You Do Nothing to Inherit the Kingdom! - Mark 10: 17-22

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” I do believe the rich young man’s question is honest. I don’t think he is trying to trick Jesus or trap him in some minutia of the Law. St. Mark doesn’t give us any reason to think there is something hinky going on. I think the question is an honest question, but it does give us some insight into the man. Mark notes that he is rich. Maybe he’s a first century Wall Street tycoon, used to making the big deals, getting his way, and negotiating his opponent into submission. He gets it done. So, he brings that with him to the conversation: “What do I have to do? It’s how the world works. What do I need to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus?”   

If you stop to think about it, we ask “what do I have to do?” quite often in a lot of different settings. This is part of the give-and-take of all sorts of relationships that we have in our daily lives and vocations. “I’ll tell you what I want, you tell me what you need, and let’s see if we can’t meet in the middle.” Students ask teachers, “What do I have to do to get extra credit?” Teachers ask students, “What do I have to do to get this into your heads?” Kids ask parents, “What do I have to do to go spend the night at my friend’s house?” Parents ask, “What do I have to do to get you to clean your room?” Teenage boys ask their buddies, “What do I have to do to get her to like me?” Teenage girls ask their friends, “What do I have to do to get him to leave me alone?” The salesman asks, “What do I have to do to get you to buy this today?” The customer asks, “What do I have to do to get out of here and go home?”

The focus is on the “I,” the initial maker of the request. “What do I have to do?”  It implies that I can bring something to the conversation, that I have something to offer, something of value to persuade you to move towards me. 

Let’s go back to the rich man’s question - what must I do to inherit eternal life? What does the rich man have that he can offer? What can he bring to the table to negotiate with Jesus? He’s prepared to offer his good life, his track record of commandment keeping. In fact, I wonder if the question isn’t actually a base desire for affirmation, making the question almost rhetorical: “What I’ve been doing….that’s how I inherit eternal life, right?”

You notice that Jesus addresses commandments four through ten. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Don’t take your neighbor’s life or wife, don’t steal the neighbor’s belongings or their good reputation, don’t manipulate someone in the business world, and don’t forget to love your mom and dad.” The rich young man thinks he has this licked: I imagine he is nodding at each commandment that Jesus mentions and thinking he’s got this under control. 

But then Jesus turns to the first table of the Law. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind.” A god is anything you fear, love and trust. Jesus, who can see into this man’s heart, knows that man’s god – lower case g – is his wealth. There’s a powerful, small detail – Mark notes that Jesus loves the man – He doesn’t want to see the young man perish into eternity by chasing after a false god. He calls the man to an act of repentance, to stop worshipping the false god of his wealth by ridding himself of it, making way in his heart to love the Lord your God instead. “Go, sell all you have and give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.” It’s as if Jesus is asking, “What does your fear, love and trust rest? Is it in me, or in your wealth?” The man’s actions serve as the sad conclusion: “Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”

“What must I do?” It’s a loaded question, one we must be very careful of asking. It’s one thing to ask your spouse or your parent. It’s a whole ‘nother thing if we think we can approach God with our grocery list of good deeds, as if we can somehow negotiate our way into God’s good graces. We’re quick to make our suggestions: I gotta go to church, I gotta give my offering, I gotta be a better parent, I gotta be a better student, I gotta be better in my Bible reading, I gotta pray more, I gotta…” Have you noticed that list always grows? There’s never an end. There’s always something else we think we gotta do:  I gotta watch my mouth, I gotta keep my eyes from wandering, I gotta do better, I gotta…” The list never ends; the list is never accomplished; the list is never perfected. The list tells the tale.

In hopeless abandon, we cry out, “What must I do?” You know what Jesus wants from you? Your sins. That’s all. He doesn’t want your perfection, or your best of intentions. He wants your sins. Rid your heart, your conscience, your life of anything else that gets in the way of Jesus. That’s what He came for. He came to be your Savior. He came to trade His perfection for your imperfection. Don’t put Jesus out of a job! He came to take your sins from you. Instead of trying to do better, and then when you fail try even harder – as if you could somehow attain perfection that way – instead, confess your sins. Surrender them all to Jesus: all of the I gottas, the I wouldas, the I couldas, the, shouldas turn them all over to Jesus and trust that His once-for-all death on the cross pays for your sins. You do nothing; Jesu does it all. You have nothing to negotiate with, so out of His great love for you, Jesus speaks for you with His Father in heaven. Jesus says, “My life for his; My life for hers.” The answer to “What must I do to inherit eternal life” is found at the cross. At the cross, in His dying breath, Jesus declares: There is nothing left for you to do. “It is finished.”

I started this sermon by saying that the man’s question was an honest one. While it may have been an honest one, it was a misguided question. Go back to the question with me one more time: “What must I do to inherit eternal life.” What must I do to inherit? Answer: you do nothing to inherit anything. Inheritance is something that is given by the head/s of the household to those who in the family. You don’t earn inheritance by something you do. Inheritance is a gift. You don’t buy it, you don’t negotiate for it.

Inheritance is yours by nature of who you are: a son or daughter. Inheritance is yours by nature of whose you are: a son or daughter of the giver. Inheritance implies family.

This is what God has done for you in Christ Jesus. In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Peter 1:3-5).

So there is no doubt in your mind of your adoption into the family of God through Christ, you are given Jesus’ name. You are called “Christian,” which means “Little Christ.” It’s not something you negotiated with God. God declares it; you simply respond in faith: Yes, Lord, I believe. There is no negotiation. There is simply declaration: What must I do to inherit eternal life? Nothing: Christ has done everything for you.

Amen.

Marriage: God's Gift to Man & Wife - Genesis 2: 18-25

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Impressive Clergyman stood up in front of the Prince and his soon-to-be wife and intoned, “Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today. Marriage, that blessed arrangement; that dream within a dream….”[1] To borrow from his sermon, as we heard in this morning’s Scripture readings, God’s Word about marriage is what brings us together today.

Marriage is a life-long walking together of husband and wife, monogamously united together, one man and one woman, in the one-flesh union that God established in the Garden of Eden. A marriage is not the same thing as a wedding, although most marriages legally begin with a wedding. A wedding is an event, hopefully, prayerfully, a once-in-a-lifetime event. It’s the stuff that girls daydream about have women studying brides’ magazines and websites. With tuxes and dresses, venues and caterers, florists and DJs, weddings are big business. But at the end of the day, it’s a singular event; relatively speaking, it’s just a moment in first chapter of the wedded couple’s life.  A marriage begins as the wedding event comes to its completion.

Marriage began because God saw that it wasn’t good for man to be alone. It would be better for him to have a female companion, a helper, a comforter, someone like him but also different from him, someone to walk alongside him through life. All the living creatures on earth and in the air were brought by God to Adam for them to be named. Do not read into this that God was authorizing some kind of weird, perverted human-animal relationship, the kind that twisted minds today call “love” as if it were the same thing as that between man and woman. This animal roll call and naming process was God’s way of demonstrating to Adam the need for companionship to defeat loneliness, setting the stage, so to speak, so Adam would appreciate all the more the gift that God had in mind for Adam, His son.

After placing Adam into a deep sleep, God took one of Adam’s ribs and used it to make a woman. I say “make,” but I kind of like the literal Hebrew translation better: to build. God built the woman from Adam’s rib. That might sound rather industrial, but think of it this way: while you might make a cake or make a blanket, you build things of significance and power – you build a home, you build a nation. Adam was created from dirt – that is what his name means, Adamah, dirt – created in God’s image of holiness. God builds the woman, carefully, deliberately, from Adam’s side. She is not inferior to him, as would be if she was taken from a bone in the foot; rather, she is built from his side, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. It’s an indication of the relationship, literally his side by her side.

Do you know why God created the world? It wasn’t because He was bored, or He was curious to see if He could do it. God is love, and He wanted an object, something, where His love could be directed toward. Thus He created the universe and all that was in it. Do you know why He created man? He didn’t just want something, He wanted someone, in His own image, someone who could receive His love and, in relationship, reflect it back to Him and also to show and distribute that love to His creation. Do you know why God created a woman? So that His love could also be shared among each other, and so that Adam would have someone to receive his love and love him in return, demonstrating God’s love to each other as God loved them.

When God gives her to Adam, his joy at seeing her practically leaps from the page: “At last! Here is one like me!” You will notice there was no wedding – well, at least, not as we think of weddings. There was no cake and punch, no band or brisket, no limo or honeymoon, no wondering what side of the chancel to sit in. But it was a wedding, nevertheless. It was conducted in the most beautiful scene the world had ever seen, the Garden of Eden, where it was, truly, a perfect moment, making it a perfect wedding. Their wedding took place in true innocence, before sin had happened, establishing wedlock to be a holy, God-pleasing estate that should be kept in a holy manner. The congregation of creation on earth and the hosts of heaven watched and listened as God gave His blessing as both Father of Bride and Groom. The pre-incarnate Jesus was the preacher blessing them with His words that a man and woman shall become one flesh and the Holy Spirit stood as witness to the sacred event, having brought the two together and uniting them with love for each other. [2]

What there was, was marriage: God instituting the gift of a husband to a wife and a wife to a husband, establishing marriage as His divinely willed and approved blessing to mankind and creation. And, like very other piece of creation, it was good.

Every time family and friends gather at a wedding to celebrate the marriage-union of man and wife in holy marriage, they do so in the footsteps of Adam and Eve and all of God’s faithful who have gone before, invoking His name and imploring His blessing not only in the wedding, but on the entire marriage that follows the pronouncement of mister and misses, husband and wife. Any other relationship other than the one man and one woman union, is not marriage, regardless what the government or conventional wisdom says and it is not, and cannot, be blessed by God.

I don’t need to tell you that marriage, while a blessing, is also hard work.  The warm fuzzies and flutters slowly morph into normalcy and, if not careful, complacency, taking each other for granted instead of as the gift they are. Statistics tell us that marriage is about a fifty-fifty proposition for success. Every time I pronounce “husband and wife,” I do so with an iota of fear for them, knowing what they face. What do you expect when two sinners are joined together, side by side, stride for stride, under the same roof, sharing the same blankets? At the end of the marriage rite, I say, “What God has joined together, let no man tear apart.” In that moment, satan giggles with glee, already hard at work to destroy what God joined together. He does it sneakily: God’s gifts get turned inward and backward. Love, which is always directed toward the spouse, becomes selfishness; compassion for the spouse’s needs becomes insensitivity; forgiveness is replaced by getting even. And Satan laughs and claps his hands in evil joy while husband and wife, man and wife, weep as what God put together is torn asunder. 

The Old Testament lesson speaks of God instituting marriage. The Gospel lesson speaks of marriages broken. I want to take a moment and speak to four specific people here today.

The first person is you who have lived through a broken marriage. Divorce is hard. It is hard on everyone who loves the couple. I have heard it described as death. That makes sense. If two become one in marriage, in divorce, the one is torn apart. In this morning’s Gospel lesson, Jesus speaks to it, but I want you to understand something about this conversation and its context. It comes because the Jewish leaders are trying to trap Jesus. They were looking for loopholes. They don’t care a lick about the souls of the husband and wife in question; they weren’t worried about the broken-hearted people whose lives are collapsing. They want to get Jesus in hot water, thus the question. Jesus answer, here, isn’t about labeling divorce a sin and branding divorcees with a Scarlet D, to be scorned and mocked. (As an aside, sadly, that happens sometimes in the Church, and for those of us who have whispered, stared, or wondered “what did he or she do?”, we must repent of those foolish thoughts.) What Jesus would do, instead, is identify the sins that led to the dissolution of what God established, and then lead the broken man and wife to repentance and, ideally, reconciliation. Jesus died for those whose marriages died, with the promised grace that even broken marriages are forgiven, the old adam and old eve drowned in the blood of Christ, living a new life as a forgiven, baptized man or woman redeemed in the eyes of God.

The second person is you who are struggling in your marriage. If Adam and Eve are the picture-perfect image of what marriage was intended, I can only imagine what their marriage was like after the fall as they blamed each other and had to wrestle with each other as sinners. To you who are struggling, you are not alone. Too often, struggling husbands and wives pretend everything is fine when, in reality, their marriage is – to use the metaphor – sick. To carry that metaphor, if your body is sick, you go to a doctor for care. If your marriage is sick, do not hide it, do not lie and pretend with yourself, each other, and to others that all is well. Seek help. Your Lord Jesus Christ is the Great Physician of body and soul and of broken lives and broken marriages; He gives gifts of peace – restoration - to you. I invite, encourage, welcome you to come speak with me. Don’t be embarrassed; I will not judge you as “less than” or a failure. I work with sinners, remember, and I face one every day in the mirror; I work with children of God, remember, and I see one every day in the mirror. And, if you don’t want to talk with me, then talk with a faithful Christian friend whose marriage is strong and will offer Godly, prayerful counsel for you and your spouse.

The third person is the one whose marriage is healthy and strong. God be praised for the love and respect you and your spouse share as you live your married life. Lift up those who are struggling and walk alongside them with compassion and humility, that your strength might be theirs. May God bless you, husband and wife, as Godly witnesses of the Lord’s love and compassion for His people.

The fourth person is the one who is single, either by choice or because death has separated you from your beloved. You are also a Godly example of what it is to be a faithful witness and child of God. May He bless you with the strength to resist temptations of this world while also giving you the grace to look forward to the blessed, eternal wedding feast of the Lamb in His kingdom.  And, if you are seeking a spouse, then begin praying now for whomever the Lord will send to you in His time and in His way.

Whichever person you are, divorced, struggling, healthy, single or widowed, remember this: God saw that it was not good for man – or woman – to be alone. He sent His Son, Jesus, to be the perfect bridegroom for the Church, claiming her to be His own. He has washed His bride of all her sins in holy Baptism, making her radiant, resplendent in His holiness and blamelessness. He cares and feeds His bride with His own Body and Blood. When she is hurt, He wraps her in His grace and mercy. When she sins, He calls her back in repentance to His loving, forgiving arms.

This, then, becomes the picture for husbands and wives. As Christ is for the Church, giving Himself for her, He is also for the husbands and wives whom He unites, binding them to each other through Him and in Him.

The Impressive Clergyman’s brief sermon was right, but also wrong. Marriage is not what brings us together. What brings us together is God’s command and love which fills man and woman with love for each other and love for He who united them. His love does not follow; His love leads, enwraps, and holds husband and wife in a union that pictures Christ and His bride, the church. But the Clergyman is right: treasure this love which is ours in Christ our Lord. Amen.

---

[1] Reiner, R. (1987). The Princess Bride. Twentieth Century Fox.

[2] I am indebted to the images in this paragraph from Valeris Herberger, The Great Works of God, vol 1, CPH © 2010, p. 172.