Stuff
When we moved from Berkeley back to the South Bay in June we filled a very large truck with the stuff we had amassed in our apartment, stored in the basement of our apartment building, and squirreled away in the garage. Then we stopped at our storage unit in Milpitas to pick up all the other stuff we had packed up because we wouldn’t need it in Berkeley. Unpacking was like Christmas: we discovered things we hadn’t seen for three years. In fact, we had forgotten about much of it.
We also found boxes of stuff that we no longer wanted and certainly didn’t need. Why had we held onto all this stuff? Did we need the single socks? We thought so. Maybe we would find their mates one day.
Remember George Carlin? He understood the hold our stuff has on us. In
A Place for My Stuff, he wrote:
That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house….A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.
George is a kindred spirit. So is the rich man in today’s Gospel! Maybe that’s why I get extremely antsy when I hear the rich man’s story. I see a very tight squeeze into heaven in my future.
We don’t know the rich man’s name, where he comes from, or who his family is. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell us that he is not only rich, but young, and of the ruling class. He rushes to Jesus and falls on his knees – unusual behavior for a man of his status. The rich man is taking the same humble position as people hoping to be healed by Jesus, people who are unimportant or unseen in society. His behavior is surprising, but so far so good.
On the other hand, the rich man seems to have a feeling of entitlement. He
doesn’t ask Jesus how to prepare for heaven, or how to earn heaven, or
to be worthy of heaven. He assumes he will inherit it: “Master,
what must I do to inherit eternal life?” That word inherit
stopped me cold when I read it. But then I realized that the rich man had inherited
his wealth and his social position and his role in the community. Is he right
to assume that he will inherit all that is important, up to and including eternal
life? Could he help himself from assuming so? Jesus’ teaching that the
first will be last and the last will be first will not come easy to him.
Or will it?
In his culture, people believed that God blessed the good with wealth, land, and health. Those who were tormented with demons, poverty, and illness deserved it: they must have done something wrong. So our rich man would believe he was on an inside track with God. His wealth is a sign of God’s favor.
People also believed that wealth supported religious duties. For example, people with money could buy favor with God by performing sacrifices. Those goats, bulls, and doves did not come cheap. Wealth spent on extravagant sacrifices kept the system going.
Is he a good man? His culture would say that his wealth proves he is. He has also followed the social commandments all his life:
“You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.”
These commandments help us to live in peace with each other, and that’s good. But when we think about it we realize they don’t move us closer to God and to the reign of God. Instead, they maintain the status quo. Jesus wants something more from the rich man, and its serious: to sell, to give, and to come follow him.
Shocked, this good man grieves. He simply can’t do it. It’s a repudiation of all he has been and all he is and all his progeny will be. How can he do all this? He can’t, he walks away.
Just as the rich man is shocked, the disciples react with disbelief. 26They were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?”
Who can be saved when the price is so great and the task impossible?
Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”
This is the Good News. “For God all things are possible.” The rich man was nearer to the Good News than he knew. He left before the miracle happened. He left before he understood how he was to inherit eternal life.
Rev. Richard Fairchild wrote,
"Inheriting eternal life is not something that we can earn - nor is entering the Kingdom of God something we can work for. There is nothing we can give to obtain it. It is free gift. All we have to do is hold out our hands and accept the gift. It's both the easiest and the hardest thing we can ever do: the easiest - because the gift is free; the hardest - because our hands are so often filled with other things."
Stuff. It’s hard to give it up. It consumes our time and our space. It distracts us from the kingdom of God. We don’t need to give away all that we have to earn the kingdom of God. We simply need to free our hands and our hearts to receive God’s grace-filled gifts and to live in them. It is so much easier to be distracted by our stuff, to protect it, to hoard it, to love it, to put it before God and our neighbors.
Remember when Jesus told the rich man “You lack one thing”? He was telling not just the rich man but all of us that we lack one thing: to empty ourselves to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. He told the rich man, and us, to rid ourselves of anything that stands between us and our love of God. Anything. We free our hands and our hearts and live in the kingdom of God, here and now and inherit eternal life.
With God, all things are possible.