15th Sunday after Pentecost
September 5, 2010
Sticker Shock
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
Our cocker spaniel Angus is a spoiled dog with many toys. He has a thick rope for playing tug-a-war, several objects of different sizes for playing fetch and—perhaps his favorite—a thing called a Kong. For Angus it is nearly the perfect toy. It’s made of hard rubber—Angus will shred nearly anything else in short order. It’s an irregular shape so it bounces unpredictably. It’s hollow so that you can put dog biscuits inside and occupy him for hours trying to get them out. Like I say, Angus is a spoiled dog with many toys.
Angus has a problem, though: no opposable thumbs. A dog with more than one toy is a worried dog, because of the lack of opposable thumbs.
We don’t have that problem. We have opposable thumbs. We can carry two toys at the same time. We can even defend a toy without having to let go of it. Dogs can’t do that. We can also use our marvelous hands to build boxes, small boxes to hold our toys and big boxes to hold our small boxes.
We can even convert our big bulky toys into money which long ago was copper, silver or gold. So, you see, instead of having big bulky toys scattered all over the place, we could have compact money that we could keep in one very heavy box that was easy to watch and hard to carry off. More recently we began using little green pieces of paper that were even handier than precious metals. Now we use information composed of digital zeroes and ones that we store in mainframe computers and can move around at the speed of lightning. In whatever form, money is easier to watch and keep track of than toys, but money can be turned into toys anytime and anywhere we want.
But we have something even more powerful than opposable thumbs or even mainframe computers to keep track of what belongs to us. We have language. We have a simple word that does the trick: “mine.” Like most of our really good words “mine” is short. It’s also one of the first words that we learn. We do that because we recognize—even as we are just learning how to talk—that the words “mine” and “my” are powerful words that powerful people are constantly using to frustrate our desires and that, if we are going to make our way in the world, we had better master them.
We learn them early and then we set out to use these words to map the universe. We cart a teddy bear around with us, one that’s been sharing our bed. “Mine,” we announce. Mom and Dad beam proudly. “That’s right, dear. It’s yours,” they say. Cool. They don’t realize at that moment that what they are witnessing is not simply a little triumph in language, but an attempted takeover of the world.
Big sister’s cell phone is next. It’s brightly colored, makes funny noises. She certainly gives it plenty of attention which must mean that it’s a good thing to have. Plus, it might taste good. So we use our new-found power and make a grab. “Mine,” we assert triumphantly.
Sis disagrees loudly and Dad unfairly sides with her. “No,” he says, “this belongs to your sister. You must not touch it.” We promptly let everyone know that this is the wrong answer.
And so it goes. We discover that there are three kinds of things in the world: the things that are mine, the things that are not mine, and things along the boundary between mine and not-mine that are contested in some way. “Mine” is a measure of who I am and how important I am in the scheme of things. “Mine” is sometimes a tool and sometimes a weapon but it is always powerful.
We all use “mine.” I suppose that makes us all “miners.” But we don’t stop using “mine” when we grow up, so minors aren’t the only miners.
“Mine” isn’t the only word we use this way, just the first. We say “my” and “mine.” We also say “our” and “ours” and that’s even more powerful, since there are a lot more of us in “we” than there are in “I.”
We use these words carelessly and sometimes even violently. Some men say, “my wife,” and then they assume that they are allowed to beat her when she frustrates them. Some adults say, “my children,” and then they think they can treat their kids however they want. We say “our planet” and think we can do whatever we want with it and that we’re accountable to no one for how we live here. We say “our territory” or “our way of life” and use that as a warrant for invasion and war.
Against that sort of thinking we in the church assert that “my” and “mine,” “our” and “ours” are not a license. They signify a covenant relationship. We didn’t notice that when we were fifteen months old. All we noticed were the privileges that were contained in the word “mine.” We didn’t notice the responsibilities and obligations.
We know all this, but it’s still a shock to see that “mine” is a barrier to following Jesus.
Unless we “hate” or father and mother and wife (and apparently Jesus is only talking to men?) and let’s add “or husband” and brothers and sisters and even life itself, we cannot be Jesus’ disciple. Not “may not” or “should not”—“cannot.”
Let’s dispose of the word “hate.” This is a case of what the scholars call “Semitic hyperbole.” It was a feature of language among the peoples of the ancient near east that they routinely used extreme exaggeration. Hate in this case doesn’t mean the deep-seated animosity that we call hate. But it does mean that family must be placed lower on the scale of value than being a disciple.
And we also need to remember that “family” isn’t a constant. Family means different things in different times and places. Family for Jesus’ hearers was their most important source of identity and power in the world. People were known as “son of this person” or “daughter of that.” Extended family was the basic unit of a community. Your extended family was how you made a living, how you defended what was yours. It determined whom you could marry and what sort of work you could do. Jesus’ followers were supposed to repudiate all that.
Jesus then told two parables both of which urge us to consider carefully what is involved in following Jesus and to decide upfront whether we can afford it. Maybe we can and maybe we can’t. But it’s better not to start to build a tower at all than it is to lay a foundation and then discover that we don’t have the resources to finish and leave ourselves open to the ridicule of all who see a monument to our lack of foresight. It’s better not to pick a fight with our neighbor if don’t think we can win. Better to make the best peace we can and get on with our lives.
“So therefore,” Jesus tells us, “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” These are very hard words.
When people become members of the United Methodist Church we ask them if they will support the church by their prayers, their presence, their gifts, their services and their witness, but we don’t ask them to give up all their possessions. We can hardly ask them to do that if we haven’t. And I can hardly ask you to do that if I haven’t. If I claimed to have given up all my possessions, you wouldn’t believe me. I’ve already told you that we arrived here with eight and half tons of stuff, not counting our two cars and everything we could cram into them. Some of you who have seen just how much stuff we have are sure to tell others.
So here we are. Jesus tells us that we can’t be disciples unless we have given up all our possessions. I haven’t done it. You haven’t done it. We can’t ask anyone else to do it either. So where do we go from here?
There is a way forward, but first let’s agree that we’re not going to soften what Jesus says. He said, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Let’s assume that he meant it. Let’s also assume that as followers of Jesus (even if we’re following from a distance) we are living in this direction. And in fact we will give up all our possessions, whether we do it willingly or not. When we die, if not beforehand, everything we own will fall into someone else’s hands. We will not appear before our Maker carrying anything at all, our wonderful opposable thumbs notwithstanding.
So the question in front of us is not, How do we avoid giving up all our possessions? but, How do we live toward that goal?
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that you are unable to pay your mortgage. Some of you may not have to imagine that and, as we all know, far too many in our nation are living this experiment as a reality. Imagine that you are unable to pay your mortgage. Let’s imagine further that the mortgage holder is someone you can actually talk to, say, a local bank. So you go to the bank and you say to the loan officer, “I’m sorry, but I’ve lost my job and I cannot pay my mortgage and I cannot even guarantee that I will be able to pay.”
Now for the biggest leap of imagination. Imagine that the loan officer says, “I don’t need a house and you and your family need a place to live, so here’s what we’ll do. You deed the house back to us. We will mark your loan as paid. Then we will write a lease so that you can stay in the house. We will write the amount of the lease down by the value of your work to us as a caretaker of our property.”
Pretty far-fetched, huh? But notice how the relationships among you, the house and land, and the bank would have changed. Although from the outside nothing had changed, you would no longer own the property. You would have moved from ownership to stewardship. You could no longer say “mine” when referring to it.
I’m convinced that it’s this word “mine” that is the heart of what keeps us following Jesus in the way that we would want. Possessions are just stuff. The world is full of stuff. As Genesis tells us, stuff is good. It’s not stuff that keeps us from the level of discipleship that we want to have. It’s our relationship to it that does that. It’s calling it “mine.” It’s that little pronoun that keeps from being the kind of followers of Jesus that we want to be.
What we need as we live toward “giving up all our possessions” is a strategy for containing and restraining the force of the pronoun “mine.”
The first thing that we can do is to give away a lot of our income. We can give it to God’s work in the church or we can give it to people who need it more than we do. Whether it’s a tithe or not doesn’t matter. I think that the tithe can be a kind of reality check: it’s hard to be making six figures, giving away fifty dollars a week, and calling ourselves generous. But the point is not to give away ten percent and then regard the rest as ours. The point is to give away a lot; our tradition tells us that this is perhaps the best way to loosen the grip of our possessions.
We can ask ourselves hard questions about what we really need to have. A friend of mine went for a retreat at a monastery. The guestmaster showed him his room, told him when meals were served in the dining room and when the monks gathered for their prayer services through the day. “If there is anything else you need,” the monk concluded with a smile, “ask us and we’ll show you how to live without it.”
And last of all we can practice living with the things that have our names on them as if they did not. We can regard our legal ownership as stewardship. We can be God’s stewards and agents. Then we can ask questions like, If I regarded this house or this car or this paper clip as belonging to God, what would I do with it? How would I live toward it?
And what does this mean for the First United Methodist Church of Decorah, Iowa? What is the portrait of the church in this text? The church in this text, I think, is that community of people who, in the midst of a culture in which ownership is everything, have called the value of ownership itself into question. We don’t have it all figured out. But if we struggle to follow Jesus it’s not because we don’t think he’s worth following. It’s because everything around us is covered with Velcro and so, it seems, are our fingers and, yes, even our marvelous opposable thumbs. The church in this text is the community of people who will encourage us in the direction of getting free. We’ll get there. With God’s grace we’ll get free, even if it takes a lifetime.
©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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