Community Church Sermons
July 15, 2007
Pentecost
7
Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Luke 10:25-37
Rev. Martin C. Singley, III
Listen to this Sermon!
The world is full of books about how to be happy. And bookstores are full of people who buy those books. We all want to be happy.
But not only do people go to bookstores and buy books on how to be happy, they come to church to find happiness, too. Although we religious types like to describe it as “finding God” or “getting saved” or “being born again”, lying underneath all those spiritual-sounding words is a much simpler motive. We want to be happy.
I once read a church’s By-laws and they started out by saying that the purpose of their church is to help people find happiness. At first I thought, “Well that’s a really secular, self-centered and rather stupid thing to say! I mean, if you start letting people think the point of faith is just being happy then what will happen to the church’s sense of sacrifice and mission? Besides, that would rule out all the cool things we do in the church to inspire faithfulness – like piling guilt on people and threatening them with hell if they don’t do what we want them to do!”
But as I thought more and more about that church’s purpose statement, I began to realize how true it is to whole Gospel of Jesus Christ.
What was it the Christmas angel said?
that shall come to all people…”
The coming of Jesus has to do with the possibility of becoming happy! Maybe that church had it right! Maybe the purpose of the church ISN’T to force people into compliance with religious doctrine or practice.
Maybe the purpose of the church is to help people become truly happy! And maybe that underlying human thirst for joyful wholeness is what motivates people to go to bookstores to buy books on how to become happy, and to go to church in search of something as simple as joy.
Jesus once had a conversation with a guy about this very subject. The man was an expert in the law – the religious law of the day – and he wanted to test Jesus to see if he was in compliance. So he asks Jesus this question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Now in the Bible, “eternal life” is not the same as “everlasting life”. Everlasting life has to do with the quantity of life while eternal life has to do with the quality of life. Eternal life begins here in this world and then goes with us into that life that is everlasting beyond the grave. Eternal life is about you and me finding wholeness in our lives in relationship to God. It is about the “glad tidings of great joy” that God brings to all people in the coming of Jesus. It is about becoming truly happy.
I don’t know if this fellow is asking Jesus a rhetorical question about how people in general can find true life or a personal question about how HE can find it. I’m guessing that he – like you and me – is probably all dressed up religiously on the outside, but inside, he’s a bit of a mess! Like us, he just wants to be happy.
Now Jesus answers his question in a wonderful way, and I want you to pay attention to it. He answers the man’s question with a question!
“What’s written in the law? How do YOU read it?”
This is classic Jesus! He is never the religious expert telling people what they must believe. No, he is the constant rabbi, asking his students questions that require them to think for themselves and to work life’s questions through their own relationship with God. So the man thinks about the question and then recites the Old Testament scriptures that we Christians later described as the Great Commandment:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.”
And Jesus smiles and says, “By golly, you’ve GOT IT!” And then Jesus adds, “Do this and you will LIVE!”
Isn’t it amazing how simple Jesus makes this faith stuff? There’s no premillenial, mid-tribulational, dispensational eschatology here! There’s no Pope Benedict-like declaration about which church is the one true church! There’s nothing about traditional hymns vs. contemporary praise music, or whether people should clap in church or not. There’s nothing here about hanging the Ten Commandments in courthouses, or getting prayer back into the schools, or holding conferences to further biblical family values, or to prove a 6-day literal creation.
There’s none of that in Jesus. There is but one focal point in the life of faith, and that is to love God; and there is but one way to express that love, and that is by loving your neighbor as yourself. Anything less won’t work, anything more is too much. Love God by loving your neighbor. Period.
And then Jesus makes an amazing promise. “Do this,” he says, “and you will live.”
Do you want to be happy? Do you want to become fully alive? Do you want the world to become a beautiful place in which you, your children, your grandchildren and all humanity can find wholeness and joy?
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Do this and you’ll find happiness.
The man then asks Jesus the key question in this story, and indeed one of the key questions in life.
“And who is my neighbor?” he asks.
It is not a genuine question, you know. He is not at all interested in finding out who is his neighbor. In fact the passage says that he asks the question to justify himself. Like us, this man lives in a world of circles – there is first the circle that includes only himself, and then the circle that holds his family, and then the circle that includes his friends and acquaintances, and then the circle that contains his community, and then the circles that include his region, and nation, and continent, and world. And there are all sorts of sub-circles too defined by things like race and religion and ethnic background and gender. And like us, as the circles of this man’s existence get further and further out from himself, the people in those circles become less and less his NEIGHBORS.
You do know that Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans, right? They lived right next door to each other. In fact, they were cousins! But they hated each other. Samaritans were not neighbors to be loved. Samaritans were despised by people like the man in this story.
“Who is my neighbor?” he asks, hoping beyond hope that Jesus will not extend the neighbor circle to include such despicable people as Samaritans! But that’s exactly what Jesus does. He goes right for a story that puts a Samaritan in the role of the hero because, unlike the Jewish religious leaders who pass by the injured man on the Jericho road, this Samaritan stops and loves his neighbor – even though the injured man is Jewish - as himself.
“Who is my neighbor?”
That question, more than any other, describes the state of your spiritual health as far as Jesus is concerned. Are the children of Iraq as much our neighborhood children as the children of Loudon County? In your mind, are they? Are prisoners in jail just as much our neighbors as those who’ve not broken the law? Are the people who work on our homes our neighbors, and what about people with whom we disagree? Are they neighbors who Jesus calls us to love? Are illegal immigrants as much our neighbors as those who were born in this country? Are the native Americans from whom we took this land in the first place our neighbors?
That neighbor question stirs us up, doesn’t it? It’s one
of the most provocative questions we can consider. And it exposes in all of us
how small we have made our worlds, and how deficient we are in keeping the one
commandment that must be kept. Every instinct we have calls us to think of
people as being less and less our neighbors the further and further out they
get from the inner circle of our lives. And the less and less we think of
people as neighbors, the less and less we hear Jesus’ call to love them
as ourselves.
“Who is my neighbor?”
That’s the defining question of
your faith – and the answer is the key to finding life and becoming truly
happy.
I know that this sounds very simplistic, and perhaps even naďve. The idea that “loving your neighbor as yourself” is the key to personal happiness and the way to a better world almost seems absurd.
Maybe so.
But here’s what Jesus knows and what we need to learn. The other way doesn’t work. In this world of our own creation where we treat people not as neighbors but as nameless “others”, we reel under the effects of crime, violence, unethical dealings, war and genocide.
And at the heart of all those sad and tragic things is the one ingredient required to tear the world apart – neighbors mistreating neighbors.
As I personally wrestle with this neighbor question, I find myself asking these questions:
What child has ever been abused
What old woman’s purse has ever been snatched
What corporate crime has ever been committed
What bank has ever been robbed
What plane has ever been hijacked and flown into a building
What nation has ever been invaded
What group of people has ever been pushed to the edges and dehumanized
Because someone loved their neighbor as themselves?
As uncomfortable as it was for the man in the story to come to grips with how he was missing out on life and contributing to the demise of civilization by limiting his neighbors and not loving them as himself, he does get it right at the end.
“Which of the three do you think was a neighbor to the injured man?” Jesus asked.
“Why, the one who had mercy on him,” the man replied.
And I like to think that Jesus
smiled at the man, and then said to him – and to us, “Go and do likewise.”