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He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins
A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
September 13, 2009
Mark 8:27-38
My brother Greg got married in the chapel at
Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, partly because he had just
graduated from Dartmouth, but also because Hanover is one of those
postcard-pretty New England towns that makes a perfect backdrop for wedding
pictures. The rehearsal dinner was a kind of casual, outdoor affair, and I
remember seeing a man in a light blue baseball cap, with these words printed on
the front: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” I laughed when I saw it
because it was a joke, right? Nobody really believes that. But then I began to
look around at the ivy-covered brick buildings and the lush, green lawns; at the
polished fenders of expensive cars and the yacht club decals in the windows; at
the golden tans of the wedding guests and the jewelry dripping from fingers and
wrists. I began to think that maybe for some of these people it was not a joke,
that on some subconscious level the idea that “he who dies with the most toys
wins” was the guiding principle of their lives, and there near the beginning of
my own adult life I wondered: was it true?
Because at some point you have to decide,
don’t you? What rules will you live by? What will be the guiding principle of
your life? How can you get to the end of it with no remorse and no regrets?
Most of us don’t come up with the answers to these questions on our own. We
look around at how others are living their lives. We look for someone who is
living the life we want to live. And then we do everything in our power to
acquire that kind of life. I saw this illustrated recently in a movie called
“The Pursuit of Happyness,” about a man named Chris Gardner, a struggling single
parent who works his way up from the streets. In one scene he sees someone
drive up to the curb in an expensive sports car and asks him, “Man, what do you
do and how do you do it?” The man tells him that he’s a stockbroker, and from
that moment on Chris Gardner decides that’s what he’s going to be, too. A
stockbroker. He’s going to make a lot of money, buy a fancy car, and live
happily ever after. It sounds like a good plan, but does it work? That’s what
we’d like to know, because that “happily ever after life” is the kind we all
want to live.
I think about those first disciples, working
as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee when Jesus came along saying, “Follow me.”
He didn’t step out of an expensive sports car, but something about the way he
said it made them believe that they should drop their nets and follow, that this
stranger standing on the seashore might really be the way, the truth, and the
life. So here, several chapters into the story, on the road near Caesarea
Philippi, Jesus wonders what they think now. “Who do people say that I am?” he
asks, and they answer, “Oh, some say you are John the Baptist, or Elijah, or one
of the other great prophets.” “But what about you?” Jesus asks. “Now that
you’ve been with me for a while who do you say that I am?” Peter says, “You are
the Messiah,” and he must have been right, because Jesus doesn’t correct him.
Now, let me just say that if you had been a
commercial fishermen, breaking your back hauling in those heavy nets and
stinking of fish all the time, and then you suddenly found yourself keeping
company with the long-awaited Messiah, you might imagine that you were on the
way that leads to happily ever after, that it wouldn’t be long before Jesus went
to Jerusalem to claim the throne of his ancestor David, and not long after that
that you would be appointed to a prominent position in his cabinet. You might
already be thinking about what part of the city you would live in and how you
would furnish your luxury home. Which is why Jesus’ next words would come as
such a shock. He’s going to Jerusalem all right, but when he gets there he is
going to “undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief
priests, and the scribes, and be killed.” Peter pulls him aside to rebuke him,
to tell him it’s not going to be that way at all, but Jesus says, “Get behind
me, Satan! You’re not thinking the things of God; you’re thinking the things of
men.”
And he’s right about that.
Men—and women too—seem to think that if you
could just get a good job, and make a lot of money, you could buy a lot of
things, and live happily ever after. Women and men—at least some of them—really
do seem to believe that “the one who dies with the most toys wins.” And so
Jesus calls the crowd together and says, “Look, if anyone would come after me he
must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For those who want to save
their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the
sake of the gospel, will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the
whole world and lose his own soul?” It is Jesus’ way
of saying that he who dies with the most toys does not win, in fact, it’s just
the opposite. He loses. He loses everything that matters including the thing
that matters most: his own soul. This is the moment of decision for Jesus’
disciples, and what they have to decide is this: can they trust Jesus?
When Faysal Sharif asked me to speak at last
week’s Muslim Background Believers Conference he told me that the theme of the
conference was “Jesus: the straight path.” Maybe it’s just the way my mind
works, but I wanted to know, “The path to what? Joy? Life? Eternal life?
Heaven? And in what sense is he ‘the path? Do you mean that he’s the only
path, as in ‘No one comes to the Father but by me’? And why would you say ‘the
straight path? Because I’ve been on some paths that weren’t exactly straight,
but they still got me where I was going.” This is when Faysal should have said,
“Never mind,” but instead he said, “Do whatever you feel led to do.” And so I
began to think about Jesus as the path that leads to life and as I did I
remembered something I had learned in seminary about the Didache, a
little book published at the beginning of the second century and said to be the
teaching of the Twelve Apostles. The Didache opens with these words:
“There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and between these two ways
there is a great difference.” And that’s when I remembered something that
happened years ago.
My brother-in-law Chuck and I were hiking up
the slopes of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeastern United
States and home of the world’s worst weather. The highest wind speed ever
recorded was on top of that mountain in 1934—a gust of 231 miles per hour. When
you are hiking up to the summit from the lower slopes you eventually come to a
sign that says, “Stop. The area ahead has the worst weather in America. Many
have died there from exposure, even in the summer. Turn back now if the weather
is bad.” But on the day Chuck and I were hiking the weather was not bad. In
fact, it was beautiful—a warm, sunny day at the end of May. But the weather can
change quickly on Mount Washington, and on that day it did. A quarter mile from
the summit Chuck and I saw a storm cloud moving in from the East. We dropped
our packs and put on our Gore-Tex rain suits and our waterproof pack covers, but
by the time we got underway again the wind was howling around our ears, the rain
was coming in sideways, and the temperature was plummeting.
There aren’t any trees at that altitude, or
any dirt paths to follow. The top of the mountain is bare granite, and the
trail is marked by cairns—piles of rock placed every hundred feet or so.
The storm cloud was so dense that we couldn’t see from one cairn to the next,
and so we walked together in what we thought was the right direction until the
cairn behind us was almost out of sight, and then Chuck would walk on ahead
until he saw the next cairn, and then he would wave his arms and call out, and I
would catch up with him, we would push on to the next cairn, and start the whole
process again. We knew we weren’t far from the top, where there was a lodge
with warmth and light and hot chocolate, but we also knew that getting there was
going to be tricky. The wind was blowing at 77 miles per hour. The chill
factor was twelve below zero. Five people had died on the mountain already that
year in circumstances similar to ours and we didn’t want to be next. I realized
in that moment that while there was a way that led to life, there were many more
ways that led to death.
I wish every person on earth could experience
the urgency of that situation, especially young people. I wish they could
understand that while there is a way that leads to life there are many more ways
that lead to death. I wish they could see that a slogan like “He who dies with
the most toys wins” is simply a signpost pointing in the wrong direction, and
that the man in the expensive sports car may not know the way that leads to
life. I wish they would strain their ears to hear, above all those other voices
shouting for their attention, the voice of Jesus saying loud and clear, “Whoever
would come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will find it. For what does it
profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” I wish they could
hear that voice, and trust that voice above all other voices. I wish they would
follow Jesus on the way that leads to life.
That day on Mount Washington I followed
Chuck. I knew that if I lost sight of him I wouldn’t be able to find the path.
I would wander all over the slopes of that mountain until I couldn’t wander any
more, until I sat down, exhausted, and let the world’s worst weather claim its
next victim. So I kept my eyes on his royal blue rain suit as if my life
depended on it because in the most literal sense imaginable, my life did. It’s
the same way Jesus wants us to follow him. He wants us to keep our eyes on him
as if our lives depended on it, because, in the most literal sense imaginable,
our lives do.
And so Chuck and I shuffled up the slope of
that mountain, moving from cairn to cairn, until at last we bumped into a wooden
sign that let us know we had reached the summit of Mount Washington. Even then
we couldn’t see the lodge. Chuck had to venture out in several different
directions before he yelled back, “Here it is!” We went inside and dropped our
packs, shucked off our wet rain suits, and shoved everything in a corner. We
shivered with cold and rubbed our hands to get the feeling back, but the lodge
was bright and warm and filled with tourists in T-shirts who had driven to the
summit in their cars. It seemed almost unbelievable. When we had thawed out
enough to order we each got a large hot chocolate, with creamy foam on the top
and steam rising from the cup. We sat down, sipped our hot chocolate, felt its
warmth seeping into our bodies, and thanked God that we had found the way that
led to life.
—Jim Somerville © 2009
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