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"This is a stick-up, see? Your money or your life! Come on, come on, I ain't got all day. Which will it be? Your money or your life?"

How many of us, faced with that decision, would try to hold on to our wallets and our purses? Not very many, I imagine. It's what we call a complete no-brainer. It is such an obvious choice that when we occasionally hear about a person who tries to fight a robber instead of just handing over their money, we wonder about that person's sanity. No amount of money is worth a person's life, right? It's not even a serious question, is it?

If you go to the Amazon bookstore on the internet and type, "your money or your life", you will get more than 12,000 books that have something to say about the subject. There are books about simplifying your life, books about enriching your life, books about millionaires living next door. There are books about how to save more money, books about investing money, books about getting your money work for you. That's a lot of books about money.

There are hundreds of songs about money, too. "Money makes the world go 'round" by Liza Minnelli. "Money for Nothin'" by Dire Straits. "Can't buy me love" by the Beatles." "9 to 5" by Dolly Parton. "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford. "Money, Money, Money" by ABBA, "Money" by Pink Floyd. "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof.

We live in a culture that is obsessed with money. We have more of it than any society ever had in the history of the world, and it's distributed more evenly than in any other society. We all use money every day. We work hard for our money, and we know that we need to hold on to as much of it as possible to live in today's world. So it should come as no surprise that money can be very important in defining who we are as individuals. In a very real and tangible way, money represents how we spend our time, and how society values what we do.

So when Jesus tells us that "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God", we are caught off guard. Like the disciples, we are shocked by Jesus' words; they sting and convict us. What did he say? Is he talking about me? Surely, Jesus doesn't expect us all to give everything away and live in the streets, does he?

Well, yes. Yes he does.

In today's Gospel lesson, Jesus confronts a man who wants to know what he must do to inherit eternal life. Like all of us, the man has lots of disposable income, and like all of us, he is shocked by the answer. Jesus looks at the man, loves him, and says in effect, "your money or your life!...sell your stuff, give your money to the poor, and come follow me. Come be one of my disciples. Come live a life of servanthood. Come live a life of true freedom and profound peace."

This is one of those hard lessons from Jesus. This choice should be a no-brainer, remember? If a robber was asking us, we'd exchange our money for our lives in a heart beat. Why then, when Jesus asks it, do we turn away? The fact of the matter is that, according to Jesus' standard, we are all too rich to inherit the kingdom of heaven. We all have many possessions which often get in between us and Christ. We all have our money, and our things, and our pride, and our ways of defining who we are based on what we do and how much we make. But Jesus loves us. So he confronts us with the reality that we all have so much mental and physical "stuff" that it separates us from the path we should follow; that by ourselves there is nothing we can ever do to inherit the Kingdom of God.

Then who can be saved?
Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."

Salvation is not for overachievers, who believe they can buy their way in. It isn't for those who do or say the right thing. It isn't for those who have so many possessions that they'll never miss the money. Salvation, wholeness, is a gift from God. We are "saved" when we allow God to reorder our lives so we can see that all that we own is just stuff that we can do without. We are saved when we allow God to show us that there are so many who have so much less than we do. We are made whole when we admit that all that we have comes from God in the first place, and that God has made us stewards of everything here on earth.

Your money or your life. None of us can pass through the eye of the needle – it is an impossibility. No matter how much we give away, there will always be someone who has less. No matter how poor we are, there will always be those who are poorer. Jesus is not saying that only the poor are entitled to life everlasting. What Jesus is saying is that God makes everything possible, no matter how ridiculous it might seem to us. All that we have is a gift from God – not only our lives, but also our money, food, clothing, health and possessions. What we do with our lives and with our stuff is our response to that precious gift. Christ invites us into the kingdom of God by giving up our claim to our stuff, and by rejecting the claim of our stuff on our lives.

Thanks be to God.

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