Sunday, October 13, 21st Sunday after Pentecost
“Selling It All”
Psalm 90:12-17; Amos 5:6-15; Hebrews 3:12-19; Mark 10:17-22
Divine Service III, no Communion
Hymns: #560 “Drawn to the Cross”; #712 “Seek Ye First”; #753 “All for Christ I Have Forsaken”; #685 “Let Us Ever Walk with Jesus”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
First Hurricane Helene, and now Hurricane Milton; it’s been awful to see. Catastrophic damage, people hurt and killed, a terrible thing. Some claim that we humans, by our activity, industry, and “greenhouse gases” and such, are somehow the cause of these storms. Some are even claiming that someone, somehow, manipulated the weather, to send these storms in the direction they went. If you’ve seen the footage of those storms as they were forming and their power as they came rolling in, both ideas are ridiculous.
Why do bad things like hurricanes happen, even to people who are trying to be good? The fact is, our planet at its center is a ball of liquid fire. The earth we live on isn’t rock-steady, but very volatile. We’re floating on an ocean of melted rock and heat. The crust of earth we’re standing on is thin, and thinner in some places. The ground beneath us shakes, quakes, and shifts, and sometimes throws molten rock and gas into the sky. Sometimes it builds mountains up, and sometimes it knocks them down again.
The sky above us, our atmosphere, isn’t steady or predictable either. It rolls and turns and roils and boils. It’s always sucking water and vapors upward, and pouring them down again, oftentimes creating winds and storms that can demolish even the strongest structures we can manage to build. Try roping a tornado like Pecos Bill. Try stopping or turning a category 5 hurricane. In a hurricane on the east coast a few years ago, someone posted the bright idea on the internet that everyone should turn all their electric fans out to sea, to try to keep the storm away. (It didn’t work!)
And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not, or if you believe in God or not, or how hard you pray. If that thing is coming, it’s coming; disasters don’t “pass over” the Christian houses. So what can we do? You could be one of those ‘experts’ who believe that with advances in science and human ingenuity, we can conquer the wind and weather and climate of our world and make it behave like we want it to. Or, you could be one of those “doom and gloomers” who believe there is no help or hope, and that neither man nor gods of any kind can save us from extinction (so “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!”) Or… we can put all our trust and hope in the God who made it all.
If anyone ever asks you that question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”, the only answer we have to give is, “Because of sin.” Adam and Eve’s sins, your sins, my sins, everyone’s sins in a sorry, collective heap. This planet we live on rattles, shakes, and quakes like it does because it’s broken, and it has been since the Fall. Bad things happen down here because it’s a sin-broken world. And the truth is, there are no truly “good people” in the world. All of us have “sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” All of us deserve whatever God chooses to give us on account of our sin, and that without exception. The answer to “why me?” is “why not me?”
So what can we do? Prophet Amos’s answer to Israel in our Old Testament reading is, “Seek the Lord and live, or He will sweep through the house of Joseph like a fire.” The prophet clearly sees sin as the reason for Israel’s troubles: Turning justice into bitterness and casting righteousness to the ground; hating the one who reproves in court and despising him who tells the truth; trampling the poor, oppressing the righteous, and taking bribes, to name just a few. Seek good and not evil, the prophet says, that you may live. Repent, confess your sins, and turn your hearts back to God. Do that, and the Lord Almighty will be with you. Hate evil, love good, maintain justice in the courts, change your behavior and mend your attitudes - and perhaps, just maybe, the Lord God Almighty will have mercy on the remnant of Joseph.
To do anything less than to confess and repent in the face of life’s disasters, is shaking your fist in the face of God – as useless as turning your little fans out to sea to try to turn a storm. Amos says that our God is the God of infinite power, the One who made the Pleiades and Orion, the constellations and the stars. He’s the One who turns blackness into dawn and darkens the day into night - the One who makes the sun come up and go back down again. And He’s the One who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land. And He, when He so chooses, “flashes destruction on the strongholds and brings the fortified cities to ruin.”
“For what purpose?” we have to ask. Why would a good and loving God allow a thing like a hurricane, a storm, or a terrible flood? (The careful distinction to be made here is that God doesn’t willingly send or inflict those things upon us; He only holds back His hand and allows them to come). Why would He do that? Again, because of our sin. Because of unbelief, because of human arrogance, because of our complacency. God’s purpose, His endgame, isn’t to give us a comfortable place here on earth, but a home in Heaven with Him. He loves us, and He wants us to love Him above all other things, and ultimately to be with Him forever. And if those “earthly things” are standing between us and Him - between us and salvation, between us and saving faith- then the Father who loves us, to keep us from setting our hearts on uncertain things and on things that are passing away, may well in His mercy see fit to take them away. To help us, not to harm us; to give us hope and a future.
No one really knows who wrote the Book of Hebrews, whether it was Paul or Apollos or somebody else; but it’s the inspired Word of God nevertheless, and that’s all that really matters. The blessed preacher who wrote Hebrews, whoever he was, tells us to be careful, to take heed, to pay attention, that we don’t let our hearts become sinful and unbelieving and turn away from the Living God, to follow things that will only crack and break and rot and blow away. “Encourage one another daily,” the preacher says, “so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.” A hard heart is a bad thing to have, folks. A hard heart is a heart that can look around at all the disasters, hurts, and suffering in the world and not feel a thing, or see a need to try to do something about it. A hard heart is a heart that can say, “I’ve got mine,” and turn and walk away. The devil, liar that He is, tries to convince us that all those other people in the world around us aren’t really our responsibility; but you and I know that isn’t true.
“Today if you hear His voice,” the preacher in Hebrews says – and God in His mercy is always there to be heard. God in His mercy calls out to everyone. “His voice has gone out into all the world,” the Scripture says. God by His good Holy Spirit is forever calling, begging, and pleading with us. He uses the voices of His prophets, pastors, and preachers - and He’ll use your voice, too - to reach into sinful and hard hearts, into angry and stubborn hearts, and into sad, hopeless, ready-to-give-up hearts, too - to melt hearts of stone and let in the light and cause blind eyes to see. God will never push or shove or force anyone to come to Him. Instead He invites, begs, and pleads, knowing all along that all of us are free to say no (though why anyone would do that, I do not understand).
One of the reasons Christ established this Church of His on earth was so that we could encourage one another, and help one another hang on to our precious faith. (It’s good, Lord, to be here!) The other reason we’re here is to share our faith, and be the voice, hands, and feet of Jesus in the world around us. That’s why those storms don’t pass over us and strike only the ‘unbelievers’ when disasters come. We weren’t put here to be safe and insulated while the world around us suffers. We’re here to suffer along with our neighbors in the middle of the brokenness, and to be the Presence of God, the conduits of His love, hope, and mercy, in the middle of the disaster zones.
In our Gospel reading, a man ran up to Jesus, as He was walking along the road, and fell upon His knees before Him. And he asked Jesus what really must be life’s most important question: "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" The world is a terrible and scary place; everyone and everything here is dying and fading and turning into dust. Lord, is there a better place beyond this one, and if there is, how do I get there?
Jesus answers the man, curiously enough, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good – except God alone.” What Jesus is asking is, “What do you mean by ‘good’? Only God is truly holy, perfect, and good; and there are no perfect or even good people down here on earth. “No one is good, not even one”; “all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.” What Jesus is going after with this man – because He knew the man’s heart before he ever came to kneel before Him – is that he, like so many people, seemed to be relying on his own goodness, his own ability to be “good enough”, to get himself right with a holy God; and that isn’t going to work.
Jesus, wise and heart-knowing God that He is, takes the man to the good old Ten Commandments. You say you want to be good; well, how’s that workin’ for ya?
You know the Commandments: “Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother…” We’re all familiar enough with those, aren’t we? We can all run down that list of ‘thou shall’s’ and ‘thou shalt not’s’, and be proud of ourselves that we’ve never lied in court, or robbed a bank, or committed a murder.
And the man replies, with a bit of pride, "Teacher, all these I have kept since I was a boy." But what the man is missing is that God isn’t looking for just outward obedience from us; He’s reaching right in for our hearts. His goal is to change us on the inside, to change our thoughts, minds, and attitudes. He wants all of us, every last bit of us; He wants us to be fully and completely His. People like to say that Jesus will take us just as we are, and that’s true; but it’s also true that He loves us enough not to leave us as we are.
“Jesus looked at him and loved him,” our Gospel says. (The same as we loves us, misguided though we may sometimes be). “You’re only missing one thing,” Jesus tells him, “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow Me." The man knows the Ten Commandments, but he’s missing the best and greatest commandments of all that tie them all together and give them their purpose and meaning. Do you remember what Jesus said, when they asked Him what the greatest commandment was? He said, “The greatest commandment of all is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength; and the second is to love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
“Love keeps the commandments,” Jesus says. The only reason we have for keeping God’s commandments is because we know He loves us, and because we love Him, and because we love our brothers. And whenever we fail, we confess and ask God and our brother for forgiveness and try again. Love is what the Pharisees were missing, and what the whole world is missing still. The First Commandment is to love God above all other things; and the last two Commandments tell us not to have covetous, selfish hearts that put our “things” ahead of God and ahead of the people God has called us to love. Get those “bookends” right, and the rest of the Commandments fall into place.
Jesus had the highest place in Heaven, the throne at the right hand of God; and He gave it all away, sold it all, to come here to show God’s love to us. Jesus, because He loves us, came here to walk in a broken world. There were storms back then, too, and earthquakes, disasters, and such; those things are nothing new. Everywhere He looked, there was violence and murder and hate, and people hating each other. There were people suffering, hurting, and dying everywhere, people hungry and desperately poor, people living without God and without hope in the world. And Jesus healed everyone He met along the way and preached them Good News.
And for our sakes, so that we could be healed, forgiven, and saved, He endured the greatest disaster every to happen in the history of the world, when God’s only Son was nailed to a cross to die, by people who would not love Him or know Him. The sky turned black and the earth shook on that day, too. Then God brought mercy up from the ash heap, and raised Jesus up out of the brokenness, out of the rubble, out of the utter disaster that sin had made of the world. The same God who’d given us life from the beginning, brought life, hope, and forgiveness up from the grave. “He is not here! He is risen, just as He said,” said the Easter morning angel. Again, this is why God asks for and requires our presence in the disaster zones of this world, both large and small: So that hope can live; and so the cross and resurrection of Jesus can bring comfort, peace, and hope to places where otherwise there would be none.
So Jesus says to the man, “Sell all you have, and come and follow after Me.” “And at this the man's face fell,” says our Gospel, “and he went away sad, because he had great wealth.” Who else but Jesus, who gave everything for us, has the right to tell the man, and us, “Sell it all if you truly want to follow Me?” We live in a world where the earth shakes and the clouds boil, and where we never know what tomorrow will bring. What in the world would we do without Him? And what will they do who don’t know Him yet, when those inevitable disasters come?
Father in Heaven, in this shaking, quaking, stormy world, You are our solid ground. Our Savior Jesus has given us hope through every trail and trouble and life disaster than comes our way. Your good Holy Spirit is with us always, bringing us comfort and peace, even in the most trying of times. As we have been loved and cared for, O Lord, help us to share Your love in the world around us, that many may hear and believe and be saved. In Jesus’ name; Amen.