Today’s story of the rich young ruler is one of the most powerful tales in the New Testament not because the man decides to follow Jesus but precisely because he chooses not to. It is the only time Jesus calls someone who does not respond to his invitation. When Jesus encounters the rich young ruler in today’s story from Mark and tells the man that he lacks one thing in his quest for eternal life – “go, sell what you own, give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven, then come and follow me.” When Jesus says this to the young dot.com millionaire we witness a Gospel truth colliding with a life that has been built upon control. The sound of the collision is the long, deep sigh the man makes – as if the wind were knocked out of him – when Jesus says, “come, follow me.” And then the slow, disappearing sound of his feet shuffling as he goes away grieving because, says Mark, he was a man of many possessions.

On the one hand, this man is a timeless figure. He lives in every generation and culture. But on the other hand, he is a real person Jesus meets along the way. When the man comes running to Jesus and kneels at his feet you sense the great expectation that hangs about him like an aura. His search for eternal life reveals that despite his wealth and status something profound is missing from his life. When he tells Jesus he has kept the commandments since his youth we realize the man’s hunger runs deeper than a mid-life crisis. And then in a moment as tender as it is poignant, Mark says, “Jesus, looking at the man, loved him.” You see, Jesus had an uncanny ability to see who people were instantly. Looking into their eyes he could see into their hearts…like the guilt-ridden woman at the well; or the disciples arguing over which of them was the greatest; or Peter pledging his allegiance to Jesus on the eve of his denial. Jesus had a way of seeing people at their core and loving them still. built upon control. Make no mistake it was built also upon wealth. But for people of means, like you and me, control is the issue. That is why the man is such a timeless figure and resonates so resoundingly with 21st century America. Control is insidious. I want to consider it today so that we can respond to it. Control grows like the bishop weed that snaked and snarled its way through our garden along the driveway entrance to the church. Slowly the pachysandra and rhododendron – plants as hearty as you can find – were taken over. The only solution was to root everything out, salvage what we could and plant grass. Control is like that. It moves into a life and spreads out in all directions. Disguising itself in color and contour with your career and marriage and family life then slowly choking the life out of your relationships and hopes and dreams. Control is the quintessential spiritual disease of our time. It is the seductive lure of affluence and status. It is the very thing Satan offers to Jesus in the desert if Jesus will only let Satan control him.

The irony and paradox, of course, is that in grasping for control we give it up. Probably nothing symbolizes this more graphically than the recent Bill Moyers television special entitled, “Dying on Our Own Terms.” Many of those Moyers interviewed, even though they had significant resources and an array of medical options simply could not control their dying or their final death. In seeking to control we become controlled. I say this is the spiritual malady du jour because our consumer culture tells us, whether we live in a gated community or in the midst of urban blight, that the endless choices before us include the very things we need to be happy. The illusive dream of American life, “having it all,” however we define “all,” lies in our ability to choose. Having as many choices as possible. There is a direct correlation between the number of choices we have and our affluence. The illusion is the more choices I have the more I will be able to control my life. So having and making choices becomes our addiction. Yet, with every choice we make, like a soap opera plot, satisfaction remains the next choice away.

Everyone from General Motors to Amazon dot.com knows this. It is their life-line to survival. The reason for our robust economy. Friday night I was hovering over the freezer section at Wegman’s. Gourmet ice cream on my mind. The pint-sized cartons were as beautiful as the new abstract expressionist wine labels that have become so common. Dozens of pints of ice cream each one different from the last, each carton more beautiful to behold, each flavor with names concocted by some out-of-work poet more tantalizing to fantasize tasting. But my search was in vain…I left unable to find a Ben and Jerry’s version of plain vanilla to go with a fresh fruit pie.
 
The title of the sermon is “When the General Operating Principles for Life Don’t Apply.” What the rich man doesn’t realize is that while he thinks he is in control he is increasingly out of control. The general operating principles that have gotten him this far are no longer effective in navigating his life, alleviating his hunger, easing his fear. The man is on the edge of some great abyss. An endless void surrounding his life. A rising tide encroaching and lapping at the threshold of each day. Anything could bring you to the precipice. Illness. A sudden turn in your career. Family troubles. Or a life passage: your children leaving the nest, retirement, downsizing from the house where you raised your family to something more sensible. There is a marvelous painting at the Albright-Knox. I have mentioned it before. It is called “The Whiteness of the Whale.” An abstract painting of the terror invoked by the metaphor of Moby Dick – a whiteness so vast it engulfs everything on the canvass and waits to swallow up the tiny blue/green blotch of life at the lower corner of the painting.

In the case of this man who visits Jesus the thing that controls him, the vast whiteness  engulfing his life are his possessions. Yet, he clings for all he’s worth to the illusion that he is the master of his life that he is in control. It doesn’t have to be possessions – and the power and control they represent. Other things are capable of controlling your life. But I don’t want to diminish the lure of affluence and possessions over our lives because I think that is very much the message Mark wants us to get and we of all people, here at Westminster, need to get it. The dynamic Mark describes between possessions and this man’s life – driven by the desire to have control and get what he wants – is a dynamic that exists with anything other than God that you choose to worship. You can fill in the blank. Whatever it is – a house or job or children who fulfill expectations that relive your childhood, economic power, political clout – whatever it is, that is the thing that controls you. And the only antidote or remedy is to let it go. To pry your fingers off of whatever it is and let it drop from your grasp.

Which one of us wouldn’t give anything to run after that man shuffling away in his grief,  not able to let go of the fortress he has constructed to dominate his world? Which one of us wouldn’t like to tell him to trust? That his security and future and life are not to be found in his stock portfolio or antique car collection, or even more – in the measure of political and social currency he wields by having those things. But his clutching is the result of a primal mix of short-sightedness and fear. I heard recently about a tribe in Africa that captures primates by placing fruit in a large wooden bowl-like device that is large enough at the opening to get a monkey’s hand through but small enough to prevent that hand filled with fruit to be removed. When the primate reaches in and tries to pull out the prize it cannot and so remains sitting there indefinitely clutching the fruit until its captors arrive and take it away. I don’t think our reaching for control is any more complicated than that. Generated by a short-sighted conviction that sees our total well-being contained in the things we own or our ability to own them; our power to choose and to have what we want, to accomplish our whims and wishes; to appear to shape the circumstances of our lives. But this grasping is also pervaded, and here we are different from monkeys, by the suspicion that the very thing we clutch may not be so necessary.

That’s where Job comes in. In today’s reading he is in the midst of despair – the helplessness and hopelessness Doug King preached so eloquently about last week. Job laments that he cannot find God in order to plead his case before him.  “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him….” The Bible tells us that that experience of emptiness, of standing before the abyss is often the prelude to new life. The painting at the Albright-Knox is right. Such experiences are terrifying. But the message today is to trust that God is in the deep darkness and then to let go. Like Job. In the closing lines of today’s speech he says, “it is God who makes me fainthearted, the Almighty who fills me with fear, yet I am not reduced to silence by the darkness or by the mystery which hides him.”

A colleague tells the story when her doctor told her she had a suspicious mole. A suspicious mole killed her father. Now the doctor was telling her she had one. Suddenly, her life passed before her eyes. The more she thought, the more anxious she became. Then she wrote God a note on a scrap of paper. It said, “I am a little anxious. Help me remember you are with me even now. I am going to take my sticky fingers off the control panel until I hear from you.” Then she folded the note and put it in the drawer of the table next to her bed as if it were God’s in box. A grown-up peace came over her. She could feel it in the ensuing days. Existing side by side with a heightened sense of symptoms. But in between symptoms she felt pockets of trust and surrender, as if she had gone into a total free fall, then landed gently after a drop of just a foot and a half. She coped. She endured. She learned to give over control.

The thing today’s story invites us to let go of is thinking we can do what ever it takes to ensure our eternal happiness and peace. “What can I do,” the rich man asks Jesus. And while Jesus answers his question by telling him to let go of his possessions, give them to the poor and follow him, he was also telling the man that in one sense he could do nothing.  Unfortunately, the rich man leaves and never gets to hear what Jesus says to his disciples. It might have helped. “With mortals salvation is impossible but not for God, with God all things are possible.”

What do we do when the general operating principles for life don’t apply? As our friends in AA know and understand so well: let go and let God. Or as Jesus puts it: “go, sell, give, come and follow.” Amen.