WHAT MUST WE DO TO INHERIT ETERNAL LIFE?
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

October 11, 2009

I have reached a time in my life that no longer allows me the freedom to no longer be reflective about age and experience.  As this year comes to an end and 2010 begins, Caela will be ordained into professional ministry within three weeks of my 30th anniversary of ordination.  Caela was not even born yet when I was ordained.  One cannot help but be reflective in situations such as this one.

I spent nearly one half of my career doing youth ministry.  I loved and I love working with youth.  I have had the pleasure and privilege of working in churches that had substantial youth ministry budgets and we were able to literally travel the world with our youth as we attempted to expose our youth to the call of God, the lure of God to serve the very real and concrete needs of people and the various creatures that we share life with in a global context.

While up in Indianapolis, our youth and advisors would travel extensively to do service projects at least two and often three times a year.  I had a basic premise that all my traveling groups needed to abide by.  My kids were required to cite it from memory.  It was a simply governing premise, "I will never do anything to intentionally harm another person, place, thing or self."   If you break the premise, then you are sent home at your parent's expense, immediately.  We always tried as a youth ministry team to exercise that final clause when we were close to home.  I would dare say that to have life simplified to a major premise when working with junior high and high school students helped us a great deal.

I was going to do youth ministry forever.  I love it still.  However, one day I looked around myself and I realized, "I'm not saving any money doing the thing that I love."   I realized that I had a basic premise of my own that I should make enough money to buy a house, own a car or two, travel and have retirement savings so that I don't have to live with my children when I get old.

I'm leaving this life review of mine simple and unreflective on several fronts on purpose.  I have, and I suspect most of you have, several basic presumptions about life that call most of the shots, that help you determine how to choose even in the most minor of situations.  It takes a lot of forethought to overcome our basic beliefs about who we are and what we are to be about doing.

The Jewish people and we who are Jesus followers are a people who have some basic premises that operate in us as people of faith.   We are fortunate that we have a book, the Bible that is filled with the stories of our faith ancestors who have been struggling to live meaningfully, faithfully and often times radically around some basic faith assumptions.

The Book of Job is my most favorite book in the whole sixty-six story lines in our Bible.  I love the Gospel of Mark, which is paired with today's Job reading.  But, I get a high when I struggle with Job's story.  What a depressing story when taken at face value!  Job is caught between a rock and hard place.  God gives him up to a direct struggle with Satan.  Job is nothing but a pawn between two greater powers.  Job, no matter what he does, will lose his partner, his children, his friends, his accumulated wealth and be left to suffer covered with shingles and boils in a dusty god-forsaken landscape.  Job is powerless, and might I add, the most moral character in the whole story.

This story was created for adults like us to listen to and ponder and wonder aloud in Hebrew  camps, schools and work places.  The question to be asked in this made for television story, "Are the underlying assumptions that God and Satan are in cahoots real?  Are we mere pawns in some divine drama?  Is having a great spouse, kids, a job and accumulated wealth a result of faithfulness and good living? 

Here is what you might be missing.  Our ancient Jewish ancestors thought the answer to all these questions were, TRUE.  They believed that God and Satan were out there somewhere and they were busy devising schemes to test our faithfulness, to lure us into goodness and tempt us toward evil. 

Have you ever wondered what was up when you memorized that line in the Lord's Prayer when Jesus had his disciples pray, "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us (God) not into temptation but deliver us from evil"?  What is God doing leading us into temptation anyway?  In the story of Job we know what Jesus is talking about.  "Don't set us up God like you did Job."   I couldn't agree more!

The story of Job is one of classic Judaism.  Job pulls himself up by his own bootstraps into life by doing good.  He follows the rules.  He honors his father and his mother and goes to Sabbath religious services and knows the commandments better than his own children's names.  His reward, according to contemporary religious thought, is that God rewards the righteous, those who live lives of religious purity—God rewards those people with wealth.  They earned it the old fashioned way by disciplined adherence to religious tradition and hard work.  The Jews did not invent it, but traditional Jewish thought certainly enhanced it.  Traditional Christianity has taken it to even higher levels of exaltation, that which many of us call the Prosperity Gospel.

The prosperity gospel is nothing more than the belief that we have what we have because God intends for us to have it because God is up there or over there somewhere deciding that our faithfulness is great enough to merit and those who don't have even enough to survive and feed their children, well, it is a matter of their failing to do what they need to do.   The prosperity gospel has a few extra chapters devoted to illness and disease and healings.  We get what we deserve.  God heals those who have somehow found God's favor. 

We blamed gay men for a lot of years as people who deserved AIDS as God's wrath for being such betrayers of God's intended designs for human sexuality.  No one deserves a disease.  We often talk about people who get lung cancer after smoking for thirty years and say,   "Well we know where that came from, now don't we?"   We say that as if they deserve lung cancer.  No one deserves any cancer.  Smoking is one of the most harsh addictions to heal from and most have been addicted to smoking through the blatant assistance of millions spent on advertising by corporations whose dividends and stock growths have benefited absolutely everyone of us in this sanctuary.

The Book of Job was written to help early Jewish men and women struggle openly with a story that is unforgettable as it leads its hearers to know how foolhardy are the belief systems that base well being on  the carrot and stick mentality.  If you believe and live right you get a carrot.  If you don't God smacks you with a stick of disease and destruction.   Neither the stick nor the carrot leaves us with a very loving God, when in another place in our Holy Scriptures we are reminded that God shares the sunshine and the rain equally with the just and the unjust.

Could it be that even if we have worked like a dog and earned great wealth and education and perhaps even good health that it has nothing to do with deserving it more than others?  There are billions of smart, hard working people who will live and die hungry and uneducated not because they lack desire to improve themselves, but because in the overwhelming majority of the cases, the opportunities that were or are ours in this sanctuary never ever even came close to materializing in the lives of most people on this  planet.  Most of us are very lucky, smart, hard workers who have a spiritual obligation to bring justice and righteousness to the vast majority of people, most of whom have nothing through no fault of their own or because God desires that they have nothing.

In my second favorite book in the Bible, Mark's Gospel from this morning second reading, Jesus has an encounter with a rich man who ran up to him and fell on his knees before him saying,  "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life."

The man wants to know what he can do to ensure his eternal life. He has kept the commandments, he has lived as devoutly as he can, and yet he still wants to know what more he can do to make sure he will merit a heavenly reward. Jesus' answer to him essentially boils down to saying, "Nothing."

"There is nothing you can do to make sure God will reward you." The observation that he still lacks "one thing" is not meant to indicate that there is one more task he can perform to earn salvation, or that giving away all his wealth to serve the poor is the one final act that will seal his everlasting deal. Instead, the call to divest himself of his wealth through giving to the poor is a call to give up the entire enterprise of attempting to do something to inherit eternal life. Wealth is an effective sign of power; what matters about wealth is not what it is in itself (apart, perhaps, from some artworks deemed precious) but what it allows its owner to do, the means it provides for its owner to exert her or his will in worldly affairs. The great danger of wealth, as Jesus explains it to his disciples, is not that wealth is somehow inherently evil.  Jesus does, after all, promise wealth "a hundredfold" to those who have given up worldly goods to follow him, but the problem with wealth is that it makes it hard to enter the kingdom of God: wealth is a constant temptation to put the working of one's own will in place of responsiveness to God's will; wealth almost inevitably constitutes a barrier to entering into right relationships of mutual well-being; wealth impedes the divine commonwealth of giving and receiving in freedom and love. Jesus' call to the rich man to give away his riches therefore amounts to a call to give up his power, to give up his desire to secure his place before God, and to accept that it is not possible for him to enter God's reign on his own. Instead, he must recognize that what is not possible for him is possible for God, that what he cannot do on his own power can be done with God's power, that his participation in the commonwealth of God is not something he can secure but something he can only accept. As it says in Hebrews, his approach to the throne of grace is enabled only by trusting in the intimate compassion of God. This passage thus poses its own form of today's question "Where is God?":  the rich man has been thinking of God as a distant overseer keeping score, as it were, of the merits earned by human creatures and dispensing rewards in a far future world; but Jesus tries to get him to see God as always present, intimate in his life, empowering him moment by moment to live into renewed relationships in which all things are possible. In the story, the rich man does not see the new aim Jesus is giving him and does not make the leap to trusting in God's creative power in him more than he trusts in his own power mediated through wealth. The question for us is whether we will.