I’m Sorry; What Was Your Question?
The recent arrival of massive artificial intelligence in our culture has popularized the notion of algorithms that capture our interests and then curates our newsfeeds, the advertisements we receive, the music that we hear so that suddenly we are living in an echo chamber of our own likes and prejudices. Today’s gospel poses a different sort of formula for our lives, curated from the world that is God’s coming kingdom, a world oriented in sharp contrast to the world into which God’s kingdom comes, a world where the last get to go first, and a world in which Jesus is more interested in the questions we aren’t asking instead of the ones we ask.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
Glimpses of Grace on Spotify
Transcript
Sometimes it feels like Jesus isn’t really trying very hard to meet folks halfway. Even with someone blind or paralyzed he makes them tell him what it is that they want from him. I should think that showing up blind or paralyzed speaks for itself. But, not in Jesus’ world. No assumptions there.
And now there’s this man who would appear to be just delightful who finds Jesus and respectfully addresses him and asks about how to inherit eternal life. True, he makes it sound like the prize in a scavenger hunt that he wants to claim. But Jesus rebuffs his respectful address and then he seems to make light of the man’s track record vis a vis keeping the whole law of Moses thing and puts an unthinkable and nonsensical condition on him about giving away everything. Scavenger hunt 2.0.
As the poor guy slinks away embarrassed to have asked, Jesus uses the man’s situation as a cautionary tale to his disciples – a bunch of poor fishermen which are unlikely to suffer the rich man’s difficulty in going through the eye of a needle.
So, what’s this really about? Why does Jesus insist on reframing the questions that we bring to him?
I think the answer lies in the first lesson from Job. Or, in my case, from Black Mountain. We begin talking to God out of our anguish, our horror, at what we see. Clearly, God has abandoned us. I cannot bear to hear someone say that “God spared us” because our house is still standing, because the unspoken message is that God did NOT spare those who lost everything, including their lives. And I have no use for a God that works randomly when possessed of the power to do anything.
It took a couple weeks to get around to seeing the full impact of the devastation in Swannonoa Valley where our home is, the home to which we will retire in a few weeks’ time. At first, all I could see was our street, not even all of our neighborhood. Although I eventually learned that much of our neighborhood now lay in a tangled pile blocking our little lane fifty yards from our house.
By last week’s visit, it became evident that the region is forever changed. The earth itself is altered. Power stations are mangled by boulders and trees. Water pipes crushed and dismantled. The course of the French Broad River is changed, and in many places much broader. We watched trailers of mules arrive in the Ingles parking lot to be saddled with supplies that they alone could trek up through the mountainsides to neighbors cut off completely by the storm damage.
And on. And on. Helicopters circling low overhead hourly searching for stranded victims. And out of state search and rescue teams combing the areas with cadaver dogs hoping to find more of those missing.
Every bit of this is real, in the sense that there is nothing in the moment that can “reframe” any of it. Like Job, “my mouth is filled with arguments for God. Today my complaint is bitter, and God’s hand feels heavy against me, despite my groaning.”
All real. The problem is that, despite all of this and how real it is, it is not what God and I need to talk about. This is why I believe Jesus is always reframing the question.
Because it is so easy to allow external circumstances outside our control to dictate the conversation, instead of internal and personal issues which are within our control entirely.
That does NOT mean that there isn’t a compassionate place for pouring out our hearts to God about the circumstances that are absolutely awful. It does NOT mean that Jesus doesn’t want to hear about it. And it certainly does NOT mean that we ought not roll up our sleeves and get busy rebuilding what can be rebuilt.
But here’s the rest of the problem: A lot of stuff can’t be rebuilt, or recovered, or made alive again. Jesus needs us to be able to be in those conversations with him, and they can only begin once we’ve done our screaming and yelling about everything else.
Because if God allows us to continue navigating this life as it connects to helping to bring in the kingdom of God in the same way that we do scavenger hunts; i.e., one clue at a time, we will never be able to see the whole story line and assist with the illustrations or the dialogues because we will have become trained only to react to whatever disaster befalls us in the moment. And that will distract us from what we were already seeing unfolding, way before a tropical storm suddenly changed its course and whipped into a picturesque little mountain valley, turning it into a dump.
See, I think the man who’d done everything right knew that this was not going to earn him what he was really seeking to obtain. Deep down he knew that even if he kept doing everything right, none of that would make him a citizen of God’s kingdom. The question he and Jesus needed to talk about was the level of belonging that comes with someone choosing to adopt us, not the kind of belonging that we earn.
And I’m not sure the disciples were the sort of guys who lost a lot of sleep over walking away from relationships. I think what they needed to talk to Jesus about was what it would look like to be part of a community of believers who truly needed them, loved them, a group of friends who would become family and who would anchor these men so used to pulling up anchor and moving on.
As for Jesus and the uber rich, we are talking about someone who according to Psalm 50 owns the cattle on a thousand hills. God doesn’t hate rich people. God just isn’t impressed by wealth in perhaps the same way that we are. Now, those are indeed some hard conversations, about as hard as getting a camel through a needle’s eye. What we need to be talking to God about when it comes to money is how to grow wealth so that real change is possible in this world. Those power plants and schools are not going to rebuild themselves.
As Stuart has observed, we aren’t reading these scriptures, my friends. They are reading us. And when it feels like Jesus isn’t listening to our cries, perhaps we do well to stop crying and consider what the deeper question is that we need to talk about, the personal questions that the text is asking us.
Amen.