This is a gospel story that inevitably starts by making us all a little uncomfortable whether we are rich or not. Because I think all of us have a great tendency to imagine that if we were ever to have a conversation with Jesus about what we should do with our lives, it would go a little like this conversation in the gospel does. We think we would be told that we would have to do something that would seem to us impossible, or something that really, deep down, we just don’t want to do. You know, we’d be asked to be a missionary saint, living in complete poverty, whether…
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Sometimes people say that we don’t know very much about what kind of a life awaits us after this life here on earth is over. And of course on the one hand that’s true, because no one here has ever seen it. But we do actually know something about what it’s going to feel like. There’s one consistent image that God has given us over and over in the scriptures, and it’s the image of a wedding feast. It’s a real disadvantage to be up here preaching about wedding feasts at a time like this, because right now it’s hard to remember what’s it’s like to be at a celebration…
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This is always called the gospel of the rich young man, but I think just as good a name for it would be the gospel of the stuck young man. He’s at a point in his life where something is working inside him, something about his current life is not fulfilling, isn’t right, and he is looking for where to turn. So he asks Jesus what he thinks he should do next. He gets an answer that’s not at all what he was expecting: Jesus says, turn your life upside down completely, give it all up, start again. And as a result, here he is, stuck, Jesus has given him…
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You would have to excuse the rich man who just walked away from Jesus in today’s gospel if the lesson that he learned in this encounter was not “Sell what you have and follow me”. Instead, what he probably came away thinking was a more familiar lesson we all know: “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” We feel sorry for him, a basically good man who asks what he ought to do and can’t bring himself to do it, and is then told that it will be very, very hard for him to ever see the kingdom of God. Let’s leave aside the image of the camel and…
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You would have to excuse the rich man who just walked away from Jesus in today’s gospel if the lesson that he really took away from this encounter was not “Sell what you have and follow me” but “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” The young man is asking what he has to do to gain eternal life, and he is told to do something that goes far beyond anything he expected. I think the way we would probably phrase it today cuts even closer to the bone: Not, what must we do to have eternal life, but, does God love us and accept us the way we…
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As a deacon, I get to go to more weddings than the average person, and frankly I had gotten to the point where very few of them met my rather picky standards of excellence. But two weeks ago that changed. Two friends of mine, both of them getting married rather late in life, if you know what I mean, had a wedding I’ll never forget. It had everything. There was a Jewish ritual that brought tears to my eyes, so many words that reminded everyone about commitments and joy and sadness, and of the bittersweet taste of life even in the midst of such happiness. And then, what a party…