{"id":3225,"date":"2021-10-10T11:00:48","date_gmt":"2021-10-10T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3225"},"modified":"2021-10-13T09:49:29","modified_gmt":"2021-10-13T13:49:29","slug":"jesus-second-favorite-topic-pauls-favorite-verb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2021\/10\/10\/jesus-second-favorite-topic-pauls-favorite-verb\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesus\u2019 Second Favorite Topic, Paul\u2019s Favorite Verb"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

Mark 10:17\u201327<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear just the sermon<\/a><\/p>\n

Jesus is setting out on a journey to Judea when he is interrupted by a stranger.\u00a0 A man runs up to him, kneels at his feet, calls him \u201cGood Teacher\u201d, and asks him a question:\u00a0 \u201cWhat must I do to inherit eternal life?\u201d\u00a0 Jesus responds:\u00a0 \u201dWhy do you call me good?\u00a0 Only God is good, and you already know the Commandments.\u201d\u00a0 The man says, \u201cI\u2019ve been fulfilling these commandments for years.\u201d\u00a0 Then Jesus tells him to do one more thing, the one thing he hasn\u2019t done:\u00a0 he is to sell what he owns and give the money to the poor.\u00a0 And when he\u2019s done that, he can come and follow Jesus as a disciple.\u00a0 The man, who is shocked and grieved by this answer because he has many possessions, leaves without further ado.\u00a0 Then Jesus turns to the disciples, and tells them that it is very hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God, so hard that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.\u00a0 The disciples are perplexed, and disbelieving:\u00a0 \u201cThen who can be saved?\u201d they ask.\u00a0 Jesus tells them that for mortals it is impossible to save a rich person, but not for God.\u00a0 For God, all things are possible.<\/p>\n

Money is Jesus\u2019 second-favorite topic in the Gospels.\u00a0 He talks about it more than any other subject except for the subject of prayer.\u00a0 This story of a rich man and Jesus at first glance seems to have a fairly straightforward point:\u00a0 If you want to get into the Kingdom of God, if you want to follow Jesus, you have to give your possessions away to the poor.\u00a0 But there are aspects of this story that are not straightforward, that reveal Jesus and those who come to him in new ways, ways that are very Markan in their upset of the prevailing social and religious norms.<\/p>\n

First, we have noted before that in Mark, it is strangers, often desperate strangers, who recognize Jesus for who he is, who he is for them.<\/em>\u00a0 The man in this story is devout, following the commandments of his faith for years.\u00a0 Yet something is missing.\u00a0 He lives a good life, he is a good person, and yet whatever he means by \u201ceternal life\u201d eludes him.\u00a0 He wants it so much, he must know<\/em> what he must do<\/em>.\u00a0 And when he sees Jesus in the street, he runs to him and falls at his feet and recognizes him as \u201cGood Teacher\u201d.\u00a0 Then he asks Jesus to teach him how to inherit \u2013 an interesting word \u2013 how to inherit that which eludes him.<\/p>\n

Jesus responds by telling him he knows what to do, and the man responds that he has been doing all that for years, with the clear implication that he still does not feel that he has inherited eternal life.<\/p>\n

And here is where things take a turn.\u00a0 Jesus looks at this man and loves him.\u00a0 It is Jesus<\/em> who recognizes something about the man<\/em> that he, Jesus, wants to encourage.\u00a0 So, like a good teacher, he tells the man what he needs.\u00a0 Eternal life is not inherited, like money or possessions from a family member.\u00a0 If fact, money and possessions might get in the way.\u00a0 In order to experience eternal life, this man will need to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, so that he will be able to receive a different, heavenly treasure.\u00a0 And when he has done that, Jesus says, he can come and follow Jesus as a disciple.\u00a0 The man is shocked.\u00a0 What kind of answer is this?\u00a0 It is not an easy thing even to consider, even to discuss.\u00a0 He goes away grieving at the choice the Good Teacher has given him:\u00a0 his possessions, or eternal life.<\/p>\n

Jesus then turns to the disciples and lays it out for them:\u00a0 it is very difficult for rich people to enter the Kingdom of God, to experience eternal life.\u00a0 The disciples are at first perplexed.\u00a0 They don\u2019t even understand what Jesus is saying.\u00a0 Then they are astounded \u2013 how can riches and all that comes with them be a problem?\u00a0 If riches are a problem, who can be saved?\u00a0 Jesus tells them they are right to ask that.\u00a0 With mortals it is impossible for riches to be an unalloyed good \u2013 as Amos reminds us in our text this morning.\u00a0 \u00a0Only with God can riches be just<\/em> a good, a way to the Kingdom.<\/p>\n

Now Paul is not rich, even though he is a citizen of Rome as well as of Israel.\u00a0 Instead, he has been raising money for the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, and also is starting a journey from Corinth to Jerusalem to deliver that money.\u00a0 After that he plans to go to Rome to invite the church there to sponsor his mission to Spain.\u00a0 So before he leaves Corinth he writes the letter to the church at Rome to introduce himself and his work.\u00a0 The letter centers on the fact that salvation and justification \u2013 or being in right relationship to God \u2013 both come through faith, faith \u00a0in Christ.\u00a0 He urges the Romans to hold fast to faith in Christ, and not to the works of the law, and he makes the point that the freedom that Christ gives does not absolve believers from responsibility to others and does not absolve them from God\u2019s law and God\u2019s will.\u00a0 Paul also writes that the journey from Jerusalem will be dangerous, as he is once more in trouble with the religious authorities of both church and temple.\u00a0 So he doesn\u2019t really know wen he will arrive.<\/p>\n

And indeed it is a dangerous and time-consuming journey:\u00a0 Paul is arrested in Jerusalem, and is taken in charge by the Romans.\u00a0 He then undergoes trial by the Jewish religious authorities, took a journey to defend himself before the Roman governor, spent two years under the equivalent of house arrest, undergoes a trial and defense before the new Roman governor, and finally he appeals to the Emperor for a hearing, as was his right as a Roman citizen. Then, before he was taken to the Emperor, he had to defend himself before King Agrippa, and only after that was \u00a0he taken to the ship to begin the journey to the Emporer.<\/p>\n

On that journey, there was a terrific storm, the ship was wrecked, and Paul spent three more months in Malta.\u00a0 After another week or so Paul arrived in Rome, in the chains of a prisoner and in Roman military custody, but allowed to preach and teach without restraint for two years, and finally to meet the church to which he introduced himself in his letter.<\/p>\n

Now even before he wrote to the church at Rome from Corinth, Paul\u2019s life was one of adventure, conflict, and danger.\u00a0 So it is perhaps not a surprise that Paul\u2019s favorite verb is \u201cendure\u201d.\u00a0 \u201cEndure\u201d derives from the Latin in durare<\/em>, which means \u201cto harden\u201d, and \u201cendure\u201d itself means \u201cto remain firm under suffering or misfortune without yielding\u201d, \u201cto regard with acceptance or tolerance\u201d, \u201cto continue in the same state\u201d, \u201cto keep doing something difficult, unpleasant, or painful for a long time\u201d.<\/p>\n

We can relate.\u00a0 We have endured a great deal over the last year and a half, and counting.\u00a0 Maybe not trials and shipwrecks, but certainly a degree of what felt <\/em>like imprisonment and isolation for a very long time.\u00a0 It almost made it worse to know that this was world-wide, that the pandemic made it so that there was no escape, no place other<\/em> we could go.\u00a0 We have also endured political upheavals, the fires and floods of global climate change, the present traumatic revelations of ongoing violent injustices to people already historically repressed for generations. Not to mention the deaths of loved ones, friends, and colleagues, economic instability, and inequality of access to economic and medical relief.\u00a0 And there is no end to any of this in sight, as these circumstances have not changed, and don\u2019t look to change any time soon.\u00a0 It seems our endurance will have to continue for a while.\u00a0 It is a hard state of being, to continue to endure.<\/p>\n

The reason Paul can encourage us to endure so often is that he does not see it as an isolated action.\u00a0 Its result, endurance, is produced by<\/em> something, and itself produces something<\/em> else<\/em>, and that something else produces something else, and so on.\u00a0 Endurance is part of a process in the life of faith, which reveals God at work in us in love, toward peace and grace and glory.\u00a0 This process begins with suffering.<\/p>\n

Suffering here is not something to be avoided \u2013 in fact, for many reasons even in the life of faith, it is unavoidable.\u00a0 Paul even says that we can boast in our sufferings, knowing that it is in them that God works with us in the process of reconciliation with God, and so with the process of reconciliation with ourselves and with our neighbor.\u00a0 Even if we are not at the point of boasting about our sufferings, as one of my mentors used to say, we should not waste them.\u00a0 We can learn from them, explore them, find out what we want instead, let them produce the endurance that will keep us going over the long haul.<\/p>\n

In faith, that endurance produces character \u2013 the particular combination of qualities in a person that makes them different from others.\u00a0 And it is that kind of character \u2013 produced through endurance out of suffering \u2013 it is that kind of character in a person or group of people that produces hope.\u00a0 This hope will not disappoint us, because God\u2019s love has been poured into us by the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 And God\u2019s love for us is proven in the fact that Christ died for us even when we were still caught up in sin, died for us even when we were still God\u2019s enemies.\u00a0 And, now that we are reconciled to God, God\u2019s love is proven through Christ\u2019s life, which teaches us how to live through our sufferings to hope.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to our story of Jesus and the man with enough money to have many possessions.\u00a0 One of the real challenges, even sufferings, of the last eighteen months or so has been to come to grips with the fact that money, or the lack of it, so definitively determined people\u2019s experiences of this time.\u00a0 To have money, or not, determined the kind of experiences<\/em> that people had and so the kind of endurance<\/em> that people had to develop.\u00a0 Money, or not, even determined the number of choices that people had so as to retain some semblance of control over their lives.\u00a0 Money, or not, even determined the ability that people had to live rather than die.<\/p>\n

Now these disparate experiences of money and the power it can grant have been around for a long time.\u00a0 Some of these tensions between different experiences around money and power from long ago remain with us this weekend.\u00a0 Traditionally this weekend has been a time to honor and celebrate Christopher Columbus as an explorer\/adventurer, and by extension to honor and celebrate explorers\/adventurers in general.\u00a0 These were people who had the money and power to travel here, to new places unknown to them, money and power to insert themselves into these new places and their new experiences, and money and power to insert themselves into the lives of other people to whom they were strange and who were strange to them.\u00a0 These explorer\/adventurers certainly had much to endure:\u00a0 ocean voyages in wooden sailing ships about the size of this chancel were long, messy, dirty, prone to disease, plagued by storms and heat, and often boring when they were not full of peril.\u00a0 We remember their courage to face their unknown in the face of hardship and danger.\u00a0 And, there was the adventure, the new and different, the opportunity for gain of all kinds, and welcome when they returned home from what was to them<\/em> a voyage of discovery in large measure a choice of a voyage of discovery to them<\/em>.\u00a0 The endurance required of the explorers\/adventurers was of the kind limited to the conditions and length of the expedition.<\/p>\n

Increasingly many people now acknowledge that the people and places the explorer\/adventurers encountered were not \u201cdiscovered\u201d at all.\u00a0 They were already here:\u00a0 the people were indigenous to the places, were deeply settled in the places and had been for a while, and had highly developed customs and cultures and systems and networks and spiritual awareness.\u00a0 As a result of this contemporary acknowledgement of these realities, many people feel it is appropriate to honor and celebrate these indigenous peoples, whose endurance developed to be very different from that of the explorer\/adventurers, due to the many negative results of their encounters with the explorers\/adventurers, \u00a0and whose endurance has had to last so much longer through so many more generations, and counting, of settler colonialism.\u00a0 The Boston University calendar marks tomorrow as Indigenous Peoples Day, a Boston University holiday on which to reflect, to remember indigenous peoples with ceremony and celebration.<\/p>\n

Now for us all<\/em>, on top of the experiences of the last eighteen months, while it has been going on for a while, the recent Pandora revelations have underscored the fact that, world-wide, access<\/em> to money \u2013 and thus access to power \u2013 is becoming more and more limited for more and more people, while more and more money<\/em> \u2013 and thus power \u2013 is being hoarded <\/em>by fewer and fewer people.\u00a0 In our story today, the man with many possessions is shocked and grieving when he realizes that he has to make a choice \u2013 his possessions are getting in the way, and he cannot have both them and the eternal life he also wants so much.\u00a0 We too are shocked and grieving, and there is anger and resentment too, as we are astounded at the increasing number and sweep of the choices we will have to make, at the hard allocation decisions around our possessions of resources, money, and time we will have to make if we are to live physically on earth as well as eternally in heaven, at the increasingly limited time in which we have to make decisions before important options are by definition off the table.\u00a0 It is easy to feel overwhelmed, easy to feel as if it is impossible to do anything.\u00a0 A good end to all this is not yet clear.<\/p>\n

We do not know what the man with many possessions decided.\u00a0 Nor do we know if Paul ever had the chance to appeal to the Emperor.\u00a0 And, their stories are still stories of hope.\u00a0 Jesus loved the man with many possessions, and taught him what he needed to do to attain what he wanted so much. Then Jesus invited him to companions and provision and more things to learn and do with Jesus and companions, and a life of faith and yes, eternal life, after he had done that one last necessary thing.\u00a0 And while the man went away shocked and grieving, he did not dismiss out of hand the idea of selling his possessions for the poor and following Jesus.\u00a0 He may have started on the way to changing his mind about what was really important, and about what he thought he knew about the world.\u00a0 He now might see new possibilities for himself and others, and act on them.<\/p>\n

As for Paul, he had not only endured and survived, but had come to see the life of faith in Jesus as a process, which reveals the love of God for us in all our circumstances, from suffering through<\/em> to the hope that does not disappoint.<\/p>\n

We can take these stories to our hope too.\u00a0 This last Friday on the PBS Newshour there was an interview with the great African-American dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones about his latest work, \u201cDeep Blue Sea\u201d.\u00a0 At the end of the interview he noted that \u201cArt \u2026 might not take away all of people’s pain, but it might do something else, which is just as good: \u00a0give people a context in which they can endure.\u201d\u00a0 Art does indeed do that, \u00a0and, even more for us as believers, it is faith that gives us the unifying context for all the others in which we can endure.\u00a0 Faith in Jesus, who loves us and recognizes what is important in us and will encourage us.\u00a0 Faith in Jesus whose life embodies the Gospel and who through his life teaches us what is necessary for a life that is both earthly and eternal.\u00a0 Faith in the love of God for us even when we sin or are confused, the love that supports us in our suffering, endurance, character building, and hope \u2013 all the circumstances of our lives.\u00a0 Faith that God\u2019s love, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, will also lead us to make good decisions, even about money and power, so that we can<\/em> endure to meet our challenges even in our<\/em> time, with grace and flourishing.\u00a0 So may we hold fast to our faith, and so keep<\/em> faith with God, ourselves, our neighbors, and all of creation.\u00a0 For with God, all things are possible.<\/p>\n

Amen.<\/p>\n

-The Rev. Dr. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Minister for Visitation<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service Mark 10:17\u201327 Click here to hear just the sermon Jesus is setting out on a journey to Judea when he is interrupted by a stranger.\u00a0 A man runs up to him, kneels at his feet, calls him \u201cGood Teacher\u201d, and asks him a question:\u00a0 \u201cWhat must I do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3225"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3229,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3225\/revisions\/3229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}