Who Can Be Saved?

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Heb 4:12-16, Mark 10:17-31

"This is a monkey trap. The hollowed-out coconut is filled with some cooked rice through this small hole, chained to the stake which is driven firmly into the ground.

Look at this hole. It's just big enough so that the monkey's hand to go in, but too small for his fist filled with rice to come out.

The monkey reaches in, grabs the rice and is suddenly trapped. Because his greed won't allow him to let go of the rice and extricate his hand, the monkey remains trapped, a victim of his greed, until he is captured.

The monkey cannot see that freedom without the rice is more valuable than capture with it.

• Story of monkey trap. Truthfully I think it’s more of a story than a practice, but it’s a story with power nevertheless. Our desire to have something results in our demise, even though the only thing keeping us trapped is our desire itself. The wealthy have many things, cares, possessions, perhaps responsibilities, so many things that we hang on to, grasp tightly, that we end up trapped (closed hand v. open hand). Jesus is right to say that It will be very hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom (Mark 10:23).

• We spoke in Men’s Bible Study yesterday about Jesus’ saying, Those who love their lives will lose them, and those who hate their lives in this world will keep them forever (John 12:25). And how there must have been something compelling about Jesus that people DID give up things to follow him

• Who can be saved? (reminder, not saved by anything we do but by act of God. Receive (open hands)) Who can be saved? Whoever hears/receives the good news of Jesus Christ communicated in a meaningful / compelling way. That’s our job, that’s our ministry, that’s our purpose.

• Talked in recent weeks about what is your purpose for being here, what is OUR purpose for being the Methodist Church in Ctown, reminding of our mission to reach out to all people with the love of Christ and to make growing, living disciples of Jesus Christ. That may be OUR purpose, but where mission and action really take flight is where individuals have personal missions and ministries.

                Yesterday a group from CUMC went to a warehouse in Mt Joy to volunteer for the Global Aid Network GAIN. Relief, development, mobilization. Packaged school kits. Processed donated clothing. Made gospel bracelets (story of putting on next person, also of feeding first). Foodpacks and seedpacks.

                Story of A., a teacher who is leaving her teaching job (and her husband leaving his job in architecture) to work fulltime with GAIN.

                Who can be saved? Whoever hears/receives the good news of Jesus Christ communicated in a meaningful / compelling way.  Cannot be saved with closed hand. Cannot participate in kingdom with closed hand.

• This weekend I learned the heartbreaking story of Amanda, a young Canadian teenager who took her own life this past week when she reached bottom in response to bullying she’d received for the last year or two. I wrote online that I cared, that anybody who reads my words, please know that I care. My wife rightfully pointed out that folks like Amanda who are depressed don’t believe my expression of care, and it makes me think Well I want to find a way to communicate it to them (think about it, God found a way to communicate with people in our darkness, and Jesus is that way, if we will let go and take hold of him… choose life, and be an agent of life.

• closing song I Am Free