Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 19B, October 14, 2012, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Job 23.1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22.1-15; Hebrews 4.12-16; Mark 10.17-31.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

In this morning’s lessons, we are confronted with some hard truths about God’s judgment and our relationship with him. We also see some of the difficulties involved in living faithful lives. Simply put, following Jesus is not for wimps and so I want us to look briefly at what we really can expect when we give our lives to Jesus, both in this age and the Age to Come.

We can all relate to Job, the psalmist in his lament, and the man in this morning’s gospel lesson. In one way or another each represents some aspect of the human condition. As we saw last week, Job had fallen victim to Satan’s evil but wasn’t let in on the original joke and so he thought God had caused the calamities that befell him. In today’s lesson, Job wants to protest his innocence to God and yet we see him waver. On the one hand, Job is convinced that if he can get an audience with God, God will acquit and maybe even vindicate him. On the other hand, we see Job wavering in his request, presumably because he is aware of God’s perfect holiness so that even though Job knows he is blameless, he comes nowhere near the holy perfection that characterizes God. Blamelessness is not the same as sinless perfection and Job surely knew of God’s zeal for righteousness and his hatred of evil in any form. It is therefore not unreasonable for us to conclude that this might have given Job good reason to pause and wonder if his blamelessness would really be good enough to pass muster in God’s presence. And if we stop and reflect on our own faithfulness to God, we too might have the same reason to pause and wonder how it will go for us when we stand before the Lord’s judgment seat, even as we desire an audience with him, just like Job did.

Then there is the psalmist who laments God’s absence and fears that God has abandoned him, perhaps permanently. He cries out to God in his need and distress but God does not answer him. This perplexes the psalmist because he knows about God’s reputation of coming to the rescue of his people when they call on him for help. So why is God not answering? Why is God absent? We all speculate on the answer, even when the Bible refuses to give us one, because if we have been at this business of praying long enough, we too have felt keenly God’s absence at times and it makes us wonder if God has finally gotten fed up with us to the point where he has given up on us for good. It’s not a pretty thought to contemplate. And then we read passages like the one from Hebrews this morning where the writer describes God’s word as a two-edged sword capable of cutting to the chase—literally. This makes us wonder further what God is really seeing as he looks at the deepest depths of our heart and it tends to make us even more afraid. If these fears are true, then we really are people without hope. No wonder the psalmist reports that his heart is melting with fear and his mouth is dried to the bone.

Finally there is the man in today’s gospel lesson who approaches Jesus and asks how he might inherit eternal life (Matthew and Luke identify him as a young ruler). We are eager to hear Jesus’ answer because if we are honest with ourselves, that question is vitally important to us too. But before we look at Jesus’ answer, it is important we understand what the man was asking. He was not asking Jesus how to go to heaven. The Greek for eternal life can be rendered as the Age to Come so the man was essentially asking Jesus how he could be part of the reindeer games in God’s promised Messianic Age in which God’s space (heaven) would come down to earth and put to rights all that was wrong in God’s good but fallen world. In other words, the man was asking Jesus how he could be part of God’s promised new creation.

Jesus responded by reciting the need to keep the commandments but the commandments Jesus cites surprise us because they deal with how we interact with others, not God. Where are the first four commandments, especially the first two that command Israel to recognize that God is the only God and worship no other god but him? The man tells Jesus that he has indeed kept all the commandments Jesus has cited. He does so, evidently not in a proud or haughty way, because Mark reports that Jesus looked at him and loved him, not the typical response to someone who is all about himself. But we recognize what’s going on here because in the midst of our fears about how God will ultimately respond to us when we meet him face-to-face, we too try to reassure ourselves by recounting all the good things we have done in Jesus’ name. We think surely that has to count for something in God’s eyes. We just hope our good deeds outnumber our bad ones!

But then we hear Jesus’ response. Sell all you have and then come follow me. Say what? Are you crazy, Jesus? How can I sell all that I have and follow you? That means I would have to give up everything in my life that possesses me to make room for you. Now it is important for us to understand that Jesus does not call every one of his disciples to a life of poverty because some of us do not let money possess our ultimate loyalty and affection. Money never was the issue for Jesus in terms of being his disciple, except in cases like this where Jesus saw clearly that the man’s possessions were his god and possessed his ultimate loyalty. And so Jesus calls each of us to ruthlessly search out those things in our life that are competing with him for our ultimate loyalty and to get rid of them. Like the disciples this astounds us as well because we suddenly realize that we cannot earn our way into God’s presence and ultimately his promised new creation because none of us measure up to God’s holy and sinless perfection. Neither will our money or power or prestige or status be of any use to us because they only tend to distract us and pull us away from loving God with all of our being. And for Americans, this is doubly irritating because we are all about rugged individualism and self-help. We want to do things our way and we don’t want (or think we need) anybody’s help in the process. But at the end of the day, Jesus is reminding us that our possessions and talents are not going to be of much use in helping us to inherit the Age to Come. Only he is, and as we think about this we are astonished to realize that in saying this to the man (and us), Jesus has essentially equated himself with God. Jesus is telling us that he is the ticket to God’s new creation. So that’s why Jesus didn’t mention the commandments about God when he ticked the others off to the man. Jesus is telling us that if we follow and obey him, we are following the first three commandments pertaining to God and we are also following the Shema, all wrapped up into one!

And when we reflect on all this, we begin to realize our fears about God are rooted in ignorance because the assumption behind our fears is that God is essentially a God who dislikes us and wants to punish us when we disobey him. But that is clearly not the God of the OT or NT. To be certain, God does and will judge our evil and wrongdoings, but not because God hates us. No, God judges our wrongdoings because like any good parent realizes with his/her children, God knows our wrongdoing serves to separate us from God and will lead us down destructive paths and dehumanize us. God does not want that for his human creatures, especially those in Jesus whom he recognizes as his children, and so God warns and judges us, not to destroy us but to heal us and help us live as the human creatures he calls us to be.

And if we doubt that, we have to look no further than Jesus, as both our gospel and epistle lessons remind us. While it is impossible for any of us to be saved on our own merits, nothing is impossible for God. That is why he became human and suffered and died for us so that we could be reconciled to him and begin to enjoy real life in the manner for which God created us. As we saw last week, a suffering God is hardly an angry or apathetic God who does not care about us. But God also knows the only path to real life and that is why when he came to us in the person of Jesus, he insisted that we deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. We must purge everything in our life that competes for our ultimate loyalty and affection so that we can prepare to live in the promised new creation following Jesus’ example. Of course, we cannot do this on our own. We need God’s help and we have it both in the persons of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. When we sincerely desire to become like Jesus, we can go to him in prayer because he is Lord of this universe. We have confidence that he hears us and sympathizes with our human weakness because he still possesses our humanity even as the risen and ascended Lord. That’s one of the points of the second half of our epistle lesson. And so in answer to our prayers, he sends his Spirit to dwell in and among us to further help us in our human weakness so that we can grow to be fully human and be ready to enjoy God’s new creation.

This, of course, is the reward Jesus was talking about in today’s gospel lesson. As we grow to be more and more like Jesus, our heart will naturally want to be with him, much like we want to be with our best beloved. The new creation with its new work and opportunities to love and serve God will itself serve both as context and ample reward for doing so. Think about it. Something is only a reward if we perceive it to be. If we remain hostile to God and stubbornly rebellious toward him, how would living in God’s direct presence ever be a reward for us? Does not compute.

And so we live by hope in this current life, even with all its ambiguities, hardships, and uncertainties, which make us afraid. The way we overcome our fears is to keep our eyes on Jesus through prayer, regular Scripture reading, the sacraments, and fellowship to help keep us from being distracted and forgetting that God loves us and created us for relationship, not destruction. As we get to know God better, we realize that God uses even the hard times to open us up so that he can heal us. But this takes faith and knowledge of God on our part. Are you ready for this challenge? If so, you are promised the resources you need to help you in your struggles. That’s the hard part. There will be struggles. But we are ultimately promised an eternal rest from our struggles and great reward when we persevere in our discipleship so that when we stand before Jesus’ judgment throne, we can have confidence to hear the blessed words, “Welcome, good and faithful servant. Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.” We will hear those words, not because of who we are but because of who Jesus is. And when we really know that, we will know what it means to have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.