Everything is Rented...

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Everything Is Rented...

Acts 2:42-47, Mark 10:17-31
May 8, 2009

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the
breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many
wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were
together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions
and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day,
as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home
and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having
the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their
number those who were being saved.

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and
asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said
to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You
know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit
adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not
defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have
kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said,
“You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he
heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many
possessions.
Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for
those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were
perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard
it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
They were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be
saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not
for God; for God all things are possible.”
Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.”
Jesus said, “Truly, I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers
or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the
sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—
houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with
persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first
will be last, and the last will be first.”

As many of you know, Douglas lives in Evanston, which is right next to
Wilmette, where he works as a school teacher. On the same block is a small
parking lot with a regular spaces for those who are authorized to park there
(it’s a private parking lot), but in that space there are two spots reserved for
something called Zipcars, something you may have heard about. Zipcars are
simply a reworking of the old rental car idea, though its unique in the sense
that you don’t have to rent for the whole day—you can rent a small car for
as little as an hour for about $8, and it includes all the gas and insurance—
and the other great thing is that the pick up locations are actually in
neighborhoods where you can walk easily to pick up your zipcar. What
happens is that you join it for $60 a year, with no monthly commitment, and
they send you card that unlocks the car for the time you’ve reserved it
for…when you’re finished with the car, you simply return it back to the place
you found it. And that got me thinking about the year I lived in the city of
Seattle, where they have a really great public transit system, focused on
buses, and you simply really didn’t need a car, and I came very close to just
selling my car, because I was using it so infrequently, and the insurance and
the taxes on it, especially in Washington state, almost didn’t it all that
feasible.

In the larger cities, where such an option is possible—selling your car and
using something like the zipcar—there really does seem to be a movement
afoot to avoid trying to own things, or too many things, where the upkeep
and storage of those things is a major hassle and burden, and is simply too
costly. But the recent downturn in the housing market has also called into
question that very American obsession with always owning your own home,
something that has been a mantra in our culture for at least 60 years,
especially in the post World War II boom years. Owning your home was seen
as a the key to our personal economic future, a sort of piggy bank you could
eventually cash in later in life, but with the bust in prices in the past few
years, and the inability of unemployed workers who are underwater—that is,
they owe more on the house than it’s worth—to get out of those houses so
they could move to potentially to other cities where their job prospects were
better, you find a lot of younger people becoming very wary about the
prospect of owning a home again, or ever, really. So, renting is now back in
vogue, something that was once just in vogue for students, or the lower
middle class or poor, or whomever. And certainly the idea of sharing, the
idea that maybe I don’t need to own a car, as much as I need access to a car
sometimes, and maybe we can find a way to split the costs, and create less
waste when it comes to that moment when the car finally is junked.   The
ownership culture that has so prevailed in our country may be waning at the
moment, though I suspect that may change when and if the economic
prospects of our country get better.

Still, maybe there is something to attend to in all of this new focus on simply
sharing what you have, rather than always exclusively owning it for yourself,
renting rather than owning things. Certainly you see something of that
sharing culture in our first text today, the one about the Jerusalem church in
the days after Jesus’ resurrection. Of course, at that point, Jesus had been
both resurrected, and had risen, ascended to heaven, leaving the Spirit of
God in his wake, and Peter had attempted his first sermon to the people of
Jerusalem, which caused an explosion of growth in that early Christian
community. It is interesting here that their first instinct after becoming
Christian was to share, share their lives, share their stuff, and what is also
interesting is that it does not seem that this practice, this radical selling and
sharing amongst Christians in Jerusalem, was actually done much outside of
Jerusalem. We know that some Christians still owned homes and seemed to
have personal property, mostly because of the writings of Paul, and some
later stories in the book of Acts. What we do know is that a few decades
later the whole city Jerusalem would be in the midst of a famine, and Paul was
raising money throughout the churches in the Roman Empire to help the
struggling and starving members of that city and church.   Perhaps was a
partial response to that crisis—certainly this story was probably written some
time during or after that crisis event in Jerusalem. Whatever reason we are
told this story, it says something that the Christian instinct was to share
belongings with each other, or at least the proceeds from the selling of those
belongings—that the way to respond to God’s good gift of Christ to us, was
to give away what has been first given to us.

And this story also points to another fact, another truth, that we find in the
second text before us today, the one from Mark: the reality is, to my earlier
musings on the growing rental culture in our country, the reality is that
everything we own is, really, actually only a rental—we have it fore awhile, and
then it is detoriates and we throw it away, or we give it away, either on this
side of eternity, before we die, or afterwards, on the other side of eternity,
when our stuff is then divided up between family, friends, charities,
whatever.   The rental nature of everything, and the challenge to give away
what is not really ours in the first place is all over the Scriptures, especially in
the Gospels, because Jesus knew what we know in the deepest places in our
heart, that our attitude toward stuff, toward the things we think we own in
our lives, it is important, perhaps more we can ever know.

Back to our story from Mark: Jesus is asked by a young man what he needed
to do to inherit eternal life, what did he need to receive salvation? And Jesus
replies simply with a shortened version of the 10 commandments, sorta of
hitting highpoints, so to speak. And this young man replies that he has
done all of these things, that he has followed the law of Israel. And Jesus
seems to understand, that indeed, he really is a good man, that its he’s not
lying or blowing his own horn. I think Jesus saw before him a man that was
genuinely good, he really did do right by God and other people. But it’s at
this pivotal point in the story, that the Gospel of Mark veers from the same
telling of this story in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke—in Mark you see the
tenderness of Jesus coming out in the story. “Jesus looked at the person
with love and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the
money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow
me.’”   It’s that look of love that is so stunning here, so tender, and which is
different from the other two Gospels that tell this story. It’s almost as if
Jesus looked into this man’s soul, and saw what he was really asking for,
what was missing in his life, and that what he was asking about was not
about getting to heaven or being a good man—he was asking Christ to tell
him what it will take for him to be the man he really wants to be, to be the
kind of disciple that deep in his heart he wants to be. I mean, he knew the
rules, he followed the rules, and he was a good man, he obeyed the rules, he
played the game—and yet he lacked something, something that was stopping
him from being wholeheartedly a disciple of this Jesus that he wanted to
follow, that he believed in. And Jesus could see it, could see what was
stopping him—and it was the stuff around him, given to him, perhaps, or
maybe he worked hard for it all his life. Either way, it was in the way, this
stuff, this rental property he thought, ironically enough, he owned, and Jesus
asked him to give it away so that he could get to what really mattered,
something he could carry with him into eternity.

And to be honest, his reaction to what Jesus asks of him, shows how much
of good man he really is—he was shocked, he was stunned, because Jesus
had nailed him, Jesus saw him for who he was—a good man, a man so loved
by Jesus that Mark himself records it, records this love, and yet a man who
would not and could not give up what he loved the most. What he lacked,
oddly enough, in his case, was a lack of stuff, of things, of possessions. And
yet he couldn’t do it—don’t ask this of me, not this—everything else is fine,
my time, my effort, my morality, my goodness, whatever, but I can’t give this
up, he seems to be saying to Jesus. Jesus struck at the core, and he knew
he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t follow this Jesus, not on those terms. I mean,
Jesus is not making a universal statement about things, or possessions—
possessions in and of themselves mean nothing, if they ultimately mean
nothing to us, but, like this young man, we know that our possessions
situate us, they define us, they mark us, they give us prestige and power
and attention and security—if we allow them to, and I have met very few
people in which that wasn’t the case—that’s why Jesus keeps bringing up
this issue over and over again, he knows what we humans ultimately struggle
with. Things are not bad in and of themselves—the Christian tradition
declares all of creation to be good, but we humans have the awful habit of
confusing the creation with the Creator, making what God has created as
good into Goodness itself, which is God alone.

And I must admit that I can imagine Jesus watching this man leave his
presence, this man’s heart a little shattered, a little stunned, that someone
got him, that someone saw what really held him back from completely being
the man God wanted him to be. It had come down to the stuff he owned,
because someone, perhaps for the first time, saw that his stuff, his things,
really owned him, they possessed him. There is a scene in the movie THE
FIGHT CLUB where one character speaks to the other about an explosion
that destroyed all of his new friend’s belongings and what he says that friend
is absolutely true: What you possess end up possessing you. Again true
words, especially in the light of some of the things I learned through the No
Impact Project, something Sven shared with us last week. So much time and
effort is spent of acquiring and maintaining the stuff we have, things that we
eventually throw away—and when you see what we do throw away, in terms
of garbage and waste, you really do understand that everything really is a
rental—we may think we throw it away, that it is not ours any longer, but, of
course it is, it remains with us, in our landfills, in the polluted communities we
tolerate, almost everywhere.

So, have I made everyone feel guilty about having stuff and loving the stuff
we own, or the stuff we think we own? I suspect not, because we’ve become
somewhat immune to messages like this one from Jesus, and even the
message from programs like the No Impact Project. When people try to guilt
us nowadays, we usually just rebel against the effort, call into question its
validity, etc, and so it really is usually useless to use guilt as a weapon to
goad people into actually making changes in their lives. I mean, it usually
doesn’t work with me, frankly. What is important to hear in these passages,
from the early church, from Jesus’ encounter with this man, is, I think,
encapsulated in a story about a teacher who asked a small boy a question:
"If you have two apples, and I ask for one, how many will you have left?"
Without hesitation the boy replied: "Two." Now, that is a case, not of
mistaken mathematics, but a case of a mistaken approach toward life, which
is an approach that says :what's mine is mine, and sharing is only an option,
just one among many options. But in reality sharing is not an just an
option, not if we know that what we have, what we possess, is not really
ours in the first place—it’s a rental, it’s always been a rental, it’s always been
a gift.   In Matthew 10 (8), when Jesus sends out the twelve to tell the Good
News of his love and welcome, he tells them to “cure the sick, raise the dead,
cleanse the lepers, cast out demons” and, he says, “you received without
payment, give without payment. The gift we have received, give away as a
gift, (Homiletics Online story, adapted) and it has always been a gift, a rental,
a loan to us, one that we will probably need to be given to others when the
time is right. I want to be clear here: I am not arguing that you go out and
sell everything and bring all the proceeds to North Berrien Food Pantry or the
church or to the nonprofit that is Kevin McLemore Ministries, Inc. (hah!) and I
don’t think I am just saying that because I don’t want to do it myself. It
really is clear that each of these scriptural texts have a historical context that
need to be considered: we don’t live in post-resurrection Jerusalem possibly
on the edge of starvation, and not everyone is the young man who can do
everything but give away everything that he thinks he owns. What these
two stories should do is to remind us that the way we use what has first
been given to us as a gift, loaned to us, rented to us, whatever, is
important, and that we need to rethink, always, our relationship with our
stuff, the things we own, or think we own, or otherwise, we will find
ourselves learning the lesson that the young men both in the movie Fight
Club and in our scripture from Mark come to learn, and that is that what we
so often possess can so easily come to posses us, especially if we aren’t
willing to pass on that possession, that gift, onto someone else.   Amen.