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Having Nothing: Possessing Everything
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
November 4, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Ezekiel 13:1-16
II Corinthians 6:1-11

“We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

I am trying to imagine losing everything. I am thinking of the twelve hundred households burned to the ground in the California fires; I am thinking of the real people whose lives in Pearlington have yet to be reconstructed; I am thinking of Haitians after the storm (or before!) and now Mexicans drowning on the coast; I am thinking of every bombed out neighborhood in Iraq and the nether lands that are Afghanistan’s Taliban-haunted villages. I am thinking of the Jews rounded up throughout Europe and the disappeared in Chile and the families who dwell on the gun-stalked streets of this city. I am thinking of these lives, nearer in time, to give us an imagination for the people of Judah marched by their captors off to Babylon; an imagination for their backward glance at Jerusalem in flames and the Temple destroyed in the end; an imagination for their empty arms, their broken hearts, their troubled minds, their faltering faith.

All of this is to say on a Sunday when we tip our Protestant hats to All Saints Day, turn in our pledge cards and gather at the Lord ’s Table, I am trying to imagine what it is to have nothing and yet possess everything. I am listening for the testimony of those dwelling at life’s limits. Against the backdrop of smoldering ashes or knee deep in flood waters or surveying the aftermath of a suicide bomb or just before slipping into a final coma, their witness is that of having nothing and possessing everything. “We have what matters,” said some standing like Job on the ash heap. “We have each other.”

The humane detail we know about the Babylonian exile is that the deportees were settled in groups. They had each other. Like many of the victims of the California fires, these were the elite of the society: the political and religious leaders, the educated class, the rich. Unlike many of the victims of the California fires, they did not have the option to return and rebuild. Rather their fall in status was precipitous. Mostly consigned to work the fields of a foreign land, they sang the Lord’s song and wept when they remembered Jerusalem. I wonder if having each other was, for the first time in their lives of forgetfulness and idolatry, enough.

We know it had not been enough for Judah before the fall. Before the fall it was as though death had not been introduced into the narrative. Oh, Ezekiel had warned them in the midst of their pride and wealth and abundance and pre-eminence: “See, the day! See, it comes! The rod has blossomed, pride has budded. Violence has grown into a rod of wickedness. None of them shall remain, not their abundance, not their wealth; no pre-eminence among them. The time has come, the day draws near; let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all their multitude.”

But the effect of God’s word apparently was negligible, a detail that should come as no surprise to us. With an ear to our comparable deafness, Walter Brueggemann imagines Judah before the fall. “The government of ancient Jerusalem was busy doing the things governments do: deploying ambassadors, developing new weapons systems, designing new technologies, dealing with cost overruns, securing more funding, levying taxes, holding press conferences. It was busy pursuing the things that would bring security (or the impression of it): power, money, technology. But,” says Brueggemann, “the more it worked on security and defense the more precarious public life became.”

In other words, what had come to matter to God’s people had more to do with the things that denied the limits of human existence: the king that promised victory, the army that assured security, the wealth that distained vulnerability, the status that assumed importance, the gods that proffered tangible blessings. Then as if a fire had begun to sweep through the mountains or a wave were about to break over the levies, darkness overran Judah’s carefully kept boundaries. “Ancient Jerusalem staggered toward death.” Now neither the king nor the army nor the defense department nor the technocrats could save them. “Most,” Brueggemann notes, “had not noticed the gathered dark-ness, the ominous violence, the fearful emptiness, the growing brutality that prepared the way for death.”

But some had noticed. They were the nuts, the traitorous, a handful of touchy-feely preachers, the prophets. “They were hostile and abrasive,” Brueggemann admits. “Their speeches were unwelcome. But they noticed what no one else noticed. That is their significance. That is why we preserve their words—they were the only ones who saw death coming.”

We have already met one of them, namely Jeremiah. Now we must do business with Ezekiel—or admit that his judgments mean to do business with us! Ezekiel is known best for seeing a wheel within a wheel, way up in the middle of the air, for “d’em bones, d’em bones, d’em dry bones.” We trivialize what we do not want to hear! In fact, Ezekiel prophesied doom as the storm gathered against the city. Taken to Babylon with the first wave of exiles in 598 B.C., a decade before Jerusalem fell, the prophet continued to rant at Judah and the nations from a distance until Judah’s future was foreclosed. Then his words of hope become nothing less than enormous.

Through it all, Brueggemann observes, Ezekiel does not “blame the king, the government, the military or the war planners for this terrible death to come. He blames the religious community, the clergy, the prophets: ‘My hands will be against the prophets who see delusive visions and give lying messages.’” Later he rails against his colleagues whose duty it was “to promote the welfare of the people, cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and evil that the strong might not oppress the weak.” [Hammurabi Code] “Ah, you shepherds of Israel,” he rants, “You have not strengthened the weak, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost….”

Rather the shepherds of Israel deceived the people and perhaps deceived even themselves. “‘When the people build a wall’ says Ezekiel ([and Brueggemann extrapolates:] the wall of the city; Wall Street, walls of finance, defense, security and privilege; walls that divide and protect; walls that include and exclude…), ‘the prophets paint those walls with whitewash.’…they call war ‘peace,’ and self-interest ‘generosity’, and greed ‘opportunity,’ and brutality ‘national interest….’”

In each instance, the word the shepherds then and the shepherds now shrink from speaking is the word of judgment against most of what seems to matter, against all those things we are afraid to lose. The word sees death coming, sees that our acquisition, our control, our dominion has come to an end. For Ezekiel and later the apostle Paul, the deathly things that appear to matter most are precisely the things that keep us from what really matters until we lie to die.

“I regard everything as loss,” wrote Paul to the well-healed Philippians, “because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” This escapes our privileged imaginations and perhaps that is our unlucky lot until, according to the prophets, God’s greater purposes in history take over our little lives: until the darkness gathers on the boundaries we have so carefully secured or the market crashes down around us or the terrorists tire of fighting on another shore or the nation rises to the news of an Iranian invasion or death actually stalks the door of our household and we wake to the only thing that does matter: that in life and in death we belong to God. It is enough.

Can you imagine what it might mean now, in this moment, to live as though this were the truth and the rest a lie? I think this must have been how the saints of the early church lived and died. In afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger, they belonged neither to the nation nor to the bankers nor to idols nor even to the family but to God. What such freedom wrought in them, among other things says Paul, was truthful speech. They saw death coming and were free to say so. Therefore by the powerful, the elite, the well-placed, the well-healed they were “…treated as impostors, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and see—[they were really] alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

Odd to say, but there is something in me that envies those who, in God’s service, lose the life they had intended and find the life that is life. I am not honestly sure those who possess everything can discover this. We rather spend our lives worrying about the bills we cannot pay for the possessions we do not need, about the nest we must feather for our children so that they too will not know what really matters until they lie to die, about the reduced life we fear in retirement because we have not hoarded enough in our barns, about our financial and national and personal security that sends us out into the world guarded and fearful of the other.

In a word, we live the reverse of Paul’s witness: we are treated as true by the society and yet we are imposters in regard to Christ; as well known and yet unknown to the God in whose image we were made; as alive when see, we are dying; as outwardly rejoicing, yet sorrowful at heart; as rich yet making many poor; as possessing everything yet having nothing. Who will save us from this body of death? Paul cried elsewhere. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, he proclaims. He alone gives us an imagination for what it is to lose everything, for he has taken on our poor estate and so hears the cry of the perishing, hears the prayers of those afraid they have lost everything. “Help me!” they pray and then “Thank you!” In his dying and his rising, by the death God in Christ faced down and defeated, we who will go to God empty-handed will go, nevertheless, as those who have been given everything in Him.

In the end, I turn to the artist who puts words to the imagination we are given in Christ of life lived in the face of death. “I can’t believe I’m laughing!” writes poet Susan King who is trying to imagine what it is to have nothing and possess everything at the boundaries and in the face of death:

What really matters? Before you wake in exile or the limousine drives you away, may you let go long enough and let go of enough to taste and see the riches of God’s grace in Him who alone for our poor sakes, having nothing, has given us everything! Thanks be to God.

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