SELL EVERYTHING YOU HAVE

Many rich people allegorize this Sunday's lection. For them "selling everything you have and giving all the proceeds to the poor" actually means something else. It is about putting God first in their lives. It is practicing "Christ above all". It means if you love God more than your money and you give regularly to charity, then it is okay to be rich. There are those who say it is not directed to the rich but to the super rich. My favorite is the interpretation that the message is exclusively for the rich young man in the passage. No one else's.

Do you know why there is a Second Coming?

Because we--those of us who call ourselves Christian whose cupboards are filled and do not need to pray "give us today our daily bread"--have failed miserably to do what Jesus commanded us during his First Coming. We have removed the "Poor" from the "Gospel to the Poor" that we are supposed to proclaim. We have not brought down the powerful from their thrones nor have we sent away the rich empty. Instead, we have embraced power, profit, and privilege. We have turned our backs on the One who called us to be salt, seed, and light and have, instead, connived with empire in order to rule the world.

We have failed to feed the hungry, to offer drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to care for the sick, to visit the prisoners, and to welcome the stranger. We have forgotten that we are each other's keepers. We have been afraid to storm the halls of power to tell the rich and the super rich to sell everything they have and give all the proceeds to the poor because we have been complicit in legitimizing the systems, structures, and theologies that keep the rich richer and the poor miserable.

We have forgotten that the Earth is not inherited, but borrowed from our children--and when we are gone, these little ones who are first in the kingdom of heaven, will be the first to take the brunt of our indifference.

In fact, with ever stronger typhoons and ever hotter heat waves worldwide every year, they are taking the brunt of our indifference RIGHT NOW.

We have also ignored Jesus’s judgment in the second half of Sunday's lection: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."


*sculpture, "Educating the Rich on the Globe" by Tom Otterness (from the vanderbilt divinity library digital archives).