Proper 23B
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Psalm 22:1-15 Hebrews 4:12-16 Mark 10:17-31 |
Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
You’re
going to have to do some powerful imagining, but I’d like for you to imagine
that I am a camel.
Yes, my name is Caleb the Camel, and I
belong to David bar Benjamin, the master who decided not to follow Jesus in the
story that Deacon Delinda just read. Before I tell my version of the story, I
need to set the record straight on one thing. Those preachers who claim that
the “Eye of the Needle” is the name of a gate in Jerusalem are just plain
wrong. I've been in and out of all those gates, and there is no gate by that name. Therefore, on behalf of camels everywhere, I
object to Jesus’ exaggerated remark about shoving us through a tiny needle hole.
This ridiculous image is an affront to our dignity. Plus, it sounds very
painful.
I am rather flattered that Jesus noticed
me, though. I was right there when my master ran up to Jesus, so I saw the
whole thing. We had been out inspecting one of my master’s properties earlier that
day. My master has lots of properties—5 estates, I think, spread out all over the
region. My brothers and I haul piles of sweet dates, and wine, and grain, and
olives for him all over the Galilee. But we don’t mind. Master David feeds us
well. He’s not like his father Benjamin.
Benjamin was a greedy man. He always had
his eye out for getting something for nothing. Whenever a poor farmer couldn’t pay
his taxes to King Herod, Benjamin was right there to buy up his land for almost
nothing. Whenever there was a drought, or a farmer got sick, Benjamin was right
there, too, promising a few sheckles for the poor guy’s home. He never forgave anyone’s
debt. That’s how the family got so much property. Then, to top it off, Benjamin
would underpay his workers—and underfeed his animals. He wouldn’t even let
widows and orphans collect the few stalks of grain that the harvesters had
dropped on the edges of his fields. Can you imagine?! Don’t tell anyone, but I
used to spit on him whenever his back was turned. When old Benjamin died, we
were all relieved.
My master David, he’s different. He was
always a good little boy, slipping me a sweet date from his pocket when no one
was looking. He was always trying to please his exacting father by doing
everything just right: going with him to collect and count the tenants' rent;
listening to all his father’s bragging; watching in silence as his father
shouted insults to the beggars and foreigners at the gate. David spent hours in
the synagogue studying scripture. He thought God was like his father Benjamin,
full of rules and punishments. I remember him reciting the commandments and
saying long prayers as we rode along from one property to the next. He was
determined to earn God’s love, but his prayers never seemed to make him happy.
I really
felt sorry for him when his father matched him up with that grumbler Leah, just
because she came with a huge dowry. His wife has been a thorn in David’s side
his whole adult life. She’s always spending money, always putting him down for
going to the synagogue. She’s never satisfied with what he provides for her. And
now he’s got three daughters to provide for, too, and no sons. Still, nobody
understands why he looks so sad and stressed out all the time.
“He’s the richest guy in town,” they scoff.
“He can have anything he wants. He’s got no worries.” But they don’t know the
half of it.
You should have seen the look on David’s
face when that leper came running into town, shouting to everyone that the
Messiah had come and healed him of his horrible disease. It was the first time
in years that I’ve seen David’s eyes light up with hope. He became obsessed
with finding this Jesus from Nazareth, and we spent days on the road looking. When
we finally found him, David nearly jerked my neck off pulling on the reigns,
and he leapt off my back before I could kneel all the way down. I couldn’t see
what he was so excited about. There was just a young guy in a dusty robe on the
side the road, surrounded by a bunch of bearded men who smelled like fish, and a
few women who didn’t look so proper, if you know what I mean. But David, he ran
down the road after this guy and kneeled down before him like this teacher was
some kind of king. All I could think was that David’s wife was going to yell at
him for getting his fancy cloak all dirty.
This Jesus really seemed to understand my
master, though. Now, anybody could see that my master was desperate, and that
he was rich. But Jesus seemed to see beyond that, right into his soul. Jesus
knew that David was there to be healed, that his heart was just as scarred as
the skin of that leper was. Jesus was somehow both hard and compassionate at
the same time—truthful, you know? He wouldn’t let my master get away with any
of that rule-following, goodie-two-shoes nonsense that he had been living by. “No
one is good but God alone,” Jesus warned. Jesus even seemed to know about David’s
father Benjamin—how he made a fortune off of the backs of the poor and the
weak. “You shall not defraud,” Jesus added to his list of ways to live. Even I know that’s not one of the ten
commandments! My master’s whole inheritance—his very being--is woven through
with old Benjamin’s defrauding, though, that’s for sure. I even heard a scornful
chuckle escape from the mouth of one of the tenant farmers standing nearby when
Jesus pointed that out.
It was hard for me to watch the hope
in my master’s eyes die out as Jesus spoke. How could he sell everything and
give the money to the poor and then head off down the road with these fishermen?
What about his obligations, his lands, his inheritance, his wife, his daughters
who needed him? Who would take care of me and all the other animals? It would
be like my master had died—died to his family, died to his dreams, traded in
his whole life for a new one. Didn’t Jesus understand that? And then that unpleasant
remark about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than
for a rich man to enter God’s Kingdom. Ouch. Even the beggars standing around
were shocked to hear that. If the well-dressed, educated classes weren’t accepted
…. then who was?
It hurt to see my master turn away in
despair, without even the strength to climb up on my back. He just plodded down
the road toward home. From far off, I heard Jesus still talking, calling out, “For human beings, it is impossible, but not for God; for
God all things are possible. … Many who are first will be last, and the last
will be first.” These words have been haunting me, especially at night, when
the stars seem to hang so close, like jewels up there in the heavens.
They remind me of a story
I heard as a young camel. Let me see if I can remember it:
Once upon a time, there was a she-camel whose
fur was woven in with silver stars from head to tail.[1] Those hundreds of shiny
stars gleamed and glistened and jingled when she walked, and when the sun shone
down upon her, she blinded you with her beauty. The trouble was, she was lonely.
None of the other plain brown camels wanted anything to do with her. When they
saw her, all they could think of was that she shone with the light of all the
stars, while they were covered in dust. Life was a competition, one that they had
lost, one that she had won merely by being born. One day, when she was crying all
by herself at the oasis, a wise old palm tree bent down to her and gave her
some difficult advice.
“Cut off your stars and
give one to all of the other camels,” the old tree suggested, “and find your
true inheritance. You can all be beautiful together. You can’t be happy when all of the others are
sad. You are a herd, and you all belong together. What affects one of you
ultimately affects all of you.”[2]
So the young camel cut
off all of her stars but one, and she shared them with the other camels. It was
very painful. She bled, and she was left with hundreds of tiny scars. She wasn’t
the same. But she found happiness in the joy that she brought to her herd. She
found her true inheritance. Now, they all glistened together, and when they
ran, it was like the sun danced with joy across the desert.
Oh, wait! Maybe that’s it!
Maybe when those camels stood around in a circle, sharing their lives with one
another, the light bouncing back and forth from gift to gift, they looked from
heaven like the round eye of a silver needle. And when that she-camel walked
through the middle of them, with their light shining on her scars, and their
heads nodding in loving recognition, it was as if she walked right through the
eye of that needle...
See ‘ya later. I’ve got
to go and share that story with my master! I hear that Jesus is still out there
somewhere healing folks. There’s still time for my master to change his mind.
[At the announcements, I'm going to ask the children to put star stickers on the adults at the door, and to have them walk under the "eye of the needle," London-bridge style between two teens. They will say to them, "With God, all things are possible."--adapted from Carolyn Brown, found at http://worshipingwithchildren.blogspot.com/2015/09/year-b-proper-23-28th-sunday-in.html.]
[1]
Thank you to Marcus Pfister, The Rainbow
Fish, North-South Books, 1999.
[2]
Thank you to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, quoted at
http://www.jackyyenga.com/the-spirit-of-ubuntu/.
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