“Don’t
Call Me Good”
Mark
10:17-31
First
Presbyterian Church
Rev.
Donald E. Ray
October
11, 2009
While my father,
suffering the emotional impact of the depression, was mostly quite frugal with
our limited resources, we were among the first in our rural neighborhood to own
a television. When my chores were
done, homework completed, my entertainment was watching cowboy movies on the ten
inch, black and white, screen. It
was easy to tell the good guys. The
bad guys wore black hats. The good
guy wore a white hat and usually a white shirt. He
was honest, respectful, law abiding even when there weren’t many laws on the
frontier. He stood up to the bad
guys and made the town a safe place to live. He played guitar and sang, too.
As I remember, there
were usually a gang of bad guys, and a lot of people who were hard working,
honest, law abiding. But it took the
guy in the white hat to stand up for the good and lead the people in making the
town a better place to live. When
the bad guys were beaten and the town was safe again, the people wanted the good
guy to stay. But, it was time for
him to move on. It was up to the
people in the community to step up and live for the good of all.
Anyone linked with Christianity lives with some
level of expectation that they will be good people. Much
of my life, because of the image of my profession, I have lived under the cloud
of a moral standard more rigid than that for those not clergy. I’ve
been a disappointment to some because I didn’t measure up to their
expectations which they equated with good. Like
the Apostle Paul, I’ve been a disappointment to myself, failing at the good I
would emulate, living the evil I abhor. Mixed
signals, missing the mark, are the hazards of equating Christian with
“good.” It leaves us with trying
to determine the standards by which one may be judged “good.” It
burdens us with the guilt of having done bad things along the way and bearing
the scars that could label us a bad person, or at least leaving us thinking of
ourselves as such.
I think all us of here in this place this day would
like to be counted as “good.” We’ve
kept the commandments - perhaps a few slips along the way - but for the most
part, we’ve lived by the rules. Living
by the rules has become an unfortunate defining of Christianity. It’s
the ten commandments that are often cited as a primary measuring standard. Living
by them may indeed be a good way. But
does doing good make us good?
Is being good, what life is really about? It
was Jesus’ cousin, the ascetic John the
There is a strain of Christianity for whom it is
important to claim Jesus as the only, ever perfect human. Mark
fills his Gospel with Jesus’ denial of any super natural status; from those
Jesus helped, he commands silence about anything that could be misinterpreted as
done in his own power alone. Mark’s
Gospel was written among people who were under heavy persecution for their link
with the
Alexander Shaia in his first book of The Journey of Quadratos describes the second path as like being in
a tiny boat on a menacing sea. It is
tempting to just stop. Shaia writes,
Indeed, many of our wounded faith systems
encourage us to do just that. They
ask us to take a walk to the altar, light a candle, say a word and then remain
as emotional and spiritual children in a bright and effortless glow. Stopping
now, when we’ve barely started, dooms us to failure, for this is the place
where we discover our level of commitment to the journey. This
is where we acknowledge our true reliance on God’s grace. (1)
It seems innocent enough - addressing Jesus as
“good teacher.” But Jesus
challenges that before he goes on the address the man’s question. “No
one is good but God alone. You know
the commandments: You shall not murder;… commit adultery;…steal;…bear
false witness;…You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.”
He is a good man; “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.”
(Mark 10:17-20) But
“good” is not enough.
In John Baillie’s book, A Diary of Readings,
the Aging and Saging group is using this fall, Sir T. M. Taylor writes: ( as
quoted by Tom in his midweek email but merits repeating here):
“Many
of the things that we most desire can be obtained only if we do not aim directly
at them. They are as it were
by-products of something else. Happiness
is one of those things. If you go
after it directly and of set purpose you miss it entirely. You
may have what you are pleased to call a good time, but is quite a different
thing and does not last long.”
“Goodness
is another of these by-products. You
cannot attain it by aiming at it. . .For the pride of the good (person) is the
deadliest sin of all, and for that reason, in the parable of the prodigal son
the virtuous brother who stayed at home was all the time farther away from the
father’s house than the younger son returning from the far country with
nothing but a broken and contrite heart.”
“You
cannot read the Gospels without seeing that Jesus did not tell (people) how to
be good in the manner of moralists of every age; he told them how to be
happy.”
The Sermon on the Mount,
I know the summer series of Novel Sermons is ended
but since Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, I am a Dan
Brown fan. I received his latest
book, The Lost Symbol, and have just begun reading it.
Katherine Solomon is a researcher in the field of
Noetic Science. Noetics claims that
human consciousness is a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical
world.
In
2001, in the hours following the horrifying events of September 11, the field of
Noetic Science made a quantum leap forward. Four
scientists discovered that as the frightened world came together and focused in
shared grief on this single tragedy, the outputs of thirty-seven Random Event
Generators around the world suddenly became significantly less random. (Random
Event Generators are instruments that produce results without any predetermined
order) Somehow, the oneness of this
shared experience, the coalescing of millions of minds, had affected the
randomizing function of these machines, organizing their outputs and bringing
order from chaos. (2)
Ross Mackenzie last Sunday alluded to the possible
impact that millions of Christians across centuries of time might have praying,
“Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.”
To the good guy, Jesus said, one thing more - care
for the poor. The “good” of the
moralists isn’t enough. There is
in the world that capability of feeding all the people who live on earth. There
is in the world resources enough that no one need live destitute in dire
poverty. There is on this planet
space enough that all might live in safety. There
may be in this world love enough that we might all live in peace.
Good is not good enough. There
is always the question, what more is needed? We
often feel over burdened and that one thing more threatens to push us over the
edge. But that question gives
perspective to what we feel pressuring us. That
quest gives us aim that may bring all the rest into place.
As we live with the quest of what is it that is
lacking as we live and move and have our being in God?; as we live in humility
and meekness and purity in heart and peace, we find that blessing and we bring
human consciousness to bear that we may live in the one good.
Amen.
(1)
Beyond
the Biography of Jesus; The Journey of Quadratos
Book I, Alexander Shaia p.
127.
(2)
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown, p. 56.
Copyright © 2009 First Presbyterian Church