What Have I Got to Lose?

Sermon for Oct. 13, 2024
Mark 10:17-31

If you were here last week, you know we celebrated the feast of St. Francis of Assisi.  We blessed pets, too, as a way to remember God’s love revealed in the created order and our responsibility to steward the creation God has entrusted to us.  By seeing the earth and the stars and the seas and the creatures as his siblings, St. Francis found spiritual rest knowing that what God provides is truly enough.

But St. Francis’ story is so rich that he’s also a great model of the spiritual practice we’re highlighting today in our “Love in Action” series.  It’s the practice of going: crossing boundaries, listening to the experience of others, and living like Jesus.  That may not be something we think about as a spiritual practice, like praying or reading Scripture or setting aside time to rest.  But when we make a practice of going along Jesus’ path, we find God’s blessings, even in the least likely places.

As a young man around the year 1200, Francis of Assisi was a spoiled brat, enjoying the wealth that came with being the son of a silk merchant in Italy.  But eventually he realized that partying with his friends wasn’t much of a calling.  So, Francis decided to go be a soldier … until he found that being taken prisoner was much less fun than parading around with shiny weapons. 

So, Francis returned to Assisi and began taking care of people who were sick or poor, forgotten by others.  He also heard God asking him to “repair the church,” and he took that literally, paying to rebuild Assisi’s crumbling church.  Unfortunately for his family relationships, he paid for that work by selling much of his father’s stock of fabrics.  As you might guess, his father wasn’t amused; and he disowned Francis – so, Francis disowned his father and the worldliness he represented.  The story is told that Francis came to the village square, stripped off his fancy clothes, and walked away.

And that’s where the story starts to get interesting.  Francis began wandering from village to village, caring for the people others rejected – the poor, the sick, the outcast.  As Jesus had instructed his disciples, Francis traveled with “no purse” (Luke 10:4) or any other means of support, living off the kindness of strangers.  He went to serve the people most in need and brought with him the love of God … as well as what came to be hundreds of others inspired by this ministry of going to people on the margins, meeting them where they were, and treating them as Jesus would.  It was the true meaning of the call Francis had heard years before to “repair the church” – helping it reclaim its identity as followers of Jesus going out to serve others.  And eventually, this movement that Francis hadn’t intended to start became the Franciscan monastic order.

Francis could follow that path not because of what he had but because of what he’d given up.  For him, the life of plenty had been a burden, holding him back from the love God was calling him to share.  Like the man in the Gospel reading today, Francis heard Jesus telling him that, in his abundance and his privilege, he actually lacked something vital: the freedom to go where God wanted to send him.  Paradoxically, his wealth and power held him back from taking part in the life Jesus wanted to give him, the life of following God’s reign and rule.  But once Francis released what held him back, he could go beyond the life his father had carved out for him, traveling light in the kingdom to live out God’s own love.

The point of the Gospel story we heard today is not that God doesn’t like rich people (although you do hear it preached that way sometimes).  In fact, with both Francis of Assisi and the man in the reading today, God embraces a person with wealth and loves him enough to try to set him free to go follow a different path.  In fact, this rich man in today’s reading is the only individual in Mark’s Gospel Jesus is said explicitly to love.¹  So, Francis of Assisi took Jesus up on the offer.  Unfortunately for the man in today’s reading, instead of going off toward the kingdom of heaven, he goes “away grieving, for he had many possessions” and was possessed by them all (10:22).

For us to follow the spiritual practice of going – of crossing boundaries, listening to others, and living like Jesus – we have to ask ourselves, “What burden is holding me back?”  I think the reason Jesus points to wealth in the story today, and why God led Francis to renounce his family’s wealth and power, is because what holds us back from going deeper with God is the fear of what we’ll lose.  You know, the reign and rule of God actually sounds pretty good, right? – unconditional love, eternal life, growing in relationship with God and the people around us.  But at what cost?  What will I lose if I go that direction?

Of course, Jesus’ answer is that you don’t lose; you gain – “a hundredfold now in this age … and in the age to come, eternal life” (Mark 10:30).  Now, those gains do include “persecutions,” Jesus says (10:30) – if you walk away from the crowd, they’ll sneer at you sometimes.  But to follow the spiritual practice of going, think about what you’re walking toward instead.  Here’s one example – from the chief of our Brew Crew, the baristas at HJ’s: Craig Lundgren. (Interview with Craig follows.)

1.      New Interpreter’s Study Bible, 1829 (note).