Loving What God Loves

Text: Psalms 146

Focus: God Loves Justice

Function: to help people partner with God in doing justice

Form: Bible Study

Intro:

The Key verse from today’s text is verse 7-8: Let me re-read them: ⁷God judges in favor of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free ⁸and gives sight to the blind. He lifts those who have fallen; he loves his righteous ones.

(repeat) God lifts up those who have fallen; God loves God’s people who do justice.

Given the nature of God’s grace, given the fact that God and Love are synonymous, given the fact that the greatest commandment to US is to love others, we can rest assured that God loves the world entire.

Why does the Psalmist say that those who do justice, the righteous in the King James translation, are the ones loved by God?

Well, we know that he does not say that they are the only ones loved by God.

It isn’t exclusionary. What we do see in this passage is the special relationship that God has with those who take the time to continue to do God’s work in this world.

But look again at that statement in verse 7, God judges in favor of the poor.

Again, this does not say that God unfairly judges on behalf of the poor. God’s law is clear that the judges are to show no partiality either on the side of the poor, or of the side of the powerful.

But the author is reminding us that when the poor are unfairly treated, God is always on their side and God will plead their case. It is a warning that God cares about what happens to the poor, even when others do not.

I want to emphasize this. There is no partiality with God, God loves everyone, but God does listen to prayers. This Psalm reminds me of the personal and individual care that God has for people.

For me, it begins to address the difference between what it means to be a partner with God in healing the world, or a person whose life is spent serving one’s own self without regard to how that affects others, or how we can continue to love others as much as we love ourselves.

I knew a young man studying business at the University of Illinois. He, his girlfriend and I shared a common interest in photography. I had had some successes with my photography during my formative years and I had a passion about sharing my hobby with anyone who would listen. I was a photography evangelist.

His name was Dave and we had talked a lot about our philosophies of life. He knew I was, or had been, a wayward preachers kid who was not sure what parts or any of it, I could come back to. I wasn’t sure about all the rules. They seemed to me to be an excuse for other things. I heard men curse people simply because of the color of their skin and all the while prove to everyone else that they were good Christians because they never drank any alcohol.

The words “it felt hypocritical” aren’t really accurate. It just didn’t feel authentic.

I was disenchanted with the Church, but Jesus was calling me back to Himself and there were many things about the Christian faith from my childhood that I missed. I was longing for the community of faith.

And this time with Dave and his girlfriend was near the end of that time of rebellion when I was figuring out where I was going. I was back to being a Christian, but I was not back to surrendering to the calling God had in my life. I wanted to make money and was doing pretty well in my sales career.

One day the three of us were out on a Photo shoot when we came across a beggar. His girlfriend and I both gave the person some change. He was lividly angry with her and he said something that I will never forget.

He yelled at her: “Only the rich can afford to be generous.”

I understood exactly what he was saying. He was a Social Darwinian, even when it applied to economics. And that means if the poor do not have enough food to survive, then let them die, it is good for evolution. His genotype was practically a perfect Aryan. It was almost scary.

The sad thing about that philosophy is that it does not take into account bad luck, good luck, privilege, opportunity and all the other factors that go into generational poverty. This man actually believed that the poor deserved their plight, even if it killed them.

Remember, even the Law of God says “The poor you will always have with you… ...they are your responsibility, take care of them.”

I woke up some more that day as I pondered exactly what he was saying.

Let me re-read that statement in verse 8: The Lord loves the righteous, those who do justice.

Why? Why does God love them?

They are living in partnership with God.

The Lord loves the righteous. Not because they are saved and going to heaven and believe and have said the words of salvation in some form or another. The righteous have indeed done all of that. But the Lord loves the righteous because they are doing God’s work here on earth.

Yesterday we spent a little bit of time talking about what it means to be here at Hope Church and what we have to offer the community that is already here, and the community of people who are still to come through our doors and join us in our journey.

And besides how welcoming we are, the one thing that impresses the members and participants of this church is this church’s commitment to service.

The next verse in our text is a good testimony to this: God protects the strangers here in our land.

We know that one of the ways God does this is through the ministry of Bethany Christian services and churches like ours who have partnered with them to give strangers a safe welcome to this land. It is like the Pope when he says: “Pray for the poor, and then feed them.”

Service toward others is in our DNA as a Church and we can allow ourselves to be happy about it. And, we know it won’t stop with the last project, there is always something more to be done and I am confident that we will continue to let God lead us into new and varied areas for us to show God’s love toward others.

God lifts people up, that is the theme. And God’s plan to lift people up is through us.

And that segues us into the the other text from the lectionary this morning, the story of the Good Samaritan. Luke 10: 25-37

You know the story. A man is mugged and beaten by robbers and left to suffer, maybe die, on the side of the road.

The Highest kind of religious official walks along the road, sees the man, deliberately crosses to the other side to avoid the man and his problems. The second tier of religious official passes by and does the same thing. And the Samaritan, you know, is a racial half-breed, the kind that was despised by the religious officials, and even the victim of the beating.

And yet the man least likely, the man who many would consider to be his enemy is the one who sacrificially saves his life.

It is a great lesson. And of course, Jesus gives it as indictment of any kind of religion that ever justifies turning ones head from someone else’s suffering pretending that we didn’t see or that we are too busy to care.

But what most often gets excluded from the story is the context in which it is told. Let me read

Luke 10: ²⁵A teacher of the Law came up and tried to trap Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to receive eternal life?”

²⁶Jesus answered him, “What do the Scriptures say? How do you interpret them?”

²⁷The man answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind’; and ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’”

²⁸“You are right,” Jesus replied; “do this and you will live.”

We all got that. We all get that. And the next verse is the most telling verse in the whole story: Verse 29:

²⁹But the teacher of the Law wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

He asked Jesus for a way out of his responsibility. My friend Dave had the mistaken belief that he was an island only responsible for the welfare of himself and had no moral obligation to care for anyone else.

Jesus’ answer to that idea is that even your enemy is your neighbor.

And I submit that God loves it when we, instead of asking the question “who is my neighbor?” just automatically assume that everyone is our neighbor.

Every sinner. Every miracle worker. Every scoundrel, every saint. Every weak willed person, every one who has always been lucky and strong willed, the clean, the dirty, the black, the white, the police officer, the thug, the enemy, the friend, and the alien.

We can not possibly list everyone, but when we go back to our primary text this morning, Psalm 146, we do see how God is especially listening and looking for those who partner with God in making sure that whatever “neighbor” God places in our path is not considered by us to be someone that God does not care for.