Lots of Stuff
Job 23:1-17; Mark 10:17-31

October 12, 2003

Millard Fuller was a successful businessman, if not a possessed one. He followed his estranged wife Linda to New York City in order to try to convince her to come back to him. She was not easily convinced that he could turn back from his headlong rush for material wealth.

Millard recalls going to Radio City Music Hall with Linda to see the movie “Never Too Late” about a woman getting pregnant after she figured she was too old. They took a taxi ride home after the show.

“I had a sensation of light in that taxi. It was not anything spooky. All I can say is that it just came into my head, ‘Give away your money, become poor again, and throw yourself on God’s mercy.’”

Millard turned to Linda and said, “I think I just had a revelation from God. I think I should give away all my money to the poor. What do you think?” Linda answered, “I agree, let’s do it!”

And they did, though not without much resistance from family, friends, even their pastor. “If I think about it, I won’t do it, because it’s not logical.” Millard and Linda moved to Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, an interracial farm commune in Jim Crow South, founded by Clarence Jordan, who among other things translated the Cotton Patch Version of the Gospels and New Testament letters.

Together Millard and Clarence worked on a ministry of housing, enabling the poor to have their own affordable housing which they helped build. Fuller took the idea to Zaire where it also worked, and when he returned home he founded with a few associates Habitat for Humanity. There has long been a branch in Regina.

Millard Fuller was only 29 when he first became a millionaire, a likely fill-in for the Rich Young Man of the Gospels. A rich man can put his camel through the eye of a needle and enter the kingdom of God. The camel always finds it painful.

Job and that person inquiring about eternal life were both wealthy men. In fact, most of the principal characters in the Bible were not below the poverty line. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon were wealthy beyond most of our imaginations. These guys all had lots of stuff: more goats than you can count, cattle for miles to see, sheep in every possible nook and cranny, servants to beat the band - and wives. You know you’ve got to be rich to have more than one wife. One wife is expensive enough.

Even though Joseph and Moses were outcasts and prisoners, their minds had been formed in the womb of prosperity.

Job, of course, had no choice. Not that poverty is a choice for many people; it is, in fact, a life sentence. Yet, Job is an amazing model of one to whom lots of stuff does not really matter. He is thankful for life, plain and simple, unadorned, ugly and beautiful. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”

Job wanted only one thing: no stuff, not even health, just the presence of God. A mere acknowledgment of his existence and his unfair plight by the King of the Universe. Don’t have to do anything about it, God, just tell me you know it’s happening. Job wanted to be justified, proved innocent, especially in front of his so-called friends who kept looking for the worst about him. The more he talked and the less he was answered, the more bitter he became, and therefore, the less thankful. He expected God to explain to him the unexplainable, but how would he understand that?

The rich man had lived a very good life. He was honest and devout. He desperately desired eternal life, though one wonders why. Perhaps it was the last thing he could buy or at least negotiate for.

Jesus, the evangelist tell us, looked at him and loved him. Mark Wegener points out that in the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke this is the only time it is mentioned that Jesus loved someone. (In the Gospel of John Jesus loves Lazarus.) He loves the man, but by looking at him knows that he is wealthy and tells him what he is lacking. Be like Millard and Linda Fuller. The man is shocked, for not only can he not buy eternal life, he is supposed to impoverish himself. He went away, much to the sorrow of Jesus. Jesus loved him as a rich man.

Jesus pulls in his disciples and declares that the rich will find it virtually impossible to enter the kingdom of heaven. The disciples too are shocked, for very good reasons. “Who then can be saved?”

Judaism encouraged several religious practices for the faithful as a way of being saved. First, there should be prayer, and indeed prayers are everywhere and on every lip. Worship is prayer, and even study of the Scriptures is worship and prayer. Unceasing prayer may have been idealized by Paul, but it was already being practiced by countless Jews.

Second, there should be fasting, abstaining from food for certain periods of ordinary and liturgical time. Anyone can do that.

Third, there should be the giving of alms to the poor and widows and destitute - a social responsibility as a child of God to brothers and sisters. But you have to have alms in order to give them. You have to have some kind of expendable income and in the ancient world of subsistence living that would make you rich. If you have lots of stuff, your assignment is to distribute some of that stuff to others. In that way, the rich have a particular, even important, place in the kingdom. If they are condemned for possessing alms in the first place, is there any reason to give alms? And what happens to all the alms-receivers? Can the poor give alms?

Camels still have to climb through the eye of a needle, but Jesus is not as condemning of those who possess stuff as sometimes portrayed. Wealth is a stumbling block, a heavy burden, to be sure. The problem is that this rich man did not understand about giving away. Almost certainly he gave alms and lots of them. Yet he seems to think eternal life is one more thing you earn.

“There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold/And she’s buying a stairway to heaven./ When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed/ With a word she can get what she came for/ and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.” (Led Zeppelin)

It is a day to be thankful, but on God’s terms, not ours. Our standards of stuff do not determine our degree of genuine gratitude. God loves us sometimes despite our possessions. “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” There are no negotiations around the bargaining table, and there is no way to say the word to open the stores to get what you came for. Yet we have received beyond our imagination and beyond our worth. The only thing we can do now is to give all of it away. How easy then is it to follow him.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan