29 October 2019
Text: Matt 19:16-30
In the name of +
Jesus. Amen.
In
the fallen world, we cannot have everything. So we have to prioritize, and act upon the
most important thing to us. In Economics,
this is known as “scarcity.” So if you
can either buy a cup or water or a cup of diamonds, but not both, which one
would you buy? If you were in the desert
and dying of thirst, you would be foolish to buy the cup of diamonds. In that situation, the water would be worth
more. Under different circumstances,
your priorities might be different.
Jesus
invokes this principle with the rich young ruler. After running through the commandments, our Lord
gives him a choice: he can either “have eternal life” along with selling all of
his possessions and giving the proceeds to the poor, or he can keep all of his
riches and forget about eternal life. St.
Matthew reports, “When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he
had great possessions.”
Having
a God to fear, love, and trust above all things is the ultimate example of
scarcity. As Jesus said elsewhere, “you
cannot serve two masters… you cannot serve God and money.” So which one is the top priority? In this case, the rich young ruler chose his
possessions. They became his god. And this is the curse of riches, for wealth
makes it difficult to worship God.
But
it isn’t only money that is an idol.
I
once had a conversation with a freemason who had been out of the church for
decades. He was older now, and asked if
he could return to the church and take the Lord’s body and blood. I asked him if he had renounced
freemasonry. He assured me that he could
be both, that freemasonry was just a fraternity, and that its connections to Lucifer
were not the devil, but rather to the goddess Venus. (Yes, he actually said that). So I posed a question to him. I said that if he could only have one, which
would he choose: the body and blood of Christ, or membership in the Masons. He remained silent.
Sadly,
he developed cancer. I visited him in
the hospital, but he clung to his Masonic lodge. He died without the comfort that comes from
worshiping the one true God and putting his faith in Christ alone. So though to my knowledge he did not have
great possessions, he too made an economic decision based on priorities in the
face of scarcity. He too “went away
sorrowful.”
Dear
friends, we have many distractions that compete for our worship: money,
organizations, the secular world, popularity, and even good things like our
families, our health, and our work can replace the Holy Trinity as that which
we “fear, love, and trust” in “above all things.” And so how can we remain faithful? Our Lord says, “With man this is impossible,
but with God, all things are possible.” Our
ability to leave even “houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or
children or lands,” for the Lord’s sake if need be, is not of ourselves. It is a grace of God.
In
our fallen world, we cannot have everything, but in the kingdom of heaven, we
do have everything: we have forgiveness, life, and salvation, we have the love
of our Lord Jesus Christ, and as we sing in Dr. Luther’s hymn: “The kingdom
ours remaineth. Amen.”
In the name of the Father
and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
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