September 16, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 4
Matthew 19:16–30

This afternoon’s sermon is one of the last in a series on well-known passages of the Bible. Today’s passage contains a commonly quoted phrase that Jesus speaks and that is often adopted well outside of the context of this passage, the phrase “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

On the surface, you may think you’re about to get a sermon all about money, one that, depending on your personal wealth and your personal views, you may either love or hate. There may be a little of that. But mostly I’m hoping to introduce you to a young man around whom the passage is built. A man who is asking important questions about his life, questions applicable to us all and much deeper than the presenting issue of wealth. The questions are about who God has made us to be; how much are we capable of, how high can we set our sights? What human limitations must we learn to accept, and how can we come to terms with failure at times when we face it. So listen as I read this story, listen as if you have not heard it before, listen for those questions, as I read from the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

● ● ●

A financial advisor named Carl Richards from Park City, Utah wrote an article about having too much stuff (“You Probably Have Too Much Stuff,” 12 August 2012 New York Times). He talked about a man named Andrew Hyde, who did an experiment in minimalism. Hyde decided to take a trip around the world and before he left, sold everything he didn’t need. He ended up only owning fifteen things and took them on his trip. He’s back home now, and home does require a few more things, so he expanded his list to thirty-nine things and gradually worked his way up to sixty. But he stopped there because he had learned to love not having so many things. Richards, the financial advisor who wrote about Andrew Hyde, was so inspired he immediately went home and found fifteen things of his own to give away, mostly inconsequential things—a tie he hadn’t worn in four years and shirts that didn’t fit anymore—but the exercise of it got him thinking about why he had so many things that were taking up so much space in his life.

When I read the article, I had a similar reaction. I went home and found a bunch of things I hadn’t been using and gave them away, and I found to my surprise that my apartment, which I sometimes complain is too small, suddenly seemed a lot bigger. Richards, being a financial planner, approached the whole experiment from an economic perspective: he walked around his apartment asking questions like, “Do I really still need that?” and “Why exactly do I own that?” and finally he got to a question that really caught my attention. He asked, “What is it costing me to own that?” He thought not only about the purchase price and what else he might have done with the money; he considered the space it was taking up in his house, the time it took him to take care of things, keep them clean, or fix them when something went wrong—all of these things he considered costs of ownership. And I was taken with the article not only because I could agree that all of those were good considerations, but also because the question he was asking is not only economic, it is deeply theological—and that’s what I want to talk about this afternoon. “What is it costing me to own that?” It’s precisely the question that is presented by Jesus in the story you heard me read just moments ago.

Jesus is traveling with his disciples and is approached by a rich young man, a man who, apparently, has a lot of stuff. It’s important to note how the narrator characterizes this man: the man asks Jesus what commandments he should obey, and we learn out of their exchange that this man keeps them all without fail. He even loves his neighbor as himself. So let’s be clear: this rich young man doesn’t seem to be some spoiled, lazy brat who doesn’t care about anyone else. We learn from their conversation that the young man has been doing all the right things. The religious laws of his time would have prescribed specific actions people should take to care for poor and vulnerable people and be otherwise socially responsible, and he seems to have fulfilled all of those obligations. He’s a good guy. Additionally, he’s not shallow. He has enough depth that in the midst of all of the things he’s doing right, he’s still got an itch that something is missing, and he wants to scratch it; he wants to figure out what it is. And Jesus tells him, “Go sell everything you own and give it to the poor.” When the man walks away devastated, Jesus’ disciples start asking about the conversation. They want to know what they are supposed to think about this rather extreme demand Jesus made on this young man who has been doing so many things right, and Jesus says something even more extreme to them, the famous and impossible turn of phrase: “It’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Listen to the extremism of Jesus’ demand: give all that you own to the poor and come follow me; it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. No wonder the disciples react the way that they do: What are we supposed to do, Jesus? If even that good man is so terribly flawed, what do you want from us? It makes me feel the same way. I like to think about Jesus as merciful and forgiving and approachable, but this makes him sound threatening and judgmental and like there’s never anything you can do to please him.

As I was trying to make some sense about this passage last week, I remembered the article about the man with only fifteen things and I thought about the economist’s reaction of going home and immediately finding fifteen things to give away and I thought about how my reaction was exactly the same, and it occurred to me that sometimes extreme examples are helpful. They compel us to act. They cause us to say to ourselves, “Well, if that guy can live on only fifteen things, I must be able to find fifteen things to get rid of. In a lot of cases, the extremism doesn’t turn us off; it inspires us. That’s the first lesson I’m trying to take from tonight’s passage. When Jesus says, “Give away all that you own,” what if I react by taking this as a challenge rather than a judgment? What if I take the command as a goal rather than an impossible dream, because usually Jesus seems full of a lot more grace than we find in this story. And he was dealing with this rich young man who had done so many other things just right. Maybe when Jesus sees someone who he knows can stand a challenge, he delivers one.

At the same time, there’s an important distinction between the article I read and the story about the rich young man. The rich young man is dismayed by the challenge. He doesn’t run off to give away all his possessions; he hangs his head. It says he “went away grieving.” There’s no doubt that what Jesus says to him really hits him where it hurts.

This is where I think we really see the essence of the passage. The young man comes to Jesus looking for something. He feels incomplete; he feels like there is something missing in his life, and he wants to know what it is. For this man it was money, but with a different man on a different day, Jesus might have said to get rid of something else: his drinking or his drugs, his lust for power—fill in the blank. The essence of the passage is that Jesus knows an essential truth of human behavior: for many of us who feel like something is missing, that’s because there’s something in the way. To use the language of the article I read, Jesus knows what it is costing the rich man to own those things. It is costing him his spirit, his energy, his happiness.

It seems to me that, in a lot of cases when this happens to us, we don’t really need to be able to ask Jesus about it in person. We know exactly what is getting in our way, and we just don’t want to talk about it because it’s hard. We put lots of time and effort into talking about—and changing—all kinds of things about our lives that are easy to change, things we haven’t invested in very deeply. But it’s the things that we’ve put the most into, the things that are costing us a lot to keep, that are often the hardest to get rid of, hardest even to talk about. What’s in your way?

And this is the really deep challenge of the passage, but it is also where the good news of the passage comes in, the news that makes it not an impossible challenge but an invitation into a relationship with God. You see, Jesus offers the challenge about the camel and the needle, but he offers something else along with it. “For [human beings],” he says, “what I am asking is impossible, but with God, all things are possible.”

We can sure beat ourselves into the ground all day long thinking about the things we can’t do as well as we would like or the things that are impossible for us. “Well,” we think, “I’d like to make some changes in my life, but I’m just not sure I’m quite ready. What if the timing isn’t right? What if I’m not able to do it? What if I don’t get it right? What if everyone sees it and knows that I’m a failure? What if I have to acknowledge that I failed, that it was too much for me, that I tried and I couldn’t make it happen?” These are thoughts all of us have known at one time or another, and they have to do with our human tendency to put everything on ourselves—to give ourselves every bit of the credit when we succeed and to feel like we must bear the entire burden ourselves when we face a challenge. But this is not Christ’s way of living. Christ’s way of living is to say, “Yes, for human beings what I am asking may be impossible, but with God, all things are possible.”

A few weeks ago, my colleague Tom Rook retired. Tom had been in the ministry for decades; he is one of the wisest people I have known. And on the last day that he led worship, in a kind of summation of things that had become important to him over years of talking to people about faith, he said these words in a prayer:

“God, give us courage and strength for the difficult places, but not so much strength that we feel sufficient within ourselves and look not to you for our greatest confidence. Grant us hope for the way ahead, but not so much hope in our own powers that we locate ultimate security outside you” (Tom Rook, Prayers of the People, 26 August 2012).

That is faithful living. Not that we would feel judged or inadequate in the face of the greatest commands Jesus places upon us, but that we would be challenged and inspired by them and also that we would be comforted by the knowledge that God wants to help, that God forgives us, that God longs for us to succeed, so we can lean on God.

So whatever it might be that is standing in your way today, my word to you is this: Do not be afraid. Do not go away grieving from this service tonight; do not hang your head and swear that it cannot be done. Instead of seeing judgment in God’s word to us tonight, accept God’s grace and forgiveness and leave this place tonight in a spirit of hope, leaning on God’s grace to hold you up where you cannot hold yourself, because for God, all things are possible.

Go out into the world and see not the failures and the shortcomings you have, but consider what you learned that might help you try again.

Go out into the world and see not the mistake you made or the wrong you committed, but go knowing that we believe in a God who forgives us and believes in fresh starts.

Go out into the world and see not the impossible obstacle but the challenge that God can help you begin.

Go out into the world and understand yourself not as a solitary human for whom so many things seem impossible, but as a child of God, for whom all things are possible. Amen.