Measuring Our Worth (Mark 10:17-31)

You may have seen the commercial on television during primetime or while surfing the ‘net.  It depicts a man in a baseball cap and jacket running around the front entrance of a skyscraper in New York.  He stretches police tape across the grounds, as if securing a crime scene.  Guards from inside the building look nervously at the camera crew following this man around, trying to politely remove the man from the premises.  The man holds up a bullhorn to his mouth and announces he is “here to make a citizen’s arrest of the directors of A.I.G.”

            At home, some viewers watch the commercial and chuckle.  Others get the remote and turn the channel with disdain.  Like it or not, audiences at home or in front of the screen are getting the word.  Another film is coming from the controversial documentary director Michael Moore, whose films are geared to critique the political and social issues of the day.  His new film is entitled “Capitalism: A Love Story”.  Hailed by some, scorned by others, the film represents Michael Moore’s perspective on the ways that the U.S. and global economy have been handled, the federal bailout efforts, and the political finger pointing that goes along with it.

            Stepping aside from the headlines and the cinema box office, do you know where the word “economy” comes from?  The word “economy” comes from the Greek:  Oikos (house) and nomos (rule), quite literally, an economy deals with how a household is structured or organized.  And just as we struggle with 21^st-century ideological differences regarding the structure and stability of an economy, rest assured, talking about the economy was just as volatile and ideological in Jesus’ day.  The first century economy of Palestine differs remarkably from our present-day U.S. context.  Nonetheless, talk about money long enough, and there will be strong disagreements arising.  Talk about money and religion, and well….

                The person who approaches Jesus is referred to as “the rich young ruler” in popular recollections of the gospel narratives.  The difficulty, however, is when we gather together the three similar stories told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and combine them together.  We will look at the differences and similarities during Adult Forum after services today, but for now, note a key difference of Mark’s gospel.  Mark notes little about the man, saying only that he has many possessions.  Instead of thinking of this fellow as a rich young ruler, we will call him “the man of means”.

The man asks Jesus a question that sounds primarily theological (“what must I do to inherit eternal life?”), however, the question is aimed at sniffing out Jesus’ thoughts on the economy.   Just as the Pharisees and the Sadducees have come forward, asking questions to test Jesus’ teachings on religious orthodoxy, just as the Herodians will step forward to help entrap Jesus in a question of politics, the man of means appears on the scene as a representative of another sector of society unnerved by any upstart religious teachers:  the financial elite of the day.

            The gospels are told from the perspective of a limited good society.  Very few people owned land.  Very few people controlled the commerce of the day.  And in turn, many people lived under the rule (and whim) of the very few:  certain families inheriting great ancestral power and privilege, members of the ruling establishment, especially those in collaboration with the Roman Empire’s resident government.  The man of means who presents himself to Jesus wears the robes of the upper echelon, a far cry from most of the other characters who interact with Jesus.  Most everyone, Jesus and the twelve included, are part of the peasantry.  No “middle class” exists in the New Testament.  A select few enjoy the high life.  Everyone else scrapes by at the subsistence level, working day and night and having very little to show for it.  Some New Testament scholars would label the man of means kneeling before Jesus as part of the “elite”, one who keeps a style of life largely denied to anyone who is not already part of the power and financial base.  When one lives in a limited good society, a person with significant finance is a person not to be trusted.  There is a deep suspicion of the elite, as they have not evidenced anything less than self interest and self preservation at the expense of the multitudes. 

            The economic background is helpful, as we hear the exchange between Jesus and this man with a bit more barb to it.  The edge to this gospel story is economic and theological:  what is the measure of a person’s worth?   Who has the last word on economics?  Will the “house rules” be determined by the elite, the “powers that be” that work with Rome and the Temple, aka “the established powers that be”, or the Lord God whose kingdom Jesus is proclaiming?

            Initially, the man of means would claim “God” is the determiner of all things.  After all, he claims, the man of means is an observant man.  The commandments Jesus cites are all agreeable to the man of means, yet he does not realize Jesus has cited only part of the Ten Commandments, those focusing on those commandments dealing with one’s behavior toward others.  Like many opponents before him, the man of means has stepped into the snare awaiting him.  As New Testament scholar Bill Herzog notes, the man of means is “moral, but selectively moral” (Prophet and Teacher, WJKP, 2005, p. 138).  The man of means has been so vested in maintaining his own economic privilege that he has claimed to be observant of a religious faith steeped in traditions of protecting the poor from exploitation and decrying covetous behavior and been part of the effort to create a different economic reality that left most of the populace in systematic impoverishment. 

            There is a common myth that the New Testament has no use whatsoever for persons who are wealthy, and this story of “the rich young ruler” (as we tend to hodgepodge the three stories together) is cited as the final word.  In truth, the New Testament depicts the earliest Christians as socio-economically diverse, including persons who are well to do.  Nonetheless, the Christian teachings would side with those who are vulnerable and condemn those whose wealth has been attained by exploitative practice.   Thus, the man of means who kneels piously before Jesus represents a class of people who have not lost a wink of sleep over their exploitation of others.  

            Bill Herzog cites Jesus’ reframing of the commandment about covetous behavior.  Jesus slips it in the midst of the commandments, a sly word in Greek (apostereō) we would render in English as “do not defraud”.  The man of means has visions of the good life continuing in the life to come.  He is not bothered in the least that he has spent this life taking advantage of others.  He wants the free pass he has enjoyed since being born into the right family or being at the right time at the right place with the sweetheart deal that sets him up for life.  He claims faith, yet he does not know the economy (house rules) of God, the One whose law provisions for all persons as part of the most sacred covenants of God with the people Israel.  This man’s wealth is at the cost of covenant obedience.  His faith extends only so far.

            As for the disciples, their response to Jesus makes sense.  We usually stop with the incredible image of the camel squeezing itself through the eye of the needle and chuckle a bit.  (Indeed, this part of the story has kept me amused since third grade Sunday school!)  The disciples wonder how anyone can get into heaven.  Hear Jesus’ response again:

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, ³⁰who 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. ³¹But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.

The economy (house rules) that matter most to Jesus are the ones ensuring the covenant is kept:  no one is left out in the cold while others kick back and reap the benefits of kicking others.  The little people of the rural villages are not the lower rung functionaries of the elite’s monopoly or Rome’s all consuming empire.  Indeed, the economics of Jesus are astonishingly defiant of the way things usually work out with humanity.  We can craft our economic theories down the generations, yet we still have the all too human tendency to create chasms between the “haves” and the “have nots”.  The early Christians practiced a way of life that we still struggle to be at peace with and follow, for we are too much a product of the economics we devise, craft, and inhabit. 

The house rules set up by the gospel look out for those who are told to stand at the back of the line.  In fact, Jesus turns the order of things around, just as the covenant and the Ten Commandments described before.  Persons who are of means have their place in the kingdom of God, yet there are no “gold card level memberships” to be found in Jesus’ vision.  Persons of all means, great and small are welcomed into the kingdom, or as I like to say it, there are no second class citizens in the Kingdom of God.   The system that keeps elite elitist and the peasant majority invisible shall not stand.  The early Church became a subversive alternative, providing a place where all folks from all levels of socio-economic status learned to live together as a counter-testimony to the ways of Empire.  And indeed, those accustomed to being told they are the last will have the last word.

In the meantime, the followers of Jesus have to ask pressing questions of the economics of the day.  What should be the house rules of a country that consumes more than its relative share of the world’s resources?  What should be the house rules of a nation that can write a blank check for warfare yet balks at the provision of healthcare?  What should be the house rules for Christians who live in the “first world” while most others (even fellow Christians) live in the hell of the two-thirds world? 

My friends, the Church has much to ponder in the first century or the twenty-first.  What are our house rules?  Where does the economy we live under diverge from the economy of the gospel?  How do you get a camel to fit through the eye of the needle?   You cannot.

The Messy Kitchen (selections from Mark 7)

The Messy Kitchen   Mark 7

At the movies this weekend, people are flocking to see “Julie and Julia”, a film based on a book based on a blog.  While working in New York City, Julie Powell decided to try her hand at all of the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  Her experiences, good and bad, of cooking her way through Julia Child’s book resulted in an online diary (“blog”), which in turn became a book: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, published in 2005.  The film’s popularity has created another remarkable twist to the story.  Despite being published forty-nine years ago, Mastering the Art of French Cooking is at the top of the best-seller list again.

Julia Child’s kitchen is now in the Smithsonian collection in Washington, DC.  You can walk into a special display at the Museum of American History, seeing everything exactly as Julia Child kept her kitchen before she donated all of it lock, stock, and “ladle” in 2001.  It is a well-designed space, a testament to Child’s practical sensibilities.  For example, her kitchen range, a six burner Garland commercial gas range was purchased in 1956, used, for $429.  Installed at the family home in 1961, she used it right up until her retirement in 2001.  (SOURCE: http://americanhistory.si.edu/juliachild/jck/html/textonly/ob4.asp)

Julia Child, played with eerie perfection by Meryl Streep in the film, valued cooking as an art that anyone could enjoy.  Julia also kept to a long-held cooking secret shared down the generations:  the five second rule.  In the midst of cooking with cameras rolling, she would drop things and pick them up, noting that it is okay to do so, “as you are alone and who is to know?”

For some people, Julia gave permission to learn how to cook and know it is okay to bend the occasional rule.  For others, Julia’s trial and error ways with food sometimes hitting the floor was a bit distasteful. Julia Child was a bane to the existence of uptight grandmothers with June Cleaver meets Martha Stewart sensibilities about kitchen hygiene.  Julia is probably still considered a menace to society according to food safety inspectors.  For some people, five seconds is okay.  To others, it is unfathomable! 

The story of Jesus engaging the Pharisees might come off as an exercise in pedantic sensibilities.  Does it matter if you use an ingredient fallen to the floor if picked up within the five second rule?  Does it matter to eat food without ritually washing one’s hands?  Why is this considered a conflict?

In the interpretation of the Gospels, Christians have tended to treat the Pharisees as a religious sect of Judaism gone too far.  The Pharisees valued a stringent religious life, however, we have to understand their views with due care, as we shall explore this morning.  Further, certain elements to the gospels make unfortunately blanket statements about Jewish practices that we do need to understand as overstatements.  For example, look at Mark’s narration here:  “The Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands….” Scholars versed in first century Judaism would dispute this sort of claim.  To say that all Jews keep this practice in the first century as resolutely or rigidly as Mark claims is similar to someone walking into this congregation and saying (with all presumption of authority): “All Baptists think alike.”

So why did the Pharisees become irked by Jesus’ followers eating with defiled hands?  The Pharisees emphasized an observance of Jewish law that placed high value on careful and detailed applications of the Law.  If there is to be purity, work tirelessly to ensure that you keep pure. Keep things purified, even down to one’s eating of the right foods with the appropriate rituals.  Pharisees desired to keep the Law by creating an ever-increasing number of rules to augment the Law. 

At this point, Christian interpreters err on casting Judaism in a negative light. American Baptist biblical scholar Bill Herzog claims this interpretation tends to place “Jesus’ conflicts with the Pharisees as a religious quarrel in which Jesus is replacing the Law (read Torah) with a Christian theology of grace and discipleship” (William R. Herzog, II, Prophet and Teacher, Westminster/John Knox, 2005, p. 79).  Over the centuries, “the Pharisees and all the Jews” have become lumped in as everything that Jesus was not, and to whom Jesus was fundamentally opposed. In recent years, Christian scholars have begun to atone for caricaturizing Judaism and working towards new readings of the texts.  In my seminary training, we talked at length about Jesus as a first century Jew who respected the Law yet engaged in questioning elements of how the Law was being interpreted by the Temple and certain religious movements. In plain terms, the New Testament ought to be read in a way that recognizes Jesus was grounded in Judaism, observant of its practices, yet he offered criticism and correctives meant to respect and keep the faith.  While he and the Pharisees clashed over issues, they actually stood on common ground:  what does it mean to be an observant Jew and keeper of the law?

The Pharisees had serious issues with Jesus’ followers moving among those who were deemed impure.  The Pharisees kept a rigorous set of rules around purity, as Jesus highlights in his response to the Pharisees.  As for Jesus himself, the Pharisees struggled to see Jesus as observant.  By this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus has touched lepers, a woman long suffering from hemorrhages, and even a corpse (Jarius’ daughter, whom Jesus brought back from the dead). (Here, Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, Fortress Press, 224, shows the score in Mark’s gospel by this point in the narrative.)  This in itself is repugnant behavior by Pharasaic standards.

Add to this Jesus’ comfort dining at table with people the Pharisees considered the dregs of society (tax collectors and other sinners), and it is no wonder that the Pharisees felt obliged to question Jesus and the disciples while eating.  They were impure many times over as they touched and encountered others, but the lack of any effort to purify their hands was deeply unsettling to the Pharisees.

Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for their obsession, not their respect for holiness and purity.  He warns them faith is not in one’s keeping of traditions and practices, which the Pharisees kept augmenting and ornamenting beyond the intent of the law.  Pharisees took the faith so seriously that the complexities of life began to become eclipsed.  Jesus reached out to the masses who were disenfranchised by the Temple, Jerusalem and Roman authorities, and even the “traditions of the elders” being held by the Pharisees to the point they could not see much beyond the narrow tightrope of piety.

Again, the cautionary word to Christian interpretation arises:  this impulse for exacting adherence is not unique.  For example, the Protestant Reformer John Calvin would have been horrified by some of his followers, as Calvinists have diverged off into forms of religious purity that would give the Pharisees a run for their money.  The writer Garrison Keillor gives a tongue in cheek reflection on what happens when Christianity gets afflicted.  In his 1985 novel Lake Wobegon Days, Keillor tells semi-autobiographical stories of growing up in a fundamentalist sect, the Sanctified Brethren.  This religious movement has a very strict religious worldview, which Keillor notes led the Sanctified Brethren to struggle with the concept of church unity.   Keillor writes,

Once having tasted the pleasure of being Correct and defending True Doctrine, they kept right on and broke up at every opportunity until, by the time I came along, there were dozens of tiny Brethren groups, none of which were speaking to any of the others.

Our Lake Wobegon bunch was part of a Sanctified Bretheren branch known as the Cox Brethren, which was one of a number of “exclusive” Bretheren branches—that is, to non-Coxians, we were known as “Cox Brethren”; to ourselves, we were simply The Brethren, the last remnant of the true Church.  Our name came from Brother Cox in South Dakota who was kicked out of the Johnson Brethren in 1932—for preaching the truth!  So naturally my Grandpa and most of our family went with Mr. Cox and formed the new fellowship. (Lake Wobegon Days, New York, NY: Viking, 1985, p. 105-6)

Intense scholarship was the heart of the problem.  We had no ordained clergy, believing in the priesthood of all believers, and all were exhorted to devote themselves to Bible study.  Some did, Brother Louie and Brother Mel in particular.  In Wednesday-night Bible reading, they carried the ball, and some nights you could see that the Coxes of Lake Wobegon might soon divide into the Louies and Mels.  (p. 107)

Patching up was not a Brethren talent.  As my Grandpa once said of the Johnson Brethren, “Anytime they want to come to us and admit their mistake, we’re perfectly happy to sit and listen to them and then come to a decision about them.” (footnote, 107)

The Cox Brethren of St. Cloud held to the same doctrines as we did but they were not so exclusive, more trusting of the world—for example, several families owned television sets.  They kept them in their living rooms, out in the open, and on Sunday, after meeting and before dinner, the dad might say, “Well, I wonder what’s on”, knowing perfectly well what was on, and turn it on—a Green Bay Packers game—and watch it.  On Sunday. (111).

           The scuffle here between Jesus and the Pharisees serves as a story needing careful interpretation as well as being a story we need to tell.  What does it mean to keep the faith?  How do we connect heart to head and hands?  Jesus speaks of a faith that keeps God at the forefront and the world not at pietistic arm’s length.  He moved in the midst of the world, across the boundaries (geographic, societal, economic, and religious alike).  Keeping the faith is not about a faith so perfectly kept that it has no wrinkles as well as no wear and tear from being out in the midst of the world.  People of faith, Christians, Jews, and any others, are called to be a people moved by conviction and compassion, deep faith as well as radical love, and ultimately, for the love of God, get their hands dirty, tending a broken world.