Sermon for Sunday, October 11,

The nineteenth Sunday in Pentecost.

Mark 10:17-31 The story of the rich young man who asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life.

Discovering that we cannot accomplish everything we think we should be able to do can be a great gift.

I have driven over to Easton Maryland on the Eastern shore the last two Thursdays to take a painting class from a painter whose work I had admired. I walked in the first week, not knowing anything about the class or the people in it, or really anything about the instructor. I had expected him to do some kind of demonstration or spend some time talking about his ideas of painting, but he just set up a still life and said get to work. Everyone else in the class had already been working with him for some time, and if there was some demonstration time, I had missed it. So I picked up my brush and started painting, and all of a sudden, my goal in being there shifted rather drastically from wanting to learn something new to not wanting to look like a rank beginner. I kind of listened to what the instructor said as he came around to critique our work, but I found myself caught between trying to paint as I have always painted on the one hand and trying to follow the suggestions he was making on the other. Caught between the desire to be seen as competent and the desire to learn, I have now driven home twice from the Eastern shore with nothing to show for the journey. All I have managed to do is mess up a couple of perfectly good canvasses. I was in a bind, caught between wanting look like I already knew what I was doing and wanting to learn something I did not already know.

That’s kind of where the young man is in today’s gospel story. He comes asking what he must do to get into the kingdom. The technique he understands is one of accomplishment. The course Jesus is offering is about something else altogether.

The young man finds himself in a bind when Jesus’ answer is too much for him to take in--when the answer seems to involve not a new step in the process he understands, but a whole new process. Who ever heard of giving everything away.

When we want to see ourselves as capable, able to accomplish what is needed--when we want that, and we want to learn, to become something more than we are right now, we are in a bind.

Wanting to see ourselves as able leads us to feel good about our abilities, we may conjure up enough confidence to believe that we can get along. We are often respected by those around us. We may become very self sufficient. Those things all sound good, but wanting to be capable in the world has its costs too. We may not ask for help when we need it. We may limit our efforts to the familiar and never discover our own limits. Valuing competency may diminish our ability for compassion by making us unable or unwilling to understand those whose limits are exposed by failure.

Wanting to learn and become more than we already are also holds its promises. Wanting to learn can lead us to ask good questions, it can lead to growth and new experiences. We may even discover new talents. But the cost of wanting to learn something new can involve things like having to discover that some of what we think we know is wrong. In order to learn we must be willing to be led, to work in an area we don’t understand and in which we may not be comfortable. If we seek learning, we may even discover that we just can’t get it this new thing--we may not have the right talents or personality. We may, in fact, discover our own limits. Wanting to be seen as competent and wanting to learn new things can put us in a bind.

The good news about living in such a bind is that that is where life is richest and most interesting. It is also where life is most challenging, in part, because it is where we learn new truths about ourselves.

It would seem obvious that becoming capable, able to do what needs doing would involve learning what we don’t yet know. Sometimes though, what we don’t know is so beyond our understanding that we can’t see it from where we are. Sometimes learning can feel a lot like dying to an old way of life and being raised into a new one.

I work on the committee on priesthood in Virginia, and I had the pleasure of meeting with some candidates for ordination on Friday. One of those candidates was coming back to the process after being sidetracked by some life issues for a few years. She was engaging and bright, young, thirty maybe, and listening to her, everyone on the committee knew she was changed. She had grown and was speaking from some sort of new grounding and wisdom that only enhanced one who had already been a very strong candidate. When asked about her personal life, she told of a relationship she had worked very hard to reconcile that had none the less failed. And then she spoke the key to her new found wisdom. She said, “it was the first thing I ever worked at and couldn’t do. The first time I had tried and failed.”

The discussion that followed involved the committee listening in awe as she talked about the flood of learning and questioning that had accompanied that failure. It had been painful and difficult; and it had been rich, filled with promise and the opening of new possibility.

Discovering that we cannot accomplish everything we think we should be able to do can be a great gift. Which brings us back to the rich young man in Mark’s story.

Several years ago I asked a group of folks to write sequels to this story. They broke up into small groups and wrestled with what they thought Jesus might say or what the young man might tell his friends when he got home, that sort of thing. I eventually wrote a sequel of my own and stumbled upon what still, after many years, speaks what I believe to be the heart of this story.

So the young man goes away sad and Jesus tells his friends that nothing will be impossible for God.

In a few weeks, Jesus and his friends are traveling through the area again, and the same young man comes up to Jesus and says, “I did it. I gave everything away. Am I ready?” Jesus looked at him and loved him and said, “That is terrific. Congratulations my friend. There is something else you might do, though. What I think you should do now is go and tell everyone who ever hurt you that you forgive them. Oh yes. And you have to mean it.” Again, the young man went away sad.

A couple weeks later, he returned. Again, he found Jesus and said, “I did it. It wasn’t easy but I did it. I forgave them all.” Jesus smiled a big warm friendly smile and said, “Good. Good. You know...what you could do now is go find someone who is very sick, someone whose illness scares you, makes you uncomfortable. Tend their sores, comfort them, sit up through the night and care for them.” The young man went away again, but then returned having done what Jesus asked.

And so it went until one day the young man went away and did not return. The weeks went by, then a couple of months.

“I’d better go see about him,” Jesus told his friends. So he went looking and finally found the young man sitting alone under a tree.

“Hey what happened?” asked Jesus. “You were doing so well, working so hard.”

“I give up.” said the young man. “No matter what I do it’ll never be enough to get me into heaven. I give up. I quit!”

Jesus took him by the hands and stood him up. He looked him right in the eyes and slowly smiled the biggest smile the young man had ever seen him smile.

“Well done, good and faithful servant,” said Jesus. “Now you are ready for the kingdom of God.”

JB