Listening to Love

 

Text: Luke 16:14-15, 19-31

Focus: Charity

Function: To help people listen to their conscience and be generous

¹⁴The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him. ¹⁵So he said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts, for what is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God.

¹⁹“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. ²⁰And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, ²¹who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. ²²The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. ²³In Hades, where he was being tormented, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. ²⁴He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames.’ ²⁵But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. ²⁶Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ ²⁷He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— ²⁸for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ ²⁹Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ ³⁰He said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ ³¹He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”

I suppose that the salient verse in the passage is the last one, , and I will paraphrase it to expose what I believe to be an hidden meaning: “If they won’t listen to the scriptures, they won’t listen to me when I raise from the dead.”

I titled the sermon, Listening to Love based on that last verse. They won’t listen to the record that is shown them in the scripture that the greatest commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. Jesus and Paul both say that this command, to love our neighbor as ourself, will fulfill all the law and prophet’s messages.

You have to understand that throughout the Gospels, Jesus employs literary license in the form of parables and stories to illustrate eternal truths.

The point of the lesson is to open our hearts to those who are hurting when we have the opportunity and resources to help them.

The other point of the story is that ignoring the plight of the poor will bring us into a place of God’s judgment.

I mention literary license in hyperbole because this passage is not a passage about hell.

The OT does not have any record of anyone going to hell.

History shows that during times of great oppression and bondage, literature arises that is called apocalyptic. It often has violent images of the oppressors being beaten back or suffering eternal torment for the pain that they caused to innocents. During the time when Jesus walked the earth that started this common era of human understanding, throughout that time, there were many references to hell and destruction against the Roman occupying forces and their collaborators.

Jesus picks up on that populist idea with a “what if torture in hell were real?” story.

Jesus said, then the rich, who are oppressing us will get there eventual judgment.

I suppose this passage is where the Roman Catholic Church gets the genesis of the doctrine of purgatory from. And the idea was and can be appealing to people who are suffering with no recourse against their oppressors.

Adequate punishment might be a comforting thought. When I think of the 80 million or so people who died in WWII, I think to myself, If God is just, then Hitler will be punished for war crimes in torment with enough time sufficient to offset the pain that he caused. After all, God is just and can figure out a way to make it the right amount of punishment for what he did.

But then, the doctrine of hell that has arisen in the Christian religion, says that hell is eternal and the punishment is eternal. Eventually he will have paid back in suffering for all that he caused, even if it is a million years per life that was lost, at the end of that time, eternity will still be beginning.

That is extreme and it doesn’t reconcile with what God commands.

As a matter of fact. God commands us to forgive our enemies. If God commands us to forgive, then God must also want to forgive God’s enemies. God is God and can do what God wants, but God gave us a sense of justice and we do not believe that God will be hypocritical.

So, the doctrine of hell is confused by mankind’s own limited understanding of God’s grace and need for revenge against oppressors.

And I bring all that up to state that this is not a passage about hell. It doesn’t validate hell, it just captures a populist idea of the time in order to get the point across to be generous with your resources if you are rich.

And the Bible describes a rich man as a person with a gold ring. I have one. So, compared to the rest of the world, we are rich here in the United States.

The passage is introduced with the statement: The Pharisees who were lovers of money were ridiculing Him.

Remember, the love of money, not money, is the progenitor of all sorts of evil.

What is the sin of the rich man? Well, the context must be that he loved money, but it was proven by the fact that he ignored the poverty that was literally at his doorstep.

It is kind of like that line from the song, “Blowing in the Wind” when we hear: “How many times can a man turn his eyes and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

I wish that line were in the Bible, but alas, it comes from a different piece of our common literature.

Because the rich man refused to see the plight of the poor, because he refused to acknowledge the plight of the poor, God judged him and if there is or was a hell, would send him there.

But again, this is not about hell but about the way we treat the poor. Do we judge them because they are dirty and filthy? Do we judge them for being lazy? Or stupid? By the way, a lot of poverty is created by the misfortune of having a medical problems and an inadequate social safety net to care for those people who are just simply unlucky, not lazy stupid, filthy or worthless.

I find it symbolic that the rich man is not named. But Lazarus is given a name.

Jesus is indicting a class of people who refuse to help others. I believe it is a scary thing to disobey God and judge the poor.

By the way, Jesus isn’t judging all the rich. There are many who generous and caring. Dolly Parton comes to mind.

The rich man, metaphorically asks Jesus to let him go back and warn the rest of the uncaring that God isn’t pleased with their actions and Jesus gives a profound answer.

He tells them that God has made the command to love one another pretty obvious in the OT law. And when the Jewish people didn’t get that message, God send prophets to warn them to care for the least of these and to stop their oppression. They didn’t listen to the command to love.

If only the rich man had listened to love, he would have seen the suffering around him. He could have been saved.

May we listen to love and see others they way Jesus wants us to see them.

Master Jesus

 

Text: Luke 16:1-13

Focus: wealth

Function: to help people focus on Jesus instead of wealth

16:¹Then Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. ²So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ ³Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. ⁴I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ ⁵So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ⁶He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ ⁷Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ ⁸And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. ⁹And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.

¹⁰“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. ¹¹If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? ¹²And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? ¹³No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

I confess, I have been pondering this sermon the entire week and I am not very sure what to do with the text.

Every other time I have considered preaching the parable, I have ignored it because it doesn’t fit with my theology of right and wrong. But then, my theology of right and wrong is based on our economic system, and not the one designed by Jesus in the early church or close to the one designed by Moses in the OT. Both are forms of heavily mixed capitalism. Almost socialism, or it would be called socialism by those who use the word pejoratively against social policies designed to life the poor out of poverty.

So, I avoided it. I am not going to get political, this is a safe space for people to find Jesus and He is open to all, both right and left. I remember that it takes a right and a left wing for a bird to fly.

So, It is obvious what Jesus says the meaning of the parable is, you cannot serve God and money at the same time. The word translated wealth in the NRSV is literally the word for money.

I believe that the question that Jesus wants His listeners to ask themselves, at this point, is who it is they serve.

Do you serve money or Jesus? There are many ways to answer that question.

We need money to survive. The more money we have, the easier it is for us to survive. We need enough money to survive and we need enough money to survive, as believers, in the US culture.

There is nothing inherently evil about money. It is the love of money that is the root of all kinds of sin.

Placing money over Jesus is the sin that Jesus wants us to root out from our lives.

If we make Jesus the Master of our lives then money is not the measure of success.

And we get all that understanding from the last two verses in our text where Jesus explains the parable.

And the reason why I have been pondering the parable all week is because the conclusion that Jesus makes us draw from the parable seems to be contrary to the lesson learned by either the master, or the incapable, and then corrupt, steward.

The story goes like this. The steward is an incapable manager and the master hears about it from other sources and wants to fire him.

When he informs him that he must prove his innocence or be fired, the steward, who so far has been inept turns to corruption to solve his problem.

He is too proud to beg and to weak to do physical labor to survive. And remember, everyone needs enough money to survive. It wasn’t wrong for him to want to care for his needs after he is fired.

I think it was wrong for him to cheat his master out of money in order to survive. But that is what he did. He went to his master’s debtors and greatly reduced their bills so that after he gets fired, one of them, or all of them in turn, will help him out and give him charity.

And this is the part of the parable that used to be hard for me to understand. Instead of condemning him for his cheating, Jesus -and the master- praise him for his shrewdness. It is almost like Jesus understands the plight of the poor and the compromises they have to make in order to survive.

I have to remember that when I see people begging on the street. We are commanded to ignore judgment of the reasons for their predicament and care for them.

I have to tell you that the Holy Spirit promises to help us understand scripture. I wish that I had not avoided that help in years past and tackled this passage in my sermons.

Then I would have come to that conclusion about the poor and would have been less judgmental.

Let me digress a second. It goes to a problem that we have with Biblical interpretation.

We approach scripture with a lens from our own experiences and past understandings.

We don’t often ask for a new and a fresh understanding even though the Bible says that our faith grows line upon line and precept upon precept. It grows gradually. And it shouldn’t stop growing until we die.

That is why we Brethren are called people of the Book. The book being the Bible, of course.

We recognize that we continually are led and fed by the Holy Spirit as we search the scripture. That is why we spend so much time during our worship service every week listening to an explanation of the Holy Christian Scriptures.

Anyway, I had avoided preaching this passage because I was uncomfortable with Jesus supporting the idea of cheating someone else.

Well, technically He doesn’t. He praises him, but then tells us the be faithful in little things and God will make us faithful in much. He does include the hard work ethic that is important to our economic success. But the parable makes room for misfortune, bad management and bad luck.

I define sin as anything that keeps us from loving our neighbor as ourselves, or loving God. And cheating someone else is certainly a form of harm.

Of course, the master wasn’t upset with the cheating, as a matter of fact, he praises the servant who cheated him for being shrewd. It is almost as if he wishes he hadn’t fired him.

And I was not okay with telling people that it is okay to cheat.

And yet, this man was about to be thrown into abject poverty. He had no recourse except the generosity of those with whom he collaborated.

I avoided the passage based on my understanding of the theology instead of letting the passage create my theology. I let my theology create the passage.

I learned a lesson in that for the way that I try to preach, keep it on the task of the scripture.

And again, the task of this scripture has to do with our relationship with money.

And all I can say is we need to take seriously the statement, you can’t serve both.

Who Deserves Mercy?

 

Text: Luke 15:1-10

Focus: mercy

Function: to help people see how everyone deserves a chance at mercy

¹Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. ²And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

³So he told them this parable: ⁴“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? ⁵And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. ⁶And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’ ⁷Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.

⁸“Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? ⁹And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ ¹⁰Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

When I was in Bible College, every year they choose a “year verse” for us to focus on. The verse for my Junior year was Micah 6:8: “He has shown you O man, what is good and what the Lord desires of you: Do justice, Love Mercy and walk humbly with your God.”

It is three simple commands, Two of them are of the heart and conscience and the third is the action verb, to do.

By “of the heart and conscience” I mean that it is a decision, or perhaps a fruit of the Holy Spirit, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.

Loving mercy is what we are going to talk about this morning.

I Wish the bible had a better description of what it mean when the text says that Jesus received the sinners and tax collectors. Tax collectors we understand. They were people who 1, collaborated with the occupying forces and 2, profited off of that collaboration to the extent that it drove the population into abject poverty.

It was perceived by many that they were the reason for the problem and people hated them because they were part of the system that exploited them.

And Jesus welcomed people who exploit others into His presence.

The other group was sinners. And that is what I mean by I wish the Bible explained it better. What, exactly, is a sinner? It is the opposite of a righteous person, and a righteous person is a just person.

When I was raised, it was simple, but wrong. It was anyone who smoked, cussed, danced or drank alcohol. I suppose they had to make it simple for my mind, but the lasting impression was the wrong one. I understand the alcohol part since my mother’s family were all alcoholics. It represented an evil in our family that was a real source of bondage. Two of my uncles died from alcohol poisoning.

But the scripture is clear, the Holy Spirit gives us self control and Jesus turned the water into wine for His first miracle. Religion forbade us the use of alcohol, but it was an overreaching of interpretation of scripture that caused it and it wasn’t true to God’s word.

It goes to show how religion gets in the way of doing the right thing. The religious people were offended by Jesus’ association with sinners and tax collectors.

I still didn’t answer the question as to what a sinner is. I believe it is a person who commits acts of evil by commission or omission that harms another human being. It can include violence against others, stealing, cheating, robbing, lying, jealousy, covetousness, and other similar acts.

They are, according to that verse that means so much to me, acts whereby we do not do justice to others. Doing Just things is the proof of our righteousness.

I am afraid that we came up with a short list, a false list of things that we called sin, like smokin, drinkin and cussin in order to obfuscate from the important issues.

For example, God wants us to deal with our own racist biases and I find it important for me to constantly examine my own prejudices.

I bought a car off the internet last week. I hope it shows up tomorrow. I bought it from a guy with a foreign name, Asif Nas, is his name and his accent is heavily middle eastern.

At one point, I accused him of lying to me, and I realize that I might not have given him the benefit of the doubt because of all the negative stereotyping of Middle Eastern men in our own TV programming. Racism is a way to motivate others ant it is a powerful and seductive tool if we let it. But as believers, we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves and weed it out.

Sin is not marrying the person that you love. I gave you a definition of what a sinner is which came from my limited experience and opinions. My definition of sin is as follows. Anything that keeps us from loving God our our neighbor as ourselves is sin to us. Sin is missing the mark of God’s loving standard for the world.

So, it has nothing to do with whom you marry. After all the emphasis of this passage is Jesus’ mercy toward people who were considered outcasts by the culture because of their sins.

Jesus showed mercy.

Did they change?

Well, He goes on the illustrate the importance of caring for people that otherwise are cast out of society by giving the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin.

And at the end He says that there is much more rejoicing in heaven for the repentance of the one than of the 99 who were already practicing love for their neighbor.

We love God by loving our neighbor.

You remember the story of Zaccheus. We sang the song when I was a kid (SING PORTION).

It was fun, and sadly the song didn’t emphasize exactly what was going on. Again, they rejected Jesus for showing mercy toward sinners. But it was the showing of mercy that caused him to repent.

Zaccheus was short of stature, so he climbed the tree to see Jesus when Jesus was passing by. And Jesus stopped, noticed him, and invited Himself to dinner at Zaccheus’ house.

And Zaccheus was so overwhelmed that he gave half his money to the poor and paid back everyone he had defrauded.

The text doesn’t actually say that he was so overwhelmed by Jesus’ mercy that he changed his life, but that is what we surmise from this passage.

Be merciful toward others who are outcast, considered to be sinners and who seem to be less than what is acceptable by society.

Jesus loves them and our mercy toward them just might be the catalyst for them believing enough in the goodness of God that they too will give up their harmful practices, if they have them and follow the way of the Lord, the love for others as your own self.

I am not saying the poor and dispossessed are sinners. Most of them are hard working honest and decent folks who have had a series of bad luck that has brought them to this place.

The Bible commands us to care for them and tells us they are our responsibility.

According to Ezekiel 16:48-49, the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was lack of concern for the poor.

I believe that when the Bible condemns Sodomites, it is a reference to those who don’t obey the Lord by caring for the least of these.

I read these verses and see the mercy of Jesus and I realize that practicing the same mercy will reconcile others back to God.

Applying Principles of Love

 

Text: Philemon 8-21

Focus: Forgiveness

Function: to help people see how to lay down their privilege to love one another

⁸For this reason, though I am more than bold enough in Christ to command you to do the right thing, ⁹yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love—and I, Paul, do this as an old man and now also as a prisoner of Christ Jesus. ¹⁰I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment. ¹¹Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me. ¹²I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. ¹³I wanted to keep him with me so that he might minister to me in your place during my imprisonment for the gospel, ¹⁴but I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced. ¹⁵Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back for the long term, ¹⁶no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother—especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

¹⁷So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. ¹⁸If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge that to me. ¹⁹I, Paul, am writing this with my own hand: I will repay it. I say nothing about your owing me even your own self. ²⁰Yes, brother, let me have this benefit from you in the Lord! Refresh my heart in Christ. ²¹Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I ask.

Let me just sum up what is happening in this letter. Paul is in prison and nobody fed prisoners. They were dependent on others to bring them food. Paul was a model prisoner and was granted some freedom. He had enough favor to have a person call on him regularly to help with his needs and that person was an escaped slave named Onesimus.

Previously Paul had introduced Philemon, the slave owner to Jesus Christ and he became a convert. And Paul tells him that he owes him his life for that. And now Paul is faced with the moral dilemma of what to do with this escaped slave. He wants to free him, but doesn’t have the authority.

This is a good story of what it meant to the early Church to flesh out the teachings of Jesus in the new Kingdom that Jesus came to establish.

The Bible, taken literally, can be used to justify about anything. During the years that America allowed the enslavement of what they called colored peoples, Slave owners justified their position of oppression sort of through scripture.

It isn’t that old of a history. My own mother, as she was grappling with what it meant to be anti-racist after being exposed to the meanness of Jim Crow laws while she was serving the Lord with my father at a Church in Tennessee had to overcome what she was taught in Sunday School in order to give black people the same love and affection that we give our fellow white folks.

She was taught that slavery was justified when Caan sinned by looking at Noah’s nakedness. They claimed that he was turned black and cursed by God. Of course, there is no mention of his skin changing color in the bible.

And it is important to remember that all of the stories of faith that we enjoy, the story of David and Goliath, the Story of Jesus and the Resurrection, the Story of Daniel and the Lions den, the Story of Moses and the 10 plagues all happened to people of color.

Mom was raised in a white supremacist Christian community.

She too, like the early church had to learn to overcome worldly notions like racism.

The church has continually had to examine itself in light of Jesus teaching and grow to include more and more people.

So, here we are the first century Church with fresh story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection compelling them to live a different way of life.

And although slavery was legal, the church is wrestling with the question of whether or not it is right.

Remember, the first thing the early church did in response to the command to care for the least of these in their midst was to start a commune where they all shared. The rich believed in the Kingdom of God and gave up their greed and the poor got a chance. Now we don’t know why the commune disbanded, but we do know that Jerusalem fell to the Romans and was destroyed in the next generation that saw Jesus’ resurrection.

And all of that goes to show that the Church took seriously the command of Jesus to care for the least of these. It did that by voluntary action until the Romans took over the Church benevolence program in the 3^rd Century.

And then, as now, Charity came under the purveyance of government in the form of taxes.

The early Church had a lot to wrestle with when it came to slavery.

Abraham was the great Patriarch of the faith and he is recorded as having 276 slaves and or servants at his disposal. A slave owner was a Patriarch of the faith and the early Church had to make sense of what it meant for there to be equality in the name of Jesus when some people were not permitted basic human rights because they were enslaved.

The Roman culture survived by slavery and the exploitation of the poor.

That was the very thing the Jesus preached against.

The Church knew that inherently, slavery was an abuse of the principle that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves.

But the call to action is voluntary and Paul has no legal authority to free this run away slave.

So he sends him back to his master appeal to his conscience to do the right thing and free the slave.

I like the way Paul ends the letter with the request to prepare a room for him to visit. In other words, Paul is going to check up on him and see if this person’s actions meet with their language. Does Philemon walk the walk or just talk the talk?

I titled the sermon, Applying the principles of love.

I want to remind everyone that God has given the Holy Spirit to everyone who believes in Jesus and the Spirit is there to lead us to love one another.

When Jesus was talking with an educated scholar and they were debating what the most important command of the entire Bible was, Jesus answered with two commands. Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself.

In Matthew 25, Jesus shows us that we love God by loving others. 1 John tells us that we can’t see God, but we can see others and we love God by loving others.

What am I saying?

The OT is full of commands that are derived from the principle that we are to love God and others. And all the Jews had to do in order to justify their greed was figure out ways to technically obey without actually obeying.

They came up with 13,000 laws to validate the 1,100 in the OT when they created the Talmud.

It is a beautiful work, but all of that showed us one thing. We can’t do it in our own power.

The Jews had a law that they were supposed to follow and instead they got greedy and selfish and refused to care for the least of these in their midst.

Jesus’ hope was that people would be filled with the Holy Spirit.

How does that happen?

We confess Jesus and we are filled with the Spirit. I am filled by the Spirit whenever we partake together in the bread and cup. Because in so doing, we are confessing Jesus as our way to love one another.