I saw the most striking thing on Friday night when I left the parking lot here after the Stewardship Dinner. The traffic on Pruneridge is light to nonexistent after rush hour, and isn’t all that bad even during rush hour. Friday night was different. I sat at the exit from the lot for a good five minutes before I could take my left toward I-880. At first I was irritated; then I became entranced.
Hundreds of bicyclists were passing me from left to right. Hundreds of people so varied I couldn’t figure out how or why they would know each other. Hundreds of people in different amounts of clothing and different degrees of Day of the Dead make up and costumes, in glow-in-the-dark skulls. There were hundreds of people who were laughing and singing and riding, riding, riding, hundreds of extremely bright headlights and vivid, flashing red taillights, hundreds of people in bike helmets, hard hats, ball caps, or no caps or helmets at all. Why were they here? They had no signs and weren’t chanting slogans, so it didn’t seem they were protesting anything; they were just out for a ride on a pleasant night. I learned later they were a group called the San Diego Bike Party and they were four thousand strong. But at that point, while I waited for the first wave to pass, I just knew that (31) many who are first will be last”—in this case, car drivers—“and the last will be first”—namely, bike riders. I learned that the one with the relatively powerful engine, who was accustomed to owning the road, waited for the ones on their own steam, those who were more typically the road’s second-class citizens.
The rich man learns something new in today’s gospel excerpt, but it’s a harder lesson than mine was and comes as an unhappy surprise to him. He probably had a bumper sticker on his camel that read, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” I saw one of those on Thursday in a parking lot, and it crossed my mind that “he who dies with the most toys is, after all, dead.” In any case, the rich man has obeyed the commandments – at least the really grievous ones – and expects Jesus to answer, “Since you’ve been obedient to the commandments, you have earned your place in eternity now and for all time. Good work!” At that time, people believed that health and wealth and comfort were rewards from God and that illness and poverty and suffering were punishments from God, and that both resulted from adhering to or breaking the commandments. Not only would the rich man need to sell all that he owns and give the money to the poor, he would also have to face the suspicions and ridicule of his community. It was just too much to ask.
The conversation continues between Jesus and the disciples, and he underscores his point: “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”…. [H]ow hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Although Jesus uses a camel metaphor here, and one in which the camel has no hope of success, I see it more like a tortoise trying to enter a narrow door. The door is the gate to the kingdom of God. The tortoise is the pure being who celebrates light and life and creation. The tortoise shell would be its wealth, its pride, its self-sufficiency, its mistaken ideas about its power and importance. The door is just right for the tortoise alone, but all its protective trappings have to be left behind.
Does this mean that we should all strip down to the bare minimum and cash it all in and give it to the poor? Maybe. Jesus makes a brief remark here that just about slips by unnoticed but changes the conversation and direction entirely. “Why do you call me good?” he asks. “No one is good but God alone.” These two sentences are our call to be Godly, to move through and beyond the “Thou shalt not” commandments the rich man found to be so comfortable. Here is our call to act as spiritual beings made in God’s image and likeness, and to resume our spiritual paths not only by avoiding problems, as the commandments teach us, but by actively seeking humility, wisdom, understanding, generosity, love, and compassion. If, like the rich man we are worshipping anything at all – money, property, individual people, exaggerated negative or positive views of ourselves—here is our opportunity to go into partnership with God and detach from whatever and whoever stands between us and God. We are called here and now to rearrange our priorities, to move those things that we have wrongly held in first place and to restore our spiritual lives and our relationships with God to first place. Once that is done, our paths become certain and we become more secure.
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. While many of you were here in the Bay Area, I was safely in San Diego learning a new lesson about priorities.. It was late afternoon. I had learned earlier from our head office in New York that I had to close our office that day. The staff members were devastated; all of us were, until one woman received a phone call from a friend watching the World Series. There had been a major earthquake in San Francisco. Her two sons worked and lived here, and there was no way to reach them. She worried especially about the son who worked for the US Geological Survey because she knew he would do everything in his power to get to the worst location he could find. It was inspiring to watch people stop their own phone calls home to be with Suzanne, to wait with her and with one another for word from San Francisco. Even some of the most agnostic people prayed. Some just sat a waited, others wanted to be held.
There is something so comforting about being held from every side. Infants who have colic are calmed when they are swaddled. Babies who are distressed can be calmed by feeling the strength of a loving arm held firmly around them. We are not so different. Job describes his misery. He wants to plead his case before God, feeling confident that God will listen and support him – if only he can find that essence of God. He writes, 8“If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; (9) on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.” Job is in a lonely and painful place. He feels the insecurity of a colicky baby, the fear of people waiting for word from San Francisco, those whose lives are beyond their control for any number of devastating reasons. All either made or returned God to their first priority, putting themselves in God’s secure embrace. The last became first and the first, once again, became last.