Sermon for October 10, 2021 - The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost, Year B, The Ven. Pat Zifcak

Click HERE to view The Ven. Pat Zifcak’s sermon from Sunday, October 10, 2021.

“Seek the Lord and live.” So says the prophet, Amos, at the start of our

first reading. “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-

edged sword….” Yet we have a great high priest who understands our

weakness and guides and teaches us by his word proclaimed to us through

the gospels.

It is Jesus who makes it possible for us to approach God despite our

human limitations and it is in worship that we find God waiting. Worship is

an act of devotion, of adoration, reverence, and honor. In our religious

context, worship is the expression of our individual and corporate

relationship with God. No matter where we worship, no matter how we

shape liturgy, scripture is at the center. It is not just the Gospel but the

readings of the Old and New Testaments, the psalm, our prayers, our

hymns, our sermons and sacraments- all are shaped by scripture. Look

back at our opening hymn: “to ploughshare beat the sword, to pruning

hook the spear.” The text is Isaiah. In worship, we hear God’s word and

God hears ours- in our prayers, especially, but also in the words of our

hearts unspoken, in the tears that come unbidden, in the burdens we carry

and the joy that makes us vulnerable. In worship, we come before God

asking forgiveness, accepting grace and knowing we are loved.

Here, in this place, we come before God with a chance to be changed. In

the Gospel, we meet a man who asks Jesus, “What must I do to inherit

eternal life?” I preached on this text not long ago and my attention was on

this critical question. Do any of us make time in our daily lives to do a

spiritual health check? Except for the time we spend in church on Sunday,

do we invite God into the decisions we make, do we pray, do we give

thanks?

Jesus loved the man who asked the question and love is demanding. Sell

what you have. Give to the poor. We don’t know until the end of the story

that he had many possessions. So is it his wealth that is the stumbling

block for him? He went away grieving. If he had asked another question, a

different question, or if he had stayed with Jesus in his shock and sadness,

would Jesus’ love for him have called him to a new way of life or a

reorienting of his dependence upon his possessions? Giving away all that

he had was what grieved him.

We know that a reasonable reading of this text is with a focus on how one

uses one’s wealth. Another is to broaden our understanding of

possessions beyond money. If it were only the rich who had to face this

encounter with Jesus, many of us could sigh in relief, change nothing about

our lives, and assume God’s unconditional love for us would save us at the

end. The man loved his possessions more than his relationship with Jesus.

This story then is about anything that separates us from God.

This is where my probing of the text ended the last time I preached on it. It

might have been true this time, too, except that I used an additional source

and, in the telling of the story, the word “I” in the text was italicized. That

changed everything! “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Inheritance can only be given. In the world we live in, we are required, it

seems, to depend upon ourselves, to build our own future, to take pride in

the security and comfort we feel, and we forget that nothing we do, nothing

we have can assure our salvation. We are saved only by God’s grace. The

disciples ask, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said,

“For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are

possible.” Our indigenous ancestors understood that nothing belonged to

them, that everything was borrowed and would be returned. The earth was

their teacher, protected and revered.

When we worship, we are living in God’s presence. Through our liturgy, we

hear the stories of our ancestors, we practice community, we remember

Christ’s death and resurrection, we are filled with the Holy Spirit and we are

sent into the world changed.

There is tension between the lives we live in this world and what God

requires of us. Just as the rich young man in the gospel and the disciples

over and over, we can ask the wrong question. We can admit our

vulnerability, we can profess our faith, hold fast to the one who loves us,

seek justice, show mercy, and hope in the God who will save us. Be

empowered not by your possessions but by your faith and tell your story.