10-11-09 Turnovers

Mark 10: 17-31

Only one thing stands between this young man and the kingdom of heaven. It's a simple, and devastating, question of what he loves most.

I've just finished working with an Lay Speaking class on another of these terrible texts, if anything maybe even worse, Luke 14: 25-35. There Jesus gives people in the crowd following him a reality check, choose me or them ("them" being family members).

Sometimes it comes down to just this stark a choice. When Luke's gospel was under construction, folks were having to choose their community, the one they'd grown up and been formed in, or this new Jesus movement that was re-forming everything they knew.

Some of us have had that same challenge throw in our faces. Choose who you will follow. ITs hard when the ones you love don't all go in the same direction.

Other places in the gospels, Jesus tells us that if we choose rightly, we may have it all. Friends, family, meaningful work, food, follow our faithful choices. But here he reminds us that he does not follow food, work, family, or friends. He is first and last.

What is your life built on?

What is able to serve as cornerstone?

Jesus has a lot of deeply ingrained upside down thinking to overturn, the sacred tables we set up in our temples. Do you remember that scene? He comes in to the temple and finds worship leaders putting money out front, the cart in front of the horse, and Jesus upends the whole situation, literally!

Texts like these are tempting to wave off:

Oh, the guy tossing the tables is off his rocker.

Or, he doesn’t really mean for that young man to sell off his assets, its obviously symbolic.

Not...so... fast!

We need to stick with the challenge, examine what we can’t bear to give up, whether its money, or all the food we want, or approval, or accomplishment…..

For s short time, many years ago, I knew and admired a man named, Mitch. He was a barrier breaking advocate for the homeless in Washington D. C. who helped set up a shelter in an abandoned building in the city. Year after year he poured his heart out for the people the rest of us tended to overlook. He fought for them with policy makers, he scrounged for food, for blankets, for medical care. He gave them everything until there wasn't anything left to give. One morning we opened the Washington Post and discovered that Mitch had committed suicide. He couldn't bear the burden that had displaced God at the center of his life. While I choose to believe that God regained the center when Christ met and reclaimed Mitch on the other side of that desperate decision, it remains a great loss in the lives of those who knew and loved him in this life.

Scripture calls it idolatry when anything, anything at all, takes God's place.

These days we do it to our children as a matter of course. We become insatiably greedy for their happiness and success, giving it our all. base decisions of how we'll spend our family time, money, energy trying to make them happy. We measure our success by theirs.

But we weigh down children’s lives when we try to make them our cornerstones. We put the burden of our lives, whether they're "worth it" on the next generation as though these still maturing little ones were able to be the foundation rather than the future. Is that really the way God intended us to love them?

And then we act like children ourselves, filling our goody bags with one pretty or yummy or entertaining thing after another.

Luke 12:15 …and he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions."

Jesus gears us up for faithful personal resistance, withstanding a system that will gobble us up, and offers us the choice of living in an alternative kin-dom.

Julie Clawson reminds us just how tough it is to turn these tables over.

So I’ve been having a few interesting conversations about my book Everyday Justice recently. I was being interviewed for a very conservative Christian talk radio show, and when I mentioned that a simple way to define biblical justice was “the practical outworking of loving God and loving others” I was told that I need to be careful about encouraging people to love their neighbor because that could lead to socialism.

In the sound-bite world of talk radio, there wasn’t a chance to challenge that assertion, so I changed tactics and tried to talk about the need for Christians to embrace the spiritual discipline of simplicity and not be overcome by consumerism. Once again I was contradicted by the host who told me that I shouldn’t suggest that people stop or lower their consumption because it is our duty to support the economy by buying stuff. At that point I realized that we were on totally different planets. I civilly made my way through the rest of the interview trying to speak a language he might understand, and then choose not to listen for the next hour as he proceeded to tear apart everything I said.

I’m fine with people disagreeing with me or not liking the book. I get that. But his mindset reminded me of the economic idolatry that has crept into our faith. More and more I find Christians who, instead of letting their faith influence their economics, interpret their faith through their preferred economic system.

So, what’s the antidote to greed? In the classic “Seven Deadly Sins” list, Generosity is greed’s opposite. At the heart of real generosity is mercy, a mercy that makes us hungry for God’s presence, love and care, in each person’s life and every corner of our world. When we can’t get enough of God’s goodness, we experience an insatiable desire for mercy, become hungry for justice. And even those efforts to make the world a better place become idolatrous if God is not the centering point, the one we need more than anything else.

Its a hard thing Jesus asks, from the "before" perspective. And yet after, after one chooses to be utterly centered on and by our loving, generous, merciful, and just God, somehow the rest falls into place.