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If No Sound
All Our Riches©
October 11, 2009
Job 23:1-9,
16-17
Psalm 22:1-15 (UMH
752)
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
Amy DeWitte
Have any of you ever heard me say, “My whole
life is in the phone” or even “This cell phone is my life”? I have to admit
that this little piece of technology is very important to me. It’s not just a
phone! It has my calendar, email, all of your contact info, GPS for when I get
lost. I can even play solitaire on this thing! When I don’t have it, I feel
lost and if I lost it, I’d be in a world of hurt.
It really is pathetic that I see this as so
important to my life, as if my life depends on it. But I don’t think I’m alone.
We depend so much on our stuff, our possessions, our riches, and the comfort and
security that provides for us. What we have defines us so much in our society.
There is such a sense that success means having a bunch of money and a bunch of
stuff. And even if you don’t own a mansion and six luxury cars and fly
everywhere on a private helicopter, you have to admit that wanting enough money
or stuff to feel secure and comfortable and happy is probably a priority for
you.
So in certain figurative ways, money is life.
But in our society it’s even more literal that that. In our society, you have
to have money to eat, you have to have money to have a roof over your head, you
have to have money to have clothes to wear that are appropriate for the
weather. These are not a given in our culture.
If you don’t have enough money, it’s more
likely that you will die of a serious health problem because you can’t afford
the treatment. We have learned in the recent heath care coverage debates that to
many people, even medical care is not a given. It seems that only certain
people deserve it. And so for us, money really is life.
That’s the way the rich who came to Jesus saw
things, too. He must have had a sense that Jesus really knew something about
life and how to have it because he came crawling to Jesus asking him what he had
to do have eternal life, and this was the kind of guy who didn’t crawl to
anybody. He had everything he needed, everything he wanted, and he was used to
being able to buy anything he didn’t have. Perhaps he could buy his security;
perhaps his money could be for him eternal life. Just say the word, Jesus!
And lest we demonize him, this wasn’t a bad
guy. He had kept the commandments of God all his life. But he sensed there was
something more, and he was right. Jesus looked at him with love and he said,
“you lack just one thing – go and sell all that you have and give it to the poor
and then follow me.”
Whoa! As the man heard this, he went away
grieving because he had a lot of stuff and this wasn’t what he was hoping Jesus
would say. Couldn’t he just give a percentage to the Temple of something? You
don’t know how hard that is, Jesus! You don’t know what you’re asking!
Oh, but he did know what he was asking, being
the one who gave up the riches and security and glory of being God and came to
earth in the form of a human. You see, God’s not asking us to do something he
hasn’t already done here.
And Jesus went one step further: “It’s easier
for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into
heaven.” Then what chance do we have? Whether we feel rich or not, we have to
admit that we are all richer than a great majority of people who live on this
planet with us. We’re the ones he’s talking about. That’s a rough statement,
one that people have tried to soften the edges of for a long time. Well, maybe
he’s not talking about the literal eye of a needle. Maybe what Jesus was
talking about was a gate where large animals can’t get through unless they drop
their packs and kneel down and crawl through – maybe what Jesus is saying is
that it’s ok for us to have riches if we’re just humble about it.
But there’s really no evidence that that was
what Jesus was saying. It’s just as difficult for a rich person to enter the
kingdom of heaven as Jesus says it is – darn tough!
And I think a lot of the reason it’s so ridiculously hard
for rich people like ourselves to be truly righteous is because we depend on our
stuff so much. We depend on our money so much that God becomes irrelevant to us.
When we live under the notion that we deserve all we have and we are self-made
people, we forget that we were made by God. When we only feel secure because of
the things we surround ourselves with and the money we have stored away for the
future, we run the risk of thinking we don’t really need God in our future at
all. And it’s hard to be righteous.
It’d be better if we gave it all up and had to
depend on God for everything we have. Then we’d know that we’re really not
depending on ourselves. Then we’d know that our security is not really in our
riches. Then we’d know that money isn’t really life. And notice that Jesus doesn’t
just say for us to trash all of our stuff just for the sake of becoming poor and
things will all be better. Notice that Jesus says that we should sell our stuff
and give the benefits to the poor.
This is a radical
call to discipleship, a radical call to risking it all, a radical call to giving
up our comfort and security, but also a radical call to realize that when we
have it necessarily means that others have not. The affordable clothes that I
can buy and still save some money are affordable precisely because there are
people in Vietnam and Indonesia who stitch them together or ridiculous wages.
In fact, must of the cheap stuff we buy from China is made cheaply because
people are arrested off the street, whether they are guilty or not, and become
laborers in prison factories. I have this amazing little gadget that sometimes
seems like it’s my life precisely because the metals that make up the parts of
it are mined cheaply by literal slaves in Zimbabwe.
Our riches in and
of themselves aren’t bad. Jesus doesn’t make it that simple. But having much
in our world means that others necessarily have little. Wealth is finite. This
is a zero-sum game we’re playing. And just hoping that everyone can simply work
hard and get really rich is not a possibility with the way we have economies
set up.
Our riches in and
of themselves aren’t bad. But they can become dangerous when we have so much
that we don’t think we need God, And when we’re used to paying for things we
think we can pay our way into heaven.
On the
other hand, when we have so much that we are able, as Christians, to give to our
brothers and sisters so that everyone can have life – that is a true gift. We
can’t expect others to spread the wealth around for us – that’s what Jesus calls
us to do.
Copyright © 2009 Amy DeWitte. All Rights Reserved. No portion of
this writing may be reproduced in any form without specific, written
permission of the author.
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