What Gives our Life Value?

October 13, 2024 First Congregational Church of Brimfield MA

Mark 10:17-31 — 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.” 

Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the good news^,*  who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.  But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

Today, we get to hear one of the great stories of Jesus.  What a great cast of characters:  Jesus, of course, but that “rich young man”, the boy who has everything, and the disciples, who, as usual, are standing around the edges of the crowd with their mouths hanging open.

Their mouths are hanging open because Jesus has just told this really sharp guy that he has to give away everything he has to the poor if he wants to have treasure in heaven.  

And that was astounding because then – as now – the surest external sign that you are loved by God (or really lucky – too often, people assume it’s the same thing) is that you’ve got lots of money, a big car, great clothes, the latest iPhone, and a really really sleek kitchen. 

And Jesus blows that idea, that picture of success, right out of the water.

Jesus says that the surest sign of God’s love is not what we have, but what we do.  The thing God calls forth from us is not belief is any particular Christian doctrine, but that we love others, with our hearts, our souls, our strength, our minds – with, indeed, all our resources.

You’d think that loving our neighbors would be clear, even if doing it has its own set of challenges, but it’s not always that easy to see what loving our neighbors will mean, and for a reason we might not expect.

You can’t be generous with what you don’t know you have.  You can’t use your power if you don’t know you have power.  And you can’t help people if you can’t see their needs.

I’m willing to guess that the rich young man didn’t think he was rich.  He didn’t realize how much more he had than everyone else, if only because he didn’t know anyone who had less than he did.  And yes, he probably had servants, but he never really saw them as people, apart from their work, so it never occurred to him that they were part of the working poor.

Here’s an example:

Do you remember the movie “Hidden Figures”? . . . the story of three African-American women working at NASA and how they helped send men into space.  Well, that’s the front story, anyway, because there’s another story there. 

Do you remember how Katherine Johnson keeps having to disappear from her desk from time to time to visit the bathroom?  But instead of just going down the hall, and being gone for, say, 15 minutes, she’s forced to go half a mile to the only building at Langley that has a rest room set aside for “colored people”… and it sometimes takes her almost an hour, going and coming.  

All her boss sees is that she’s gone, and one day he gives her a hard time about it.  She loses her temper and tells him exactly why she’s gone for such a long time.  And this white man takes up his power to change the world, and knocks down the sign for the “colored women’s restroom”, making it possible for Johnson to use the women’s room right outside her workstation door.

I don’t think it ever occurred to the boss that he had the power to change Katherine Johnson’s life until he got mad enough to do it.  And even then, what made him mad was probably not the injustice of making her walk a half mile each way to the bathroom, but the time that was wasted by that rule.  None the less, he used his power to make a change, and in the making, changed the lives of every African American woman on the campus, permanently. 

Jesus called to the rich young man to use his power, in his case wealth, to make change for the poor in his area.  We are called to do the same, to use our power to make our world better.  But first, we have to realize that we have power, that we have convictions.  In order for that to happen, we are called to see and understand our world.

Think about it:  what do we see, really see, when we look around?

Years ago, I was the interim in Bethany CT, a teeny little town on the road from New Haven to Naugatuck.  Bethany’s not much different from Brimfield, I guess… except they had more horses than people, and maybe more college professors, because homes there had been inexpensive once upon a time and they were close enough to the many schools in New Haven for an easy commute.

The year I was there, we were celebrating an anniversary, and decided to do a BIG PROJECT.  We wanted something that would be spectacular, that would make a huge pile, that would really impress the Conference Minister when he came to preach – and decided to collect disposable diapers… 

Now, not all our folks were convinced – some worried about the environment and said we should be collecting cloth diapers instead of disposables.  

Some folks really didn’t believe there was that big a need.  And some, of course, thought that collecting diapers for New Haven instead of anything for Bethany was not quite right – take care of ourselves first, right?  And then there was the discovery that, wow, those diapers were expensive… Shouldn’t we concentrate on tuna?  

So we launched an educational event.  We discovered that local day cares insisted that each baby bring in at least 2-3 disposable diapers every day.  And we learned that without reliable child care it was really hard to get and keep a job, any job, even the most menial.

We discovered that poor people can’t, by and large, use cloth diapers.  Really poor people don’t have washers and dryers.  And most public laundromats won’t allow you to wash cloth diapers in their machines.

We got into it to do something that would make a splash because we wanted to show off.  We discovered that ready access to disposable diapers was essential for a mom to be able to work.  Our church was mostly college-educated and hardly any of us had been that poor.  Our diaper campaign opened our eyes to one of the barriers that keeps poor people poor – and to the privilege we enjoyed because we had ready access to washers and dryers, and the money to fix them when they broke.

What are we here in Brimfield seeing?  And what are we missing?  What power, what gifts are we not using because we don’t realize we have them?  Who is missing from the picture?

Can we see the reasons why people who are poor, stay poor?  Can we see how hunger makes it hard for kids to learn?  Can we recognize how hard it is for parents who don’t read easily to read stories to their children?  Can we imagine a world where it’s hard to come up with clean clothes, or even diapers?

Can we see that we have the power to make a difference?  Can we see how much we have been given?  We have money.  We have prestige, stability, a reasonably safe future, where others have no safe place to take a shower or wash their clothes, much less plan for their retirement.

We are called and commissioned by God to use our eyes to see, to use our hearts to love, to use our wealth, our power to change our world, to create with God a world where all are truly welcome.  It is the work God gave us when we pledged our lives to God’s church; it is our thanks for God’s never-ending love that surrounds the whole world wide.

Give your lives, your world, true value.  Go, see truly, love wisely, build God’s community always.  

Amen.