According to Jesus, the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor. Neither is easy. Both are necessary.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the end of the twenty-second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 22:34-46), which describes events during Holy Week, that last week before Jesus’ crucifixion.
Jesus had been teaching in the Temple. Somewhat more accurately, he had been responding to challenges from the established religious leadership gathered in the Temple. As this passage begins, Jesus had just silenced the Sadducees, most closely associated with the Temple leadership, when they had asked a question that they thought he could not answer.
At this point, the Pharisees stepped up and they asked him a question: Which is the greatest commandment?
Jesus actually answered this question — sometimes he answered questions with questions, but he answered this one. “The greatest is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself.”
These are challenging commandments.
They also are found in more or less those words in the Law of the Old Testament. Jesus did not make these up.
Is it difficult to love God? It is difficult to love God with the thoroughness, with the commitment, with the loyalty of which Jesus spoke. And what about loving our neighbors as ourselves? In the passage in Leviticus from which Jesus quoted (Leviticus 19:15-18), there is more specificity to this commandment. To be protective of your neighbor, and also to correct your neighbor when they are in danger of infringing on the law.
How many of us are really willing to protect our neighbor against the dangers of the world? And how many of us will really dare risk that kind word to a neighbor to let them know that they are running afoul of trouble? Some of us do, and it’s a wonderful thing, and some of us hesitate, and it’s not such a wonderful thing.
Love God, love neighbor: the two greatest of the commandments. May we fully love one another and our maker.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
We learn things in a lot of different ways. We learn things by reading about them as well as by going to new places and experiencing new things there. I learned to tie knots by watching someone tie them, by watching them tie them again and again, and then by repeatedly tying that knot again and again until not just my brain but my fingers knew how to tie it.
Over and over again, though, I’ve learned how to do things by imitation.
I’m sure that any of you who have visited my office have noticed the lack of something: an unoccupied horizontal surface. I firmly believe that horizontal surfaces exist to have things placed on them. Books. Memorabilia. Photo frames. File folders. Paper.
I believe in employing horizontal surfaces for their purpose.
I learned this behavior from my own parents in my own home. Both of them treated flat surfaces in exactly the same way. The kitchen counters were usable toward the edges, because the back was taken up by ingredient canisters, appliances, and other kitchen articles. Somehow my mother managed to keep the kitchen table empty for us to eat meals.
I like to think that that’s where I got the example to keep the table in my office mostly empty for Bible Study.
Early Christians had a limited set of examples to imitate. Those raised as Jews had more examples: there were lots of people in the Hebrew Scriptures, people of faith, people of principle, people of righteousness. As I think I’ve also mentioned, they all had flaws. I would be thrilled to imitate Moses, but I would like to do so without whining. I would love to imitate Solomon, but I would also like to conclude my career without people complaining that I’d put unfair burdens on them. I would love to imitate Jeremiah, but hopefully without sounding like, and possibly being, somebody who was clinically depressed.
That’s a complicated set of examples to emulate. The Christians who came into the Church from the religions of Greece, Rome, Egypt and northern Europe didn’t have those examples handy. They had very different ideas of what it meant to live a faithful life, ideas that sometimes went smoothly with the Jewish foundation of the Church, and sometimes really clashed. In First Thessalonians, Paul sounded concerned about that. From what Paul wrote in verse 9 – “how you turned to God from idols” – it sounds like most if not all of the people in the Thessalonian congregation came from other religions. They had had to learn a lot about the God of the Hebrews, in addition to welcoming the good news of Jesus. It’s no wonder Paul was so proud of them, so pleased with their faith, so concerned that the stresses they were under (which might have been official persecution or might have been the more casual but still painful pressures of prejudiced neighbors), so thrilled that despite these pressures, they were a growing and learning and thriving Christian community in Macedonia.
What examples had they had to follow?
The one Paul would have mentioned first, of course, was Jesus. That’s kind of a basic for any teaching about Christianity. Whatever else you say about Jesus, his acts of wisdom, compassion, faithfulness, bravery, self-sacrifice, and resurrection became a primary model for the Jesus-people to follow. The first name for Christians was, it appears, the “People of the Way,” those who imitated Jesus. Before his crucifixion, Jesus had directed his followers to care for the people around them as he did. Feed them. Heal them. Teach them. Baptize them. Encourage them.
What did he teach his disciples to do after his resurrection? The same. Make more disciples, too. Set everyone to feeding, healing, teaching, baptizing, encouraging.
It’s a good example. Paul would have been all too aware, though, that Jesus’ example was (and is) a hard one to follow. Jesus knew that the authorities were suspicious of his activities. He was warned. He went right on with them. He walked right into the lion’s den (or rode a donkey, if you prefer). Even with resurrection beyond, who wants to emulate a man whose courage led him to execution?
Paul did. I think that makes it fair enough to include him among the examples for imitation – and for the Thessalonians, Paul and those with him on his initial stay were the whole of what they knew Christians to be and to look like. “What’s a Christian?” “Well, there’s Paul. And Silvanus. And Timothy.”
Who else would they imitate?
Michael Joseph Brown writes at Working Preacher, “Persecution and death are not the only way we, as believers, imitate Paul, the other churches, and the Lord. Consequent to these crucifixion-like experiences are resurrection-like experiences. Paul indicates this when he notes that the Thessalonians ‘received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit’ (emphasis mine). The inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer is an indication that she has transcended persecution, just like Jesus’ resurrection transcended death (i.e., ‘whom [God] raised from the dead;’ 1:10).”
Paul named, I think, the first point in which the Thessalonians imitated him: “for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy inspired by the Holy Spirit.” It’s a crucial point, isn’t it? Christianity has earned itself a somewhat bleak reputation, not just in this century, but in many, of being judgmental to the point of cruelty. I’m grateful that we’re not currently experiencing anything like the waves of legalized violence against “heretics” that took so many lives so horribly in Europe. Lest we think too much of the modern era, we might remember “the Troubles” in Ireland in which Protestant vs. Catholic hatred was repeatedly fanned into violence. I guess I could be relieved that it’s not just Christianity that does this kind of thing – but I’m not.
In contrast, the Thessalonians responded with joy. With joy. Christianity was not a burden to be imposed. It was a gift to be embraced. As they embraced it, they received the power and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as well, the sign Paul always looked for as those new to following Jesus grew in faith.
Joy. Not angst. Joy. Not regret. Joy. Not self-punishment. Joy. Not other-punishment. Joy.
Paul summoned them to a work of faith and a labor of love, and they responded with joy. “Why? what labor is it to love? Merely to love is no labor at all,” wrote John Chrysostom in the fourth century. “But to love genuinely is great labor. For tell me, when a thousand things are stirred up that would draw us from love, and we hold out against them all, is it not labor?”
Yes, there are things that would draw us from love, aren’t there? So many things.
Greed. Rage. Lust – both for sex and for power. Self-criticism – that notion that I’m not worthy of a relationship with God. That would draw us from love, too.
The first step, I think, and I think Paul thought, was to accept the gifts of God with joy.
That was imitating Paul.
The next step, I think, and I think Paul thought, was to translate faith into loving action. As Richard Ascough writes at Working Preacher, “The presentation of the Gospel is found in words and action. Paul notes that he and his colleagues did not simply talk about the Gospel, they lived it. They lived it to the degree that when the new believers wanted to know how to live, they imitated the messengers. In like manner, the Thessalonians themselves became exemplars of action for others.”
Should you imitate Paul in all things? No. He could be remarkably abrasive with people he loved and respected. As much as I honor the truths of Second Corinthians, I’m aware that if I tried speaking to people the way he wrote to them, I’d be a spectacular failure. I don’t think I’d persuade anyone to my way of thinking.
We don’t actually know whether Paul did.
So no, don’t imitate everything in Paul. Paul wouldn’t want that. Think about the person who comes closest in your life to living fully as a Christian. Don’t emulate everything in them. Don’t emulate everything in me. I don’t want that. I try to be a good example of a Christian, but I know I fall short. Take the best from me, and leave the rest. But know that neither you nor I will know, just as Paul couldn’t know, the fullness of truth, the depths of righteousness. We’re still people, after all.
No, if you want to imitate someone and have pretty fine assurance that goodness and truth are what you’re emulating, choose Jesus. Choose one who fed people, healed people, taught people, encouraged people.
Choose one who loved people. Imitate that one.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the sermon as preached does not precisely match the sermon as prepared.
You could argue that things had gone very well. Very well indeed. Better than anyone could have expected.
A large group of people – how many people is one of the things that Exodus scholars argue about – had escaped slavery in Egypt. Mass escapes from bondage are pretty rare in history, and successful escapes even rarer. Enslaved people from Africa called the Maroons successfully established and maintained regions in Jamaica in the 18th century. According to the National Geographic Society, some historians estimate that the American Underground Railroad freed around 100,000 people between 1810 and 1850, but that wouldn’t have been all at once. But most attempted escapes or rebellions by enslaved people have ended badly for the people seeking freedom.
These people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had done very well. They were out of Egypt. They had survived a vengeful army. In the dry wilderness of the Sinai peninsula they had water. They had bread. They even had meat – poultry.
They had these things because of the clear intervention of God, the same one who had guided their ancestors of the past. God had first recruited a leader – Moses. God had performed a series of signs for the Egyptians to persuade them to let the Hebrews leave, a series of signs that, I’m sorry to say, got steadily more drastic as Pharoah “hardened his heart.” God had parted the sea for them to escape from the Egyptian army. God had given them drinkable water not once but twice. God had provided the bread. God had provided the quail.
And then God had provided something else. God had given commandments, the foundations of law, the structure not for a band of escapees, but for a nation. Not just a nation, but a holy nation, a priestly kingdom. This disorganized band, homeless in the wilderness, would be one established to strengthen people’s relationships with one another, and with God.
It was going very well.
Then it was going sideways. Moses, the leader who had dealt with Pharoah and led them through the sea and brought forth the water and the food when they complained, Moses was missing. He had gone up a mountain they were forbidden to climb – and given how much thunder they’d heard from it, they had no interest in climbing – and he’d been missing for a long time. The text says he was there forty days and forty nights (Exodus 24:18), but don’t take that too seriously. For centuries, Jewish writers used “forty” as a figure of speech, basically meaning, “a long time.” Which, if you’re a group of traumatized people scraping together their food and water each day, might have been forty hours.
“Make us gods,” they said to Aaron, Moses’ brother – they were still relying upon the same leadership family. Or they might have meant, “Make us God.” You see, the Hebrew word for some generic deity, a god, was “El.” But when they wrote about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they used the plural form: “Elohim.” Which is the word used in verse one. “Make us gods,” or “Make us God.”
Mind you, they’d already heard the ten commandments. They knew not to have any other gods before God. They also knew not to create any idols. The question is somewhat meaningless. Breaking one commandment really isn’t much better than breaking two. When God saw it, God was not happy.
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it…” (Exodus 32:7-8a)
God was ready to abandon the whole project of a holy nation, or rather to start over again with a single person: Moses. “Of you,” God said, “I will make a great nation.”
Callie Plunket-Brewton writes at Working Preacher, “In vv. 11-13, he [Moses] speaks to God of the divine promises to the ancestors of the people, thus implicitly urging God to be faithful to those promises. He also speaks of the terrible waste represented in bringing the people out of Egypt just to destroy them. Granted, he puts it in terms of being bad public relations, but I think it is clear that Moses is reminding God of the tremendous investment God has made in saving the people. Thus, Moses serves to remind YHWH of God’s own character, a character spelled out in 34:6-7: ‘slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness … ‘”
Moses argued with God. And… in this argument, Moses won. The nation would be formed from these people, not just one person.
Moses had argued with God more than once. He’d argued with God about the summons to free the Hebrew people. He lost that one, but he’d successfully negotiated a fair amount of support. I’m not sure that I would call some of Moses’ conversations with God about water and food arguments, because they usually sound to me like complaints, but Moses did get God’s help each time. Nor was Moses the only one to argue with God. Adam and Eve had – badly. Abraham had – rather better. Jacob argued with everybody, including God, and after a memorable wrestling match had received a new name: “Israel,” “One who struggles with God.”
The tradition of arguing with God continued after Moses. Gideon did. King David did. The prophet Jeremiah called God, “a deceitful brook.” And, of course, the most famous arguer with God of all was: Jesus. “Let this cup pass from me.” I grant you, it’s not an angry argument, but Jesus certainly did ask God to reconsider the course before him.
So should you argue with God?
Christianity has, for the most part, discouraged it. Judaism, I must say, hardly encourages arguing with God, but can’t help noting that most of those closest to God and God’s will have done so. But should you?
Sara Koenig writes at Working Preacher, “…the Old Testament gives us examples of humans who understand prayer to be a conversation, and God to be a relational God who actually listens to humans. To settle here does not deny that God is God, but clarifies that God is a God for us and with us.”
Prayer can be a conversation. I’d venture to say that from time to time, prayer should be a conversation. It’s a funny thing. So many people have been taught that prayer is a one-way thing. I’m talking to God. God is listening. Okay.
But prayer can be more than that. Prayer can be a relationship. Prayer can be responsive. Prayer can be an argument. Prayer can make change. The first step toward this kind of prayer is to do something that we’ve been trying to persuade people to do for millennia with uneven success: Listen.
People aren’t all that good at listening to people. But oh, how wonderful it might be if people listened to God. And as I’ve been told in active listening workshops for decades, the first step to effective listening is: stop talking.
I know that doesn’t sound consistent with effective argument with God. But how will you explain yourself to God if you don’t listen to what God has to say to you? Moses listened. God responded. Moses argued. God took another direction. So when you pray, make pauses in your prayer, and listen. Listen.
Note as well why Moses’ arguments were persuasive. Yes, he sounded like a public relations manager, but what did he remind God of? God’s promises. Moses went directly to the remarkable characteristic of Israel’s God: faithfulness. Dependability. Steadfast love.
Moses asked God to be God.
“’In God there can be no wrath,’ 14th century visionary Julian of Norwich wrote in her A Revelation of Love, the first book that we know of written by a woman in the English language.” Amy Frykolm writes of Julian at JourneyWithJesus.net, “During Julian’s day, the wrath of God was everywhere… And yet she was insistent that, no matter how hard she tried, she could not see wrath in God because there was no wrath in God. The reason is simple: God is all love. ‘Wrathfulness and friendship are two contraries,’ she writes. Where one exists, the other cannot exist.’
“If that is the case, then where does all of this talk about God’s wrath come from? Julian’s answer again is simple: it comes from us. We are the wrathful ones. We project that wrath onto God, who is all love.”
If you believe that God is all love, then you can approach God with anything, any feeling, any need. I don’t know how God will respond. I do know that God will listen, and God will respond.
The way to argue with God is to start.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the text as prepared does not match the sermon as delivered.
The image is L’Adoration du Veau d’Or (The Adoration of the Golden Calf) (ca. 1633-1637) by Nicolas Poussin – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=157563.
Some years ago, my children’s godfather said something that I just didn’t get. My children and his were playing together and one of them came up to us and asked for something that they just couldn’t have. As they departed, disappointed but not surprised, their godfather reminded them of the children’s theme song. “The children’s theme song” went right over my head, so I had to ask.
“You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find You get what you need.”
John was more of a Rolling Stones fan than I’ve ever been, but I had to admit: he was right. Those lyrics are the theme song of children everywhere: you can’t always get what you want.
In Jesus’ story, there seemed to be a lot of people who couldn’t get what they wanted. These were the people who spent various amounts of the day in the marketplace looking for work – some were hired early, some later in the morning, some at the end of the day. These people were doing what could be done to earn a living. They didn’t own land. They didn’t have a specialized skill. They worked the fields and vineyards. It wasn’t steady work. They relied on a farmers sending their managers to the marketplace to find them, hire them, and at the end of the day, pay them.
Pablo Jimenez writes at his blog, “Most Jewish people in the first century were peasants. A good portion of the agricultural land was owned by absentee landlords. Such farmland was cultivated by laborers just as the ones depicted in the parable. Their economic reality was characterized by poverty, subemployment, heavy taxation, and dispossession.”
They hoped to be hired at the beginning of the day. When that didn’t happen, they hoped against hope that somebody would need more labor later in the day. If that didn’t happen, they stayed in the marketplace hoping against desperation that somebody would pay them a pittance for as much work as was left before sundown.
The first workers in Jesus’ story would have thought themselves relatively fortunate. The later workers would have thought themselves pretty lucky, too. The last ones would have been somewhat relieved, but also wondering: on the little they’d be paid for the day, how would they make rent, buy bread, or get fuel for the fire? They’d be behind, and probably not for the first time.
The surprise of the story, of course, is that at the end of the day none of them were behind. All of them got the daily wage. Everyone went home, not with what would enrich them, but with what would keep them going for at least another day.
This situation of a few haves and many have-nots is specifically prohibited by the Hebrew Scriptures. As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “It is a result of debts not being forgiven every seven years or forfeited family lands not being returned every fifty years or the prohibition of “joining land to land” not being observed, and so on. (See Ched Myers for an explanation of the term “Sabbath Economics” at www.chedmyers.org/catalog/sabbath-economics). The mere presence of a place where the landless gather in search of day labor is itself a testimony that the imperial economic structure is contrary to the Sabbath Economics of the OT.”
That alone would be a reason for Jesus to tell that story. It would be a reason for us to hear this story with distress, because we have also maintained an economic system that permits employers to pay less than a living wage. I know we keep hearing all these complaints about “nobody wants to work.” But why would anyone want to work for people who will pay you less than what you need to keep the lights on and the car repaired and the refrigerator stocked? And people do work. They work multiple jobs. They work long hours. They work for uncertain pay. They get labeled as unambitious, unskilled, unsuccessful, unworthy, unimportant.
A few years ago they were the ones required to break quarantine and go to work. It turned out they were essential.
Our economy could learn something from Jesus.
I don’t actually think Jesus spoke entirely about the immoral economics of his day. I’m not sure he spoke primarily about it. “The kingdom of heaven is like,” he said, not “the kingdom of earth is supposed to be like.”
I do think the kingdom of heaven is pretty good model for what the kingdom of earth might be. It’s worth working for.
Jeannine K. Brown writes at Working Preacher, “Are God’s ways really like this? Is this kind of maddening equality, regardless of what one has contributed to God’s kingdom, really a part of the new reality God is inaugurating in Jesus? For Matthew’s Jesus, the answer is ‘yes.’ God’s generosity is an affront to those who think about God’s benevolent rule in categories of status, privilege, and what one has earned.”
What, after all, does God give us?
To start with the most obvious, life. Life itself. God gave us a world, indeed a universe, so full of marvels that we actually get bored by them – what a strange thing that is. Ten years ago, I first drove down Waianuenue Avenue from the hospital and saw Hilo Bay gleaming beneath me in the sun. I promised myself that I would never come down that way and fail to appreciate the beauty of that sight. I’ve done my level best to keep that promise.
Life and beauty, which is not limited to vision but includes sounds and scents and sensations. Company. Challenge. Learning. Growth. Small people. Middle-sized people. Big people. People who are dark complected, light complected, with hair that runs long or short, bright or dark. People who are new, people who we’ve known for decades, people to whom we matter. People. God gave us people.
Most of all, God gave us love. God loved us in the creation of the species, in the guiding of our ancestors. God loved us to set slaves free and bring exiles home. God so loved the world that we received God’s only begotten son so that whoever believes in him may not perish, but have everlasting life.
At the end of the story, at the end of the day, I don’t see coins in the hand of the manager. I see love presented by the landowner. I see full inclusion of all who came into the vineyard. I see no hierarchy of welcome. I see a love given fully and freely to everyone, every last one.
How can anyone receive more than the love of God? How can there be grades and differences and pay rates to the love of God? What else is there than the love of God?
Elisabeth Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “God, it turns out, is not fair. God does not play by our rules. God does not give us what we deserve. And thank God for that! For if each of us got exactly what we deserved, where would we be? In fact, God lavishes grace and mercy on all of us, no matter how late we have come to the vineyard.”
God loves us. God loves you. God loves me. God loves them. God loves the them that you find it difficult to love. God loves the them who don’t care much for you. God loves us, whether we deserve it or not.
Isn’t that the kind of love we hope for? Isn’t that the kind of love we credit to Jesus? Isn’t that the kind of love that is our faith and our hope? Isn’t that the kind of love that we can say, with Paul, “the greatest of these is love”?
Yes. It is.
Love isn’t fair. Any small child knows that. Love means the polite child and the rude child eat the same dinner. Love isn’t fair. Love means the family celebrates the doctor’s degree and the GED. Love isn’t fair. Love means that the one who staggers home after wasting his inheritance receives a feast because we’re so relieved he survived. Love isn’t fair.
Thank God for that. Because given a choice between God being fair to me for the things I’ve done or not done, or God being generous and loving to me, I’ll take love.
Any day. Every day. To the end of time.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes to his sermon while preaching – sometimes intentionally, and sometimes accidentally. The sermon as you read it does not precisely match the way he delivered it.
The image is “The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” by an unknown artist in an 11th cent. Byzantine gospel. Paris, National Library. Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Έθνους, Εκδοτική Αθηνών. Αθήνα 1980. Τόμος Η’, σελ. 202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9472307
Jesus’ story about every worker getting the same wage makes no sense in the business world – but it does make sense in the love world.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the twentieth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 20:1-16) Jesus’ story that we usually give the title, “The Laborers in the Vineyard.”
On its surface, an easy, if somewhat puzzling, story. Jesus described a vineyard owner who went out to find workers for the day. He went to the marketplace early, found some folks who were available. They went to work in the vineyard and were promised a denarius, which was the usual daily wage for a laborer.
But this landowner went out several times. He even went as late as about five o’clock in the afternoon, not long before the work had to end because of darkness. And each time he found people and sent them off to work.
When the sun had gone down, he gathered everybody up and had those who had arrived the latest receive their wages first. They received a denarius. Those at the end of the line who had worked the whole day, they also received a denarius, and were angry. Because they had worked much longer, why should they receive exactly the same wage?
The landowner replied, “My money is mine to do with it as I like. Are you upset because I am generous?”
As a story of business and economics, I suspect that anybody who taught in a business school would say this is not the way to do it. Among other things, it means that you’re paying expenses that you probably shouldn’t. It also means that some of your workers are angry with you about the way you treat other workers. It isn’t fair.
As is common in Jesus’ stories, it’s the place that somebody departs from the ordinary and the expected that we typically find the point that Jesus was trying to make. And in this case, it is that unexpected and extravagant generosity: that each person who worked in the vineyard, no matter how long, received the same amount. They received what they needed to live on.
Is it a model for business? Probably not. Is it a model for salvation? I think so. In the end, what can God give us that is more than salvation? If we arrive in the vineyard — that is, if we make the effort to participate in the community of God — what more can God give us than membership in that community? There isn’t anything more.
I think also, however, this is a model for relationships. It’s also something that we know.
We labor to try and treat our children fairly, but we do not treat them equally. Because one has skills and talents the other does not. That same one has needs that the other does not. And so we spend our time focusing on the things that they need or spend our time focusing on the things that they accomplish and that time will be different from one child to the next. We are perhaps not fair, not absolutely even-handed in our love for our own children, because it would be wrong to treat all human beings as if they were exactly the same.
Love can’t be absolutely fair. Love has to respond to what is. Love has to reveal what might be.
Jesus, I’m sure, in part spoke of the love of God here. The love of God is what it is and it is shared equally. And that may not seem fair, but that is what it is. And our love, we’re also called upon to respond to the needs and to rejoice in the successes of those we love, as they occur, but also in such a way that all know that they are loved.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Paul didn’t want people to judge one another. In particular, he didn’t want Christians to judge one another. He accurately foresaw that people who judge one another don’t live together very well. In a new community of a new faith, that could be catastrophic, resulting in resentments, conflicts, and fractures.
It turns out another famous early leader had much the same notion, a once obscure laborer from a small Galilean village named, as you’ve no doubt deduced, Jesus of Nazareth. “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged,” he said in the Sermon on Mount, found in the seventh chapter of Matthew. Paul’s teachings echoed Jesus’ teachings: The Church was supposed to be a non-judgmental community.
There’s only one problem. It is basically impossible for human beings to live life without making judgments. Most of them don’t have moral content – it doesn’t really matter much what I choose for breakfast – but others do. People ask me to do things and I make a judgment about whether I will or not. People ask me to tell them things I make a judgment about whether I can or not. People give me directions or even requirements and, yes, I make a judgment about whether I will do those or not – and face the consequences.
I’ve made countless judgments about the content of Christian faith. I judged the basic assertions of Christianity about the existence and priorities of God, about the nature and work of Jesus Christ, about the strength and presence of the Holy Spirit – and, oh, yes, the triune nature of God. I judged them to be true. I believed them. It’s a curious thing about Christianity that we’re asked to make a judgment – to believe in and trust the beneficence of God – and the very next thing we’re told is: “Do not judge.”
It gets more ridiculous when I consider how judgment is indispensable to learning. Teachers choose what to teach (yes, I know, curriculum gets set by administrators and legislators, but bear with me here). People decide what children should know and when, in their development, they should come to know it. It’s judgment that says children should learn to read. Plenty of places in the world choose not to teach some children to read. Famously, Malala Yousafzai was targeted for assassination for advocating education for girls and women in Pakistan when she was barely a teenager. She survived and her work survived. She remains the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – which is also a judgment.
We learned things that others judged we should learn. We didn’t learn things that others judged we should not learn. We learned things because others tested us to see what we knew and insisted we learn the things we hadn’t because they judged we should.
Without judgment, there simply isn’t learning.
So why can’t I judge?
Audrey West writes at Working Preacher, “It is tough to praise God if you are busy passing judgment on other people. At least that is what the apostle Paul seems to be saying in this passage from Romans, in which he exhorts the community of house-churches in Rome to avoid fighting over non-essential matters.”
Paul named two issues here. It’s not entirely clear whether he knew that these were subjects of debate in the Roman church – remember, he’d never been there – or whether these were handy examples that came from his experience with churches he knew more about. The issue of eating meat or eating vegetables: In First Corinthians, Paul gave a full and detailed consideration of whether to eat things that had been offered to idols. This was apparently a common practice around the Mediterranean cultures within the Roman Empire. Animals sacrificed before idols became meat sold in the marketplaces – that says something about how scale of it all, doesn’t it? If it was a concern in Corinth, it was probably a concern to other churches Paul worked with in Galatia, Ephesus, Thessalonica. It was probably a question in many churches, including Rome.
The other concern he mentioned was whether to observe “special days,” which probably means religious festivals. Which ones? Well, in Galatians 4, Paul wrote, “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental principles? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? You are observing special days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.” (Galatians 4:8-11)
It sounds very much as if the Galatians Paul criticized – rather harshly and judgmentally, I have to say – were participating in pagan seasons and festivals.
There would have been a lot of pressure to do so, both internally – this is what they knew to do – and externally – “I know you’re devoted to this Christ god now, but you can honor Demeter, too, because we really need a good harvest.” In the first century Roman world, very few people limited their devotion to a single deity, and they didn’t limit it to a single pantheon. The Egyptian goddess Isis had a temple in Rome next to the complex to which Roman citizens went to vote.
Some of the Galatians had succumbed to the pressure. So, too, I’m sure, did church members in Corinth and Phillipi and, of course, Rome.
So why can’t I judge?
Paul asserted two things here: First, these practices involving food and festivals were not essential. It was an astonishing statement, given that devotional practice has been considered essential in nearly every religion in nearly every place. Paul was the person, however, who had concluded that if a law so old it preceded the Law of Moses – namely the requirement of circumcision for all males in the community of God – could be set aside if it became a barrier, a wall, a stumbling block for those who sought to enter that community.
Paul judged circumcision, food practices, and religious calendars to be non-essential. It was an astonishing thing to say, but he said it. You could eat, or not eat; you could celebrate, or not celebrate; you could circumcise or not circumcise; and either way you could do so out of devotion to God.
The second thing he said was, “It’s not your judgment to make, anyway. It’s up to God. That’s who judges. Not you.”
As Alyce McKenzie writes at her blog, “When we judge others we place our authority above God’s. We are all only servants of God in God’s household. We are to focus on God, not our supposed superiority to others. All conduct must take its reference from our service to Jesus whose claim to lordship over all comes from his death and resurrection. (Best, 156) We will not have to justify to God the conduct of others, but only our own.”
Israel Kamudzandu writes at Working Preacher, “The question to be addressed in today’s church is as follows: tolerance or love? Romans 14:1-12 is a call to introspection of individuals, groups, clergy, and faith pillars who have settled into a culture of tolerance instead of love, hospitality, and appreciation of others. The entire New Testament is about love, but many people operate with a mindset of tolerating others, rather than loving them.”
When we judge people, we tolerate them. At best. At worst, well, let’s not go there. When we love them, we may be disappointed by some of the things they do. I don’t think we’ll avoid that. Love’s foundation is trust. I trust that you do this thing out of love. I trust you do this thing out of your best wishes. I trust that you do this thing because you believe it will make things better for all of us. I trust you.
You might be wrong – you may not know what you need to know to make the decision you made – but I will trust you did the best you could with what you knew at the time.
Love is founded on trust.
So why can’t I judge? Because I can’t judge you and love you. I just can’t. I can love you and trust you. I can love you and ask, “Can we do this differently? Did you know this would happen? Had you heard what this other person had to say?” You can love me and ask, “What did you think would happen when you did this? Is there a better way to approach such things in the future?”
You can love me and insist that I learn the multiplication table.
What you can’t do is love me and decide that you’re a better Christian than I am. I can’t love you and act as if I’m the be-all and end-all of Christianity. That’s not me. That’s Jesus.
That’s why I can’t judge.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches, both accidentally and intentionally. The sermon as written does not precisely match the sermon as delivered.
In his commentary on Galatians, the fourth century theologian Saint Jerome told this story: “The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, ‘Little children, love one another.’** The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, ‘Teacher, why do you always say this?’ He replied with a line worthy of John: ‘Because it is the Lord’s commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.’**° He said this because of the Apostle’s present mandate: ‘Let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the household of faith.’”
Jerome wrote nearly three hundred years after John wrote the Gospel, so it’s hard to tell whether he’d preserved an authentic memory, or whether he’d preserved a story that reflected the way people thought of John. It certainly honored teachings of Jesus. We honored the “new commandment” Jesus gave at the Last Supper by calling the Thursday of Holy Week “Commandment Thursday” – “Maundy” is an English shortening of the Latin “Mandatum,” which means “commandment.” Jesus also spoke of love as the basis of the “greatest commandments.” As recorded in Mark’s Gospel: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
This wasn’t a new idea. The Babylonian Talmud records this story about Hillel the Elder, who lived in the century before Jesus was born:
“It happened again that a certain stranger came before Shammai and said to him: –‘I will become a proselyte providing you teach me the whole Torah while I’m standing on one foot.’ (Shammai) knocked him down with the builder’s rule in his hand. (The stranger) came before Hillel, who made him a proselyte. He told him: –‘What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go, learn (it)!’”
I note that when Paul spoke of love as the fulfillment of the law, he used the negative form that Hillel had, avoiding doing harm. In contrast, Jesus used the positive form, love your neighbor as yourself.
So what is the good of law?
The Apostle Paul had, in fact, spent a good deal of the Letter to the Romans arguing that the Law of Israel had become a problem. When there’s a standard, he said, there’s not just the risk, there’s the likelihood that people won’t meet it. And when they don’t meet the standard, they’ve fallen into sin. Without the standard, there would be no transgression.
Paul argued persuasively that the Law had failed to prevent people from sinning – it’s an impossible argument to counter. No legal system has ever entirely prevented people from breaking the law. People make unintentional mistakes, such as not noticing that stop sign at the corner. People make uninformed mistakes, such as believing that those entering a traffic circle have the right of way rather than those in it. And people make deliberate decisions to break the law, passing in no-passing zones because they think it will save them time.
Mind you, most people follow traffic laws fully informed and faithfully. Law brings a basic order that’s really useful. Law also gets into the specifics of things. Like most of us on this island, I try to “drive with aloha,” and I’m glad for all the others who do. If we had no speed limit signs, however, I’d have more difficulty doing it. I wouldn’t know, necessarily, whether the road ahead was straight enough for high speeds, or whether around this next curve there is a series of small curves which I may or may not be able to navigate safely.
Not to mention the challenges of a traffic circle. It’s one thing to drive one with aloha, but if you’re driving with aloha, who goes first?
Despite dismissing the Law as a saving force, Paul definitely believed in offering specific guidance. Nancy Lammers Gross writes at Working Preacher, “In the event we are not clear about what the law of love looks like, even after the gifts for ministry and the disposition of love as described by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and alluded to in Romans 12, Paul spells out for us what is singularly inappropriate with regard to the law of love as we prepare for the return of Christ: Avoid reveling, which is excessive partying and wild behavior; avoid drunkenness, debauchery, and licentiousness, which may be taken as reckless indulgence in immoral behavior; avoid quarreling and jealousy.”
Indeed, Paul’s letters are full of lists of things to do and things not to do. If you’re looking for guidance in what to do, read Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, and so on. Paul happily told people what to do two thousand years ago, and people like me have been happily telling people what to do using his words ever since.
In the end, yes. Paul was right. Love does fulfill the law, at least as long as the law is dedicated to avoiding harm to the neighbor, as long as the law is dedicated to lifting up the neighbor. As we also know, that’s not always the case. Amy Frykolm writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “When Paul reflects on the second commandment in Romans 13, he writes, “’Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law’ (Romans 13:10). But I can imagine [Maria] Skobtsova having a fiery argument with him about this. She would say, ‘How can you sell love that short?’ She thought of love of neighbor as a ‘dangerous thing’ that immersed a person in the world and in its suffering, stopping short of nothing. Her life itself was a parable about this commandment and her deeply uncomfortable answer to the question: How do you love your neighbor as yourself?”
Maria Skobtsova was an Orthodox nun who hid Jews from the Nazis in occupied Paris, and died in a gas chamber in 1945.
Love does not just fulfill the law, it goes beyond the law.
Poet Wendell Berry died this week. For decades his work has inspired people of faith, so I’ll close with his words:
“I know that I have life only insofar as I have love.
I have no love except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry this candle against the wind.”
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching. Sometimes he makes them without intending to. Sometimes He hope they’re improvements. The sermon as written does not precisely match the sermon as preached.
The apostle advised his readers to do the will of God as best they could – but also to be aware that they did not, could not know everything.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the twelfth chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 12:1-8).
Paul wrote that we should present ourselves in our bodies as a sacrifice to the living God, by which I’m fairly certain that he meant that all our deeds, our actions, and our words ought to be done with some notion of fulfilling the will of God, at least as best we understand it. Paul followed that with a caution, not to think too well of ourselves, which is very much a temptation if we see ourselves as following and enacting the will of God.
It is, I think, some of the most honest advice that the Apostle Paul ever wrote in his letters. I’m pretty sure that his besetting temptation was, in fact, arrogance. The temptations to think that he knew more than he did, to proclaim more than he knew. You can see it in a number of places in the letters, both where the Apostle Paul recognized it and drew back from it, and the places where he didn’t recognize it and did it anyway.
That’s advice that is good for Paul’s time, for Paul. It’s advice that is good for our time, for us, for me.
First of all, to be cautious about what we claim to know, to be careful about the things that we say, to make certain that we identify our opinions as opinions, our faith as faith, and to maybe not declare it quite so firmly as established fact. By all means, bring out that which supports your opinions, but know also that there is far more to know than any of us can know.
And of course, that first point still remains an excellent challenge for all of us, to strive to do that which God has called us to do, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love God with all our heart and soul and mind.
Romans twelve. Romans eight is, by far, my favorite in this letter, but there are good words here to guide us in each day of our lives.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you are thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Who is included in God’s vision of community? More people than we tend to think.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the fifty-sixth chapter of the book of Isaiah (Isaiah 56:1, 6-8).
Isaiah appears to have been an assembled work. There’s a lengthy section that is primarily the work of a prophet named Isaiah, who lived in Jerusalem in the 700s before Jesus. There’s also a lengthy insertion, which is literally copied from the book of Second Kings. And then beginning about chapter 40, we get another writer.
Isaiah scholars believe that this one appears to have been an exile in Babylon, so hundreds of years after the initial Isaiah. He brought different concerns, and he brought a different sense of God’s promises. This part of chapter 56 is concerned with the restoration of the nation, which had been conquered by the Babylonians in 587. And here in chapter 56, it’s very clear that Isaiah expressed God’s promise that the exile people would at some time be able to come home.
But would there be anyone with them?
This portion of chapter 56 is very clearly answering the question, “Could others then Jews become a faithful part of the restored nation?” God’s answer was a clear, unequivocal, “Yes.” Those who wanted to be a part of the community and who would act according to its rules and its standards and its laws: they would be welcome. They could come and sacrifice in the rebuilt temple of God, and their prayers would be heard.
I don’t need to tell anybody that these are fractious days, days in which division and separation is very much the way of things. If you look through the Scriptures, you will find plenty of support for the notion that we should be separating people into little bits and bobs of communities. But Isaiah heard from God that that was not how it had to be, and many years later, along came Jesus, who in a conversation with a foreigner initially rejected her plea for healing, for her daughter, but was persuaded, was persuaded, and let his power find its way to a sick little girl.
Which will we choose? Will we choose the fractures of division and embrace the ways of dissension, even hatred, or will we be persuaded as Jesus was, as Isaiah was, to welcome the stranger and celebrate with them, and all of us together be faithful to God?
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
If you’ve been trying to count the Scripture passages I say are among my favorites, well, add another one. Or maybe I’ve already mentioned it. In any case, it’s true. This section of Romans includes some of the words that ring most true in my soul.
I’ve known what it is not to know what or how to pray because the sadness and the hurt go so deep. I’ve been in places where prayer itself has seemed impossible – although God had supported me through many stresses and trials, I simply couldn’t find not just words, but even a direction for prayer in the sorrow of my soul.
How important it is to know that in those profoundly disconnected times, the Spirit helped me in my weakness, interceding with groanings too deep for words.
Sometimes I became aware of that. Other times, I didn’t. It didn’t matter. The Spirit was there, groaning with me whether I knew it or not.
As Israel Kamudzandu writes at Working Preacher, “The inarticulate moans or groans of the Holy Spirit are not oriented to the human conscience but they are directed to God on behalf of a believing faith community… The reality is that human beings run out of words, especially in moments of sickness, death, hunger, poverty, and whenever life confronts us with pain.”
It doesn’t stop there for me. That next verse about all things working together for good for those who love God – well, I know there’s some problems there. Let’s face it, not all things work together for good period. There are plenty of people who do evil and seem to delight in it. There are storms and earthquakes and although they have no conscious intent to harm, harm they do. The history of these islands, going way back or staying recent, reveals both evil intent by human beings and evil impact by impersonal force or human accident.
But still. I read that verse with relief. Maybe everything doesn’t work for good, but God does. God doesn’t set the world into the courses of evil. God acts to mitigate the harm, to transform it into something else. When human hubris and arrogance crucified Jesus Christ, God brought forgiveness in Jesus’ own words and then resurrection in Jesus’ own life. If God was willing to transcend the rejection of God’s most precious gift, then what will God refuse to transcend?
I can’t think of anything.
As Erin Heim writes at Working Preacher, “In Christ, God does not meet our human violence with divine violence or retribution but, rather, takes on our human violence and overwhelms it with God’s self-giving love (8:32–34). In Christ, God promises to bring justice and wholeness through God’s overwhelming love. In Christ, God’s love has had the final word, and in Christ, the ending is sure.”
The question that has occupied a lot of Christians over the last two thousand years is: for whom is this ending sure? That is, once God’s love has had the final word, for whom has God spoken?
It’s a knotty problem.
The plain sense of the English translations with which we’re familiar uses the word “predestined.” A lot of theologians and Bible scholars have concluded, based on that word, that God has chosen some people to become Christians and to be saved in advance. Some theologians and Bible scholars have further concluded, based on this passage, that God has chosen other people not to become Christians and not to be saved. Among those who believed this were Augustine of Hippo and John Calvin. Calvin was one of the Reformation thinkers behind our own Reformed tradition. Our church was more influenced by Calvin than by Martin Luther.
Did the Apostle believe that some people were blessed ahead of time and some people were cursed?
I don’t think so. The reason I don’t think so is found in the purpose of Paul’s letter to the Romans in the first place. When he wrote the letter, Paul hadn’t visited Rome. He seems to have known something about the leaders there, and he seems to have known at least a little about conditions for the Christians in Rome. But he hadn’t been there, and… he planned to visit.
He planned to visit on the way to Spain.
Why was he going to Spain? For the same reason he’d toured around the cities of the Anatolian peninsula, modern Turkey. For the same reason he’d visited the cities of Macedonia and Greece. He was introducing the news that Jesus Christ had lived, had taught, had died, and had rose again for the blessing of humanity. He firmly believed that embracing that truth brought eternal life to those who did so. So he set out to bring that word to a horde of strangers he’d never thought to meet. He set out in journeys fraught with risk and hazard – in his Second Letter to the Corinthians he mentioned that he’d been shipwrecked no less than three times. Now he proposed to take the longest sea journey of his ministry from the eastern Mediterranean to the western.
That’s an enormous amount of effort for someone who believes that God has predetermined it all. If God has set it all out ahead of time, what difference do the actions of any human beings matter? God has set it. It’s determined. It’s done.
Paul couldn’t have believed that and done the things he did.
In Paul’s day, people believed in big powerful deities and in local gods whose influence was limited to small areas or whose concern was limited to particular nations. In contrast, Paul taught of a God who could exert power in many places, but who was concerned for and extending grace to people of many backgrounds, even every background. As Michael Fitzpatrick writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Class, race, sexual orientation, wealth, fame, gender, religion, marriage, political party — none of these categories by which we carve up humanity into various tribes counts for or against a person in the Kingdom.”
Paul’s travels and labors were in service of a first century quest for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Church of Jesus Christ and the Realm of God. “How much grace did God have?” people might have asked him. “It’s bigger than you think,” Paul would have replied. Paul did reply: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
It’s bigger than you think.
These are days of factionalization, of separation into my group and your group, of division between the “We’re entitled” and “You’re nots.” It’s not the first time in human history; it won’t be the last. Isn’t it obvious that such thinking feeds the violence of the automobile attack on a Pride parade in Berlin yesterday, or the wars in Iran, Palestine, Ukraine, and more? Doesn’t it buttress the fears of women who receive no justice when they are assaulted?
In contrast, Paul taught of a church in which male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free – the most significant categories of his day – no longer mattered. God’s grace was for all. Did Paul fully recognize the implications of his own thinking? I don’t think so. He was still a person of his time, as we’re people of our time, and there were limits to his imagination just as there are limits to our imagination.
God’s grace is bigger than we think.
Of all the things I try to teach you from this pulpit, of all the things I try to convince you of from this pulpit, of all the things I try to persuade you of from this pulpit, this is the one I most earnestly want you to remember, to believe, and to live from:
God’s grace is bigger than we think. It’s for you. It’s for me. It’s for them. It’s for everybody. It’s for the ones we don’t think it’s for. It’s bigger than you think.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric writes sermons in full, but he tends to make changes while preaching, some of which are intentional.
