Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Mark 10:17-27

October 28, 2007

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: '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.'" He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth." Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 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." They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."

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In the fall of 1974, I entered the Coast Guard at a time shortly after they had made a service wide change of uniforms. They had recently let go of the old traditional sailor's outfits in favor of slacks and shirts that were thought to be more businesslike. It was largely because of this change that I learned to sew. I was told that whenever the military made a major change like this, they went through a procurement process that required three bids from competing companies. The choice was nearly always the lowest bid, which sometimes meant less than the highest quality. I don't know if that's true. All I know is that my brand new uniforms began falling apart at the seams, literally, before I was half way through Boot Camp. The thread they used was practically worthless, which meant that I, and the rest of my boot camp buddies, spent much of our down time putting our clothes back together.

One of the pictures I still carry in my mind is of sitting on my bunk in the barracks trying to get the thread into those dinky little needles they gave us. It was very frustrating experience, and I'm sure they did it on purpose. Boot camp, for anyone who doesn't know, is a place where people go out of their way to make life miserable. It's all part of the training. We used to talk about how some captain or commander somewhere must have come up with a bright idea. "Chief," he would have said, "issue all the new recruits the tiniest needles, you can find. That'll burn 'em up." The upshot is, I know from experience that the eye of the needle can be a tough fit, even for the thread it is supposedly designed for.

Needles have not changed substantially in the last 2000 years. A good many have been dug out of various archaeological sites around Israel. These ancient needles were generally made of bone or bronze or ivory, in contrast to modern needles made of steel. But the size and shape and function are much the same as they have always been. Take a thread, run it through the needle's eye and do your stitching. It's a pretty basic process and one that is familiar to nearly everyone, which is why it made such an effective metaphor for Jesus. One of the essential hallmarks of Jesus' teaching was that he frequently took the simple, familiar, everyday experiences of people's lives and used them get across subtle or paradoxical spiritual insights.

Now, I know you know what a needle is. The meaning of Jesus' story seems pretty obvious. But I'm stretching this out to make a point. Every once in a while, in reference to this story, you will hear someone say that there was once a small door in one of the Jerusalem city gates called "the needles eye." The door was small enough that it would have been very hard to get a camel through it, but not necessarily impossible, a little grease, a few people pushing and pulling and viola: camel through the needle. According to this theory, what Jesus really meant was that, though it might be difficult, it is not necessarily impossible for rich people to get into heaven. If you can find a way to squish a camel through a little doorway, it ought to be similarly possible to hang on to our money and still get through the narrow gates of eternity.

There's a small problem with this theory though. No such "needle's eye" doorway ever existed. According to scholars, all references to this doorway trace to the eighth century. Apparently someone dreamed it up in an attempt to take the edge off of Jesus' message. But it doesn't work. What Jesus was talking about was threading a real live camel through the eye of a normal size sewing needle, and impossible is exactly what he had in mind. We know this partly because of the reaction of the disciples. Mark says that when they heard Jesus say this, they were "greatly astounded." In the Greek style and language of the times, Mark could hardly have chosen stronger words. Today we might say Jesus blew them away. He knocked their socks off. He took their breath away. But whatever words we use, their reaction alone is enough to know that they weren't left strategizing about how to get a big animal through some little door. Rather, they were left wondering if anyone could get into heaven at all.

As I look around this morning, I can't help but notice that our reaction to this story isn't quite so impassioned. We are not "greatly astounded," and I'd guess we all still have our socks on. We've heard it all before, haven't we; most of us many times. Stories tend to lose their shock value once we've committed the punch line to memory. And besides, we're not so frightened by the idea of not being able to get into heaven as some people are. And neither are the images as fresh and immediate as they used to be. We hardly ever see a camel except in the zoo, and personally, since Boot Camp ended, I probably haven't picked up a needle half a dozen times. Laying all that aside though, wealth, is still every bit as much a challenge for us as it was for the rich young ruler, at least spiritually speaking.

Back in June, when my father-in-law was here preaching, he talked about that famous passage in which Jesus says that we can't serve both God and "mammon." He got quite a laugh when he talked about how much he loved his mammon. We all do, don't we? I am very attached to my house, my car, my books, my music. Last week I spent all morning raking leaves and cleaning up around the yard (for all the good that did.) The whole time I had my iPod attached to my belt. I was happy as a clam, singing away while I pushed the leaves around. Times like that, it's pretty easy to wonder, what's wrong with a little mammon?

Leslie Weatherhead once wrote a book that asked the question, "Did Jesus Disapprove of Wealth?" In the book, he talked about how Jesus praised the man who turned five talents into ten; about how he enjoyed without criticism the hospitality of the rich; and how he came to the end of his life wearing a very expensive robe. Talking about this morning's story, Weatherhead said "[Jesus] told the rich young ruler to 'sell all that he had' because in his case wealth was a stumbling block. It would be foolish and indeed impossible to take one sentence spoken to one man in one special set of circumstances as if it applied to all men in all circumstances."

I do get what Weatherhead was trying to say. Jesus certainly didn't mean that we should turn giving everything we have away into some kind of law. Still, I can't help feeling that, like the guy who came up with that "needle's eye" doorway idea, Weatherhead was softening Jesus' message so that it would be easier to swallow. The truth is, heaven and hell aside, wealth is often a problem for us too. If we imagine, unlike Weatherhead's take on the rich young ruler, it is not a stumbling block for us, we are responsible for the burden of proof. Both for those who have it and for those who spend all their time wanting it, money can be easily become all consuming. The attachment to money in all its many forms makes it all but impossible to rest our hearts in God. We're too busy resting our hearts on our next purchase. And that, I believe, is what Jesus was trying to say.

And, even when we have the best of intentions, isn't it amazing how easily it can creep up on us. I love the story about the abbot, who was so taken by the spiritual progress of his young disciple that he lets him live on his own in a lean-to shack on the riverbank. Each night, happy as a lark, the boy-disciple washes his loincloth and puts it out to dry. One morning he is dismayed to find that it has been torn to shreds by rats. So he begs for a second loincloth from the villagers. When the rats destroy that one as well, he gets a kitten. But now he has to beg not only food, but also milk. To get around that, he buys a cow. But then he has to seek for fodder. Cleverly he concludes, "It will be easier to work the land around my hut." That leaves him no time to meditate, so he hires workers. Checking up on them is too demanding so he marries and convinces his wife to do the job. Pretty soon, he is one of the wealthiest people in the village. Several years later, the abbot comes back to find a mansion where the lean-to had been. Sharply he asks, "What is the meaning of this?" This embarrassed disciple replies, "Holy abbot, there was no other way to keep my loincloth."

That's what happens. Wealth takes on a life of it's own. It entices, it promises, it's sneaky. The more we have, the more we want. The more we have the more concerned we become about protecting what we have. The more we have, the easier it is to believe we have gotten it all ourselves and we deserve it. That's what Jesus was talking about. He knew full well that we begin thinking that our wealth serves us, but very quickly we find that in fact, it is we who serve our wealth. And that service tends to crowd out service to anything else, God very much included.

John Wesley, the great preacher and evangelist, knew this from personal experience. Wesley lived in economically uncertain times, yet from humble beginnings he became so well known that his income eventually reached 1400 pounds per year. In 2001 this would have been the equivalent of an annual salary around $300,000. So what did he do with all this wealth? Did he tithe it? No. Wesley went way beyond tithing. He disciplined himself to live on just 30 pounds of the 1400 he earned. He gave away 98% of all he earned and lived on just 2%!

Most of us would call that madness, but Wesley's highest concern was to serve God. He was not opposed to money. He actually preached a sermon one time on all the wonderful things money could accomplish. "It is food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, raiment for the naked: It gives to the traveller and the stranger where to lay his head. By it we may supply the place of an husband to the widow, and of a father to the fatherless. We may be a defence for the oppressed, a means of health to the sick, of ease to them that are in pain; it may be as eyes to the blind, as feet to the lame; yea, a lifter up from the gates of death."

What Wesley was opposed to was allowing ourselves to become so wrapped up in money that it takes over our lives. And he thought that, for Christian people, this was almost inevitable. Since Christians, in his day at least, tended to be industrious people, it was almost inevitable that they would become wealthy. "As riches increase," he said, "so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches." Then he went on to reflect, "What way then can we take that our money may not sink us? There is one way, and there is no other under heaven. If those who 'gain all they can,' and 'save all they can,' will likewise 'give all they can,' then the more they gain, the more they will grow in grace, and the more treasure they will lay up in heaven."

My message today is the same as his. The more we give, the more we grow in grace. On this Consecration Sunday, I invite us all to "give all we can."

Amen