Eighteenth Pentecost
Mark 10:17-31, Hebrews 4:12-16
Confirmands, get your sermon note sheet out and your pencils
ready. I’m going to tell you the main point our lesson right off the bat.
The disciples say to one another, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looks
at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God
all things are possible.” We are saved not by how good we are, or by the
number of good things we do, or how wonderful we are as persons but by God’s
grace and mercy. That is the point of our gospel lesson this morning.
I am sharing this with you right from the start
because it’s easy to find in this lesson all kinds of important other issues
to deal with. We can see it as a challenge to our materialistic society and
our selves. That is certainly a valid consideration in this text and I don’t
want to minimize it but….but..
I read the Hebrews lesson. “Indeed the word
of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until
it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow, it is able to judge the thoughts
and intentions of the heart.”
The word of God is hard. Walter Willimon puts
it this way; “The gospel is bad news before it is good news.” The
word of God challenges us to be honest with ourselves, like a fine sharp scalpel
it dissects our hearts and minds. We need to understand how incompetent we are,
how inadequate our own efforts and our own strivings are before we can accept
the goodness of God who reaches out with the net of grace and pulls us in.
The “man” in our gospel lesson this
morning is a paradigm of us. Though the gospel of Mark does not, the other gospels
note, when they tell this story, that he is young. I feel like he’s young.
He has the naiveté and the arrogance of youth. He reminds me of a friend
I had in High School. As most of you know I grew up in Lincolnshire, so did
my friend. I went to high school at the time when there were violent riots on
the West and South Side of Chicago. Nobody could escape awareness of the turmoil
because it came into our homes on the news every night. As students we did a
lot of talking about the causes and the justice issues, prejudice, racism, poverty,
that were part of the social problems of the day. Well one day my friend Beth
decided to go down and see Jesse Jackson at Operation Push and get the real
story. She got on the train, connected to the el got off at 43rd street, walked
through the neighborhood that had been a tinder box just weeks before, marched
up the steps to the Operation Push offices, passed the guards, told the secretary
what she wanted. Jesse Jackson came out and talked to her for a few minutes
and finally said, “Little girl you better go home”, called one of
his body guards to escort her back to the el. Our parents were appalled when
they heard of Beth’s excursion, we students all thought it was a decisive
way to get to the heart of the matter. The innocence, arrogance and courage
of youth. So, it is easy for me to picture this man as young. In his search
for “truth” he has no hesitancy when approaching Jesus, of going right
to the heart of the matter.
He comes up to Jesus, the rabbi, with a question.
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Well that’s
a question we all have on our minds, he just has the gumption of youth to ask
it.
Jesus gives us a clue about where he’s going
with his first remark, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God
alone.” Clearly the young man does not hear what’s behind what Jesus
is saying. Jesus is trying to puncture the arrogance that would allow him to
believe that he is good. Jesus continues, “You know the commandments,”
and quickly the man answers “Teacher I have kept all these from my youth.”
Now here’s our first clue that he might not be totally honest with himself.
While we might be able to concede that he hasn’t murdered anyone, has he
never born false witness against anyone? Has he never taken God’s name
in vain, has he never idolized anything above God? He is blatantly lying to
himself. He’s finding escape hatches and loopholes to justify himself.
When I came to the second church I served, there
was a woman by the name of Rose Peterson. She was 90 years old, seldom missed
church and then only for illness, headed up the altar guild, a job that she
executed with holy gravity. As I came to know people, they all talked about
Rose and how very saintly she was. . She had been the daughter of missionaries.
She could quote scripture, chapter and verse from memory. She could be called
upon at any time and in any place to pray and she would put to words the deepest
longings and desires of the gathering. I was in awe. So much so in fact that
I steered clear of her until it got back to me via not a few folks that she
thought I didn’t like her. Thankfully that was the push I needed to get
to know her at least a little. She was truly a good woman. Several months later
she died and as the other pastor who had known her for 20some years was on vacation
I was called on to preach her funeral sermon. The other pastor telephoned back
to share his personal insights and feelings. I was surprised when he said “More
than any other person he had ever known she was aware of her shortcomings and
honest about her weaknesses. She didn’t think of herself as a saint. She
didn’t even realize she was good. Perhaps that’s why she could genuinely
accept the faults and flaws of others, because she understood her own.”
I have encountered a few saints in my ministry, a few people who I would consider
genuinely good. The one common bond they all seemed to have was an honest and
accurate insight into their own faults and flaws, their own unworthiness.
Before the gospel is good news it’s bad news.
It’s bad news because if we’re honest we’ll know that we can
never live up to the standard of real goodness. “Go sell all you have,
give the money to the poor and follow me.” If you think you can earn your
way to eternal life, if you think you can achieve goodness then you don’t
know the way to eternal life.
A kindergarten teacher once taught me a most valuable insights into life. We
were doing a Sunday School class together for pre-schoolers. The children were
drawing. One little boy would take a crayon and make a quick scribbly dash across
the paper. Then he’d bring it to show me and I’d praise this squiggly
dash up one side and down the other. Then he’d go back and zip out another
squiggly dash not unlike the first. And I’d praise him because of course
we’re all about positive reinforcement and building self-esteem. Finally
the kindergarten teacher could bear it no more. You know, she said he’s
going to keep doing that, he’ll never do anything better and he’ll
think you’re a fool. He knows that’s not good drawing—he can
do a lot better than that but he won’t try if you’re satisfied with
that.
Our text says that Jesus looked at the man and
loved him. Because he loved him, he couldn’t be sweet and affirming to
him. The young man had the potential to be and do so much more—he could
draw a beautiful picture but only when he stopped deluding himself that he could
be perfection.
Jesus needed him to go home and think it through. We need to go home and think
it through.
Amen.