October 12, 2003
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture:
Job 23:1-9,
16-17; Psalm 22:1-11, Mark 10:17-27
"CROP: Walking the Talk, the Camel Walk"
Let us pray for those of us CROP-walking today (Please stand) and for
those of us CROP-talking, with our financial support, which could be all
of us! Just seek out a CROP-walker to support after worship!
CROP-walkers walk the simplest talk: We walk that others might eat! We
walk that others might eat. Another way of saying, we live simply, that
others may simply live. And that is the "camel walk" Jesus
calls us to this morning. The walk of learning how much can live
without. How much more simply we 6 percent, we 6 people out of the world’s
every 100 people, now consuming 50 percent of the world’s resources,
leaving the other 94 people to try to get by on the other 50 percent, --
how much more simply we could be living, that others might simply live.
I know I want to learn and to grow to become more a
"gleaner" and sharer of God, and of the life-sources and
resources of God, than I am a "hoarder" and keeper of God for
myself. I want to follow Job, the psalmist, and Jesus here. They seem to
"glean" God in fleeting glimpses and glances, in bits and
pieces, and fits and starts. Job is here responding to friends who want
to "fix" God for him, "make sense" of God for him,
rationalize God, moralize God, justify and explain God away. Martin
Buber says God cannot be known and explained but only addressed. Dag
Hammarskjöld of the United Nations says, "I pray to the One I do
not know but to whom I belong." In the "Jesus at 2000"
videos and questions at 10 am Tuesday mornings (Please join us!) we are
"gleaning" the God of Jesus, not only in Christianity, but in
other traditions of faith as well!
We live in that kind of world today, where everyone holds a part of
the elephant, a piece of the puzzle, and we cannot see the "whole
thing" without taking in everyone’s part, fitting in everyone’s
piece. God cannot be calmed and controlled, tamed and trained, to be
kept safe in our respective places of worship. God can only be wrested
and wrestled, engaged and endured in the midst of the everyday world.
Job here respects himself, as well as he does God. He lives in the midst
of suffering. He knows he is treated unfairly. He knows he does not
deserve this, no matter how his friends may revel in the misery of his
company!
Job longs to go before God even as his judge, trusting in God to hear
him and take mercy on him. But Job cannot even find where God lives!
Cannot even get an appointment! There is no perceiving, no holding to
God. Job only feels faintness and terror and, perhaps like King Lear in
the storms of family life, wishes to vanish in darkness, even in death.
Brothers and sisters, sometimes there is no understanding! There is only
"standing under," as we say, for the rains of God fall, the
storms of God dump, on the just and the unjust alike. We only live by
perpetual questing, questioning, seeking and searching, refusing and
resisting to take any cosmic "NO" for our "final
answer!" in life. We will not be denied. Elie Wiesel says God loves
us for our courage to stand up to God!
The psalmist knows that feeling of forsakenness here. Jesus carries
these words to the cross! If not only Job but Jesus experience this kind
of darkness, this kind of distance, from God, who are we not to? How can
we not identify with them? Have we not been here, calling on God all
day? And hearing no answer? If not for ourselves, then surely for
others? For all the suffering world? Have we not been here, crying to
God all night? And finding no rest? The poet in our Words for Meditation
sees John of the Cross, "suffering from sleepless fears,"
lighting a lamp, watching the toadstools grow on the wall of his cell!
Any of us been there yet? Close? Father’s violin, mother’s glasses,
grandmother’s cane -- the things of this world, God love them, the
poet observes, walk with us as far as they can, only to leave us there,
on the abyss. Things of this world, even, especially, our wealth in this
world, like so many camels’ humps, pushing through needles’ eyes.
With the psalmist we find ourselves wondering how generations before
us could put such faith, such trust, in this God. How could they know
themselves to be so delivered, so saved? Does our failure to find what
they found before us, or to find it the way that they found it, mean we
are less than human? Like worms to be scorned, derided, rejected,
outcast? Why not, then, give up on God? On faith? On trust? Why not look
out for, take care of, ourselves? Why not abandon any such plan we ever
thought God to intend for us in this grim world?
Please! Let none of us have to pretend to a state of holiness or even
wholeness! Let none of us have to check any "unholy" and
broken parts of us at the door! To act always as if "nothing’s
wrong." Let none of us have to stay home from church out of anger
and shame at our "failure" always to find perfect faith! We
wonder, would we welcome Job or the psalmist? Would we let bleeding
Jesus come in?
Worship needs to be time when we can weep and wail and gnash our holy
teeth. "Act out" in our fears and frustrations. We have got to
be able to trust our experience, to bring our whole selves with us, and
to name what is happening to us for ourselves! We do not need any
friends to "fix" God, or us! As the gospel song puts it,
"Lord! Help me to hold out! Lord! Help me to hold out. Lord. Help
me to hold out, until my change comes!" The race is not to the
swift, says Paul, or to those without any humps in their backs, we might
add, but to those who endure to the end! Look always to the one on the
cross, fully human, freely alive. Does anyone here really want a
"savior," one who saves and sets free, who heals and makes
whole, unless that savior knows and accepts every last thing about us? A
savior who has not "been there," who has not "been
us," themselves? I am so glad to know Jesus suffers as we do for
walking his talk, for practicing what he preaches, acting on his
beliefs, his values and his commitments. I am so glad to know Job keeps
faith against such impossible odds only God can reverse.
Sisters and brothers, our sickness in this culture, as Jesus knows it
would be, is affluence. Affluenza! We are possessed by possession,
addicted to accumulation, of so much more than we need. We place
ourselves at such risk in the eyes of the rest of the world. We leave
others so little to lose by striking out in defiance of our abundance.
How much more "gated," protected, defended, from the world and
from one another, can we possibly be? Let’s not even cite the
so-called "defense" budget. It is so offensive to all the
world!
Jesus’ confrontation with this man of obvious social/religious
status leads not to concern for his riches, per se, but to concern for
his very soul! Our affluence comes between us: between God and us,
between God’s world and us, between one another and us, between our
own purest human selves and us. We have to be shown, even as Job, the
psalmist, and Jesus, how much we can learn to live without! How little
we really need, to be fully human and freely alive. Otherwise, we are
slaves of our own hoarding and keeping for ourselves, the very
"gating," protecting, defending, we know is destroying our
place in this world and on this earth. It is not so much, or not only,
at least, that we are sinning persons. We are a failing species. Jesus
comes to redeem the whole so-called "human" race!
But redemption, which is repentance, which is reparation, and
restitution, and restoration to right relationship – Redemption begins
with each one of us! It is not easy. It is easier for those poor camels,
-- those strange-looking "horses made by committee!" – who
get by on so little for so long. Jesus invites us, in suffering love, to
do the one thing needful to save our souls, and perhaps our species as
well: Give up our excess, our wealth. Give it up to the poor. Share what
God has given for all. It is one thing to talk of justice. It is another
to walk it. To CROP-walk and camel-walk it. Justice is love in action!
Justice is love among persons and peoples. Justice is living as if we
were just one people among so many, just one faith, one color, one
culture, one language among so many, just one nation among so many, even
just one species among so many.
As we know by Jesus’ call and this man’s response, justice is
often a choice between "givings up." Either we give up on our
wealth, or we give up on our faith. We cannot serve them both. Jesus
knows how hard this is, even as Job and the psalmist do. It is the whole
point of his teaching. As Frederick Buechner paraphrases Jesus in this
story, It is harder for us to give up our wealth, our illusions of all
the security we believe wealth affords us, than for Nelson Rockefeller
to slip through the night deposit slot of the First National City Bank!
We would rather worship Jesus than follow him. He is, literally, a very
"hard act to follow!" But he is an act! An action! A walk. A
journey. Even a "trip!" Jesus always begins, like the journey
of a thousand miles, with our next step, whatever that step might be for
each one of us, a step for justice, a step for peace.
Jesus does not fall for this man’s appeal to his supposed
"goodness." Only God is good. The rest of us are not even
candidates. Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement used to say to
those who would make her a saint, You cannot get rid of me that easily!
Much less does Jesus fall for the question about "eternal
life." He cuts from the empty pursuit of life after death to the
full chase of life before death. Jesus’ only real question of him, of
us, seems to be, With so many poor and needy, so many oppressed and
exploited, all around us, how do we, in good faith, get so rich? How do
we stay so rich? Compared to the rest of the world. How do we explain,
how do we account for ourselves? Not only to Jesus, but to our own
children, our grandchildren, who have to inherit this world, and this
earth?
This man and we seem to presume we "inherit" eternal life
as we, and those after us will, "inherit" the vast estates of
this nation, this world. Not so fast, Jesus exclaims! Can you do the
camel walk? Can we do the camel walk! Is "eternal life" ours
to accumulate? Ours to consolidate? Ours to control? Like property?
Privilege? Prerogative? Like so many King Lears dividing up kingdoms
just as we choose? Do we know any families, any parents, like that? Do
we know any congregations, any preachers, like that? Do we know any
states, any governors, or ex-governors, like that? Do we know any
nations, any presidents, like that? Let us all count the ways! But let
us begin with ourselves. So much of what we accumulate
"belongs" to somebody else. Somebody else "belongs"
to it! Julie’s grandparents lost a farm in the Great Depression.
Anyone else’s family do that? Or lose a small business? A livelihood?
A home? In that, or in any depression?
Jesus pleads with us for the good of our souls! Go, sell, give to the
poor! In John Wesley’s terms, earn all we can, save all we can, give
all we can! Give, share, as if our very lives, in faith, depend upon it!
To pass through the eye of the needle, to walk the camel walk, means to
place all our faith, all our trust, in God and not in wealth. It means
to reject the whole premise that wealth is some sure sign of God’s
pleasure with, God’s approval of us! Finally, this story is not about
wealth at all, but about some and some place beyond all wealth, some
hope, some dream of a world where there are no "rich" and no
"poor." Whoever can bring such impossible visions to pass?
Only God, for whom all things are possible. And God chooses to start
with us! God chooses to start with us.
Amen.
