Change We Can [hardly] Believe In

Hebrews 4:12-16

Mark 10:17-31

[Editor's note of clarification:  There's a different between taking Jesus literally and taking Jesus seriously.  To be clear, we would be remiss to lose the metaphors, stories and creativity of Jesus, but we do equal injustice by watering down the challenging words of Christ.]

Listen to It

                At the start of one of my pastoral care courses in seminary, the professor asked us, “How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?”  We waited.  “Change?!?!  Who said change?!?!”  We, as Presbyterians, as humans really, do not like change.  If you want to see real whining, forget about the two year old class downstairs.  Just read the newsfeed on Facebook for two days after a minor change in how it looks.  People using a website just to complain about that same website.  I have no scientific studies to back this claim, but I’d wager over half the posts on Facebook and Twitter are complaints… mostly about change.  Editorial columns, sports columns, blogs… all full of folks complaining about one change or another.

                We don’t like change.  Ever.  My home pastor once said in a sermon he was going to tell us about the great tragedy of his life.  Knowing the losses he’d suffered in his family and how he’d once fallen nearly two stories off a ladder in our sanctuary, we all braced for the worst.  “It was,” he said, “the day I drove here on the way to work one morning last year… and the Krispy Kreme had closed!”

                And brothers and sisters, these are the small things in life.  Even as I was writing this paragraph in the coffee shop, a woman got very upset that the tall table in there wasn’t by the window any more.  When it comes to the big changes, we get even squirmier.  Our faith, our deeply held ideologies, our church, our lifestyle… these are not up for consideration, much less debate.  Our very identities are wrapped up in what we do and what we have.  A recent technology commercial for a backup service for all your data, pictures, music and so forth ended with these lines… “Because without all your stuff, where are you?  In fact, without your stuff… WHO are you?”

                Psychiatrists tell us how traumatizing it is to move, to change jobs, to lose a house in a fire.  Our worlds are rocked by such major changes in large part because what we do and what we own… our STUFF… shapes our identity.  College students meeting new people immediately ask, “What are you studying?”  Adults ask, “What do you do?” A friend of mine used to refuse to ask this, instead asking, “What do you like to do?”

                We’re fortunate in our - modern society, that what we do and what we own are flexible ideas to some extent.  You can change careers.  We have a longstanding tradition in the American dream that you can raise yourself from pauper to prince.  And a prince can lose his fortune and become a pauper.  In Jesus’ time, however, one’s identity was tied to their profession and possessions, and those things were not thought to be flexible.  A poor man could not work his way up to a fortune, nor could a rich man lose his wealth and become poor.  A rich man was a rich man, and a poor man was poor, end of story.  That sort of class system still exists in some parts of the world.

                As we read this story, it’s typically titled “the rich young ruler,” but that ruins the story for us.  The original hearers of this story would not have had a title.  The book of Mark would likely have been recited as an entire story of the life of Christ in one sitting, straight through.  Without the title, we don’t know he is rich until the end!  The young man approaches Jesus and says, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  This should strike us immediately after last week’s reading on the prodigal son.  What must anyone do to earn an inheritance?  Nothing.  You gain an inheritance as a birthright, by being the child of someone.

                But Jesus doesn’t point this out directly.  Jesus, as he so often does, slips around and comes in from the side.  Time and time again, Jesus questions the motives, the opinions and the perceptions of those around him.  So perhaps he asks him then in the tone he used with Peter when he asked, “But who do you say I am?”  Perhaps he says, “Why do you call me good?”  And while the young man ponders this, Jesus asks him about his own “goodness.”  Do you avoid murder, adultery, theft, lying?  Well, of course, replies the young man.  I’m good too.  Then Jesus gives it to him, his answer.  So far as I have been able to find, it’s the only time in all of scripture that Jesus gives someone their own personal plan for guaranteed eternal life… Sell everything you have and follow me…  The word hard has many opposites.  Among them… EASY and SIMPLE.  Jesus’ answer is simple.  But for this man, it is not easy.

                He goes away disheartened… because he had great possessions!  You see, as we discussed, he couldn’t just have a yard sale.  The guy was a rich man.  He couldn’t just become poor.  He was a rich man.  Of course the young man, our cautionary tale, walks away… and the disciples get the rest of the lesson, as do we…  It’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than a camel to go through the eye of a needle.  And the disciples were “astonished!”  Why?  Because even after all their time with Jesus, leaving their jobs and their families, they still didn’t fully buy into this idea that they could change their lives, their identities.

                And Jesus hits them with it, the verse we all love as privileged first world, comfortable American Christians.  Like our sermons here at Wellshire, Jesus liked to end his stories with hope.  He says, “With man, it is impossible, but not with God.  For ALL things are possible with God.”  And we all go, “Whew!  I was worried there for a sec!”  Collectively, we all think, good, Jesus will squeeze me and all my possessions and wealth through that needle’s eye.  WRONG!  The good news Jesus shares with this young man and the disciples is not that God will push us through that needle magically with our bag of stuff like Santa down a chimney.  Jesus is telling them, telling us, that God can change us.  God can make us people who no longer need all our stuff, all our comforts, all the things on which we build our identity.  He can change our hearts so we can build our identity on him, on his call.

                Brothers and sisters, the Good News is that God can change us into people who don’t need all the stuff, all the status, the professions or the possessions.  The bad news… is that God can change us into people who don’t need all that stuff.  It’ll scare us.  It’ll scare our families, our friends.  The question from that commercial is worth considering… Without your stuff, WHO… ARE you? 

                Jesus says that there are none who have left houses or siblings or parents or children or property for the sake of the Gospel who will not receive all of that a hundredfold now and in the life to come… along with persecutions.  Yeah, he says that.  Jesus tells it like it is… houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands WITH persecutions.  Jesus would never have made it as a used camel salesman, but he didn’t lie.  Jesus tells us we’ll face challenges.  But he also tells us that in this life and the one to come, it’s worth it and he will be with us.

                This verse is one of the most challenging for us as people of privilege.  Even in this country, we’re people of privilege.  Our birthright as Americans is to be among the richest people in the world.  And many of us by virtue of our ancestry, our ethnicity or our skin color or our parents’ have inherited opportunity and access and power over and above many others in this nation.  We look at this verse, and we try hard to explain it away, to turn it into a metaphor, to water it down.

                I attended a church a few times in seminary, a large well-educated, white collar Presbyterian church.  One of their adult Sunday school classes did a series on the hard sayings of Jesus.  The goal was to wrestle with the challenging verses and not merely explain them away.  I attended the one they did on this passage.  The class and teacher spent the entire class discussing the camel and the needle metaphorically.  They brought up the explanation about the gate into Jerusalem known as the Eye of the Needle, that it was small and a camel could only squeeze through on its knees.  People love that one… but scholars say it’s completely untrue and has no basis in fact.  They discussed that maybe it’s a mistranslation and that it was originally supposed to say something about passing ROPE through the eye of a needle, difficult, but possible.  Also has little basis in reality.  And like many of us, they discussed how through God all things are possible.  They offered up that Jesus always spoke in context.  His instructions were for this rich man and not for all of us.  We can’t all do that.  Someone has to work.  We can’t all be hippies living on the street.  Not once was it suggested that Jesus meant what he said.

                But I challenge you today to never again water this passage down.  Because you cannot water down the challenges of Jesus without also watering down his promises.   Jesus promises that when we give up our professions and possessions, when we turn those things wholly over to God in a real way, surrender all we have and all we have become to God… we receive a hundredfold in return, here and in the life to come.  And who wants to water down that amazing promise?  Not I.  And I hope not you either.

                Because in Hebrews, it says that the word of God is living and active.  And this means that the words Jesus speaks to the young ruler and to the disciples… they are living and active… full of meaning for us today.  We can be a people terrified of change, but assured and confident in the promises Jesus makes.  I don’t know if God is calling you to give up all you have.  I do know that if you let him, he will change you in ways you never expected and the things you hold dear or the things that hold you, could suddenly not matter.

                God can change who we are, from prince to prophet or politician to Presbyterian or pretentious to public servant.  That which God dreams for us is so much bigger than we can know till we open our hearts and minds to be shown.  Each of us has marvelous potential to be and to do so much more than what our self-imposed and accepted identities seem to indicate.  I think RL Sharpe puts it well…

Isn't it strange how princes and kings,
and clowns that caper in sawdust rings,
and common people, like you and me,
are builders for eternity?

Each is given a list of rules;
a shapeless mass; a bag of tools.
And each must fashion, ere life is flown,
A stumbling block, or a Stepping-Stone.

For we are builders for eternity.  People have great capacity for change.  YOU have great potential to be changed.  Do not yearn for God to use you on your own terms.  Do not be content with that.  Do not pray for that.  Or you’ll go away as dejected as the young ruler.  Surrender yourself to radical change.  Open your life to the hands of the master potter, ready and eager to be shaped.  Amen.