Don't Get Attached

Propers: Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 28), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Any serious discussion of religion or philosophy or spirituality will eventually come to the topic of nonattachment. This is often associated with Buddhism, because it is one of the core tenets of the Buddhist faith: that suffering is caused by attachment, and that to cease suffering we must learn to let go.

But it’s a Christian value as well. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t have the early Christian community in the book of Acts selling their possessions and holding all things in common. We wouldn’t have hermits in the Egyptian desert, or Syrian stylites, or medieval monks taking vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.

It’s often couched in different terms, mind you. Stoics call nonattachment “amor fati,” to love one’s fate: a radical acceptance of whatever may come our way. The modern minimalist movement, led by folks like Marie Kondo, encourages us to rid our lives and homes of clutter, of anything that does not “spark joy,” lest the things we own end up owning us. I have a hard time with her because I can’t give up my books; I’m far too attached to those.

But really what it is, is faith. Nonattachment is faith. And faith, despite its many detractors, is nothing other than radical trust: the trust that, no matter what, we are upheld in every moment by grace and love and superabundance. This is not naïveté. No religion encourages us to be stupid. And neither is it testing God. Christians don’t let go of the steering wheel at 70 miles per hour in order to prove our faith. Even Jesus wouldn’t leap off the Temple; that’s not how this works.

If the Bible can be said to have a theme, I think it must be that of idolatry. Idolatry is worshipping the wrong things, loving the wrong things. We constantly mistake the gifts of God for gods in and of themselves. And we all have gods. We all have something that gets us out of bed in the morning, something more important to us than anything else in the world. That is your god, with a lower-case G. And however you worship your god, however you shape your life around it, that is your religion. And there is no irreligious species of humanity.

To know the true God is to let go of false gods. To know the true God is to know that other things aren’t gods. And that’s an easy thing to say, but false gods can be tricky things. They aren’t always obvious, like Odin demanding that we slit people’s throats and hang them upside-down from trees to bleed into the roots.

No, false gods are often good things, good gifts from God: things like health, wealth, prosperity, success, strength, family, nation, tradition, power, food, drink, sex, knowledge, righteousness, purity, equality, freedom—all good things! But all false gods. Like fire, they make for an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

We mistake good things for the Good Himself. We mistake true things for the Truth Himself. We mistake beautiful things for Beauty Himself. Everything good in this world points beyond itself to the One who is Goodness and Truth and Beauty. And when we love Him—when we love God in His infinity, eternity, and perfect depthless grace—our other loves do not diminish. Rather, by taking their rightful place around the throne, they blaze forth all the greater!

“I could not love thee, dear, so much, / Lov’d I not Honour more.” You ever hear that? It’s from a poem by Lovelace, about a man whose wife begs him not to go off to the wars. If he loved her, she says, he wouldn’t go, he wouldn’t leave her. But he says: If that’s the type of person I really were, I wouldn’t be able to love you as I do. And you wouldn’t love me as you do, because I would be less than what I truly am. Higher loves do not diminish the lower. Rather, they raise them up.

If I love God more than my wife, more than my children, more than my country, then I actually love my wife and children and country more than I ever could alone, than I ever could without God. God is the source of all our loves, the ceaseless flame. He does not take; He gives. “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in,” wrote C.S. Lewis. “Aim at earth and you will get neither.”

See, people think that nonattachment means that you don’t love anything, that you’re above it all. But what it really means—in Stoicism, Buddhism, or Christianity—is that when we let go of selfish attachments, selfish expectations, we are then free to love things as they are, for what they are: free to see people as other people, rather than as means to my own ends. Do I love my wife because I expect for her to make me happy? Or do I love my wife for who she truly is? To let go of expectation is to be opened unto joy.

And that openness is the very thing that makes us useful to those in need. The most important part of a vase, after all, is its emptiness, its availability to hold water. The most important part of a wheel is the hole that lets it turn on an axis. And the most important part of a schedule is open spaces within it, allowing us to receive unexpected guests, important requests, and to respond to emergencies. Emptiness, openness, nonattachment allows us to love in the moment.

In our Gospel reading today a rich man comes to Jesus—a good man, decent man—and he says, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He’s kept all the commandments. He’s prospered in all his ways. And he humbly seeks for God. And Jesus looks at him, and loves him, and says: “You lack but one thing. Sell what you own, give to the poor, and then come follow Me.” And the man goes away grieving, for Jesus has asked of him a very hard thing indeed.

And it makes us uncomfortable, as indeed it should, because we like our money. We like our stuff. It defines who we are, doesn’t it? Our purchases, our possessions. Moreover, it is our security. Most Americans don’t have $400 for an emergency expense. Most of us are really just one bad diagnosis from being buried in such debt that we would envy the penniless. Money is power; money is freedom; money is choice. Money is god. It keeps its promises, we hope. But it is a fickle beast.

Now, it’s true that not everyone’s idol is money. There are other things we cling to, other than God. Churches love to cling more to the appearance of righteousness, rather than to the righteous One. Churches love to talk about the way things used to be. But it’s also true that for most of us money is the great idol. Those who have too little are afraid of losing what they have. And those who have too much are even more afraid of losing what they have. Money is a hole in the soul that gets bigger as you fill it. We need it to cover our bills; but we want it to cover our sins.

And to their credit, the Apostles get this. The disciples realize that Jesus isn’t only talking about the 1%. Jesus loves the rich man; His motivations are laid out clear. And Jesus says, with heavy heart, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the Kingdom of God!” He doesn’t say they won’t; He says it will be hard. “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.”  Oof. That sounds pretty final, doesn’t it?

Forget any nonsense you may have heard about the Eye of the Needle being some narrow gate in the walls of Jerusalem. That’s medieval hogwash. The people of Jesus’ day know how big a camel is, and how small a needle, and how the one ain’t gonna pass through the other without being turned into paste. And the people are greatly astounded, and they ask Jesus, “Who then can be saved?”

That’s the kicker, because you see the Law has done its work. It has convicted us all, not just that one poor fellow who went away grieving. None of us want to let go of what we have, even if opening our hand would allow us to grasp infinitely more. So now here comes the punchline, right? “For mortals it is impossible,” Jesus declares, “but for God all things are possible.”

You can’t save yourself. You can’t let go on your own. It has to be grace. It has to be mercy. We have to trust in His power to save, because only He can let us let go. It’s faith, remember. Nonattachment is faith. And faith is a radical trust, that God is here, and God is good. And unlike every other god, the true God keeps His promises.

The message here is not, “Sell your stuff to earn God’s love.” It’s not a ticket price. It’s not purchasing admission. It’s that only God can grant us grace to let go of what is false, and to open ourselves to what is true and beautiful and good. That’s not how we get into the Kingdom; that is the Kingdom! And it’s not going to be easy for anyone, and even harder for the rich. But God will get us there in grace.

And when we can finally let everything go—then at last we will be free to welcome the one true gift of God: the gift of Himself in His Son.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.