She lived just beside the railroad tracks - on the other side of the tracks, as they say in small southern towns. Her name was Mrs. Hunsacker, her home a weatherworn trailer ringed by fading, plastic yard ornaments: Dutch kids kissing, a praying Jesus keeping company with soft-winged angels. I’d heard that her husband had been a life-long alcoholic whose fists she’d learned to fear. Now Mr. Hunsacker was gone, and she seldom heard from her grown sons, who had followed their father’s path to the local bar. Her life was marked now by long periods of solitude that by all logic ought to have been soaked in regret – but she would say with the utmost conviction “oh, the Lord’s been good to me. Yes, He has! I thank Him for every day – every day! You can never tell what He’s gonna do, and do I love to watch!” And across her broad face, for all the world to see, was joy.

He would have lived far from the tracks, uptown, had there been such places in Bible times. The Gospel of Matthew tells us he was young and rich, like the folks we see on Entertainment Tonight. But unlike them, he also knew his Bible, living decently as well as grandly. I imagine that of the toys that would have caught the eye of a wealthy young man in his day, he’d have had the latest and best. So I suggest we imagine him just a bit ahead of his time, pulling up to see Jesus in a custom, tinted-window, black Humvee. Jesus and the disciples hear his subwoofer-enhanced sound system blaring Christian rock well before he skids to a stop. His low-profile tires plow up red Judean dirt, he kills the rumbling engine, the music falls silent as the crowd stares. The birds begin again to sing as his $12,000, 24-inch spinners flash silently to a halt.

He is a good man. Jesus looks at him and knows this. The man is not only rich, he has a moral compass, and has lived life doing the right thing. “Jesus,” he exclaims behind designer sunglasses. “Jesus, it is so cool that you are here! I just wanted to ask you: what do I have to do to have eternal life?” You see, for all his toys, for all his success and the respect he gets from those with less, something is missing. He’s spent more money than most people make in a year tricking out his SUV, had his home redecorated, bought a second one on the Mediterranean…he’s kept the commandments, not just the big ones. He’s played the game well and done well. He believes in God. But some nights he lies awake and almost dares to say out loud, like a prayer, “God, I feel so empty. Surely there’s more for me than this.”

Mrs. Hunsacker had so little by comparison. Every TV spot, every billboard, every magazine ad would tell you she is to be pitied, and the young man is to be envied. And indeed, one of them really did have all that was needed for contentment, and one did not. It’s just that it’s the total opposite from what Hollywood and Madison Avenue tell us it is. At a time when so many are grappling to maintain what our culture calls a standard of living, when the alleged American dream is on the ropes, with people unsure as to whether their children will be able to exceed or even meet their own standard of living, there is this strange, deep truth: too much is never enough. And all the possessions in the world cannot open one’s life into boundless joy. From her modest front porch, Mrs. Hunsacker saw every day something that brought her joy. What was it?

When we live our lives in response to what we understand God to be doing in the world, our joy is independent of our external circumstances. The rich young man is so close. He figures his life just needs tweaking, some minor adjustment like the front-end alignment he just got for the Humvee. “Hey, Jesus, what more do I need to do to really live?” he asks. The Gospel of Mark says Jesus looked at him and loved him. In a spirit of love, Jesus told him the one little thing, one small adjustment he needed to make to his life. “You do lack one thing. So go, sell your Oakley sunglasses and your Christian Dior leather jacket. Put your H2 on AutoTrader.com. Sell your homes and what’s in them, and give the money to those who have no homes or fine clothes. Then come and live with us, and you will discover the treasure God has in store for you.”

We in the Church have spent 20 centuries trying to soften those words. Way back, we made up a legend about how Jesus was really talking about a gate in the city wall, called “The Eye of the Needle Gate,” that was really hard for camels to get through. Only problem is, there never was such a gate, and Jesus said it was impossible for the rich to enter the Kingdom, not really hard. Later some preachers said, “well, this command to sell everything applies to people on an individual basis, just to this young man and a few really rich folks, for whom money is a stumbling block to loving God.” Oh! Only rich folks love money. I see. We believe that, and we can console ourselves, thinking, well, I’m not that rich. I don’t have a yacht or a house in Barbados!

But lest we pardon ourselves our little wealth piles, Jesus also asked: ‘what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his very self, his soul?’ Our Savior gave his life for us, and commanded us to follow his example, to die to self and invite God to reign in our hearts. He invited more than obedience to the Law – he invited radical commitment to a new way of living in the world.

His disciples are shocked. They see the young man, equally shocked, heartbroken, climb into his Humvee and roar away, the MP3 player now silent. They know that the young man is going away for good, out of the story in a cloud of dust. He is headed for the place where those at the end of their rope go, to the Well of Despair, to drink deeply of self-pity. The disciples know very well that what Jesus just asked of that young man is impossible – as impossible as a camel crawling through the eye of a needle.

So they call him on it. “Lord, who can be saved?” Then Jesus turns to them, his eyes sad for that rich young man, who so wanted to know what one thing he needed to do to be saved. “For you, for him, it is impossible. But for God, nothing is impossible.” And now we stand at the cusp of great wisdom, the deepest knowledge ever sewn into the fabric of the universe. For God, all things are possible.

Perhaps someone here is, like the rich young man, exhausted with the weight of trying to be good. Maybe you have labored under the Law for many years, trying mightily without rest to please God, to be a good Christian son or daughter or mother or father. Maybe you have played at Church for so long, you’ve become very good at it, here when the doors open, Sunday School, familiar face at the worship service. Truth is, that rich young man drove right out of the pages of the Bible and right into our lives, because his story is our story: we’re all laboring to save ourselves. And we don’t really want it any other way. Because we’ve learned that hard work and fair play will get us across the finish line, right?

Almost right. We’re so close! In fact, we lack only one thing. Joy. The joy that comes with perfect alignment with what God is doing in the world. And that joy – we cannot buy it. We cannot create it. The one thing we lack. Are you close to the Kingdom of God? We can be close as the breadth of a needle, but miss the mark completely. We are, after all, talking about perfection, which is always what we speak of when we speak of God.

But know this: Jesus had no SUV, but he walked all the way to the Well of Despair. When he got there he found the young man, and every one of us that has ever stubbornly chosen to try to make our own way into God’s perfect Kingdom. There he stretched out his arms, and took all that despair on himself, not because he was abandoning God’s way for the world, but because he was taking on what is rightfully the consequence for our own disobedience.

If you’ve been drinking from the Well of Despair, he is offering another drink – the living water of eternal life. Those who drink of it will never be thirsty, whether all around them is drought or rain, it does not matter. If you believe this, you are not far from the Kingdom of God. If you want to know the joy that comes with living in the Kingdom, you can pray with me.

Lord, we know what it is to need ‘one thing more’. There always one thing more that somebody needs from us, one thing more that we need to be happy. We’ve worn ourselves out trying to be good. After all, there is only One Who is good. Lord, place him before us today. And if he should ask us to lay it all down, to empty our hands to embrace his way, then we pray you’ll give us the courage to see that there is no other way. Open our hearts to him, that we might lose everything and finally, at last, lack nothing. Amen.