This is the seventh of 8 sermons on a series Entitled “God Solves our Problems”.
We’ve heard how the promise of eternal life changes our perspective on problems, allowing us to see problems with an eternal, godly perspective instead of an urgent, human perspective. And we saw how, with our permission, God puts us into a training program to help us learn to live godly, holy lives. Then we saw how God’s model of the servant leader drives us to help other people rather than look upon others as our servants. We saw how understanding our relationship to God keeps us from becoming arrogant, and how prayer keeps us humble. We talked about how God requires and helps us keep our integrity, and we found out that following Jesus is far more important than following rules. And last week we saw how asking to see Jesus and approaching Him heals us. And today, we talk about relationships.
Jesus and His disciples had arrived in Jerusalem for the Holy Week that led up to the great Passover Feast. Jesus and his students had entered the town to a great celebration. He went to the temple for a while and then they went back outside the town a couple of miles to stay at Bethany.
The next day was an eventful day. Jesus and his followers went to the Temple, and Jesus began teaching. Various people kept coming up to Jesus and challenging Him on various points. A group of priests and teachers asked him who had given Him authority to teach. He spoke to them of a leased vineyard where the workers continually kill the servants who come to gather the rent for the owner, and those same workers eventually kill the son of the owner.
A group of Pharisees and men from King Herod tried to trap Him with His words, asking Him whether or not it was right to pay taxes to the Romans. He asked them for a coin, asked them whose image was on it and when told it was Caesar’s image, he told them to give back to Caesar what was Caesar’s and God what was God’s.
After this, a group of Sadducees, who didn’t believe in a resurrection, asked him a trick question about how would be the husband in the resurrection of a woman who had been married seven times. He told them that God had said to Moses: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’, focusing upon the small detail of the present tense of the words “I AM” and concluding that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob must have been living at the time – resurrected by God.
And then, a teacher, a rabbi, overhead them and asked Him what was the greatest commandment? You see, according to the ancient Jewish rabbis, there are far more than Ten commandments in the Old Testament – there are 613 commandments – 365 Thou Shall NOT commandments, corresponding to the number of days in the year, and 248 Thou Shall commandments, corresponding to the number of bones and organs in the human body. “Which of all these commandments is the greatest, “the man asked Jesus.
29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
Jesus recited the SHEMA’, the ancient formula that dated back to Moses and has been found on pottery and trinkets in Israel as old as 800 BC. “Hear, O Israel: Yahweh is God, Yahweh is one”. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
And because Yahweh is God, you should love Yahweh with all your emotion (your heart), with all your life force (your soul), with all your reasoning (your mind), and with all your physical body (your strength). Jesus tells us our number one focus in our entire life, our greatest love, the focus of our energy, our every thought and our physical work should be devoted toward loving God.
How seriously do you take this?
When you were dating your future spouse, how focused were you upon them? Did you think of them in the morning, spend your day dreaming of them, re-arrange your life for them, always try to clear your schedule for them? Did you plan and think and work out ways that you could be together with her or him?
And do you do half that much toward God, who is to be number one in your life?
Jesus told us to give everything to God, for one day, you see, you will have nothing except God…
But because every person on earth is a three-dimensional image of God, created in the likeness of the Creator by the Creator, we also have a second commandment. As Jesus said, “31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
You are an infinitely valuable image of God and therefore are worthy of the love you give to God. And your neighbor is also an image of God, if you will, he or she is a photograph of God taken from a different angle with different lighting, yet is another infinitely valuable image of God. We are to be completely protecting and supporting and lifting up all the people we know and meet and run into. We are to look sideways at everyone as if we are looking in the mirror when we see someone else.
But instead, we look downward upon some people, and upward toward others. But our head neck was designed to turn most easily sideways and to look forward. Looking up is for avoiding predators and looking down is for picking up food. And so we treat some people as predators, out to get us, and we fear them. And we treat other people as prey, to be consumed by us as we try to get what we want from life. And so we damage ourselves, cringing when we think everyone is a predator, and developing a wolf’s posture when we think everyone is food for our desires.
But this is wrong. We are to treat all people – as ourselves. And the only Persons we are to look up to are the three Persons of the Holy Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
And how do we treat others as ourselves? Just what CAN we do?
Perhaps when you buy Christmas presents this year, you’ll put aside an equal amount of money for Open Heart Ministries, the Harrison County Ministry that helps people with rent and utility payments. Yes, we need to help those in need in our community.
But treating others as ourselves goes a bit farther, and involves people closer to us, such as our family members, our church friends, our friends.
To treat others as ourselves, perhaps we’ll not complain about something that someone didn’t do for us, recognizing that complaints are often an attempt to force another person to do something we don’t want to do ourselves. For example, if you think we need more flowers planted around our church, perhaps you might plant those flowers yourself. Particularly in the church and our families, we need to remember that WE are the church. We are the family.
If something needs done, it is up to us to do it or spend money hiring people to do those few things we don’t have the skill set for. We get so much in the habit of training our children to do things – which is appropriate - that we go further and inappropriately complain about our husband or wife who doesn’t do something such as loading the dishwasher, or we complain about the choices made in the church by the people who HAVE stepped up and are trying their best to do things for us. So often, we dehumanize these people and say, “The church ought to do things better, or SOMEONE needs to do A, B, or C”. How about saying “I think such and such needs done and I’d like to do it for everyone else!”
To love others as yourself perhaps you’ll look to another’s comfort before your own. I recently heard of a church that discovered a homeless man in a wheelchair outside their church, a church which is simply not handicap accessible. When it was suggested that the small congregation might move their worship service outside to be with him, because the temperature was in the sixties, members of the congregation declared – “It’s too cold to stay outside”. Yet they left the homeless man outside. Where was the love for neighbor?
To love others as yourself, perhaps you’ll change your perspective on other people, trying repeatedly to understand why someone might do something differently, respecting their decisions, assisting them when they make poor decisions instead of condemning them for their decisions, lifting them up in prayer and lifting them up with tangible help. Sometimes, the very best thing you can do for someone else is to mow their lawn, rake their leaves, or wash their dishes. Remember the time that you needed your lawn mowed - and someone did it for you. Remember the time when your house was a mess - and someone walked in and washed your dishes for you.
Sometimes, what people need is simple – give them a $100 in cash. Sometimes, they need you to take their children to the movies so they can have some time alone. You don’t give them advice – you simply do what would help you most if you were in their shoes. And yes, sometimes the best answer is to tell them how God helped you through a similar situation when you were struggling.
And if we do this, we will one day find ourselves standing alone before God, without anyone or anything else. But that will be just fine with us, for through years of practice and learning to understand other people and our God, we will be standing in front of the One whom we love the most.
And then, suddenly, we will be standing there with all those other images of God that we have learned to love – those reflections of God’s glory that we once knew as other people in this life. And we will be a bright, shiny polished mirror, reflecting God’s glory back to each other, as we stand together in the eternal kingdom of God.
And so there are two relationships that we must uphold. Our vertical relationship with God – and our horizontal relationships with each other – not just in our families, not just the people in this room, but our relationships with all people. And that begins with an intense focus upon what God says to us, learning all that Jesus taught about the Father and the Holy Spirit, imitating Jesus in every action, working to become a saintly person every day.
I’ve recently been studying St Francis of Assisi. You may remember that St Francis is associated with animals, but he also founded the Franciscan order of friars, and is the man whom the current pope took his name from. Francis revolutionized Christianity in the 13th Century, because he did something no one had done in a thousand years. Perhaps the most distinguishing thing about Francis was that he actually took Jesus at His word in His commands. For example, when Jesus said, “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me,” Francis, who was the son of a wealthy man, gave away everything he had, even stripping naked in front of his father and the local bishop, and never owned anything again. The bishop quickly gave him a robe, but to Francis, this was just a loan. He forbade his followers to even touch money. And when Paul said in Colossians 1 that “15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” Francis listened and therefore understood that everything and everyone - the Sun, the Moon, the animals, a rock – are all brothers and sisters of Francis, and thus worthy of being treated like family. All this flows from listening intensely to what Holy Scripture has told us – and loving God and other people.
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied to Jesus. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
Today is All-Saints Day. Today, we will honor those images of God who have gone on before us to stand before the throne, reflecting the glory of God back and forth to each other.
Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews today reminds us that the high priests of Israel made sacrifices of the blood of goats and calves, but Jesus, being the Son of God, part of God, and thus divine Himself, had something much more valuable than all the goats and calves in the world. He had the infinitely valuable blood which flowed through His body. And thus, when He sacrificed Himself, His precious body and blood upon the cross, His sacrifice was the only thing which could possibly be valuable enough to pay for every person’s sins, once and for all. And therefore, it is through the Blood of Christ that Christian believers may enter the heavenly throne room where God the Father sits. The Blood of Christ is the password that gets us into Heaven. It is the precious Blood of Christ that allows us to one day meet God face-to-face in joy and not despair.
Let us pray,
Lord, we remember these your servants who have gone to be with You. Grant them eternal peace and rest from their labors. Receive them into that Holy City, the New Jerusalem, where they can eat from the Tree of Life and live with You eternally. Grant us the faith that we may declare Your wonderful glory to all people everywhere, and that we may love all people as ourselves and see You in person one day. Amen
St Francis was also a grand poet, the first significant poet who wrote in the Italian language. Here is one of his short poems.
And if we do this, we will one day find ourselves standing alone before God, without anyone or anything else. But that will be just fine with us, for through years of practice and learning to understand other people and our God, we will be standing in front of the One whom we love the most.
And then, suddenly, we will be standing there with all those other images of God that we have learned to love – those reflections of God’s glory that we once knew as other people in this life. And we will be a bright, shiny polished mirror, reflecting God’s glory back to each other, as we stand together in the eternal kingdom of God.
And so there are two relationships that we must uphold. Our vertical relationship with God – and our horizontal relationships with each other – not just in our families, not just the people in this room, but our relationships with all people. And that begins with an intense focus upon what God says to us, learning all that Jesus taught about the Father and the Holy Spirit, imitating Jesus in every action, working to become a saintly person every day.
I’ve recently been studying St Francis of Assisi. You may remember that St Francis is associated with animals, but he also founded the Franciscan order of friars, and is the man whom the current pope took his name from. Francis revolutionized Christianity in the 13th Century, because he did something no one had done in a thousand years. Perhaps the most distinguishing thing about Francis was that he actually took Jesus at His word in His commands. For example, when Jesus said, “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me,” Francis, who was the son of a wealthy man, gave away everything he had, even stripping naked in front of his father and the local bishop, and never owned anything again. The bishop quickly gave him a robe, but to Francis, this was just a loan. He forbade his followers to even touch money. And when Paul said in Colossians 1 that “15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” Francis listened and therefore understood that everything and everyone - the Sun, the Moon, the animals, a rock – are all brothers and sisters of Francis, and thus worthy of being treated like family. All this flows from listening intensely to what Holy Scripture has told us – and loving God and other people.
32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied to Jesus. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
Today is All-Saints Day. Today, we will honor those images of God who have gone on before us to stand before the throne, reflecting the glory of God back and forth to each other.
Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews today reminds us that the high priests of Israel made sacrifices of the blood of goats and calves, but Jesus, being the Son of God, part of God, and thus divine Himself, had something much more valuable than all the goats and calves in the world. He had the infinitely valuable blood which flowed through His body. And thus, when He sacrificed Himself, His precious body and blood upon the cross, His sacrifice was the only thing which could possibly be valuable enough to pay for every person’s sins, once and for all. And therefore, it is through the Blood of Christ that Christian believers may enter the heavenly throne room where God the Father sits. The Blood of Christ is the password that gets us into Heaven. It is the precious Blood of Christ that allows us to one day meet God face-to-face in joy and not despair.
Let us pray,
Lord, we remember these your servants who have gone to be with You. Grant them eternal peace and rest from their labors. Receive them into that Holy City, the New Jerusalem, where they can eat from the Tree of Life and live with You eternally. Grant us the faith that we may declare Your wonderful glory to all people everywhere, and that we may love all people as ourselves and see You in person one day. Amen
St Francis was also a grand poet, the first significant poet who wrote in the Italian language. Here is one of his short poems.
“What Wonderful Majesty! "
What Wonderful Majesty…
What stupendous condescension!
O sublime humility!
That the Lord of the whole universe,
God and the Son of God,
should humble Himself like this
under the form of a little bread,
for our salvation”
“…In this world I cannot see
the Most High Son of God
with my own eyes, except
for His Most Holy Body and Blood.”
- St Francis of Assisi (http://www.azquotes.com/quote/566025)
Shall we now share together the Body and Blood of Christ in Holy Communion. As Francis did – look upon these elements and know that Jesus is here with us, encouraging us, lifting us up, waiting for us each month to use this spiritual food to replace our natural weak body with a spiritually strong body that will have eternal life.
Let us purify ourselves as Christ is pure, leaving behind all sin by asking forgiveness from our Holy Father.
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