Last weekend we gathered at the Mississippi River for something called Wild Church. A time of wandering and seeking conversation with the natural world is at the heart of a Wild Church gathering. Drawn to a patch of vibrant green grass in an area that was damp, even amid our current drought, I discovered a tiny snail. How does one converse with a snail? It didn’t move or change. It just sat there, even as the blade of grass on which it clung swayed and jiggled. Maybe, I thought, that is the message for me.
At the Wild Church gathering, we drew inspiration from St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is in early October. Born the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, as a young man, Francis lived lavishly. And yet, he continually felt drawn to God. One day, he heard the voice of Jesus saying, “rebuild my church.” He took this calling literally at first. In order to raise money to repair the church in his village, he sold a bolt of cloth from his father’s shop. His father, furious, dragged Francis before the bishop, demanding that he return the money. As the story goes, Francis stripped off all his clothes and ran away naked, leaving home for good. He entered into a life of wandering and preaching, attracting followers into a community of sharing and simplicity.
Francis considered all nature to be a mirror of God, called all creatures siblings, and understood the community of Jesus’ followers to encompass the more than human world. Francis famously preached to the birds and other animals. I love the painting on today’s bulletin cover, in which iconographer Kelly Latimore subtly reframes this tradition, depicting the bird preaching and the saint listening. The example of St. Francis reminds us that our attempts at conversation with the natural world are in fact pleas for healing. Through this practice we seek restored relationship with all the beings of creation. We express our collective longing for health and wholeness.
Today’s Gospel story is also one of healing. It’s an easy detail to miss. The rich man knelt before Jesus. And a posture of kneeling, in Mark’s Gospel, typically accompanied a request for healing. The person with leprosy, the demon-possessed man, the woman who had experienced 12 years of continuous bleeding—they all knelt before Jesus (Mark 1:40, 5:6, 5:33). In comparison to these others, the rich man seemed to have it all. In addition to being wealthy, he was a genuinely nice guy—treating others with the honesty and respect the commandments required. And yet something was missing. This man was in pain. His soul was sick. “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” Jesus saw this man’s stress and struggle, and he wanted something better for him. The words that seem so uncompromising and difficult were in fact meant to heal, to lead the man toward happiness, toward the eternal life, to give him the vibrant aliveness he was seeking. “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor . . . and then come, follow me.”
The healing medicine Jesus offered the man was an invitation to follow him. It’s true that this prescription involved shedding wealth and possessions, and yet it was not a calling into destitution. It was a summons to join a community of generosity, sharing, and equity, to enter into an alternative society in which wealth was relational. Which is what Jesus was talking about when he assured the disciples that everything they had given up they would receive back one hundred fold: “houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields.” These incredible riches came “with persecutions” presumably because the powers attempted to used fear and scarcity to divide and control.
Theologian David Bentley Hart once wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times titled “Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?” On the one hand, he argues, the early church was not a political party. On the other hand, it’s absolutely clear that they practiced wealth re-distribution and owned possessions communally. He investigates a particular word in the New Testament, koinonia. This concept, he says, is “usually rendered blandly as “fellowship” or “sharing” or (slightly better) “communion.” And yet, he recalls,
I came to the conclusion that koinonia often refers to a precise set of practices within the early Christian communities, a special social arrangement—the very one described in Acts—that was integral to the new life in Christ. As best we can tell, local churches in the Roman world of the apostolic age were essentially small communes, self-sustaining but also able to share resources with one another when need dictated. This delicate web of communes constituted a kind of counter-empire within the empire, one founded upon charity rather than force—or, better, a kingdom not of this world but present within the world nonetheless, encompassing a radically different understanding of society and property.[1]
Jesus, in speaking to his disciples about wealth used the ridiculous image of a camel attempting to squeeze through the eye of the needle. Just as a large animal cannot fit in a small opening, he said, wealth encumbers us, prevents us from joining ourselves to beloved community. In using this extreme metaphor, Jesus pointed to the profound challenge of transforming a system that makes some wealthy and others poor, rather than providing for the needs of all. Wealth was considered a sign of divine favor in Jesus’ time. Jesus shocked his disciples when he instead that wealth is a symptom of a sickness that needs healing, that wealth is a barrier to life-giving connection and care. Wealth and poverty are two sides of the same systemic problem, and both experiences are isolating and dehumanizing.
Recently, Cody Sanders, Baptist minister and queer theologian, wrote an excellent piece: “Ten Things I Wish Churches Knew about Christian Nationalism.” This article points to the ways that powerful and wealthy people are exploiting the dynamics of alienation that are infecting our society for their own political reasons. All ten of the points are important; the first is this: “White Christian nationalism (WCN) is a symptom of a larger crisis of belonging.” Sanders explains:
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” ravaging the country. The epidemic has physical health consequences; shockingly, lacking social connection was about as dangerous to our bodies as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation also has consequences on the social body. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher who studied the rise Nazism in Germany, identified totalitarianism as a form of “organized loneliness.” Loneliness prepares people for totalitarian domination, destroying the public space between people and pressing them together in the “iron band of terror,” she argued. [Instead] We need the complexity of human communities to make the best sense of our lives and to provide care amid crises and chaos. According to the Surgeon General’s advisory, the more diverse these social networks are, the better. They help stimulate our creative thinking and our ability to consider different perspectives. Even small social interactions, like conversations in line at the grocery store, help to cultivate social trust and increase empathy. What’s good for the cultivation and care of community is also medicine for the treatment of WCN and the factors that give it rise. Make this a top priority in your church’s countering of Christian nationalism.[2]
Jesus’ politics, his prescription for healing of what ails our common life, is to share wealth and to treat the rest of creation not as a resources to extract but as relatives to love. So I leave you with some questions. What is your relationship like with wealth, with money and possessions? With the relational richness of community? What specific medicine might our great physician offer you, within the particular conditions of your life? How does Jesus want to heal the soul of this church and how does he call us to be part of healing the soul of our society? What is our next best step on the way of discipleship, on the path toward vibrant aliveness? Amen.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/opinion/sunday/christianity-communism.html
[2] https://goodfaithmedia.org/10-things-i-wish-churches-knew-about-christian-nationalism/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFyvtlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWLcoMo-NvoEWnWJxx1mSbyUpJ15DuYrT5hZmxi_brm30bPhruANP95SlA_aem_b6FyEDDnjt_Z2Ik6Oa1jHQ