Doing the Heavy Lifting

“Chris, pause. You need to straighten your wrist when you do that motion.”  I have now heard some form of this comment weekly for the past four months.  For my ongoing health and well-being, I have started going to a physical trainer to help me build strength.  Last fall, I was diagnosed with a genetic condition where my body doesn’t synthesize collagen correctly.  That results in ligaments and tendons that act like old, stretched out rubber bands.  One of the ways to combat this is to build strength in the muscles to compensate for what those ligaments and tendons can’t do.  Only one problem: I hate lifting heavy things and so I haven’t done so for years.

In order to get me to actually lift heavy things a few times a week, I have started seeing a trainer.  This also doubles as protection from me hurting myself by using bad form.  In recent weeks, I have struggled to keep my wrist straight when doing a particular set of exercises.  Me being me, I stood there for a minute trying to figure out when I kept returning to a bad form that would injure me in the long run.  What I realized is that curling my wrists felt like I was protecting that joint from stretching out (due to my overly stretchy ligaments) and the weight was heavier when I straightened my wrists.   The side effect of this slight change meant that I wasn’t working the muscle intended and I was opening myself up to injury later.  Correct form was more difficult, but I told myself that I can do difficult things.

Jesus’ teachings are difficult to follow.  There is no way around it: so many of Jesus’ teaching are difficult.  Some of them are difficult because we are fallible humans and it is difficult to love everyone 100% of the time.  Other teachings are difficult because - if we were honest with ourselves - we actually don’t want to follow them.  One topic that Jesus returns to again and again is how the accumulation of wealth is immoral.  He tells followers to give up their lives and follow him in a life of nomadic ministry.  He instructs a rich young man to sell all of his possessions.  He tells parables about rich men dying and burning in the flames of hell.  He says that it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  At the end of his ministry, Jesus flips the tables of money changers in the temple.  There are many questions that we have about Jesus, his ministry, and his life; but his feelings toward people who have accumulated wealth is clear: he thought it was sinful and immoral.

Following Jesus’s teachings on money and wealth are some of the most difficult teachings to follow.  I know very few people who are willing to take a vow of poverty and sell all of their worldly possessions.  I fully admit that I am one of the people who doesn’t want to live in poverty due to my faith; but when I read certain parts of the Gospel, I can feel myself doing the theological equivalent of protectively curling my wrists to make the weight lighter. 

I ask myself:

• How much do you need to have to be considered rich?  Yes, I live comfortably, but Jesus is talking about the millionaires and billionaires, not me!
• Can you have wealth and not love it?  Jesus criticizes the love of money.  Just because I have some money doesn’t mean that it is a priority above my faith!
• What about the middle class?  In Jesus’s time, there were landowners and peasants.  It isn’t fair to apply his teachings today; Jesus would have a slightly different message to the middle class.
• Doesn’t God want good things for us?  If I sell all of my things, that doesn’t actually solve the problem of inequality in our society.  I might as well keep it.
• Jesus died to offer us forgiveness for our sins. I guess sinfully holding on to my money is a forgivable sin.  Jesus, I’m working on it!
• What matters most in not how we sin, but where we end up in the afterlife.  We don’t need to worry about how much money we have; we should worry about how many souls we have saved! (One perspective, not mine).

But in the end, all of these points are just lifting the heavy weight of Jesus’s most difficult teachings.  I don’t have answers to most of these questions, and I still wrestle with how to understand Jesus’s teachings about money today.  But if I am being honest, I find that I am often all too willing to curl my wrists to make the weight a little bit lighter.
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Blessings,
Pastor Chris