Give Up Your Knick Knacks (and Power): A Sermon from Liesl

Gospel: Mark 10:17-31

As many of you have heard, when I first moved to Minneapolis I worked at a business that doubles as a service helping people empty their homes, and as a thrift store. As customers flooded the store every Saturday morning our job was to restock the shelves as quickly as possible. Plush chairs, dining room tables, wooden chests,  ice skates, and boxes upon boxes of knick knacks. The supply was endless.

While it was at times overwhelming, it was also a ministry to find second homes for things that once held or made meaning in another person’s life. If you have been to a baby shower or a wedding, if you have moved homes or emptied the home of a loved one, you have experienced how we make meaning with our belongings. 

We are ritual beings.
​We use outward signs to mark inward experience.

A devout man comes to Jesus and says, Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? He has kept the commandments, he has done as he has been taught. He is a good and devout man, by every outward measure. But Jesus knows there is something that weighs him down.

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.” And he went away grieving. It was too much to ask.
​
Jesus is saying, to experience the Kingdom, you’ve got to give up your stuff—and more importantly, all that it represents. You must look to God alone, God who alone is good, as the source of life. In the words of the prophet Amos, Christ says: “Come, seek the Lord and live.”

***

It is a little too easy to read this passage and say that Jesus is only talking about spiritual baggage. What is the one thing that is hardest to give up, but power?

One week ago, a report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urged that if international leaders can reduce warming from half its already stated goals, half as many people would suffer from lack of water; there would be fewer deaths from heat, smog and disease; half as many vertebrates and plants would lose their habitats; and we might not lose the coral reefs.

But in our current political environment, with the richest country and the biggest carbon polluter walking away from international climate agreements, the appeals of this UN body seem wishful at best.

What does it take for a person or people or an institution with power, to become aware of the consequences of their privilege, and to let go of their own priorities? To give something up, so that someone else, their children and grandchildren, can have a shot at a better life? Suddenly getting a camel to shimmy through a needle’s eye doesn’t sound so hard.

***

Today in Rome a man who has long been considered saint to many will be officially canonized by the Catholic church: Oscar Roméro, a priest and archbishop in El Salvador, who was martyred for his role as an activist on behalf of the poor. To Roméro, a Christian’s calling was to live in spiritual poverty, in solidarity with the oppressed. In the days leading up to his assassination, he preached:

“This is the commitment of being a Christian: to follow Christ in his incarnation. If Christ, the God of majesty, became a lowly human and lived with the poor and even died on a cross… Our Christian faith should be lived in the same way.”*

Christ, the God of majesty, came to earth to walk among us, to enter into our suffering, to liberate the poor and the poor places within us. To heal—beginning where it hurts. To comfort—beginning where we are weakest.

Jesus invites the rich man, and each of us,
to consider a Kingdom and a kinship, where giving up power results in a still greater treasure--
In a community where all people live in dignity;
where the greatest resource goes to the greatest need.
Jesus is not selling tickets to a far off reward,
He is inviting us to open our eyes to a reality that is possible today, that we already glimpse in this community and in our neighborhood.
For humans it is impossible.
But the God, for whom all things are possible, has made a way before us.
She is present with us now.

We are ritual beings.
We use outward signs to mark inward experience.
As Christians, we surround ourselves with outward signs every time we gather.
The water in this font, the bread at this table, are visible signs of invisible grace.
They tell us who we are.
That we are beloved by the God who created us,
who sees us, accepts us, and loves us where it hurts,
who opens our eyes to our blindnesses,
that we might live into the Kingdom to which God calls us:
here, in this place.

Come, seek the Lord and live.
Amen.

*Scott Wright. Oscar Romero and the Communion of the Saints: A Biography. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2016.