A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on Oct. 15, 2006, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

            Marvin Walker tells me that P.T. Barnum never said “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Apparently that was a slander by Barnum’s detractors.  We know that Barnum DID say, “Money has the potential for either being an excellent servant, or a terrible master.” He was right about that.  And that, as I understand it, is what our Gospel is about this morning. Money can be either a great servant or a horrible master.

            Most people can only remember one thing that Jesus said in this Gospel reading: that shocking injunction to “go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor.”  There’s a general tendency in reading the Bible to take lines like that out of context and to make them into some sort of universal law.  We forget that Jesus said those words in the middle of a specific conversation with a particular person. Before we generalize from this statement, we would do well to hear it in context. First, I think we would do well to remember the first thing Jesus said to the young man in this morning’s encounter. The man came up to Jesus on the road and addressed him as “Good Teacher.” I love Jesus’ response: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”  From the very first Jesus seems to understand this young man’s concern with finding eternal life as a symptom of a quest to be perfect.  The young man is unhappy and in his discontent is clinging to heroes and models of perfection. In our own moments of perfectionism we ought to remember Jesus’ response: “No one is good but God alone.”

            Next, Jesus reminds the young man that if you’re planning to work your way into heaven, the Jewish law already provides a formula.  “You know the commandments,” he says and then repeats most of them.  The rich young man in his perfectionism answers with a claim most of us can’t possibly match: “I have kept all these from my youth.”  With that, the Gospel reports the most significant thing in this whole story. “Jesus,” says St. Mark, “looking at him, loved him.”  Then and only then does Jesus recommend that the man sell all and give to the poor.  The young man apparently did not hear Jesus’ suggestion as very loving.  The Gospel says he “was shocked and went away grieving because he had many possessions.” However the man heard Jesus’ suggestion, the intent was clear.  Jesus didn’t intend to hurt him.  Rather, I think Jesus intended to give him his heart’s desire.  Jesus understood that the man was unhappy, that he had tried all his life to be good, but that something still stood in the way of his happiness.  “You lack one thing,” Jesus said.  And that brings us back to P.T. Barnum.  What’s missing in the young man’s life is a love of his fellow human beings.  He loves his things and they rule his life. He needs to learn to use his wealth as a tool to love others.

            Jesus is not advocating poverty or philanthropy here; he is calling the young man back to the essence of religion: to love God and love your neighbor.  He is not advocating spirituality over materialism. Instead he is urging the young man to follow a different kind of materialism: one in which you don’t use possessions to set yourself over other people, but one in which you use possessions for the well-being of everyone.  If money is your master, you can only use it for yourself.  If it is your servant, you can use it as an instrument of love.

            This week, that great source of current events information, the Daily Show did a short segment on what the super wealthy use their money for.  The segment began with a businessman who spent five million on a custom-built Ferrari. Then it moved on to someone who reportedly paid twenty million to participate in a Russian space mission.  The commentator remarked that twenty million enabled her to fly over millions of starving people without having to see any of them. The problem here is not wealth.  The problem is a lack of love.

            And what about us? What will make us happy? If we listen to the story of the rich young man we know that goodness won’t make us happy.  Being better, more righteous, more perfect than our neighbors won’t do it.  And we know that wealth won’t make us happy. Having more stuff than anyone else—bigger house, better car, more money in the bank—that won’t do it.  What will make us happy is acknowledging our dependence on God alone and using what we have for the good of God’s kingdom—as a servant to do some good in the world around us.

            In its wisdom, the Church has long come to understand that we have a built-in resistance to learning this lesson.  We human beings never believe we have enough.  Students of human behavior know that if you ask anyone—from a minimum-wage earner to a multimillionaire—we all think if we made just about 20% more, we’d have enough. Trouble with us is that is that it is a hunger that never ends—no matter how much more we have, we still want just 20% more.  So the Church, in its wisdom, recommends the discipline of the tithe: a percentage that we give off the top before we buy the Ferrari or fly to the moon.  Giving a tithe to God’s work doesn’t make you holy.  It doesn’t eradicate world poverty—though it would certainly go a long way toward that goal.  No, the object is to stand as a reminder that what we have comes from God and is a holy trust.  It is a reminder to use all we have to love one another.

            I have been in the clergy business for a quarter of a century.  I’ve heard every argument there is against giving a tithe to the church: it’s not fair, the government already takes a chunk, I can’t afford it because I have a mortgage and car payments…and the excuses go on.  I even make up a few new ones myself when it comes time for me to fill out my own pledge card.  But all of the excuses I believe boil down to one thing: we love our stuff and believe it is ours and we don’t want to let go of even a little of it. All of us, I think, would benefit from a little of Jesus’ shock therapy.  “You don’t want to tithe?” Jesus would say, “Then how about this: sell all that you have and give the money to the poor?”  Makes giving the Church ten percent of your income look good.  More to the point, it reminds us that our money has stopped being our excellent servant and has become our terrible and unrelenting master.  If we want to break the power of that master, we might well start with filling out a pledge card.                              AMEN