Sermon for Oct 11, 2009, Fr. Klein. The Parable of the Rich Man and a stubborn heart.

Have you ever noticed how often Jesus ended His teachings with the somewhat mysterious statement, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (Luke 14:35).

We hear something similar this morning in His statement, “Children, how hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God. (Mk 10:24c)… He is speaking to the difficulty we often have in actively listening to one another and to God. To take this a bit further Jesus is saying that the root of this struggle to actively listen lies in fallen man’s most common illness, and that would be a stubborn heart.

In the Gospel reading this morning Jesus encounters the rich man… and in doing so He encounters a stubborn heart.  Jesus saw much potential in this young man. It even says that He looked upon him and “He loved him.” (Can you imagine God doing that towards us? Yet, He does so all the time.)

Yet, this compassionate love of Christ can only teach or show the way. The young man himself, that is his free will must say “yes” to what Jesus was asking. So our Gospel lesson draws us into the question of actively listening to Jesus and exercising our free will properly in response to what we hear. A proper response is tied into the difficulty some will experience in entering the Kingdom of God. “Hearing” means being open to receiving spiritual truth and validating the existence of God verses those whose spiritual ears and heart are closed to God’s will and truth.

Take two different people. We can share some aspect of the faith with each person.

1. One will listen actively asking honest questions, and seeking real answers.
2. The other person simply writes off the conversation, maybe with a smile or the nod of the head, but in some way dismisses the “religious conversation” without any serious effort to learn.

Those who write Christian truth off do so with personal explanations padded with situation upon situation upon situation (situation ethics), and for me, I can always tell when the message of faith simply isn’t getting through.

Now, what prevents a person from hearing God’s call?  What prevents him or her from responding positively to God's call?  I believe the inhibiting factor is stubbornness. A stubborn heart rejects truth regardless of the logic presented. A stubborn heart was the cause of man’s fall from grace (Adam and Eve), this stubborn heart followed man out of Eden and down through the centuries from the journey in the wilderness (the Exodus) up to the present moment we live in.  Stubborness is an aspect of our fallen nature.

We also learn of an important spiritual truth. Our ears are connected to our heart.  Now this is both a blessing and a real challenge.

Holy Scripture helps us here. In Hebrews 3:7 we find, “Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, when you hear His Voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness,” (Ps 95:7). [Speak about the meaning of “today.”]  Although our intellect is important in the process of making a decision, when the information finally filters down to the level of deciding if something may be true or not the heart often is the final authority in how well we hear the truth and influences the decision we make.

The spiritual truth found here is that spiritually speaking, our ears are connected to our heart. It’s the main way our conscience is brought into play in the decision-making process. [Talk about this a little bit].

• Here’s how this works.

A person wants something very much. But the faith may challenge the person in how to obtain what he wants or it may even inform his conscience that he should back away or even walk away from what he “really wants.”  Following Jesus Christ often means that we find our self “backing away” or “letting go” of the very thing(s) we’ve set our heart on. This reality is hard to deal with at times. So, rather than face the hard learning curve, people will avoid the truth, they will avoid any decision in order to protect themselves and keep their world view and their personal hopes intact.

We see this (compromise) all the time.

In fact, if we work at it long enough we can come up with many “good reasons” why we needn’t or shouldn’t listen to the arguments presented by our faith or theology. And of course we would be very offended if anyone were to tell us that we may be rejecting the truth God has for us to learn in favor of self-will and self-preservation. I believe we can see this in the rich man. If we look hard enough we may be able to see our self here at times too. We all compete against “deafening desires and attachments.” The bottom line: Self-deception and compromise can be defeated only as we come to love truth more than our dreams. But if we stubbornly cling to our desires, self-will will always “tone-down” and even mute the voice of God.

Fallen man has a heart condition.

So, what fallen man has is a heart condition. This condition is caused by our desires being focused somewhere other than upon God’s will and His truth.

Let me offer three factors that cause our spiritual heart condition.

• The imagination of the heart.

If we let the world with all of its promises of capture the imagination of our heart we will gradually be turned away (by the world) from the Word of God. The more we attach our hopes for happiness to the things of this world, and let this world and its commodities “take care of us and heal us” the less we will be sincerely interested in God or His spiritual truth. We can’t love the world and be a child of the world and love God and be a child of God at the same time. [God and mammon]  We can turn to Holy Scripture to receive guidance in this. Saint James explains: "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God?" (Jas. 4:4).

Saint John explains: "Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him." (1 John 2:15).  Saint Paul explains to Timothy: "Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge a person into ruin and destruction." (1 Tim. 6:9–10). Please notice how Saint Paul says that it is the desire to be rich (not wealth itself), [the desire is the human element that forms the attachment of the heart to the things of the world] that causes the real problems.

James, John and Peter each explain that following Jesus Christ means facing (even daily) the ongoing struggle to combat the weeds of the world to keep them from taking root and influencing our mind, body and soul.  The question is, are using our spiritual tools wisely, are we accessing the grace of God properly to uproot these nasty weeds or are we too guilty of fertilizing them?

• The sin of pride and prejudice.

We often see these two sins joined at the hip. Pride and prejudice are like a set of earplugs. They are often present in our conversation, when we say four words, "I already know better." Pride and prejudice keep us pinned to preconceived notions. We don’t want to take the time to investigate new positions, even if another way was presented with the accurate of evidence or the best of logic.  [History is one of our most faithful teachers and yet we often turn a deaf ear to the past, even wanting to disconnect from the past because we think we know better].

Our fallen nature makes our hearing “selective” in many ways. We wear the earplugs of pride and prejudice when certain topics or ideas are brought up or when certain people speak.

• Moral Relativism.

I think relativism is probably the most devious of all reasons why Christians are experiencing loss of spiritual hearing.  Relative truth allows a person to avoid both objective truth (God) and their conscience all at one time.

• Here’s how it works.

First, you need to dismiss objective truth all together. In place of this is put “subjective truth" and it becomes the method to believe whatever is appropriate for you. Make up a new God according to your personal design. Feel free to vary His laws to fit your situation or preferences. Sin? What is sin? Who defines sin? No “authority” knows my situation. My situation allows me to disregard the faith. Because of my unique situation I am permitted even to bend or break the commandments of God.

Relative truth is very attractive, very popular today, and it is very deceptive and evil.

It’s evil because it tells good people to believe that they really can change divine truth (any truth) simply by changing their minds.  It’s evil because when people accept anyone’s version of truth as "the truth for me," what they are doing is really denying the reality of their spiritual nature, the spiritual world and the full life that God has made us for.

We’re saying, in effect, that God doesn’t exist, or that if He does exist there is no way to really know Him. Those who live in this way exchange the reality of God for fantasy all the time.  But God has spoken. The gift of the Christian faith is to tell the world that our heavenly Father speaks to us. He sent us His beloved Son: "This is My beloved Son . . . listen to Him." (Matt. 17:5). The Son in turn said of Himself, "For this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth." (John 21:37); and He also tells the Church: "If you continue in My word, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31–32).

Can we hear this truth and be liberated by this truth? Yes, absolutely.

The genius behind the ministry of Jesus Christ was that He went to great lengths to first give us Truth and then to make sure that His Truth would be handed on from generation to generation intact until His return. He accomplishes this through His Church that He said would always be guided by the Spirit of truth (John 14:16–17, 16:13). He put His anointed in charge of His Church, giving them the necessary spiritual gifts to govern with love and teach faithfully all that He taught ((Matt 28:20), and reminding them that "He who hears you hears Me" (Luke 10:16).He gave them the reassurance that "I am with you always, even to the end of the age." (Matt. 28:20).

To say we can’t know Jesus Christ, or that we can’t know truth is absolutely wrong. In fact, in the end on the day of our particular judgment before God we will be judged by whether or not we have sought to learned the truth of God and that we have lived by that truth to the best of our ability. (John 12:47–50)  So what are we to do about spiritual deafness? Or better yet, how could we have helped this rich young man had we been in the crowd on that day with Jesus?

We can help people like the rich man by focusing on what needs to change within us. It has been said that. Monica won the conversion of her son, Augustine, by becoming a saint herself. Suffering through necessary change and growth is not an option for Christians. It’s a guarantee. This involves the purification of our hearts.  So, our first step is making sure we believe in the existence of God and absolute truth, for that’s a basic requirement for finding Him (Heb. 11:6). Our second step would be to look at what we are really attached too. Are we choosing our own will over God’s in any area? And our third and final step would be to cultivate a real hunger for God, as opposed to being unconcerned with Him in the matters of life.

If we had been present that day with Jesus, and as the rich man left with his head down, walking in his own direction, we could have offered him this prayer that comes from Psalm 25: “Make me to know Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth, and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; for You I wait all the day long." (Ps. 25: 4–5).

Amen.