“The Lord helps those who help themselves.” You can look it up.

Actually, if you do look it up, you will see that this saying is attributed to Ben Franklin, and that this saying is actually not in the Bible. Although it is not like the Bible has nothing to say about our use of money. Just days before his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus tells his followers that you can tell the righteous from the damned by whether they fed the hungry, housed the poor, took care of the sick, comforted the prisoner, welcomed the stranger. Most of that takes – money.

What is the greatest commandment, Jesus was asked elsewhere? You remember it. “Love God – and love your neighbor.” Love being not a feeling, a warm sentiment, but instead an action word, a word that means “have compassion for, look out for, help, care for”, a word that is not modified by “only if they deserve it.” Love your neighbor, period. Often that takes – money.

A friend, a first-time father of an eighteen month old, was sitting at the computer at home playing an on-line game while his spouse struggled to make dinner after a long day at work, their toddler clinging to her legs. “Tim”, she implored, “please play with your daughter so I can get this meal done.” “But honey,” he whined, “I don’t want to play with our daughter.”

A response that is just as irrelevant for followers of Christ as saying, “But I don’t want to love my neighbor.”

Jesus is walking along with his disciples, and a man comes running up with a burning question. His sincerity is made manifest in his kneeling at Jesus’ feet, his frustration obvious from his question: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus cares about this man, just as Jesus cares about us. He wants this man to have what he is so desperately seeking, and so he tries to work with him.

First off, Jesus says, eternal life is a gift, and it is a gift not from me, but from God. God alone is “good”, good in the sense of being the author of all our blessings, the source of all that we have. And you don’t have to do anything to receive this gift, beyond accepting that God wants you to have that gift.

Second, working within the faith tradition that this man has called home all his life, Jesus tells him to cast aside all his dependencies and in radical trust stand bare before the God who loves him and cares for him and will provide for him all that he needs in this life and the next. Trust in God. Don’t put your trust in stuff – you’ve been doing that all your life long, that’s how you got rich -- yes, I know you worked hard for that stuff, but that you still have so much means that you’ve been holding onto it so tightly, in the faith that it would save you, and you know, it just can’t – so let it go, and follow me, and you will have what deep down you really seek – eternal life, the kingdom of God, not just in the life to come, but here, now, today.

The thing is, this fellow actually believes that he is fulfilling himself by his pursuit of self-enrichment, and we can hardly blame him, can we? Hard work and a desire to get ahead, seeking to better one’s position in life, these are hallmarks of the American dream, and we know that much good has been achieved by these. But a virtue pursued to an extreme can become a vice, and here, for this man, a prison as well. And he seems to know this, it is what drives him to seek that “something more” which leads him to that encounter with Jesus.

And then, Mark tells, us, the man became depressed, turned away, and walked off in the opposite direction. And why – the reason was money. He did not walk away because he did not believe that Jesus was his personal Lord and Savior; he did not walk away because he did not have the right beliefs; he did not walk away because he couldn’t stomach the Apostles’ Creed or the United Church of Christ Statement of Faith or the Covenant of West Parish Congregational Church -- he walked away because he had lots of stuff. His stuff – not Jesus – came between him and eternal life.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus was calling people to follow him. Most of the time, people dropped what they were doing and what they had to follow him. Think of those first disciples, the fishermen by the sea – they walked away from their profession, their homes, their families.

This is the only place in the gospels where someone has a direct, face-to-face call to discipleship from Jesus, and they walk away – and the reason is money.

Maybe you think Jesus is going too far here. I think Jesus is going too far here.

But I have heard it said that one definition of a good leader is that a good leader is someone who says, “I won’t ask you to do anything that I am not prepared to do; I won’t tell you to go anywhere that I am not prepared to go myself.” By that definition, when Jesus tells this man to give away the wealth that enslaved him, Jesus was a good leader. Wealth had no hooks in Jesus. Confident that his Father would provide his daily bread, he traveled without even a place to lay his head each night.

This passage is not an ode to poverty, it is not an attack on the wealthy. Here is a person whose whole life was defined by wealth – and he simply refuses to accept a new definition of who he is – a man rich before God, a man rich in eternal things, things that last, things that might not make for the good life, but certainly make for the life that is good.

This man is offered freedom, but he refuses to accept it. Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus puts the matter plainly: “No slave can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Luke 16:13) What this man needed to do was to learn to put wealth in its proper place. Remember, the Bible does not condemn money – the proverb is not “money is the root of all evil”, it is, rather, “the love of money is the root of all evil.”

One way we can put money in the right place is through giving – using our money, instead of having money use us. It is what that man with Jesus failed to do – he kept it to himself, for himself. He is like the rich farmer in that parable Jesus told elsewhere, the one who had such a bumper crop that he had nowhere to store it all, and so decides on just the thing. So instead of sharing his abundance with his neighbors, instead of using the surplus to help feed those without, he decides to build some more barns. And the irony is, of course, that that very night his life is demanded of him, and his riches – well, as they say, you can’t take it with you.

Jesus’ words to the rich man and to his disciples are words for us, as well. In this consumerist culture which tends to commodify everything, we can be trapped into thinking of church in the same way. Church is where I come to get my needs met; church is a place where I can get my spiritual longings satisfied, where I can be blessed.

But Jesus will have none of this. He tells us that he came not to be served, but to serve; he came not to have his needs met, but to meet ours; he came not to get, but to give, and he gave even his life for us.

It is the same with the church – church is a place that helps us redefine what our needs are, about giving us needs that we would not have had had we not met Jesus. Church is not a place where we get our needs met – it is where we learn that it is in serving others that we are set free, that it is in the giving that we receive, that our wealth is measured not by what we have, but by what we share with others, that if we want to be blessed, then we will be a blessing to others.

Church is, in truth, a place that just goes too far. And it is a place where the gospel makes demands on us, a demand that includes the invitation, offered each year, to make a pledge of financial support to our ministries here and in the world out there. Those demands can be hard on us – Lord knows, they were hard on the disciples long ago.

“They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’”

The good news for them, and the good news for us as well, is that “Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’”

Amen. ---------------------