us and has never stopped believing in us.
So, have I made everyone feel guilty about having stuff and loving the
stuff you have? I actually hope not, because that is not what Jesus ask
of us—he doesn’t ask us for our guilt, that has never gotten him or us
anywhere. But he does clearly ask for all of us, the whole of us, if we are
going to be his disciples. And that means always thinking about what I
am to do to follow this Jesus with my whole heart. You know, the only
thing that makes sense for me in this passage is something I finally
learned about a few years ago, though I’ve had some trouble actually
putting into practice. And I think it captures what Jesus was getting to in
this point about giving it all away, because in the end, Jesus knows that
for a few of us, though not the vast majority of us, possessions, or
things, are not what hinder us from giving God our complete attention—it
can be a lot of different things: our relationship, our families, our need
for approval, whatever. But most of us, myself included, we get tripped
up on the material things, because of what they mean to us, and what we
think they mean to other people—the acknowledgement we think others
give us because we own and possess more than they do.
Now, having said that, I know that I am not ready to sell everything I have
to give to the poor—and a lot of us have obviously have chosen not to
do that, we’ve obviously chosen to ignore what Jesus seems to saying
here in this passage.Now, the church has spent a lot of energy
explaining away this passage about selling everything we have, and
giving it to the poor, but the problem is that this Jesus we follow, he
keeps telling us to do this thing—in all four Gospels, and even in the
book of Acts, he does this—and even the early members of the church in
Jerusalem right after Jesus died and rose again sold all their
possessions, pooled the resources and lived together, essentially, as
socialists, much to the embarrassment of all of us capitalists. It’s a
problem, this obsession most of us have with things, and its problem
because Jesus thought we had a problem with it, and the early church
tried to do something about it, though we know eventually that the
solution they tried, this solution of selling everything they had and
pooling their resources together, in their radical commitment to Christ, it
eventually failed. So, what are we to do about it? I mean, how do I stay
faithful and not try to pretend that if Jesus thought humans had a
problem with materialism in first century Palestine, he would probably
think we have the same problem with it now, in this, the richest country
the world has ever known, in any era, in any time?
Well, the only way I have found to even vaguely put Jesus’ words in this
passage into action, to reconcile my problem with stuff, with things, is to
begin to personally give away what I love most on this earth, the
possessions I love the most in this world, the ones I think I can’t live
without., like my books, those things I love for no other reason than what
they seem to promise to me. And I’m not talking about giving those
books away in a will at the end of my life, but giving it away some of
those things NOW—because I know that I love this thing, this stuff, these
books, maybe TOO MUCH. I’m not saying be stupid, but maybe I am—I
mean, how else would you characterize what Jesus asks of this man—
talk about a stupid financial decision Jesus is asking him to make—
clearly, Jesus should have consulted with his financial advisor before
giving this kind of advice away! I mean, I know I can’t sell everything I
have, even if I know it competes for my attention with God, but I know I
can slowly start thinking about those things in my life that I think I can’t
live without—and I can start giving them away, before they possess me,
before what I own ends up owning me. Or maybe I could chose the route
of one of the mothers I knew at the church in Houston—her children
would have to give away one old toy for each new toy they got—they just
couldn’t continually accumulate more and more toys, without sharing
those toys with others.
Whatever possesses you, whatever thing, like books or cars or money or
whatever thing that gives you some sense of security, or some high that
comes from owning it, if it hinders you from being the person God wants
you to be, a disciple fully committed to following Christ, then maybe,
maybe its time to give it away. Is it possible? I don’t know, I don’t know if
I can do it—I love my books, and I’m probably not going to stop buying
them anytime soon, much to Douglas’ dismay, and I certainly don’t know
whether or not you can let go of what possesses you, but I think God can
certainly do it through us--“for God, all things are possible!” so says
Jesus, the one who makes the impossible so very possible. St. Francis
did it, he gave all that he had, finally, because for him, nothing mattered
more than God. I’m not sure I’m ready to give away everything like he
did, or even to share everything, and I suspect most of us are not there
yet, but we mustn’t forget that everything is what is asked of us—
because God has given us everything—it is the only response worth
giving to the God who has given everything. How odd it is, to be given
something, everything, and then to be asked to give it all away; how
incredible of God to expect so much of us, we who often just struggle
with admitting that everything was a gift in the first place. But it is
possible for us, you know, in the end, because of who God is—this God
who loves us so much as to give everything to us, in this world and in the
next, and who asks of us to be like the Giver of it all. We can do this
because of the One who asks us to do it—with this God, all things,
everything is possible, even this difficult, difficult thing. Amen.
