A few years ago, I was visited in Seattle by a Search Committee from the Church of the Redeemer.  As we sat together in the living room of my home, after an hour or so, the discussion moved to a deeper level of honesty.  “You need to know,” said one of my guests, “that we are a very affluent parish, wealthy in many ways, but spiritually we are poor.”  I was moved by the humility of this admission, and as I recall it today, in the context of Jesus’ exhortation that we be “rich toward God,” it seems in my mind’s eye that the wall of the room where we were sitting falls open, and I imagine us carried into the midst of the crowd at the center of the story Marc has just read from the Gospel according to Luke.

By this moment in the narrative, the movement inaugurated by Jesus and his disciples has passed the tipping point.  He is no longer just the charming teacher of parables, the universally popular rabbi, the charismatic public figure who blesses children and says comforting things to the poor.  He has become much more than this, releasing men and women from their demons with sometimes terrifying results, declaring clean what had been judged impure, speaking to unjust authority with an authority of his own.  He accepts a dinner invitation from a Pharisee and, over coffee, condemns Pharisaism in its totality.  Wherever he goes, whether among the humble or the great, he exhorts, rebukes, chastises, instructs and disciplines.  And, amazingly, his following grows.  The text says that, at this point, thousands of people from all walks of life accompany him on the road, and we must imagine they do so not because following him is easy, but because they (like Peter) suspect he alone has the words of eternal life.  He manifests, not only in his words, but in his person and work, the fullness of God’s majesty and power; in his presence, though it is sometimes frightening and painful, people begin to feel themselves growing into the human beings they never imagined they might become.  As the works that announce the Kingdom of God spring up around and among them—works of healing and deliverance, of judgment and mercy and empowerment—their heads are lifted up from the prison of their ordinary obsessions, the things that once seemed absolutely life-defining and life-limiting, and they begin to grasp the importance of a life—their lives—as actors in the drama of redemption.  To put it in a phrase, they begin to learn what it means to be rich toward God.

            In the middle of this rolling avalanche of the Kingdom, a voice comes out of the multitude, asking Jesus to do something:  tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.  We know nothing else about the case, whether the man is young or old, whether his case is just or unjust.  We only know that he is obsessed with it.  Amidst the heavenly music of the dead being raised, the sick healed, the lame walking and the blind being given their sight, a complaint arising out of an unsatisfactory result in probate court sounds markedly out of tune.  This man clearly does not get it, and Luke seems to interject him here as a representative of a broader human tendency, the universal temptation for us to hijack the Kingdom of God as power for our own agendas.   We do this because our agendas arise out of the things that are most immediate to us—our suffering, our appetites, our losses and pride and hope and fear, as defined by the people closest to us, by the circumstances nearest us; these are the things that fill our hearts.  Sometimes they are enormous by any standards, as in the sudden death of those we love or an enormous miscarriage of justice we cannot escape.  In other cases, they may be less than first-order events, but (as with the man obsessed about his inheritance) they seem at the time first-order to us; they take up space and time of the first order as we sort through them and worry about them and are awakened by them in the small hours of the night.  In the story of the man whose abundance has outstripped his warehouses, Jesus ties this anxiety to our struggle over possessions, over physical wealth, in which we can clearly see all the ways that we are never satisfied, never seem to reach a place at which we can set aside our appetites and deal with the things that matter.  But by the end of the passage, his concern is larger than our covetousness.  He indicates the problem is not in the substance of our anxieties, as if worry over sickness and grief were more understandable than worry over our 401K or worry over our children’s grades.  He draws no distinction whatever between reasonable and unreasonable anxiety.  Rather he simply suggests that almost all of our misery is caused by the way we allow our hearts to be dominated, imprisoned, sold, bagged and carried away, by things that are not of God.  “Be rich toward God,” he says, “and your heart will no longer be in danger.  You will get the point of all that I am doing, of this joyous parade to Jerusalem, the point of my death and my rising from the dead, and even the point of your own life, why you are here, and what you are supposed to be about.”

            Now this is the summer, and I am trying to keep this short, so I will cut to the chase and simply assert that being rich toward God means “possessing” Jesus:  not simply following him in an ordinary sense, hoping to enlist him on our side as we try to keep our daily agonies at bay; the man troubled over his inheritance does that much.  I mean possessing Jesus in the way one possesses the deepest love.  It is the reverse of everything we usually associate with possession, since its first mark is an utter loss of control over anything that has to do with that love.  True, we possess him in the sense that when we acknowledge him as Savior and Lord, we receive as our own the gifts of his person and work—not only the forgiveness of sins and the victory over death, but the very righteousness and innocence of God are attributed to us as if we deserved them.  While we can be said to possess these things, and (because of them) in fact possess everything, we can be said to control nothing.  From that point on, the love of Christ controls us, and we possess him in about the same way that Jonah possessed the famous fish!  

            I consider my own record in this regard spotty at best.  Saint Paul could have been speaking for me when he wrote, “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self; but I see operating within me at the same time another law at war with the law of my mind.”  I do earnestly want to belong to Christ, to seek him and him alone, and yet this earnest desire is set upon by other demands that conspire to render me dispirited, confused, half-committed, and unambitious for the Kingdom of God.  But I find that the longer I am a Christian, the less patient I am with myself in regard to these failures, the hungrier I become to lead a life rich toward God, the more I feel that to make my peace with living any other way would be the same as agreeing to be habitually dishonest or indecent.  I know it is the Spirit of God that is driving me in this direction, because my own spirit is not at all of this temperament.  I would say the Spirit of God drives us all toward this end, and it is up to us simply how much we will choose to resist it.  I don’t think this means that everyone in this congregation needs to quit what they are doing and go to work for a small NGO somewhere.  Honestly, someone has got to make some money for the sake of Christ, and there are a lot of people here who are very good at doing just that.  Being rich toward God, for such folk, means, it seems to me, having an unquenchable desire to see their resources strategically deployed for the sake of the Kingdom, for the proclamation of the Gospel, and the building up of people in the name of Jesus Christ, and a certain holy restlessness, a refusal to give up until every aspect of their lives bears visible witness to the mercy of Christ’s Cross, the power of Christ’s resurrection, and the life-renewing grace of Christ’s Spirit.   

Personally, I discover that when I find people who are already living this way, when I spend time in their company, the more I want to become more like them, and the more I actually do.  The secret of becoming rich toward God lies in seeking the company of those who already are. It is, after all, Christ who calls us, forms us, sends us, chastens and reforms us, convicts us, heals us, and makes us wholly his gift to one another and the world by re-making us more and more in his image.  So it should come as no surprise that we learn what this means by watching those whom Christ has filled, living in conscious fellowship with one another, loving one another, sacrificially, until the image of Christ be seen in us. “Be imitators of me,” says Saint Paul, laying down the purpose and principle of Christian fellowship: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”  We are re-shaped by God’s Spirit as we come under the loving influence of those who have been so re-shaped.  We lose the prison of our obsessions, our possessions, our agendas, when we draw near to those who have decided to be rich toward God, when we choose to be dispossessed by the world and owned by the Christ whom we see owns them.  And as we make that decision, we ourselves begin to become worthy of imitation.  As we grow in that direction together, here in this parish, it is hard to predict what a wealthy Church indeed we shall become.