Read John 5:1-9 and Acts 16:9-15
Just before today’s passage from Acts we read these verses:
6Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. 7When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.
Interesting isn’t it that though Paul and his friends were trying to do the work of God, taking the Good News about Jesus Christ to those who needed to know how very much God loves them, that they were stopped by the Holy Spirit from going into Asia. How do we know what is God’s will in our lives and how do we do it? How can we discern what it is that God wants us to do at any time in our lives individually or gathered together as the church in this place at this time?
These are questions we all struggle with. In fact, our church is struggling with a question of what to do about our location of worship and the time we will have worship services. We are talking with University Temple United Methodist Church about using their very nice chapel for our worship services. The chapel seats 160 persons in easily moved and very comfortable individual padded chairs. The chapel has both a piano and an organ. There is storage for our supplies. There are very nice fellowship and meeting facilities next to the chapel. There is plenty of free parking on Sundays. The church is on a busy bus route on 15th Ave across from the University of Washington. We could move our worship services from 1:00 PM to as early as 11:30 AM. The cost of leasing their facility would be the same as we currently pay here at Temple de Hirsch Sinai.
University Temple UMC desires to have a relationship with us. They want us to share their space with them and they have actively courted us by coming to us with this proposal. They see this as their way of helping us yet realize that it would also benefit them by providing additional income for their congregation. I have met with members of their facility usage committee and with their pastor, Rev. May Boyd, who is a friend. All of them want us to come and worship in their building. If we ever wanted it and could afford it they even have office space to lease to us. They want us to think about joint worship services during holy days at Advent and Christmas, and Lent and Easter. They have invited us to participate in their children’s Sunday School and in their adult education programs. They see this as a step toward them and us moving into joint worship facilities together if and when the University District Ecumenical Campus is built which would offer us a permanent base of operations and worship space. Even if the UDECC project is never built there is the possibility of this becoming a very long term relationship.
Many of you have expressed great concern about the late hour of our worship service and how you must often make a decision to not come to worship in order to go out to dinner with family and friends, or participate in another activity taking place on Sunday afternoon. Having the freedom to move worship services to an earlier time will help many of you not have to make the decision to choose between church and family and friends. You will be able to do both. Many of us would like to extend the fellowship time by going out to dinner together on a Sunday afternoon after worship. Moving our worship time earlier will allow us to the opportunity to build stronger fellowship ties with each other.
Pastor Michelle will meet with their facility committee this week to discuss any questions they might have as well as to share with them how we now use this building on Sundays. That committee will then take the matter to their board who will make a formal decision about inviting us to share their facility.
Our board will hold its next board meeting at U. Temple on May 23 so the board and anyone else can tour the chapel and fellowship space we would be using. On June 6 we will hold a forum discussion after fellowship time to listen to your opinions on this decision. At its next meeting on June 13 our board will make its decision about moving our worship services to U. Temple or staying at Temple de Hirsch. Please begin talking together about this opportunity and how you feel about it with each other and with our pastors and board members. This is a decision we all must participate in and hopefully we all will feel that God is leading us forward together to new opportunities and possibilities. Personally, I think this situation offers us great potential for increased attendance and participation by those who might not choose to come at 1:00 PM on a Sunday afternoon.
Some want us to stay in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood because it is the traditional Gayborhood. However, few of our current members and friends actually live in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood. The truth is that our people come from all over the metropolitan region with many driving 30 minutes or more to get here. They would still drive to get to worship services no matter where we choose to have worship. Those that use the buses would simply have to change routes. The one or two who walk may need for others of us to help them get to church. Our church isn’t linked to one and only one neighborhood: we must have a vision that includes all of metropolitan Seattle and surrounding communities.
The fact of the matter is that those who come to our church are more interested in relationships than they are in location. Think about it. Why did you come to church here? It’s seldom about the building or the location of the building. Most of you found out where this Queer Church was meeting and you came. You would have gone wherever it had been located because you came seeking relationships, seeking friendship, seeking to share a worship experience with like-minded persons.
Research has proven over and over again that the primary reason someone comes to church is to find friends, to build a caring community with others. We should be able to do that anywhere we decide to have worship services, mostly because what happens in a church isn’t only about what happens in the worship service, but also what happens beyond the worship service as we engage ourselves in each others’ lives and care for each other between worship services.
We must, like Paul and Silas, listen to the Spirit of God speaking in our hearts and chose to follow the guidance of the Spirit. Like us, Paul had other plans in mind but the Spirit of Christ stopped him from pursuing those plans and sent him in a different directions. Paul found the truth of this in the relationships he developed with other people who helped him discern the will of God for his life. We should do the same thing. Open ourselves up to the creative God who puts us into relationship with other people all the time. We must be ready for the unexpected gifts God wants to give to us when we enter into relationship with others.
Paul’s habit was to seek out those who worshipped in the Synagogues. In other words, Paul usually went to the Jews first, those who already worshipped God but might not yet know about the life of Jesus Christ. When they get to Philippi they find there isn’t a synagogue so they go to the river outside the gates of the city, a place of prayer, where they hope to find a group of belivers gathered together worshipping God and studying God’s Word. But what they find is the unexpected. They find a group of women praying together and studying the scriptures of their faith, but these aren’t Jewish women, these are women who are referred to in the scriptures as God-fearers, that is those who believe in the same God as the Jews and who are studying the Jewish scriptures. Very uncharacteristically, and very much against tradition and the idea of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time, Paul and Silas sit down with the women there on the banks of the river outside of the city.
Outside of the gates of the city, outside of the usual boundaries and places of worship they had expected to find, even outside of the usual gender group they had expected to connect to. Paul and Silas open themselves up to the leadership of the Spirit of God. We don’t know who most of these women were, but I might suspect that among them are widows, those who have been excluded and ignored by the rest of society because they no longer have a husband who can provide economically for them. Some might be other women of wealth and influence who know and follow the leadership of Lydia. Don’t miss the truth here that seeking out women would not have been something that Paul would normally have done, because as a devout Pharisee he would have been obligated to follow the law and avoid public conversation with women. For a man to talk to a woman he was not related to by blood or marriage was to assume that you were asking her to prostitute herself for a sexual relationship. Why else would you talk to a woman you weren’t related to? When we see how Paul is changing his behavior as he develops relationships with non-jews, with gentiles, we begin to see just how far Paul has come from his religious roots as he follows Jesus who broke down all the barriers between God and persons and between persons themselves, Jesus who always goes outside the gates of the city to those who live on the edges of society.
Among these women is a very prominent woman, Lydia, apparently a wealthy woman of some means who is also a maker and seller of purple fabric which only the upper class and rich were allowed to wear. She is the owner of her own business, a leader in the community. She is also a believer in God and she opens her heart up to the message Paul preaches and quickly becomes a believer in Jesus Christ. What is significant is that following her conversion to faith in God through Christ, her whole family follows her in professing faith in God through Christ, a very typical pattern of faith at this time. If she were married, then this verse implies that even her husband followed her leadership and became a Christian. It wouldn’t have been so unusual at this time for the father to converted and then the whole family converting. But in this situation we have the very unusual case of a woman setting the example and others from her household joining her in this new faith.
Lydia practices radical hospitality and she opens her home to Paul and his co-workers and they apparently go to stay with her despite the rules and regulations that say that a Jew cannot go into the home of a gentile person. Relationships change people and relationships change the traditional rules we thought we were suppose to follow blindly.
We know that her home becomes a house-church for Philippi and though we do not know if Lydia became a primary leader of the church in that city, though I suspect she was since it met in her home. We do know that later in this same chapter after Paul and his companions are arrested and put in jail, that upon their miraculous release through an earthquake that frees them, they return to Lydia’s home to rest up before resuming their journey. Lydia provides for Paul and his companions through her resources and through her relationships with others in her community. She is in fact the first European convert to the Christian faith, and the founder of a church for that city that worshipped in her home.
Today we celebrate Mother’s Day. We remember Lydia, but especially we remember the great women of faith who have cared for us in our own lives: Women who birthed us, who raised us, who gave us their love and care, who built loving relationships with us. Women who had enormous influence on our lives often because of the deep and abiding relationship they had with God.
I want you to honor all the women in your life today who helped you to become the person you are today, not just the woman who may have given birth to you, but all the women who had significant influence in your life because of their relationship with you, because of what they did to help you. I look around this room today and I see so many of you who do for me those things that my own mother, God rest her soul, can no longer do for me. I see Gloria who worries that I should be taking better care of myself. I see Lee who encourages me and lifts me up in so many different ways. I see Michelle who prays for me and who is honest with me always even when I don’t want her to be so honest. I see the ever-smiling Demi who I know will love me and hug me and affirm me and make me feel good about myself. I see the gentle, loving Deb who is so very willing to help me in so many wonderful ways.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I am the person I am today because of the love, care, support, and encouragement of the people gathered in this room to worship today. You are my mothers, and fathers, and brothers, and sisters in the faith. You are the ones I seek out to build relationships with, to help me discern what God’s will is in my life and in the life of our church.
Paul and Silas did not know that there would be a Lydia when they got to Philippi, but thank God they found Lydia and her group of women on the bank of that river outside of the city that day. For through that chance meeting God grew a great church in the city of Philippi one that Paul later writes to by saying, “Rejoice, again I say rejoice,” and “make my joy complete.” Paul celebrated his relationship with these members and friends of the church in Philippi just like I celebrate my relationships with you, the members and friends of the church in Seattle. Very simply, I rejoice in you because you make my joy complete in so many amazing loving and caring actions and words. You are a miracle in my life and I thank God for you daily.
We have been taught over the years through other less than perfect relationships we have had that we might not be acceptable to God or at least to those who identify themselves to us as God’s people. I was raised in a fundamentalist religious home where I was taught that any Queer person who wasn’t heterosexual was an affront to God and considered a sinner worthy of eternal punishment in hell. That scared the dickens out of me because I knew I was gay and I also knew that there wasn’t anything I could do to change that fact about my life.
I internalized the homophobia of others and it literally condemned me to a life of depression and self-loathing. I tried to do the things I was told to do to change myself so that I would be acceptable to these so-called Christians and their crooked understanding of God. And when trying to do the so-called right thing, in the so-called right way, at the so-called right time didn’t result in any change in my life, I was made to feel that was also my fault because I just didn’t have enough faith in God. Listen to me, dear friends, those kinds of religious relationships are toxic, they are poison. Those kinds of religious relationship will literally kill you or cause you to take your own life. If you find yourself in those kinds of relationships, please, get out! Respect yourself. Love yourself. Leave the abuse behind and move into the future God wants to give you that is full of hope and joy.
Now, if you didn’t know this about me before now, please don’t gasp in amazement, but I’m a rather stubborn person. I will let others rule my life only for so long before I have to escape from their clutches and figure things out for myself. I had to come understand who I was and how I was suppose to live my own life in my own way by experiencing a relationship with God through Christ that was based on my own study of the life of Christ and what Christ taught. In other words, I couldn’t rely on anyone else’s relationship with God; I had to build my own relationship with God.
Luckily for me God did put some wonderful people in my life and through those remarkable relationships I discovered that God loved me exactly the way God made me: gay. My sexuality had nothing to do with my relationship with God. God already knew I was gay before God created me and if God knew that and accepted it and made me that way, then I should just accept that fact myself and listen to God who loves me and stop listening to all those other people who didn’t even know me, and kept telling me that they loved me but not the sin in my life (even though, between you and me, being gay isn’t a sin). I had to escape from those people who were misinterpreting the Bible and using their misinterpretations to condemn me because I was outside the gates, outside their personal boundaries of acceptability.
We are often taught that understanding God's will in our lives and doing it is a matter of following the rules, keeping tradition, doing the right thing (as defined for us by others) in the right way and at the right time. This has resulted in the rejection and condemnation of many who should be hearing from the church that God loves and accepts them exactly the way that God created them.
Few so-called fundamentalist Christians will come to the aid of those who they believe are outside of the will of God in their lives as defined by their own faulty interpretation of scriptures. Fundamentalist Christians will tell you that the scriptures have always been interpreted the same way, their way, and that you and I are out of God’s will when we say that there might be a different way of understanding the same scripture passage. This kind of reasoning in ancient times was used to condemn the handicapped and disabled persons because they must be that way because of some sin in their lives. We now know that kind of interpretation of scripture is not what God intended for us to understand. The same kind of misinterpretation of scripture has been used to support slavery, to keep women from assuming equality with men, to separate the races, to keep as many people as possible outside of the gates.
In John 5:1-9 Jesus encounters a man who has been paralyzed for 38 years. The tradition is that when the waters of the pool he is lying beside are troubled that those who are first to lower themselves into the water will receive healing. But the man is paralyzed and no one will help him get into the pool of water. He can't get healing because he can't do things in the right way at the right time.
Jesus comes into his life and Jesus tells him to forget about doing the right thing in the right way at the right time. Jesus offers him both a relationship and healing. Jesus helps the man by caring for the man, by healing him, by doing for him what he can do within his abilities. We should follow the example of Christ. We should care for others in loving, considerate ways that lift persons up out of their predicaments and gives to them the opportunity of a life full of rejoicing and hope. Rejoice again I say rejoice. Make my joy complete.
As I examine this passage from John and from our other lectionary passages this week I am impressed that knowing and following God's will has more to do with our relationships than with rules, regulations, or theologies. God leads us by giving us relationships with people who guide us with their wisdom, their care, their love and their kindness. God calls upon us to be and do the same for others.
We are spiritually healed, not according to the rules we have been taught to follow, but by trusting someone who stands beside us in love, just like Jesus stood beside the paralyzed man, just like Lydia stood beside Paul.
Who do you choose to stand beside today? Into whose life can you bring hope and joy? And while you are helping others, don’t forget to allow others to come into your life and bring to you the hope and joy that God wants you have through your relationship with them. You deserve it! Don’t take anything less.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Are You Wearing Your ID Badge? Easter 5C
Scripture: Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:34-35
Who is a Christian? What are some significant traits of a Christian that would make you observe of another person that he or she is a Christian?
In other words, exactly what makes a Christian different from other people?
When I was growing up it seemed to me that people defined who a Christian was by what he or she didn’t do. My parents taught me that a Christian didn’t gamble, smoke, dance, or drink or go with girls or boys who did. We couldn’t go to movies, unless it was a Disney cartoon. In fact, we couldn’t play real cards, though Rook was okay. I remember my parents clipping the curtains together on our windows when we played Rook just so no one walking by might look inside and see that we were playing cards. Of course that person would have had to be ten feet tall to look into the windows of the home we lived in at that time.
Yes, there were some things that Christians did do that also defined them as being one of the followers of Christ. Let me remember, now. Oh, yeah, you went to church everytime the doors were open for any worship service, bible study, prayer group, or committee meeting. And, if you weren’t there, then everyone else prayed for you to get right with God, because you must have some kind of sin in your life that was keeping you away from God and the church. If it was your job then they would pray for God to get you a new job that allowed you to be a better Christian.
Christ gathered his disciples together on that final night with them to hold that last supper with them before he was arrested and crucified. Normally someone would greet you at the door, help you remove your shoes and then wash your dusty and dirty feet. It was a sign of hospitality and comfort when you entered the home of another. This was the duty of a servant, a slave in the household, to care for the grimy feet of the travelers who had come into the home from the dusty street. But not a single one of those disciples would lower himself to wash the feet of the others. That would have said to the world that the one doing the washing was inferior and that the other disciples were superior to them and to put it bluntly, none of them were going to go there. If you recall they had had already had disagreements about who was going to be the most important person in Christ’s new Community when he established it. Christ had told them that it wasn’t going to be that way in his new Community, that the first would be last and the last would be first, that they should be servants to each other and stop wanting the most important positions of authority for themselves. But they didn’t learn the lesson, because their hearts weren’t ready for the truth of what Christ was trying to explain to them and to demonstrate for them by his words and his actions.
So he gives them another lesson by what he does for them that evening. They won’t condescend to wash each other’s feet, so he takes off his outer garments and wraps a towel around his waist and taking a basin of water he goes to each one of them and washes their feet. Their Master Teacher becomes their servant taking care of their needs in a loving, kind action of comfort and care. Then he gets up and dresses himself and turns to them and says: “A New command I give to you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”
How would you have felt had you been one of the disciples in that room that night when Jesus washed your feet and then said these words?
You have to be careful what you pray for. If you ask God to give you patience then don’t be too surprised when God finds ways to test your patience with other people just to see if you are using the resources God wants you to tap into to actually be a more patient person. And if you are a pastor writing a sermon on loving others then get ready to have everything you believe about loving others tested during that week. Perhaps God is saying, “Well, Ray, it’s pretty easy to write out what you should believe, what you should tell others they should believe, but maybe, Ray, just maybe, it’s better if you live out the lessons that you need to preach on, just to be sure that you’ve learned them well enough to teach them to others.” Don’t you just love God for being that way with us?
I’ve had my patience and my love tested this week by some pretty difficult people, no body any of you know, so relax, I’m talking about you. I work a retail job and interact with the public, most of whom are very loving and very kind toward retail clerks and salespeople. Now, most of the time I enjoy my retail sales work and I get to meet a lot of interesting people, however, every once and a while, someone comes in who tests my desire to be patient and kind and loving. God sent several of those to help me with this week’s sermon. I won’t bore you with the stories, but suffice it to say that God impressed upon me that love is more often an action I take, something I do, and not necessarily something I feel. The feeling may come later or never at all, but the loving action creates life and hope where it might not have existed before.
Love changes situations. Love changes people. Love changes the world. What kind of love actions did you take this past week that changed the world for someone else?
We pretty much know when someone else isn’t treating us in a loving manner, or at least we know when we aren’t feeling the love flowing from someone else toward us. But do we usually realize when we aren’t being loving toward another person, or do we excuse our unloving behavior toward others with logical reasoning that allows us to excuse ourselves from following this commandment of Christ to love others exactly in the same way as Christ loves us?
The first Christians had this kind of a problem. They thought they knew what it meant to love others, but they discovered that God’s kind of love, the very kind of love God wants us to share with others, went way beyond anything they had ever imagined for themselves.
They had been with Jesus when he walked on this earth and demonstrated for them just how wide God’s love was as he welcomed those who were outcasts from society into his life and cared for them in amazing ways: the handicapped, the diseased, the widows, the orphans, prostitutes, and even tax collectors who were in league with the Roman Empire to oppress the people, even healing the male servant, some would say lover, of a Roman commander, a non-jew, the very person in charge of making sure that the people stayed under the military rule of Rome. Jesus crossed every boundary line that you could imagine in taking God’s love directly to persons that others thought didn’t deserve any kind of love, much less acceptance by God. People knew who was in and who was out and how things worked in society until Jesus came along and turned their world upside down with his radical thinking, subversive speech, and his revolutionary actions. Jesus was upsetting the status-quo and it’s no wonder they set out to kill him as a danger to society.
600 years before Jesus their nation had been defeated in battle by a foreign power and their most educated and able people carried off to another country to become the servants and workers for their oppressors. They realized that they were going to be absorbed into that society until nothing was left of their own unique identity and so they made some changes in their religious law and practice. They formed the first synagogues bringing together as few as ten men or families to make a worshipping group. They made laws that said you couldn’t eat with anyone other than people like yourself from your own group and made more laws about what food you could eat and couldn’t eat. They made laws about who you could marry and couldn’t marry so that the bloodline of your family would be true and not contaminated. Keeping the laws became a sign of who you were and what you were and everyone knew you by what you did or didn’t do. These changes to the law and the religious life of the Jewish nation meant that they have survived as a separate, identifiable people throughout most of their history and into this day. The idea was there that the only person who could worship God and serve God was a Jew. No one else could do this, unless he or she first converted to being a Jew.
But when Jesus came that all began to change. Jesus opened up the idea of who was acceptable to God and Jesus demonstrated by caring for Jew and Gentile alike that God would no longer allow such arbitrary human rules to prevent God from taking care of God’s human creation, no matter who that might be, or where they might live, or how they might light live their lives. Jesus ended the divisions between people.
So you would think that after living with Jesus for three years, after listening to him teach, seeing him care for everyone without question, that the disciples were a group that opened their arms and hearts and welcomed everyone into their new little church? But you would be wrong. That’s not what happened. They continued to believe that the only persons who could truly worship God and serve God were Jews. And therefore only Jews could become Christians. Nobody else could be a Christian, a follower of Christ, unless he or she were a Jew or converted to being Jewish, abiding by all the rules and regulations of what it meant to be a complete Jew.
But God has a way of shaking up our misconceptions and attitudes. So God blesses Peter with a dream in which God sets food down all kinds of forbidden foods in front of Peter on a picnic blanket and says to Peter, “Take and eat.” But Peter, being the good Jewish boy who has learned all the lessons his parents had taught him says to God, “No, thank you. These are the foods I’ve been taught that we can’t eat. To eat such food would be a sin against you, God. I couldn’t do that. I love you too much God to sin against you by breaking the rules.” And God says, to Peter, “If I have made it acceptable, then you, Peter, have no business calling it unacceptable.” But Peter keeps refusing to take the food that God is giving to him.
Have you ever done that to God? Told God you knew better than God does what you need in your life, what you need God to do for you, what you want from God? We get very arrogant and self-inflated by ourselves to the point that we feel we have a right to tell God just how wrong God is and how it would be so much better for us and everyone else if God would just do things our way for a change. But God has an ingenious plan and a imaginative purpose for all of us. If we just get our selfish selves out of God’s way then God can bring about a miracle for others through us and even for us.
This isn’t so foreign to our experience now or over the last 50 years. I’m a child of the 50’s and 60’s who was taught to sing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I was taught that song by people who also thought it was wrong for those same little red, and yellow, black and white children to be in the same classroom or same church Sunday School room for fear that they might grow up and intermarry with each other. In other words, “Only good white children could really serve God.” Not so much different from Peter. And in many ways, it isn’t so much different today as we exclude those who don’t measure up to our standards from our churches and from our loving embrace. We make decisions about loving others every day: I’ll love her, but not him. I’ll accept him, but not her. Jesus didn’t leave the decision about who to love to you and me. Jesus just said, “Love each other like I have loved you.” No exceptions. No exclusions. Obey me. This is my commandment to you. Love each other.
After his vision, there comes a knock on his door and a messenger has been sent from Cornelius, a gentile, a non-jew, who wants to know how to become a Christian. An angel of God has told Cornelius to go and ask specifically for Peter. Peter, having been prepared by God with the vision of God’s definition of acceptability, goes with the men and preaches and teaches to them and low and behold they believe in God and become followers of Christ in the same way that Peter has seen Jewish persons become followers of Christ. There is no difference between them, for a follower of Christ isn’t defined by his or her ancestry or former religious background, but only by his or her relationship to God in Christ.
More specifically, a Christian, a follower of Christ, is defined by his or her ability to love others like Christ loved us. Peter learned to love others like Jesus loved them regardless of who they were, where they came from, or how they currently lived their lives. Peter learned how to cross the same boundaries that God crosses to claim God’s precious creation for God’s self. God will not allow anyone to be outside of God’s gracious love.
Margaret Guenther, director for the Center for Spirituality at General Theological Seminary says that like the rest of us in this age of required identification cards and badges she carries an ID card with her picture on it so she can be identified. Like you and I, without the ID card she can’t rent a video or cash a check. But she goes on to say, “As Christians we identify ourselves, too. We put crosses on our buildings or wear crosses on chains around our necks. Yet according to Jesus, we don’t need these emblems. We have a permanent, universally valid ID card (a badge if you will)—we can be spotted anywhere Christ people if we love one another.”
Do others see Jesus in you today? Are you wearing your ID Badge of love?
Who is a Christian? What are some significant traits of a Christian that would make you observe of another person that he or she is a Christian?
In other words, exactly what makes a Christian different from other people?
When I was growing up it seemed to me that people defined who a Christian was by what he or she didn’t do. My parents taught me that a Christian didn’t gamble, smoke, dance, or drink or go with girls or boys who did. We couldn’t go to movies, unless it was a Disney cartoon. In fact, we couldn’t play real cards, though Rook was okay. I remember my parents clipping the curtains together on our windows when we played Rook just so no one walking by might look inside and see that we were playing cards. Of course that person would have had to be ten feet tall to look into the windows of the home we lived in at that time.
Yes, there were some things that Christians did do that also defined them as being one of the followers of Christ. Let me remember, now. Oh, yeah, you went to church everytime the doors were open for any worship service, bible study, prayer group, or committee meeting. And, if you weren’t there, then everyone else prayed for you to get right with God, because you must have some kind of sin in your life that was keeping you away from God and the church. If it was your job then they would pray for God to get you a new job that allowed you to be a better Christian.
Christ gathered his disciples together on that final night with them to hold that last supper with them before he was arrested and crucified. Normally someone would greet you at the door, help you remove your shoes and then wash your dusty and dirty feet. It was a sign of hospitality and comfort when you entered the home of another. This was the duty of a servant, a slave in the household, to care for the grimy feet of the travelers who had come into the home from the dusty street. But not a single one of those disciples would lower himself to wash the feet of the others. That would have said to the world that the one doing the washing was inferior and that the other disciples were superior to them and to put it bluntly, none of them were going to go there. If you recall they had had already had disagreements about who was going to be the most important person in Christ’s new Community when he established it. Christ had told them that it wasn’t going to be that way in his new Community, that the first would be last and the last would be first, that they should be servants to each other and stop wanting the most important positions of authority for themselves. But they didn’t learn the lesson, because their hearts weren’t ready for the truth of what Christ was trying to explain to them and to demonstrate for them by his words and his actions.
So he gives them another lesson by what he does for them that evening. They won’t condescend to wash each other’s feet, so he takes off his outer garments and wraps a towel around his waist and taking a basin of water he goes to each one of them and washes their feet. Their Master Teacher becomes their servant taking care of their needs in a loving, kind action of comfort and care. Then he gets up and dresses himself and turns to them and says: “A New command I give to you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”
How would you have felt had you been one of the disciples in that room that night when Jesus washed your feet and then said these words?
You have to be careful what you pray for. If you ask God to give you patience then don’t be too surprised when God finds ways to test your patience with other people just to see if you are using the resources God wants you to tap into to actually be a more patient person. And if you are a pastor writing a sermon on loving others then get ready to have everything you believe about loving others tested during that week. Perhaps God is saying, “Well, Ray, it’s pretty easy to write out what you should believe, what you should tell others they should believe, but maybe, Ray, just maybe, it’s better if you live out the lessons that you need to preach on, just to be sure that you’ve learned them well enough to teach them to others.” Don’t you just love God for being that way with us?
I’ve had my patience and my love tested this week by some pretty difficult people, no body any of you know, so relax, I’m talking about you. I work a retail job and interact with the public, most of whom are very loving and very kind toward retail clerks and salespeople. Now, most of the time I enjoy my retail sales work and I get to meet a lot of interesting people, however, every once and a while, someone comes in who tests my desire to be patient and kind and loving. God sent several of those to help me with this week’s sermon. I won’t bore you with the stories, but suffice it to say that God impressed upon me that love is more often an action I take, something I do, and not necessarily something I feel. The feeling may come later or never at all, but the loving action creates life and hope where it might not have existed before.
Love changes situations. Love changes people. Love changes the world. What kind of love actions did you take this past week that changed the world for someone else?
We pretty much know when someone else isn’t treating us in a loving manner, or at least we know when we aren’t feeling the love flowing from someone else toward us. But do we usually realize when we aren’t being loving toward another person, or do we excuse our unloving behavior toward others with logical reasoning that allows us to excuse ourselves from following this commandment of Christ to love others exactly in the same way as Christ loves us?
The first Christians had this kind of a problem. They thought they knew what it meant to love others, but they discovered that God’s kind of love, the very kind of love God wants us to share with others, went way beyond anything they had ever imagined for themselves.
They had been with Jesus when he walked on this earth and demonstrated for them just how wide God’s love was as he welcomed those who were outcasts from society into his life and cared for them in amazing ways: the handicapped, the diseased, the widows, the orphans, prostitutes, and even tax collectors who were in league with the Roman Empire to oppress the people, even healing the male servant, some would say lover, of a Roman commander, a non-jew, the very person in charge of making sure that the people stayed under the military rule of Rome. Jesus crossed every boundary line that you could imagine in taking God’s love directly to persons that others thought didn’t deserve any kind of love, much less acceptance by God. People knew who was in and who was out and how things worked in society until Jesus came along and turned their world upside down with his radical thinking, subversive speech, and his revolutionary actions. Jesus was upsetting the status-quo and it’s no wonder they set out to kill him as a danger to society.
600 years before Jesus their nation had been defeated in battle by a foreign power and their most educated and able people carried off to another country to become the servants and workers for their oppressors. They realized that they were going to be absorbed into that society until nothing was left of their own unique identity and so they made some changes in their religious law and practice. They formed the first synagogues bringing together as few as ten men or families to make a worshipping group. They made laws that said you couldn’t eat with anyone other than people like yourself from your own group and made more laws about what food you could eat and couldn’t eat. They made laws about who you could marry and couldn’t marry so that the bloodline of your family would be true and not contaminated. Keeping the laws became a sign of who you were and what you were and everyone knew you by what you did or didn’t do. These changes to the law and the religious life of the Jewish nation meant that they have survived as a separate, identifiable people throughout most of their history and into this day. The idea was there that the only person who could worship God and serve God was a Jew. No one else could do this, unless he or she first converted to being a Jew.
But when Jesus came that all began to change. Jesus opened up the idea of who was acceptable to God and Jesus demonstrated by caring for Jew and Gentile alike that God would no longer allow such arbitrary human rules to prevent God from taking care of God’s human creation, no matter who that might be, or where they might live, or how they might light live their lives. Jesus ended the divisions between people.
So you would think that after living with Jesus for three years, after listening to him teach, seeing him care for everyone without question, that the disciples were a group that opened their arms and hearts and welcomed everyone into their new little church? But you would be wrong. That’s not what happened. They continued to believe that the only persons who could truly worship God and serve God were Jews. And therefore only Jews could become Christians. Nobody else could be a Christian, a follower of Christ, unless he or she were a Jew or converted to being Jewish, abiding by all the rules and regulations of what it meant to be a complete Jew.
But God has a way of shaking up our misconceptions and attitudes. So God blesses Peter with a dream in which God sets food down all kinds of forbidden foods in front of Peter on a picnic blanket and says to Peter, “Take and eat.” But Peter, being the good Jewish boy who has learned all the lessons his parents had taught him says to God, “No, thank you. These are the foods I’ve been taught that we can’t eat. To eat such food would be a sin against you, God. I couldn’t do that. I love you too much God to sin against you by breaking the rules.” And God says, to Peter, “If I have made it acceptable, then you, Peter, have no business calling it unacceptable.” But Peter keeps refusing to take the food that God is giving to him.
Have you ever done that to God? Told God you knew better than God does what you need in your life, what you need God to do for you, what you want from God? We get very arrogant and self-inflated by ourselves to the point that we feel we have a right to tell God just how wrong God is and how it would be so much better for us and everyone else if God would just do things our way for a change. But God has an ingenious plan and a imaginative purpose for all of us. If we just get our selfish selves out of God’s way then God can bring about a miracle for others through us and even for us.
This isn’t so foreign to our experience now or over the last 50 years. I’m a child of the 50’s and 60’s who was taught to sing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I was taught that song by people who also thought it was wrong for those same little red, and yellow, black and white children to be in the same classroom or same church Sunday School room for fear that they might grow up and intermarry with each other. In other words, “Only good white children could really serve God.” Not so much different from Peter. And in many ways, it isn’t so much different today as we exclude those who don’t measure up to our standards from our churches and from our loving embrace. We make decisions about loving others every day: I’ll love her, but not him. I’ll accept him, but not her. Jesus didn’t leave the decision about who to love to you and me. Jesus just said, “Love each other like I have loved you.” No exceptions. No exclusions. Obey me. This is my commandment to you. Love each other.
After his vision, there comes a knock on his door and a messenger has been sent from Cornelius, a gentile, a non-jew, who wants to know how to become a Christian. An angel of God has told Cornelius to go and ask specifically for Peter. Peter, having been prepared by God with the vision of God’s definition of acceptability, goes with the men and preaches and teaches to them and low and behold they believe in God and become followers of Christ in the same way that Peter has seen Jewish persons become followers of Christ. There is no difference between them, for a follower of Christ isn’t defined by his or her ancestry or former religious background, but only by his or her relationship to God in Christ.
More specifically, a Christian, a follower of Christ, is defined by his or her ability to love others like Christ loved us. Peter learned to love others like Jesus loved them regardless of who they were, where they came from, or how they currently lived their lives. Peter learned how to cross the same boundaries that God crosses to claim God’s precious creation for God’s self. God will not allow anyone to be outside of God’s gracious love.
Margaret Guenther, director for the Center for Spirituality at General Theological Seminary says that like the rest of us in this age of required identification cards and badges she carries an ID card with her picture on it so she can be identified. Like you and I, without the ID card she can’t rent a video or cash a check. But she goes on to say, “As Christians we identify ourselves, too. We put crosses on our buildings or wear crosses on chains around our necks. Yet according to Jesus, we don’t need these emblems. We have a permanent, universally valid ID card (a badge if you will)—we can be spotted anywhere Christ people if we love one another.”
Do others see Jesus in you today? Are you wearing your ID Badge of love?
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