Sermon Video: "Who is my neighbor?" - Luke 10:29-37

As the conversation between Jesus and the expert in the Law continues, the lawyer and Jesus have agreed that the heart and soul of the Law is loving God with everything and loving our neighbor as ourselves.  At this point, the original question, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” has been answered in that what is required by the Law has been clearly summed up.  The next part of the conversation should be a discussion of how we reconcile the Law’s demand with humanity’s failure to fully keep it, i.e. a discussion of repentance and forgiveness, of mercy and grace.  The lawyer, however, in an effort to justify himself turns the discussion in a new direction by asking Jesus, “and who is my neighbor?”  The lawyer’s question is focusing on the object of the Law, who it applies to, in the hopes that a narrow definition will make it easier to keep.  As Jesus typically does, he doesn’t answer the question he is asked but instead chooses to focus upon the subject of the Law, that is, us, by explaining what it means to be a good neighbor.

                The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the most commented upon sections of the Bible, it has fascinated Christians down through the centuries with its powerful message.  In the story, the unnamed man who is robbed, beaten, and left for dead while journeying from Jerusalem to Jericho is only treated as a neighbor by one of the three people who pass by that way.  The first two that come along, both of whom are professional servants of God and thus in theory ideal representatives of the requirements of the Law to love your neighbor, yet they both walk by without even stopping to assess the situation.  Both of these men of God commit sins of omission by not helping a fellow human being in distress.  The lawyer who asked the question of Jesus about defining the term neighbor was hoping that the definition would end up being, “only people like us, our fellow Jews are your neighbors”.  Even by that narrow definition, the priest and Levite are in violation of the Law.  The broad definition of neighbor advocated by Jesus, everyone you meet is your neighbor, is embodied by the Samaritan who comes along next, takes pity on the wounded man, and goes far beyond the minimum to take care of his needs. 

                The twist of the story is of course that a hated Samaritan is the good guy and two respected religious leaders are the bad guys, that alone is a powerful enough message about prejudice and judging people based on outward appearances, but the parable also teaches us to not put limits on who we consider to be our neighbors.  The demand from God that we love our neighbors as ourselves has no boundary, there is no “us” and “them”.  Anytime that people start dividing the world up into groups of “us” and “them”, the process begins which allows racism, sexism, indifference, callousness, greed, and hatred to grow.  Why?  Because when we look at another human being as a “them” we allow ourselves to begin to minimize their suffering and treat it as somehow less than our own.  How was Hitler able to murder millions of innocent Jews, Gypsies, and other “undesirables”?  He had millions of willing men and women throughout Europe that also believed that those lives were less valuable, because it was “them” and not “us”, unspeakable horrors were unleashed. 

                What is the call of God for his people?  To love all, and treat all equally, to see everyone as your neighbor and imitate the love of God by loving them in turn.  The conversation between Jesus and the lawyer ends when the lawyer is forced to concede that the one who acted as a neighbor to the man in distress was “the one who had mercy on him”, it does not matter who he was, his actions spoke for him.  In response Jesus said, “Go and do likewise”.

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Sermon Video: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" - Luke 10:25-28

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  That question lies at the heart of mankind’s hopes to stand before our Creator without fear.  Connected to that question is the related question of, “What is the greatest commandment?”  Jesus interacted with those two questions on multiple occasions in the Gospels, and always came around to the same answer, whether he was answering the question himself or simply agreeing with the answer of someone else: Love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself.  These two summations of the duties and responsibilities of the Law of Moses are recorded in Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.  That these two requirements of total love, for God and our neighbor, are an effective summation of the Law was one of the few things about which Jesus and his adversaries among the ruling religious clique of Jerusalem could agree.  The answer to the question is not in any doubt, in order to stand before God, we must love him with everything we have, body, mind, soul, and strength, AND we must love that which he loves, people created in his image, as we love ourselves.  This is what God requires of us, the stark difference between Jesus and the self-righteous leaders who opposed him is that Jesus knew full well that humanity was incapable of even approaching this standard of perfection, let alone accomplishing it.

                “What must I do” is a failing proposition from the beginning.  Because God is holy, our effort will always fall far short.  If we cannot “do” anything to save ourselves, are we simply left without hope?  From the very beginning, when God promised Adam and Eve that he would one day send a redeemer, the answer to mankind’s dilemma lay with God.  The Messiah, God’s own Son, was sent to remedy that which we could never do.  What mankind is incapable of, Jesus did, what we could not do for ourselves, he has done for us.  Where does that leave us?  Grace, God’s grace, that is our hope and our trust, when we put our faith in what Jesus has accomplished, the Spirit of God can begin to transform us, washing away our past sins, and starting us on the road, through his power, to becoming a people that loves God with everything we have and loves our neighbors, all of them, as ourselves.

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Sermon Video, "rejoice that your names are written in heaven" - Luke 10:17-20

When the seventy-two, sent out by Jesus to prepare the towns and villages for his arrival, return full of joy at their major success, they share with Jesus their enthusiasm that “even the demons submit to us in your name.”  Jesus confirms their success by relating to them that he witnessed the fall of Satan, “like lightning”, and then he goes further by telling them that they will do even greater things for the kingdom because he has given them his authority and power.  With that ability the followers of Jesus, soon to become the Church after Pentecost, are entirely capable of overcoming the forces of darkness and carrying the Gospel’s saving grace to the ends of the earth.  There is much in Jesus words to give us confidence and hope as we continue to be beacons of light in a dark world.

                After building up their enthusiasm and expectation, Jesus ends the conversation by reminding his followers that wielding power in his name, even over the forces of darkness, is not an end in and of itself, but rather an outcome of the foundational work which he is about to accomplish on Good Friday and Easter.  Jesus reminds them that the most important thing is that they can rejoice that their “names are written in heaven.”  If we, as individuals and as a Church, don’t have that, we don’t have anything.  This perspective has major implications for each one of us and for our collective efforts to do fulfill our mission through the ministry of his Church. 

                Is this then a call, by Jesus, to place our focus entirely upon evangelism to the exclusion of service?  Of course not, that would fly in the face of the approach that Jesus himself used as he continually met the physical needs of the people he met in the process of sharing with them the Good News of the Gospel.  This is not a call to divorce evangelism from service, rather it is a reminder that the two must be inextricably linked, because the evangelist who cares not for the people will soon have no audience, and the servant who doesn’t bring the Gospel with him/her will have no message.  In the end, figuring out how we combine service and evangelism in our personal, Church, and para-church efforts will be an ongoing task, but as long as we keep the proper perspective from Jesus that there is only one foundation we can build upon, we will continue to be useful to the kingdom of God.

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Democracy, The Free Press, and Facebook

Something struck me as I was working my way through William Shirer’s massive and insightful “The Collapse of the Third Republic”, which is his accounting through first-hand insight as a newspaper correspondent, and massive research after the fact, of the weaknesses that brought about the quick collapse of France in WWII.  It serves as a companion to the equally massive and equally insightful “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” which he also wrote.  In his account of the chaos and strife that enveloped France from the time period before WWI until their defeat by Germany in WWII, Shirer lays much of the blame for the divisions and hatreds within France upon the invective and clear falsehoods of the publications of both the Left (Communist, Socialist) and the Right (Fascist, Royalist).  The papers were filled with shrill accounts with little basis in reality that stoked fear and pitted Frenchmen against each other as each side envisioned that the other was on the verge of a coup that would destroy the Republic.  The press, and the politicians who were no better, treated each electoral defeat as the end of the world for their side, and vilified the opposition to the extent that mobs took the streets when urged to take matters into their own hands: assassinations, protests that turned violent, and other such drastic measures pushed France further and further down the road that had already destroyed the Weimar Republic in Germany and replaced it with Hitler’s Fascist police state.

                Why all this talk about France almost one hundred years ago, and what does any of this have to do with Facebook?  The reading of history is of course its own reward, a pursuit that enlightens today as it revels to us yesterday.  I saw just this week on Facebook, yet another dubious story about the imminent overthrow of America at the hands of the insidious Islamic revolutionaries who are even now plotting to take over the country and impose Sharia Law.  This latest version, reported by plenty of people on Facebook as if it was a proven fact, is saying that the FBI knows of dozens of terrorist training camps in America, but isn’t taking any action against them.  The story should be, on its surface, so ludicrous that no one would be willing to pass it along, yet there it is on Facebook, shared and re-shared over and over.  Stop and think for a moment; in order for the story to be true, the FBI would have to have sold out their own country, these brave men and women of law enforcement, some of the best patriots in our nation, would not sit by and choose political correctness over their own country.  Certainly there are terrorists out there trying to establish a worldwide Caliphate, but they're not evenly remotely close to doing anything of the sort, they've taken over pieces of a few war torn failed states, they're not a threat to topple the world's most powerful country.  Stories such as this, and there are plenty of other topics equally butchered on Facebook and other online sites by both the Right and the Left, contribute nothing to a democracy but fear, cynicism, division, and hatred.

                The willingness of a population to let their fears cloud their judgment so that they accept what they fear as the truth without questioning it, is not in any way a new facet of democracy.  It has happened before in our own history, at the very beginning, when John Adams, as ardent a patriot as the Founding Fathers ever had, was accused in the press by the opposition of secretly desiring to return America to King George if Adams should win the Presidency.  Ridiculous nonsense, yet willingly spread by those opposed to Adams’ politics and believed by far too many regular people who should have known better.  A similar story could be told of Athens during its glory days, when Alcibiades was convicted in absentia of desecrating the gods and condemned to death; when he heard the news he was in the middle of fighting for his city on foreign soil, a fact that his enemies used against him as he could not defend himself in the courts.  Likewise, the aged war hero and philosopher of Athens, Socrates, was also vilified without factual basis and convicted of corrupting the youth of the city, he too was condemned to death, and unlike Alcibiades, who fled and switched sides to fight for Sparta, Socrates willingly took the hemlock to die as a martyr.

                There are two equally unpalatable explanations as to why ridiculous scare tactics would be utilized by a free press: (1) the people writing these stories know that they’re false, but care so much about their cause, and hate their opposition so much, that they don’t care about the Truth. (2) The people writing such stories believe them to be true because their ideology has clouded their rational minds to the point that everything is seen through that prism.  Neither of those scenarios are a good one.  The first envisions a limitless supply of morally repugnant behavior in the pursuit of an ideal, and the second requires a human mind so blinded by its own convictions that rational thought is not to be found.  When a society is infected with this sort of rancor, both purposeful falsehoods and willing blindness are at work.

                The reason why this diatribe about the portions of the Press (which includes many outlets claiming to be journalism, but falling far from that standard) that are partisan, and the ongoing manifestation of truth-less claims in Facebook arguments, are being included in my blog about the Christian Faith and my life as a Pastor is that I have personally witnessed the negative effects of this on morally upright Christian men and women.  There are people I have known, some for decades, who now only listen to one side of any political story, who now assume that the opposition is full of scoundrels and turn a blind eye to the moral deficits of their own champions, and who seem to have accepted the false premise that the cure for what ails America is to be found at the ballot box, in Congress, the White House, or before the Supreme Court.  This is a false hope, one that will continue to cheat and frustrate those who put their trust in it.  The only true hope for America, for any nation, is to bring about spiritual revival through the local churches, one person saved by the grace of God and transformed at a time.  The time, energy, and passion spent indulging in fears about the future, in listening to and creating salvos about the wickedness of the other side, and in looking for a political savior when only a spiritual one will do, is sadly time, energy, and passion that could have gone far in building up the Kingdom of God. 

                I’m not surprised that Facebook, and the internet in general, are where those without a filter indulge their capacity for spreading rumors as if there were facts, but I am saddened and troubled to see Christians, those taught by the Word of God, committed to the Truth, and servants by choice of the Kingdom of God, joining in on this farce to their own detriment.  This isn’t a new problem, for democracy or for Christianity, but it is one that we ought to be on the side of combating, or at least ignoring, instead of passing it along.

Sermon Video: Acceptance and Rejection - Luke 10:3-16

History is full of people who believed an idea so much that they felt justified in utilizing force to get other people to accept it.  From Tomas de Torquemada with the Spanish Inquisition, to Vladimir Lenin’s dream of a worldwide Communist revolution, to Osama Bin Laden’s vision of a global Islamic Caliphate.  These men, and countless others, utilized coercion, manipulation, and outright violence in order to advance their cause.  As Jesus prepares to send out his 72 followers to spread the Gospel, he tells them that their methodology will be far different, they won’t utilize for or power at all, but rather be “like lambs among wolves”, and they won’t have vast resources at their disposal to accomplish the mission, rather they will rely upon the generosity of strangers.

                The Church learned the hard way that the corrupting influence of power and money are extreme hazards to our ability to fulfill our mission.  As a Church, or as an individual Christian, our ultimate battle is not in the physical realm, we do have to account for it by planning and prudent stewardship, but are true battle is in the spiritual realm.  If God has people filled with love and compassion, living pious lives and dedicated to his service, he will accomplish an amazing harvest no matter what resources they have to work with.  Conversely, if God’s people fail in the spiritual realm through lack of prayer, immorality, or complacency, it won’t matter how much money is spent in our ministry.

                After telling his followers what to do when they’re received with generosity, Jesus continues by telling them what to do when they’re not even welcomed in a community.  The culturally appropriate thing for them to do is to shake of the dust of their sandals before leaving town to show how serious the rejection of the Son of God truly is.  To illustrate this point, Jesus tells them that the city of Sodom, destroyed by God due to its excessive wickedness, will fare better on the Day of Judgment than a much more moral city like Capernaum that even with all of the benefits of the Law and the Prophets and Jesus’s words and miracles, still rejected the Messiah.  To reject Jesus, is to reject the Father as well, what else is there to say?

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