I understand that St. Andrew’s Parish is, today, beginning its annual stewardship campaign, so I suppose it’s appropriate that we heard the story of Jesus being confronted by the wealthy man who wants to inherit eternal life in today’s Gospel reading from Mark. This tale must have been an important one to the earliest Christians, because we find it in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. Mark tells us only that the man is wealthy; Matthew adds that he is young; and Luke informs us that he is a ruler of some sort. But none of those details really changes the basic nature of the encounter: a potential disciple comes to Jesus seeking guidance and Jesus tells him that he must give up everything he possesses – “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor….”[1] The obligations of discipleship, in other words, are total.
Preachers through the ages have sought to soften the demands of this story. Generally, they’ve taken one of four approaches to make the story seem less burdensome. The most popular for quite a while was to interpret Jesus’ comment – “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”[2] – to mean something other than it seems to mean at first blush.
“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”
Again this week as last, our first reading today is from the First Book of Kings and like last week’s, it is a prayer spoken by King Solomon. Last week, it was a private prayer spoken in a dream late at night. Today, it is a public prayer. As long as it was, this reading is just a small part of the dedicatory prayer that Solomon offered when the Temple was finished and consecrated. In it, Solomon asks an important question, “[W]ill God indeed dwell on the earth?”
Our gospel reading this morning is taken from the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel according to John, which I’m sure you know is the sort of odd-man-out of the gospels. The other three gospels, the so-called Synoptic Gospels (a Greek word meaning that they see the Jesus story in the same way), pretty much agree and present the events of Jesus’ ministry in the same order over a one-year time-line. John tells the story in a completely different way, with a three-year time span and a different order of events. 
The United States is, at least ostensibly, a very religious country. Nearly two hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “there is no country in the world where … religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility and its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.”
We have had more than enough of contempt,
There is a graphic artist named Brian Andreas whose work I can’t really describe to you. He uses a lot of primary colors, representational but non-realistic images, and words to create prints called “StoryPeople.” In one of them that I saw a while back is this quotation (I don’t know if it’s original to Mr. Andreas or quoted from someone else):
When I was about 8 or 9 years of age, my grandparents gave me an illustrated bible with several glossy, color illustrations of various stories. They weren’t great art, but they were clear and very expressive. My favorite amongst them was the illustration of today’s gospel lesson.
What is Lent all about?
Here we are at the end of the first period of what the church calls “ordinary time” during this liturgical year, the season of Sundays after the Feast of the Epiphany during which we have heard many gospel stories which reveal or manifest (the meaning of epiphany) something about Jesus. On this Sunday, the Sunday before Lent starts on Ash Wednesday, we always hear some version of the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration, a story so important that it is told in the three Synoptic Gospels, alluded to in John’s Gospel, and mentioned in the Second Letter of Peter.
