Impossible

Proper 23 B 2009
(Job 23: 1-9, 16-17; Ps 8; Heb 4: 12-16; Mark 10: 17-31)


After a flood, a young man walked along the swollen riverbank to see the rushing water and the wreckage.

Around a bend in the river, he found an old man standing up to his chest in the dangerous current. The old man was reaching out his hand to a tangle of branches in the midst of the waters. Looking closer, the young man saw a large scorpion clinging to the end of one branch. The young man watched in wonder and horror as the scorpion stung the old man on the hand. After shaking his swollen, bleeding hand, the old man reached out to the scorpion again. And again, and again.

After watching this repetitive drama for some moments, the young man finally burst out, “Leave it alone, you old fool! Let that ungrateful bug drown! He’s not going to appreciate what you’re trying to do, and he will sting you every time!”

The old man turned and looked at the young man with serene eyes in spite of the pain. “It’s in the nature of the scorpion to sting. And it is in my nature to try and save it. Why should I change my own nature?”

Well, this story raises a lot of questions for me. The first is, who is that old man living with living with and why hasn’t he been taking his medication? To rescue an unlovable poisonous insect even though it thanks you with a sting is insane as far as the world is concerned. Lots of words come to mind to dismiss the old man’s behavior—self-destructive, masochistic, even the milder “co-dependent.” I know that as I tell this story faces and situations from my own life and my own ministry come to mind—people who rewarded loving attention with demands for even more attention, or new arrays of problems when the old ones had been resolved, or walking away after absorbing tons of time and attention, sometimes waving one or more fingers behind them as they did. We all can relate, we all have been there. Perhaps we have been on the other side of the fence also, at least once or twice.

We speak about “boundaries” and “tough love” and “taking care of ourselves so we have something left to give to others.” Those are all wise words. Job’s words in the first reading become all of our words as we try to live and love, when all good works seem to taste and feel like dust and God’s face is hidden.

And yet, I want what that old man had—the peace, and the freedom to live in that embracing, giving, loving place. I find myself thinking that it is not just natural to live like that. It is supernatural, it is transformed nature, it is nature that is healed and set free by God.

Getting there is not an easy journey. Beware of easy religion with clear maps and all the answers! The man who ran up to Jesus today and asked him what to do had done everything right. He had kept the commandments, he’d read and listened to his Bible and took it all to heart. And I don’t think he was a hypocrite, because the text says that Jesus looked at him “and loved him.” But loving this man meant asking him to go to a place that his conscience and his religion had never asked him to go to before. Leave, leave what he thought he had a right to own even if he was doing good things with it. Leave it even though wealth was thought by some to be a sign of God’s blessing. Leave, give, follow, be nothing in the world’s eyes so you can have everything in God’s eyes. “How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God.”

It’s impossible, humanly speaking. It is totally possible, with the help of God.

A man named Mark Scandrette recently gave a speech on “The Five Myths of Community.” He shocks his listeners, good church people, by reminding them that the first Christians were “miserable”—they lost a great deal for following Jesus, even their lives some of them. But church, says Mark, is not the place where we get all our needs met, where we find our favorite opinions affirmed, where we are totally comfortable all of the time. Even wanting community, says Mark, is not a good goal in itself; he said that “community is a beautiful by-product of seeking God’s kingdom together.” The key is to know and live that we come together to seek the kingdom of God. That is what a church is; that is all a church is.

This, by the way, is a stewardship sermon. Notice I have never used the word “money.” Stewardship begins with remembering who we most deeply are, and why we gather at all. When we hear that story of the old man reaching out to the scorpion, do we simply shudder in revulsion and disgust, or dismiss it as an improbable fable? Or does something in us come alight and say softly, “Yes, yes. I don’t like stings, but that is the kind of freedom and generous nature that I hunger for. I want to believe that life is possible. But I do not know how to get there.” And in the Gospel, the same thing—sell it all? In this housing market? Give it away? Where would I raise my kids? But isn’t there something deep inside, something that maybe was more active and visible when we were young and we hadn’t let life teach us oh so many limits, be oh so practical, that comes alive and says, “Yes, yes. I remember that! I remember hungering for that kind of freedom, I remember wanting to know what it would be like to live for God in that way. I remember traveling light, walking on a holy road.”

For us it is impossible. But not for God—even our tired and cynical hearts and our minds bombarded with a culture that tells us to get and get and no you do not yet have enough—it is not impossible for God.

And to share that journey, to ask what all that means, and to try it out—that is why a church exists. And that is the only Gospel reason for a church to exist.