A sermon preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, October 13th, 2024
The service included the commissioning of one of the church members as a Street Pastor
Watch the whole service on YouTube (apart from the commissioning itself)
‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’
How do you measure success in life? One very powerful metric for doing so is the ability to accumulate wealth. Just as people in Jesus’s day (including his puzzled disciples) saw wealth as evidence of being in with God, so we today, in this much more secular age see the wealthy as being “blessed.”
So it’s the wealthy who fill up gossip columns and the celebrity magazines. It’s the wealthy who are the subject of so many fly-on-the wall documentaries, who so often appear on the interviewee’s couch in the television studio.
There’s a lot of wealth around. Take Lloyd Kelly as an example. If you haven’t heard of him it’s probably because he only plays for Newcastle United. He was signed in this summer just gone. His wages come to one hundred and fifty thousand pounds … per week. Another way of saying that is £3.1 million per year. That puts Lloyd near the top of Newcastle United FC wage earners but there are more than fifty other Premier League players ahead of him; the list is topped by Kevin de Bruyne of Manchester City. He’s on four hundred thousand pounds per week. Poor Lloyd! Premier League players are going to need a very, very big needle in order to make it in to the kingdom of God! Or maybe not ….
We might think that what Jesus has to say about how difficult it is for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven applies to Premier League players, but not to us. If so we would be half-right. It applies to them, but also to us. By one measure UK average annual purchasing power is forty five thousand pounds per year. Maybe you still feel that Jesus’s words about the wealthy are for other people. That, though, is to think in UK terms only.
By the same measure of average purchasing power, what is £45k pa where we live, is £1261pa in Mozambique, £1187 pa in DRC, £860 pa in the Central African Republic, £700 pa in Burundi, and £350 in South Sudan. Makes our £45k per annum look good, and even if you and I get by on less than that per year (because it’s an average figure), then there are others in the world getting by (or not) on less than £350 a year. We are wealthy, and Jesus says it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle ….
So what are we supposed to do about that? Jesus, seeing what was number one for the rich young man told him to ‘sell what you own and give the money to the poor.’ (10:27) That was too much for the man, so he departed sadly, hanging on to his ‘many possessions.’ (10:22) I think I probably would have done the same if I had been in his situation, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
I remember one highly committed church member I knew (not from this congregation) who informed me she would never sing the fourth verse of the hymn, ‘Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord to thee,’ as she was opposed to lying. So she always stayed silent for the lines, ‘take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold.’ I respected her honesty, whilst aspiring to the sentiment of the hymn.
The good news, though, that Jesus shares with his puzzled disciples, who want to know, ‘who then can be saved?’, is this: ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God: for God all things are possible.’ (10:27) Our entry into the kingdom of God is not dependent upon us, and upon our level of commitment, but upon God, and God’s committed love for us.
For all we know, that rich young man, who kept the commandments against theft, murder, adultery, false witness and the like, was included within the kingdom by God, despite his human desire to hang on to his riches – for nothing is impossible with God.
Don’t, however, think that that gets us off the hook concerning what we do with the resources that God has gifted to us. Once Jesus has made his point that entry to God’s kingdom depends upon God’s love, not our actions, he goes on to talk about what happens when we do commit to following him, sometimes in ways that are costly: ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the good news who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age — houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with them persecutions — and in the age to come eternal life.’ (10:29-30)
When you commit to joining with others in following Jesus, there may well be obstacles, even inconvenience or suffering, but these are balanced, outweighed by the positives, both now and in ‘the age to come eternal life.’ (10:30)
Take street pastoring as an example. You have to sacrifice your time and your beauty sleep. You might find yourself out in the sort of weather that would make you want to be indoors instead. You encounter people and situations that you find personally challenging, and, I imagine, sometimes fill you with deep sadness. And you accumulate precisely zero material wealth in return.
On the other hand, you get to experience the fellowship of your newly acquired sister and brother street pastors; you get to discover things about yourself you never knew; you receive gratitude from those you help (sometimes); you get the opportunity to be Jesus-like (which is what following Jesus is supposed to be about) by going about the streets meeting a big variety of people, sharing in their celebrating and their sadnesses, and helping them out when life throws something difficult at them. As someone I know put it, ‘you get the chance to be a bit “Jesus-y.”’ And to me, being a bit Jesus-y sounds remarkably like that you get ‘to enter the kingdom of God’ here on earth.
So, whatever in your life that you put before following Jesus is a “camel” that stands between you and entering the kingdom of heaven. In a rich country like ours often it’s our attachment to our possessions that’s the issue, so don’t just try to hang on to them. If you can’t give everything up for Jesus, though, don’t give up on yourself, because God will not give up on you. It might be impossible for us to struggle our way into God’s kingdom, but it’s not impossible for God to drag us in anyway.
In the meantime, let’s do our best to be Jesus-like, for when we make the effort, the sacrifice, Jesus says that we will experience all sorts of positives, both now and ‘in the age to come eternal life.’ (10:30) Amen.