St. Paul Lutheran Church, Minden, Nebraska
Sunday sermon – 19th Sunday after Pentecost - Oct.11, ’09
“The New Kingdom of God; Up on Generosity & Letting Go!”
Text: Mark 10:28-31
Look! Enter! Go! Look! Enter! Go! These are three words for three important directives at the heart of this Sunday’s worship service and this Sunday’s message.
Look! Look to the hills! God reigns. Our help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.
Enter! Enter the kingdom. Be open to the Kingdom of God! Jesus says, “Sell all that you have! Give it to the poor! Come, follow me!”
Go! Go for a ride! That’s the title of this little news-paper a member of the LWML handed me saying, “You should read this, everybody should read this.” Go For A Ride! Relief for Human Need World-wide! Ride the Orphan Grain Train. An Army of Volunteers: “Priceless efforts around the country fuel the Orphan Grain Train!” (Volunteers aren’t paid because they’re worthless; they’re not paid because they are priceless.)
Look to the Hills! Enter the Kingdom! Go for a Ride! Such is life in the “up-side down” Kingdom of God according to Jesus.
This Second Sunday of October, although this Sunday is LWML Sunday or Lutheran Women in Mission Sunday, it is also a Sunday when we find ourselves like last Sunday once again in the Gospel of Mark chapter 10, in the company of Jesus & His disciples going “up” to Jerusalem. As Mark reports Jesus moving closer & closer to Jerusalem and to being lifted up on a cross there, we see & hear in each of the Gospel readings for these Sundays in October that when it comes to following Jesus, things we are familiar with, things that look pretty normal & right side up to us, are things Jesus turns around, turns over, turns upside down.
Last Sunday we heard and focused on the good news that Jesus went “up the down staircase” on the subject of marriage. Not down on divorce but up with marriage as a God-ordained, grace-based, forgive-ness-filled “we” experience and not a “me” experience.
We also heard & were glad to hear Jesus is never down on children but Jesus is up with all God’s children. Jesus is up with all those persons who are vulnerable & valuable persons no matter how young or how old they are because God the Father’s steadfast love & tender mercy is freely, completely available to them, not to be earned but to be received.
Now this Sunday we hear & hopefully we have our eyes & ears & our hearts open to the truth that in the Kingdom of God, Jesus is not down on success or money or wealth, but Jesus is up with generosity & letting go. Jesus is up with generosity, “up the down staircase” with totally letting go of money & material things which is impossible with man, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.
A bumper sticker I saw recently said, “God doesn’t want shares of your life; He wants controlling interest.” So what’s up with the Lord Jesus Christ wanting “controlling interest” of the lives of all those who want to know “what they must do to inherit eternal life?”
What’s up is that Jesus does not leave it up to those who believe in Him and want to follow Him how much of their lives or what part of their lives they’re going to let Him have control of. With Jesus, the standard for following Him is laid out pretty clear & straight-forward, and for many turns out to be painfully hard to follow through on.
Normally, in our world, in the right-side-up way most people live & operate in our world, there are basically these two classes of people, the haves & have-nots, meaning “the haves have it”, money, wealth, property, power, prestige, possessions, two of this, three of that, and the “have-nots don’t have it”, no money, no wealth, no property, no power, no prestige, no possessions, no two of anything. What’s also true is that normally, most of us see ourselves somewhere in the middle, not really filthy rich, and not really dirt poor.
What Jesus does to this normal picture of what we have & how we like to use the word “my” – “mine”, is to turn things around, turn them upside down. That’s what’s going on in Jesus encounter with the man who wanted to know what he had to do to inherit eternal life, a man who was wealthy, had great possessions.
Looking at the man, Jesus loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go sell all that you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.
What this story reveals to us is that whenever there is talk about wealth, property, possessions, investments, “materialism”, we as Christians should know there are two kinds of materialism.
Materialism no. 1 is that material things matter the most, that material things are what one lives & works & dies for because we only go ‘round’ once in this life & we grab for all we can get. This kind materialism may not be totally sinful, but it is totally distracting, definitely diminishing our trust & dependence on God for all things.
Humble as the man was who came to Jesus, good as the man was at keeping those commandments that had to do with “loving & respecting one’s neighbor”, Jesus did not reach out to pat this man on the back. Jesus looked the man straight in the eye, loved the man completely, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Which the man didn’t do because he had great possess-ions, and couldn’t bear to part with any of them.
In other words, Jesus did not call this man with so much of this world’s goods & material wealth to an abstract, idealistic, spiritualism. Jesus did not call him to a complete abandonment of things material & real & physical & enjoyable. No! Jesus called the man to move up, to turn up from one kind of materialism, the self-absorbed, self-satisfying kind, to a higher, holier materialism focused on giving to the needs of others, including their material needs.
In other words, Jesus is not down on success & money & wealth, but Jesus is up with generosity & letting go & helping people to find that the true treasure of all living & dying & letting go is in heaven!
Before Jesus stood a humble, godly man whose life up to that point had been defined by wealth, hard work, wise investments, good looking portfolio, a man well off in the eyes of the world. But humble & sin-cere as the man was in coming to Jesus in search of eternal life he could not & would not let go and accept a new definition of himself – namely, a man rich before God.
How about you & me? Is this ever an easy thing for us on our own to turn around or turn upside down – to let go of all that we have & let Jesus raise us up to being rich before God?
Money, savings, investments, assets, having all this stuff we have isn’t everything we say! Do we mean it; do we really mean it? How hard it is to say “not my house on the lake, not my van, not my farm, not my ground, not my cattle, not my savings, not my silver & my gold, not a mite would I withhold, not my stuff, but “thine, O Lord.
The story is told about a rich man who spent his days checking on his assets & counting his bars of gold. Just beyond the long driveway up to this rich man’s magnificent estate lived a poor cobbler who spent his days singing as he repaired people’s shoes. The joyful singing annoyed & irritated the rich man.
One day the rich man decided to give a couple of bars of gold to the cobbler. At first the cobbler was overjoyed, and he took the bars of gold and hid them. From time to time the cobbler would be worried and go back to check if the gold was still there. Then he would be worried in case someone had seen him, and he would move the bars of gold and hide them in another place. During all this, he ceased to sing. Then one day the cobbler realized that he had ceased to sing because of the gold bars. He took them back to the rich man and said, “Take back your gold and give me back my songs.”
Do we have songs to sing that we should be singing rather then getting tied down, burdened, worried, possessed by this world’s goods? Songs like . . .
Many spend their lives in fretting, over trifles and in getting, Things that have no solid ground.
I shall strive to win a treasure, that will bring me lasting Pleasure, and that now is seldom found. (LSB, 732, v.3)
Here I am, Lord. Is it I Lord? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go Lord, if You lead me. I will hold your people in my heart. (Hear I Am Lord, With One Voice, no. 752)
What about people in need we can reach with what priceless volunteers can do for them through the Orphan Grain Train.
What about people in the dark we can reach with the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, through the mites & missions projects of the LWML, looking to the hills and to God with whom nothing is impossible.
What about people we can help with all their needs when we put down, when we let go of whatever we cling to most in this life, and take up our cross, and follow Jesus.
How much Jesus loves us this we know & how much He is counting on us and looks us in the eye, and for our own good, for not accumulating & keeping & clinging to our possessions to the point we that we miss His Kingdom’s goal, He says to us too,
Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.
Let Jesus word, Jesus love, Jesus death on a cross, Jesus forgive-ness, Jesus Savior, Jesus gift of abundant life, new life, move you, engage you, energize you to take another step up the down staircase. While we are alive, while we’re still here, while we have it, money, wealth, blessing upon blessing, let it be for doing good thing for our neighbors. Look to the hills. Enter the Kingdom. Go for a ride . . . like a ride on the Orphan Grain Train.
