Sermon at St. Thomas By Lynn E. Cunningham October 15, 2006 Amos 5:6-7, 10-15 Hebrews 3:1-6 Mark 10:17-31

“Go, sell what you own, and give the proceeds to the poor, and come to follow me.” So Jesus instructs the rich young man in this morning’s Gospel passage from Mark.
For those of you who want to follow this Biblical commandment, should we have representatives of the Fremont County Title Company standing by during the coffee hour to take title to your houses? Should we have representatives of the used car dealers in Lander standing by to take title to your cars and trucks and ATVs? We have gun dealers standing by to purchase your hunting rifles from you. Does the NRA realize the import of this passage? All television sets will be turned over to the appliance dealers, and there will be no way to watch Sunday afternoon football. Are you ready for this?
“Go, sell what you own, and give the proceeds to the poor, and come to follow me.” So Jesus instructs the rich young man, and the disciples are put in a panic, no Sunday afternoon football, or its First Century equivalent.
I do not recall the mega-churches and the Christian fundamentalists putting much stress on this particular passage. Yet it appears in all three of the synoptic gospels, in essentially this form.
Jesus is not saying something outside the Jewish and Christian tradition. In the Book of Acts the early church is reported to have called upon its members to share all their possessions in common. Giving up all possessions became a standard part of the monastic tradition in the later Christian centuries, with Benedictine monks taking vows not only of chastity and stability, but also poverty. Giving up ALL possessions.
The Old Testament, as well, expresses a related theme. The Torah mandates that every fifty years, the year of the Jubilee, all lands had to be returned to their original owners, since the land always belongs to God. In the year of the Jubilee all debts were to be forgiven.
There are other examples found in scripture where the follower of God is asked to give up all possessions.
The disciples react much as any normal person would, to Jesus’ pronouncement to the young man. They tell Jesus that no one can be saved if being saved requires that they have to give up all their possessions. But Jesus persists in his demand.
Shall I keep the Opportunity Shop open this afternoon for you to bring in your extra clothing, and kitchen appliances? You will not need them. You will no longer have a house for storing them. Think what Dubois would be like without any cars. All of them given up for the sake of the Gospel!
So ......... What is it going to be, my friends, our souls or our SUVs?
Now at this point the preacher might take a stand, tell the congregation what choice to make in response to Jesus’ challenge. In many sermons that I have heard, the preacher has

made up his or her mind about how the congregation must respond to an issue, and proceeds to tell parishioners how they should act. I heard a couple of such sermons at the Diocesan Convention last week.

But I am not going to do that. Instead, let the passage be as a prayerful meditation. Let that choice just hang out there in the mind. Let that choice hold up a kind of mirror of what possessions mean for a person and for the community.

Jesus offers a challenge in this passage similar to that found in many places in the Gospels: he puts hard issues before his listeners.

For example, He shows a Roman coin to the Pharisees and tells them to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God. What does that mean?
He comes upon a group of men about to enforce the Torah by stoning to death the woman taken in adultery, and then asks the one who is without sin to cast the first stone. What does that mean? Is Jesus condoning sexual immorality?
He is out walking on the water on the Sea of Galilee and comes upon the disciples in a boat. He asks Peter to get out of the boat and to walk across the water to approach him. What does that mean?
And after his crucifixion, he leaves the women and the other disciples encountering the empty tomb where his body had been lain. What did that empty tomb mean?

Is it so surprising therefore, that Jesus would now confront his disciples, and by extension, each of us, with the instruction to give up all possessions?
Over and over again, I see Jesus trying to break up the way his followers think about themselves, and about the world, in order to bring them closer to God. This lesson can be read to ask the follower to re-examine the role played by worldly possessions in a world that is created by God. Most worldly possessions, houses, cars, guns, TV, are human made. Many people have come to live in Dubois to escape the extreme man-made world quality of the big cities. Possessions shield people, often in deeply comforting ways, from the harshness of the natural world. How many of you slept outside last night when the temperature dropped below freezing? Probably no one. But those same possessions block experiences of the created world directly. What would letting go of them mean for a person?
The season is changing with fall covering the valley where we live. People who live here are letting go of the warmth of summer days. People are giving up the long hours of sunlight for the long hours of the winter nights. The snowbirds are giving up their Dubois homes to leave for homes elsewhere. The long liturgical season of pentecost will end a few weeks and with it the slow, rich learning that comes with this season.
So, people know how to let go of things, like the seasons, and the summer days, friends, and sometimes, even certain possessions. What makes it so hard to even think about giving up houses and all other possessions? Perhaps many possessions are those things that are held onto most deeply in order to provide some stability and sanity in a world that is changing, changing as dramatically as summer warmth into winter.
Just with the passage of days, each person here has found himself often letting go of enjoyable and comforting things, in the ongoing cycle of creation and life.
By asking his followers to surrender all possessions, is not Jesus, who is God incarnate, asking us to reconnect with the fundamental reality of God’s creation, the holy creation underlying all things, including all human possessions.
I have spoken before about living on the borderland with the holy, how life sometimes takes on a quality where the sacred feels like it is palpably interwoven with the everyday world. God is close to every person in these thin places. Isn’t Jesus’ challenge to let go of all possessions another way of inviting each person to re-connect deeply with those thin places? Isn’t Jesus inviting his followers to restore themselves to that deepest security of all, a place that is rooted and grounded in the Holy One? A place that is deeper and infinitely more secure than even the dearest and most comforting of human possessions?
“Go, sell what you own, and give the proceeds to the poor, and come to follow me.” So Jesus instructs the rich young man. And Peter responds to Jesus by saying, “look, we have left everything and followed you.”
And Jesus comes back to him with this blessing: “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age....and in the age to come, eternal life.”
I ask you to re-connect with this good news, dear ones.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.