Matthew
19:16-30
January 26, 2014
Then someone came to him and
said, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said to
him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If
you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.’ He said to him, ‘Which
ones?’ And Jesus said, ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery;
You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; Honor your father and
mother; also, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ The young man said to
him, ‘I have kept all these; what do I still lack?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If you
wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When the young man
heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
Then Jesus said to his
disciples, ‘Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the
kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ When
the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, ‘Then who can
be saved?’ But Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible,
but for God all things are possible.’
Then Peter said in reply, ‘Look,
we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?’ Jesus said
to them, ‘Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man
is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on
twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left
houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my
name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life. But
many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.
A man was once visited by an angel in his sleep, and the
angel told him that he was going to die the next day. The man begged the angel
to let him finish his many projects, but the angel told him that death comes
like a thief and to be ready. Then the man begged the angel to let him take something
into heaven with him. “No, no,” the angel replied, “no one gets to take
anything with them.” The man persisted: “Please, please! Just one little thing,… just one little
suitcase!” Finally, after much begging and groveling by the man, the angel
relented. He would be allowed to bring one suitcase.
The next day the man died, and showed up at the Pearly Gates
with his suitcase in tow. Dragging it along the ground, he stood before St.
Peter, who said, “Well, well, so you’re the one with the suitcase. Before you
can come in we have to inspect it—new security measures and all.” The man opened
the suitcase before St. Peter, who stared at it for a long time, stroking his
chin. The suitcase was filled with gleaming gold bricks. St. Peter finally closed
the suitcase and said, “I heard that you desperately wanted to bring this into
heaven. What I don’t understand is why you would make such a big fuss about
bringing in pavement.”
If you could take something with you when it’s all over,
what would it be? That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? We don’t get that
choice. As Job said, “Naked I came from
my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord
has taken away…”
Another way of saying this is that we come into the world
with nothing, and we leave having to give up everything. In a lifetime we build
up so much—possessions, property, power, prestige, capital, clothing, cars,…
everything. The slow loss of all of this material we’ve built up is one of the
things that makes aging so difficult for so many people. Aging can be a process
of detaching from everything we’re attached to whether we want to or not.
I’ve seen this struggle to let go of things in so many
members who have faced the difficulty of deciding to move to Passavant
Retirement Community in Zelienople or Sherwood Oaks Retirement Community in
Cranberry Township. One of the hardest things for people deciding to move to a
retirement community is giving up so much of what they’ve accumulated over the
years. They have to give up their home, furniture, things they’ve been storing
for decades, and items that have memories. Aging can really be difficult
because it means giving up so much.
When
I think of the pain of giving up so much as we age, I can’t help but think
about an experience I had in in 1987. I
spent that summer in Washington, D.C. working as a chaplain at a local
hospital. All summer long I had heard about a particular patient from the other
chaplains, a guy who had moved from floor to floor in the hospital.
He
was a man with an interesting history. Until his retirement a few years
earlier, he had been a senior vice-president at the World Bank. He had been a
man of power. Leaders the world over had kowtowed to him in their attempts to
procure loans for important projects in their countries. When he retired, he
retired as one of the most influential and powerful men in the world.
Unfortunately for him, by the time he came to the hospital, he was a very
different man. He had no more power, and without the power that came with his
position, he was lost.
He
had been in the hospital for some sort of kidney problem. Each time he would
have some sort of medical procedure that required him to leave a particular
floor of the hospital, he would be transferred to another floor. Why? Because
he had irritated the nurses and staff of that floor so much that they refused
to take him back after he left. Slowly,
he was transferred to each floor of the hospital throughout the summer. By the
end of the summer, he was transferred to the floor I was responsible for.
What
did he do to earn the scorn of the hospital staff? It was his yelling and
demanding. It would start once he woke up in the morning. He would begin yelling
in a low voice, “Nurse.” Then he would
get progressively louder: “Nurse! Nurse!! NURSE! NURSE! BLANK-BLANK IT! (you can fill in the blank) GET IN
HERE!” The nurse would come in and ask
what was wrong. The man would say something like “I don’t like my pillow.”
A few minutes later it would start all
over again: “Nurse. Nurse! Nurse!!
NURSE! NURSE! The nurse
would come in and ask what was wrong, and he would say, “I want some water.”
Each time he would make it sound as though the world was falling apart, yet he
would ask for something minor. If the nurse refused to help him, he would hurl
curses at her or him. You would think that the hospital staff might be able to
get his family to intervene and get him to behave, but his wife had left him
years before and his son wanted to have nothing to do with him.
One
morning, he was yelling and screaming up a storm because the nurses were
ignoring him, and so I decided to visit him. His arms were strapped down
because he would get angry and pull his I.V.s out in his temper tantrums. I
walked in and asked him what was wrong. He said, “Who are you?” “I’m a
chaplain,” I replied. “Take these things off my arms,” he said. “I can’t do
that.” “Well, get someone in here who can.” “There isn’t anybody who will take
them off,” I answered. “Then get me the hospital administrator.” “I can’t do
that either.” “Then what (blanking) good are you?”
After
thinking for a while, I finally responded, “I’m not much good, but I’m the last
person in the hospital who’s willing to sit and talk with you. You’ve managed
to tick off everyone else in the hospital to the point that they don’t even
want to help you. You’ve tried to bully everyone, and it’s left you here alone.
I’m the only one left willing to sit and talk with you.” He looked at me for a
while, and finally said, “Okay, then why don’t you sit with me.” We actually
had a nice conversation as he told me his life story. And it became apparent to
me that he was deeply lost by having had to give up so much in his retirement.
He had had power. Now he was powerless, and didn’t know how to live without
power. He was trying to carry pavement.
Having to give up so much is what makes aging difficult,
yet willingly giving up possessions and power is what makes spiritual growth
possible. As long as our lives are filled with attachment to things, we remain
spiritually poor, but as soon as we are able to detach and give up things, we
become spiritually rich. I’m not necessarily saying that we have to give up
possessions to become spiritually rich, but we do have to give up our
attachment, our reliance, on things.
Our passage is telling us about this idea of detachment.
A very wealthy young man has come up to Jesus to ask him what he must do to
merit eternal life. He’s not asking what he has to do to get into heaven when
he dies. His question has to do with his own disquiet. He has been a good Jew.
He has kept the law. He has done everything that a person is supposed to do to
feel a sense of meaning and purpose in her or his life. Yet he knows there’s
something more, something missing from his life.
The “eternal life” he’s seeking is a deep connection with
God. He follows the law, but feels as though God is still missing from his
life. Eternal life has to do with living a life here on earth that is deeply
connected with God. The rich young man feels he lacks that connection, so he
asks Jesus what he can do to capture that connection. Jesus tells him to sell
all that he has, give it to the poor, and to follow him. Jesus is really
telling the young man that he has turned his wealth and his possessions into a
false god. He cares more about them than about God. It is possible to have
great wealth and still care more about God, but this man does not have that.
It’s the reason Jesus says, “it is easier
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to
enter the kingdom of God.” The wealthier we become, the more we worry about
the wealth and about losing the wealth. We become too “attached” to the
material world, and Jesus is saying that we need to “detach.”
The twin concepts of attachment
and detachment had been central to
Christianity up till our modern age, but the message has been diminished in our
culture. What are these ideas? They are fairly simple ideas, although they are
hard to live out. The idea is that we always tend to get too attached to things
or the world, which causes us to lose our love for, and connection with, God, the
sacred, and the divine. The answer, when we become too attached, is to detach
from the things of the world. It is to detach from our overreliance on
possessions, wealth, power, and more. That does not mean that we give up all of
our possessions, wealth, and power. It means that we detach from them so that
even if we have them, we could lose them and still feel like we have meaning
and purpose in life. We possess things, but they don’t possess us.
Detachment is at the core of the Christian ideals of generosity
and tithing. We are called to be generous with our time and money, and to tithe
10%, as a way of pushing ourselves to make sure that we are not overly attached
to our wealth. By giving to others and to God, we detach from wealth and
connect with God.
Detachment is also at the core of love. When we deeply
love another, whether it is our child, spouse, friend, or stranger, we are
willing to give up and sacrifice ourselves.
The idea of detachment doesn’t mean giving everything up,
although many in Christianity’s past took it to mean that. The whole monastic
movement rightly started as an attempt to detach from the things of the world.
It recognized that too many people were too dependent on things, wealth, and
material. The problem with the monastic movement is that in the past they
became too attached to detachment. They wanted to detach so much that they
became attached to being virtuous. Over time monasteries also became fairly
wealthy places in the Middle Ages, even if the monks themselves didn’t have
personal possessions. They often lived in the equivalent of mansions. As one
Franciscan brother once said to me, “It
can cost a lot of people a lot of money to keep us in poverty.”
We have an opposite problem in modern Christianity.
One of the reasons I often talk about the problems with the “prosperity gospel,”
the message preached in so many megachurches, is that it aligns God with
attachment to things. It preaches a message that if we are good, faithful, and
holy, God will bless us with possessions, wealth, and things. Yet the deeper
Christianity teaches that it is attachment to possessions and wealth that
actually pulls us away from God. Much of modern Christianity teaches a message
that is at odds with the original Christian ideals.
The real idea behind detachment is to not become attached
in the first place. It’s to have possessions, but not to let them have you. It
is town things, but don’t let them own you. It is to have ideas and
philosophies, but don’t turn them into false gods. It is to hold onto what’s
good and right and what matters, rather than becoming stuck on things that
don’t matter. It means don’t get caught carrying around pavement.
We may not be called to give everything up like the rich
young man, but we are called to detach. And the way you can tell if you’re
overly attached to anything is the extent to which you would make whatever it
is more important than God.
Amen.
