The only person who refused to follow Jesus

We have discovered that there is vocal opposition to our project to build Brockton's green and pleasant land.

Here are the links to two articles in the Brockton Enterprise: from October 9 and from October 6. Read them for yourself; from our point of view, they do not treat the development plans fairly, and seem to go after quotes from politicians who oppose this development not having spoken to us or seen our plans. In all fairness, Michael Brady, Linda Balzotti and Robert Sullivan have come to us, to ask about what we are doing and why and how. We appreciate their commitment to improving this neighborhood in which St. Paul's Church sits and which suffers from blight and neglect.

Our project is to begin to transform our very blighted block at the corner of Warren and Pleasant. Working with a variety of partners -- developers of affordable housing, churches, soup kitchen volunteers, neighbors, the Episcopal City Mission -- we want to take a neighborhood of blight and neglect and turn it into a place of beauty and usefulness, where people want to live and where they feel safe to walk to work and to shop.

In the first years of my ordained ministry, in the 1980s, churches all over the country, like St. Paul's, opened soup kitchens. There was a crisis in homelessness; people were on the streets, hungry and with no where to go. Large mental institutions closed their doors, rooming houses and small apartments disappeared as waves of gentrification and urban renewal swept over cities. That was 30 years ago. Churches like St. Paul's cannot continue to provide emergency services for ever. We are in danger of institutionalizing a permanent and massive underclass of poor people, who have to eat in soup kitchens and live in shelters because they cannot afford to live anywhere else. The PleasantGreen project is part of an effort to end homelessness, an effort endorsed by Mayor Harrington.

What churches like St. Paul's can do is to contribute to making their communities safe for all kinds of people -- for the poor people who live here, and for the middle class people who might want to come to church here. For the working people who need a decent place to live, that they can afford working for minimum wages, and for people interested in a culturally vital and attractive downtown, who might want to attend a concert or a class or view an art show.

St. Paul's was built by people who no longer live in Brockton: shoe factory owners and workers. The shoe factories are no longer here, but the church is, and for its next 150 years, it can be the kind of place it has always been: a place where poor and rich sit side by side, who walk next to each other on the way to the altar. A place of beauty and peace, where music rises to the heavens, and hands are clasped in friendship. A place of safety and hospitality, where the hungry in body and spirit meet and are fed.

In preparing for my sermon for Sunday, October 11, I re-read my sermon from three years ago. The Old Testament reading is from Job. The Gospel reading is Mark's account of the man with many possessions: "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" he asks Jesus. "Sell what you have and give to the poor," Jesus told him, and the Gospel tells us that the man turned away, sorrowful, for he had many possessions. This man with possessions to save and protect is the only person in the Gospel who refused Jesus' invitation to follow him.

Even the disciples seem to find Jesus answer to the man harsh. "What are you telling us, Jesus," they seem to shout in perplexity. "At the rate you are going, no one will be able to get into heaven."

St. Paul's is a church with nothing left: a painful conflict in recent memory, and an economic base that disappeared along with the shoe factories. Is Jesus asking St. Paul's to give all of that away, too? Is that what all this "public opposition" means? Is Jesus telling us, "Sell what you have and give to the poor," and might we not ask back, "How much more? What is there possibly left to give?"

Perhaps this is just where Jesus wants us to be.

Proper 23-B; Oct. 15, 2006; St. Paul’s

Job 23:1-9, 16-17;Psalm 90; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

“No one is good but God alone”? God is good? Ask Job. The excerpt we are reading today finds Job in the middle of his God-induced misery, having been harassed by friends, as well as his wife, to curse God and die, or to find in his own behavior a cause for this terrible treatment. As one wise biblical teacher puts it, Job “is still laboring under the old delusion that God is reasonable.” “Oh, that I knew where I might find him … I would lay my case before him … I would learn what he would answer me.” Job is suffering. Job is the archetype of suffering, suffering without the relief or assurance of God’s love.

The rich man who kneels at the feet of Jesus is also suffering. He is worried that, although he lives a good life, as he defines it, it is not enough. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he plaintively asks the one he calls “good teacher.” Jesus gives him some answers, but they are no more welcome to his ears than God’s silence is to Job. In fact, Jesus’ words may as well be silence, for they are not what the rich man wants to hear.

Jesus takes “good behavior” a few steps beyond the “10 commandments.” To that list Jesus adds, “Do not defraud.” This word for “defraud” in Greek means cheating a worker you’ve hired out of the wages due to him, or it means refusing to return goods or money someone has entrusted to you for safekeeping. And then Jesus throws in the kicker: “Sell what you have, and give the money to the poor.” You can see Jesus using this man’s seemingly purely spiritual and religious question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” and turning it into an indictment of all wealthy people. They have obtained their money through fraudulent means; they have cheated those whose labor created their wealth, they have not returned that which was entrusted to them. Jesus demands restitution. “Get up,” he says – a phrase otherwise used by Jesus when he heals someone. “Get up and be healed of your sickness of accumulation, of using wealth as an end and not a means. “Sell that which you have. Give it to the poor. Follow me.” And this is the first and only time in the Gospels when Jesus says to someone, “Follow me,” and he does not do it. The rich man refuses to be a disciple.

The disciples are really shocked; this is too hard, they say. No one can do this, rightly recognizing that these harsh statements of Jesus do not apply only to the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” crowd. They apply all of us, for all of us can find something we would rather keep than follow Jesus. “How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!”

The epistle reading, from Hebrews, reminds us that Jesus does not ask us to do anything he has not already done. Even more than that, though, the reading reminds us that when we do what Jesus asks us, he is right there with us every step of the way, “one who in every respect has been tested as we are.”

Here on Pleasant Street we might well ask Jesus, “Sell what you have and give to the poor? How much more? What is left here?” This is an extraordinarily generous and giving congregation, a witness to the power of the Gospel. But isn’t it always the case, when we think we have nothing left to give, when we feel we are played out, hit rock bottom, done all we can do, that Jesus comes to us again, and asks even us to sell all we have and follow him. Go deeper, Jesus says. Go farther. If you think you have reached a limit, then you are being all too human, Jesus says. For God, only with God, always with God, all things are possible.