Unshackled

Scripture:       Amos 5:6-15   Psalm 90

Hebrews 4:12-16          Mark 10:17-31

As you’ve spun your way around the radio dial – maybe while on a long car trip and trying to find a station playing some half decent music on it, perhaps you’ve run across the radio show “Unshackled”.  Broadcast by the Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago since 1950, the radio show “Unshackled” features old timey radio dramatizations, complete with voice actors and sound effects and organ accompaniment – lots of organ accompaniment - of testimonies of people falling into sin – defined as alcohol, gambling and such, – and being saved by the power of Christ. For those who aren’t familiar with the series, it’s sort of like Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noir, Private Eye segments on Prairie Home Companion, except that on Unshackled, the two eternal answers to life’s persistent questions – to every last one of life’s persistent questions - are Jesus and schmaltzy organ music, roughly in that order.

My sermon title that’s in the bulletin and on the sign board, “Stuck”, with a question mark, was the best I could come up with by the time I had printed the bulletins yesterday morning – I’d been fishing for a title all week – but after I’d printed the bulletins, I realized that “Unshackled” was the word and the sermon title I’d been groping for.  “Unshackled” – the word conjures up a vivid image of having an old fashioned metal ball and chain shackled to one’s ankle, or having one’s arm shackled to a metal ring in the wall of a jail cell, and then somebody coming along with a big old metal key and opening the metal shackle, allowing us to walk free.

In our gospel reading today, we’re told that Jesus was preparing for a journey, maybe on his way out the door, when a young man ran up to him and bowed before him.  It’s really quite a striking image:  we’re told later that the young man was quite wealthy, and it’s unusual for someone of wealth and social status to run for any reason, let alone to some scruffy traveling preacher and healer and his smelly sidekicks, the disciples.  Wealthy people are used to sitting still and having other people running around scrambling to meet their needs….think of the phrase from a few years ago, “I’ll have my people call your people, and we’ll do lunch sometime.”  But this young man didn’t send his people to talk to Jesus’ people – thank goodness, or the disciples would have messed everything up.  Nor did he send enforcers to issue Jesus an invitation he couldn’t refuse.  The young man himself came to see Jesus, and clearly there was a degree of urgency in his visit.

Now, think of other people in the Gospels who have walked or run up to talk to Jesus.  They often came to ask Jesus’ intervention with a medical emergency: a son or daughter possessed by a demon and suffering seizures, a woman suffering for years from internal bleeding, a man suffering from blindness, or from leprosy, a servant ill and at the point of death from fever.  Someone is dying, or in danger of injuring themselves or others, and so there’s some urgency – they need healing now. In these cases, Jesus says the word – in some cases, accompanied by laying on of hands – and the illness departs.   Mark tells us of this young man running up to Jesus, and perhaps we’re expecting another request for physical healing – but if that’s our expectation, we’re mistaken.

Perhaps still huffing and puffing and gasping for breath, the young man asks Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” As I read this story, I thought to myself, “Hey, kid, what’s the hurry?”  By all indications, the young man was in perfectly good physical health.  He had every reason to expect he was going to be around for many years to come.  Why run? What’s the hurry? Where’s the fire?  Why not send your people to talk to Jesus’ people and plan to do lunch sometime when it was convenient to both you and Jesus?  Surely Jesus would appreciate dinner out at a nice restaurant, and the young man could surely pick up the tab for both of them. And yet, here’s this young man at Jesus’ feet, gasping for breath, asking about eternal life, asking ultimate questions.

While the young man was by all accounts in perfect physical health, it was clear he suffered some disease of the spirit, some sickness of the soul, that made him run up to Jesus as he did.  In addressing Jesus as teacher, it would appear the young man thought there was some secret knowledge out there that he was missing out on, some secret of life that Jesus had and the young man desperately wanted.  And so, like a doctor diagnosing a patient, Jesus tries to determine in what way the patient feels something is wrong, to find out where the patient is hurting.  Perhaps the young man feels guilt over some awful crime he’d committed.   “Why do you call me good?” Jesus says. “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.'"  The young man replies, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.”

Mark begins the next sentence with the words, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.”  Clearly the young man had gotten Jesus’ attention.  The young man wasn’t seeking cheap grace to cover over some crime, but a serious follower of the Jewish faith, a sincere seeker after truth.  It’s striking that in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ encounter with the young man is the only time Mark explicitly tells us that Jesus loved someone, even though love was behind all of Jesus’ actions.  The young man was living according to the best that his faith tradition had to offer….and yet, somehow, it wasn’t enough.  It just wasn’t enough.  And the young man knew it.

“Jesus, looking at him, loved him,”…..and Jesus loved the young man enough to tell him the truth.  “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.”  These words may shock us, scandalize us, as they did the disciples.  Certainly, if this took place in an episode of Unshackled on the radio, this would be the time when the organ music would swell and Jesus would say, likely with a Kentucky fried accent, “You need to get down on your knees – on your knees, young man – and pray for me to come into your life. You must repent of your sins and receive the Holy Ghost.”  And while it didn’t happen in exactly that way, Jesus did invite the young man to come, follow him.  Jesus invited the young man to be a part of Jesus’ life, and Jesus’ ministry.  In fact, Jesus invited the young man to be a disciple, along with Peter and James and John and all the rest..  But he told him he had to do one thing first:  “Go, sell all you have and give the proceeds to the poor, and you’ll have treasure in heaven.  Then come, follow me.”

Oops.  That wasn’t what the young man wanted to hear.   This wasn’t Jesus telling the young man, “Send in your love offering of $100 to bless this ministry, and we’ll send you a genuine anointed fabric sample….er….prayer cloth, and blessing will be upon you and your home from that day forward.”  No, Jesus didn’t want the young man just to make a donation, and he didn’t want the young man’s money for himself or his ministry - Jesus didn’t need them.  But the poor did.  “Go, sell, give, then come and follow”, Jesus told the young man.  Jesus had put his finger on the sore spot, had named the elephant in the room: the young man’s wealth.  The young man had wealth he didn’t need, and the poor needed wealth that the young man had.  Jesus asked the young man to make the connection, to connect his gifts with the world’s needs.  And the young man turned away. 

Although the young man ran up to Jesus, all the same, he was shackled by golden handcuffs to his wealth, to his land holdings, to his stash of cash, shackled away from the eternal life he sought. Jesus held up the key that would leave him unshackled – give away your stash to those without cash – but the young man refused.  Likely it was, at least in part, a lack of trust or faith or confidence in Jesus – “If I give away everything I own, how do I know that God will provide?  How do I know that Jesus and his posse won’t leave me begging in the streets? That Judas guy following Jesus seems like he’d just as soon backstab me as look at me.  How do I know that I’ll be ok?  Nah, I’d best stick to what I know.”

Actually, I think the young man’s wealth was more than a shackle, more than a ball and chain.  I believe it had become a part of his identity, a part of how he saw himself, a part of him, like an arm or a leg.   Before he saw himself as a young man or as a Jewish man, he saw himself as a wealthy man.  Wealthy people move differently in the world than the rest of us do...as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand."  Or, as Fitzgerald wrote of two characters in his book The Great Gatsby, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”   The rich are different, and this young man was rich. To give away his wealth would not only change the young man’s circumstances, it would change him, at the core of who he was.  He’d be different – not a “wealthy man” but a “formerly wealthy man”. To give away his money would be like cutting off his own arm or leg……and, indeed, we remember that Jesus said, “if your foot makes you stumble, if your eye makes causes you to sin, cut it off, pluck it out.”  Jesus asked the young man to do exactly that – “if your bank account makes you sin, give it away”.  And it was more than the young man could do.

How about us?  What has us shackled?  It may be sins that are known to us, like addiction or infidelity or out-of-control anger or bigotry.  But, like the young man, we may be shackled by things that seem innocent, that aren’t explicitly prohibited – after all, nowhere in the Ten Commandments does it say, “Thou shalt not be wealthy” – but that keep us from responding to the invitation of Jesus “Come, follow me.”  It may be wealth, or power, or comfort.  It may be ideas of respectability that keep us from hanging out with the so-called disreputable people who need to hear the good news of Jesus, or that keep us from confronting the evils of Empire – militarism, oligarchism, economic elitism, which might bring disapproval or even arrest and imprisonment upon us.  It may be assumptions – about our place in the world, about our community’s and our country’s place in the world, about what’s rightfully ours – that keep us blinded to complacent, self-righteous attitudes and beliefs and actions that desperately need to change.  

Yesterday Mark and Barbara and I were at a training session in community organizing held by POWER – Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower and Rebuild – which our church recently joined.  At the beginning of the session, we were asked to write down the answers to two questions:  “What’s holding us back?” and “What would we do if there was nothing holding us back?” My answers to the first question, aside from physical nuisance stuff like advancing age and retreating stamina, an expanding waistline and diminishing vision and hearing, involved my litany of fears: fear of confrontation, fear of disapproval, abject terror about dealing with conflict, on a more personal level, fear of being truly known for who I am and for how I experience myself, and rejected for it.  Despite my jokes and my bluster, I live with fear – lots of it - and battle against fear every day, 24/7/365.  In my battles with my fears, I win some, and I lose some…though having fought many battles, my batting average has improved over the years.  And my answer to the second question – what would I do if those were removed – involved my dreams of an Emanuel Church.  And my dreams were not about an Emanuel Church with more money or more space…though some chair lifts for the stairs and wash basis for the rest rooms would make me so happy! Rather, I dreamed about an Emanuel Church that’s even more welcoming than we already are, even more diverse, a church with many many more children, and more teachers and leaders to guide them, an Emanuel church that does more to look in on our shut-ins and elderly members, and let them know how much they’re loved and appreciated, a church even more engaged in proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ and in helping one another and the wider community than we are, a place where all are not only welcome but are loved and affirmed and celebrated, and feel affirmed and celebrated enough to give back to others by being active in some kind of ministry helping others; ultimately, a church even more faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ than we already are, a church that has good news and is good news – all qualities we already have, but kicked up several notches. Really, in the language of my sermon title, the questions were “What has us shackled?...Where are we stuck?”, and “what would we do if the shackles were removed?

“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  What’s holding you back, holding me back?  What could you do, what could I do, what could we do together if nothing held us back? May God grant us the grace to ask for our shackles to be removed, and the vision to see God’s dreams for our unshackled lives.  Amen.