Sermon for Sunday, August 9, 2015
“A Little Less Ego”
United Church of Christ, Clemson, SC
Mark
10:17-22
In the early
part of the 20th Century—as well as many, many years before—both men
and women would give up their ordinary, normal lives in the world to enter
monastic communities. This decision was a radical departure for some people
like Thomas Merton while for others like Mother Teresa, it was a natural
flowing of love into contemplative action. After a rambunctious youth and
adolescence, Merton entered Gethsemane Abbey, a Trappist Monastery in Kentucky,
and the strictest religious orders in the Catholic Church, and arguably became the most
influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. Referring to race and peace as the two most urgent issues
of our time, Merton was a strong supporter of the nonviolent civil rights
movement, which he called "certainly the greatest example of Christian
faith in action in the social history of the United States." For his
social activism Merton endured severe criticism, from Catholics and
non-Catholics alike, who assailed his political writings as unbecoming of a
monk.
The other
memorable contemplative activist of our time, Mother Teresa, went to the
streets to help the poor of Calcutta. Like Merton, her work was not without
criticism, but she developed a number of communities over the years of her
vocation which still work to help the poor throughout the world; work which, I
believe is the result of her contemplative life. In the Gospel for today, Jesus
is busy blessing and healing when he encounters a rich man who asks him a
question. I believe we can make an important connection between the work of
contemplative activism and this story of the rich man.
Can you
visualize this scene? In the previous passage, Jesus has been blessing the
children—one of those lovely acts that shows us his compassion and wisdom. And
now Jesus is setting out on a journey, but a man runs up and kneels before him.
The man—perhaps a young man; perhaps even the son of someone in the crowd—kneels
there and asks Jesus how he can earn eternal life.
And, so,
Jesus recites the Commandments—the bedrock of Judaism—to him but the rich man
(perhaps impatiently) tells Jesus, “Yes, yes, I know these Commandments. I’ve
followed them from the time I could understand what it meant to obey God.” But then, Jesus spells out the demands for
the rich man that the man cannot fathom. Jesus tells him that the riches he has
accumulated in his life are in the way of his entering the Kingdom of God. You
see, the rich man thought that he could own all his possessions without any
responsibility to anyone but God. If he just knew what God demanded, he would
have eternal life. But Jesus effectively exposes the misperceptions and
counterfeits of following rules that have shaped the faith of the rich man.
Jesus,
however, does not leave him hanging, but perhaps, in retrospect, the rich man
would have preferred uncertainty instead of the answer that he received. Jesus
tells him, “Sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
Now, this
Gospel lesson actually comes in the Revised Common Lectionary in October, which
in my Episcopal tradition is known as “stewardship season.” However, I think
there is so much more here than what we do with personal wealth. What Jesus is
asking the rich man is to embrace a change of perspective along with changing
his behavior in a way that is both radical and difficult. Could you do it?
Could I? And, if we could do it, what would that stance look like?
Over the
past couple of years, I have had the privilege of becoming a member of The
Northumbria Community, a new monasticism group based in, of all places,
Northumbria, United Kingdom. Last summer my husband and I made a journey there,
and I made my vows as a Companion in the Community. The Northumbria Community
is a dispersed community, much like the Iona Community in Scotland. Companions
live all over the world, but there is also a Mother House which is lovingly
referred to as The Nether Springs.
The
Northumbria Community does not own the property on which the Mother House sits.
There is a house team that volunteers to run The Nether Springs, and some stay
there for six months, some stay for a year or two and some stay for longer.
Their only “salary” is room and board. In addition, each new Companion is
expected to volunteer for one week during his or her first year in Community.
People come from all over the world to make retreats at the Mother House and to
take some quiet time for reflection and rest. Those of us who are Companions
ascribe to a Rule of vulnerability and availability, promise to say the Daily
Office, and to live the heretical imperative. Of course, no one in the
Community has the Rule down to a science, and, in fact, those who have worked
the Rule for a while say it’s a messy process. The people living at The Nether
Springs practice a common life where they say the Office together, eat
together, wash dishes together, and even change sheets in the guest rooms
together.
The rich man
in today’s Gospel followed the Commandments, the letter of the law, but he was
distracted by his wealth. Jesus goes on to say in the passage that follows that
it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle. It’s not the wealth that is the problem, but rather one’s
attitude toward possessions that make it difficult to “be saved.”
I tell you
this background on The Community because we have embraced that absolute trust
that comes from living from our contemplative center. The reason the Community
now resides at Acton Home Farm is because the owner of Heaton Hall where they
previously resided gave them notice, and they had to move out rather
immediately. The same day of the notice, the invitation came from the owner of
Acton. He told the overseers that he had some property, and he wondered if the
Community might be able to do something with it. As it turns out, after some
refurbishing, it has made a wonderful retreat center with a home-like
atmosphere—complete with the comforting lowing of cattle.
To put it
another way, listen to this story from Everything Belongs by Richard
Rohr.
“Less than a block from where I used
to live in downtown Albuquerque there is a sidewalk where the homeless often
sit against the wall to catch the winter sun. Once I saw a fresh graffiti chalked
clearly on the pavement. It touched me so profoundly that I immediately went
home and wrote it in my journal. It said, “I watch how foolishly man guards his
nothing—thereby keeping us out. Truly, God is hated here.” I can only imagine
what kind of life experience enabled this person to write in such a cutting but
truthful way. I understood anew why Jesus seemed to think that the expelled
ones had a head start in understanding his message. Usually they have been
expelled from what was unreal anyway—the imperial systems of culture, which
demand “in” people and “out” people, victors and victims. In God’s reign
“everything belongs,” even the broken and poor parts. Until we have admitted
this in our own soul, we will usually perpetuate expelling systems in the outer
world of politics and class. Dualistic thinking begins in the soul and moves to
the mind and eventually moves to the streets. True prayer, however, nips the lie
in the bud. It is usually experienced as tears, surrender, or forgiveness.”
Rohr goes on
to say, “Living in this consumer-driven world, we are often infected by what
some call “affluenza,” a toxic and blinding disease which makes it even more
difficult for us to break through to the center. Our skin-encapsulated egos are
the only self that most of us know, and this is where we usually get trapped.
…Most of us have to be taught how to see; true seeing is the heart of
spirituality today.”
This past
week, I spent five days at Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner on retreat. I had not
been to Mepkin in several years, and it was very comforting and challenging to
return to a place I had frequented for a number of years. One of the monks, Fr.
Christian, had recently passed over to the other side, and I found myself
missing his mischievous grin. Once when preaching, Fr. Christian used the term
“Thy ‘Thingdom’ Come.” This phrase has stayed with me all these years as the defining
point of how our possessions can and do own us.
So, what
does Jesus offer the rich man? Nowhere else is his distaste of wealth more
stark, except perhaps in the story of the money changers in the Temple. Jesus
wants us to realize it’s not about the “bottom line,” the THINGDOM, but rather
it is about the sacred in life—and everything is sacred—even the homeless man
under the bridge—when we look on life in love.
“Human
existence is neither perfectly consistent (as rational and control-needy people
usually demand it be), nor is it incoherent chaos (what cynics, agnostics, and
unaware people expect it to be); instead, St. Bonaventure claims human life has a cruciform pattern. It
is a “coincidence of opposites,” a collision of cross-purposes; we are all
filled with contradictions needing to be reconciled.
And that is
what Jesus was trying to tell the rich man. His outer life was overwhelmed with
the chaos of wealth. His inner life was a mess because while he followed the
rules, he had no real experience of God at the center. The rich man wanted
eternal life, but he was not willing to let go of the very things that stood in
his way!
So, what is
the task before us when we consider what Jesus says to the rich man? He asked
the rich man to give up his wealth—to sell his possessions and give to the
poor. For us, Jesus may be asking that we give up our attachment to
consumerism, racism, ageism, or chauvinism. Maybe he is asking us to give up
our judgmental distaste or fear of others who hang onto those “isms” because
they need to keep others in their places in order to make sense of their own
lives.
The most
telling line in this Gospel passage is “Jesus looked on him and loved him.” In
speculating why this line seems so poignant to me, I discovered that there are
a limited number of concepts in today’s spirituality that make good sense to
me. Living in the present moment is certainly one of them. Stop judging is
another one. Having a little less focus on ego, however, opens the door to the
most important teaching which has been around from the very beginning. We are
told to love. In the story of the rich man, Jesus does what he tells us to do.
We are to look on others with love. We are also told to look on ourselves with
love. When we do this, we become the
Christ; we have done as Jesus did. When we do as Jesus did—when we move beyond
our comfort zone—we experience conversion. We cannot look on the hungry with
love unless we go to the hungry; we cannot look on the homeless with love
unless we go to the homeless; nor can we look on the broken in love unless we
go to the broken. That movement takes a lot of letting go, and as Richard Rohr
reminds us “all great spirituality is about letting go.” And when we let go, we
are allowing a transformative experience to occur. Love is transforming us into
love itself” (James Finley quoted in Richard Rohr). When we understand what
Jesus asked of the rich man—and what Jesus asks of us—we can affirm with Mother
Teresa, “It’s not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.”
