June 27, 2004

Rev. Marietta T. Smith

Scripture: I Corinthians 13, Matthew 22:34-40

As we all know, our church has been engaged for some time in a study of natural church development in which we have surveyed our church life to assess our strengths, or maximum factors, as they call them, and our weaknesses, or minimum factors. The purpose of the study is to turn the weaknesses into strengths and to make the strengths stronger. In the first study, we discovered a weakness in passionate spirituality and, I believe it was, need-oriented evangelism. And then in the second study we discovered a weakness in loving relationships.

At our January 2000 planning retreat, the Reverend Claude Taylor was with us and he gave us a list of the eight characteristics of a healthy church, and I realized, as I was preparing this sermon, that there are scripture references. (I don’t know why I never saw that before now, but there are scripture references that go along with each of the eight characteristics of a healthy church.) You would do well to get a copy of this and read those scripture references and what they had to say about empowering leadership:

Two weeks ago when I preached, I preached on becoming fruitful disciples, and I mentioned the fact that everything we do has to be rooted and grounded in love — that the first fruit of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life that Paul mentions in Galatians, chapter 5, is love, the fruit of love. And it is this love that nourishes and promotes the development of the rest of the fruit that Paul mentions there. Hence the sermon on The Greatest Commandment, so will I read the text from Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 22, beginning at verse 34.

The last chapters of Matthew’s gospel account of the life and work of Jesus contain many instances where the Pharisees and Sadducees tried to trip Jesus into compromise. They were forever trying to cause Him to say something that they could label as blasphemy. And we know that Jesus didn’t fit in with the religious leaders of the day. He was a kind, compassionate (tape change). . . . . And of course His parents said, “Now Jesus, you know we had to go back to Nazareth. Why did you not come on and go with us?”

And He said to them, “Do you not know or understand that I should be about My Father’s business?”

His Father’s business, as He said in Matthew 5, was to fulfill the law. He said, Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets? I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.

Jesus fulfilled the law in the sense that He gave it His full meaning. He emphasized the deep underlying principle of the total commitment to it, rather than the external acknowledgement and obedience. And this was upsetting to the self-righteous Pharisees and they tried many times to trap Him. We discovered in our text that Jesus has just silenced the Sadducees’ question about the Resurrection, so the Pharisees took up the quest of entrapment by asking Him which was the greatest commandment of the law. Now the Pharisees considered the law to be the first five books of the Bible of the Jewish scriptures. And if you read, starting with Exodus, chapter 20, where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, and read on through Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, you find the interpretation of what those Ten Commandments mean. But the Pharisees and Sadducees took them to excess and required strict obedience to over five hundred rules just for observing the Sabbath, not to mention how many rules for observing the other nine commandments. Most of the observances of the law were in name only. They were first class hypocrites when it came to the deep underlying principles of the law. They followed the letter of the law but they ignored the spirit of it. All that they did was to be seen and heard of men and to get brownie points with the Lord.

Jesus was aware of this superficial religiosity, so his answer to their question is not surprising: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. (And Mark adds: With all your strength.) And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.

If you turn back to Exodus 20 and read again the Ten Commandments, we find that the first four are indeed commandments of how to love God and how to honor God.

You know, strict Jews were afraid even to whisper the name Yahweh, for fear of profaning it, so when they came to that name in the scriptures they would be silent in that space.

So, Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with your total being.” And if we are loving God with our total being then we will be honoring Him and not making idols and not misusing His name. Our commitment to God through Christ will be deep and true. And this love of God will manifest itself in our actions toward others.

Commitments Five through Ten are commandments to love others.

Honor your Father and your Mother. We just celebrated Mother’s Day in May and Father’s Day last Sunday. How many of us really prize highly and care for and show love and respect for our parents?

You shall not murder. The Hebrew for this verb usually refers to premeditated or deliberate acts.

You shall not commit adultery. That’s a sin against the spouse as well as a sin against God.

You shall not steal. Stealing is stealing, is stealing, is stealing, is stealing. By any other name it is still stealing.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. And that doesn’t just mean testimony in court. First Corinthians 13 says that real Christian love does not rejoice in the bad things about somebody, but rejoices in the truth about them, the good things.

You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor. Some of you ladies, when you have on something pretty, I say, “Coveting is a sin, but honest confession is good for the soul.” Well, “Thou shall not covet” means we shall not desire anything our neighbor has with any evil motivation.

Jesus said to break God’s commandments inwardly is the same as breaking them outwardly, that even a murderous look, thought, or a lustful look is just as if we had committed the actual act.

Now Jesus never called anybody a sinner, but He did call the Pharisees and the teachers of the law hypocrites, and snakes and vipers, and He told them to clean up their act, to clean up their insides and then the outsides would be clean as well. So Jesus upsets the Pharisees’ Little-God-in-a-Box theology by saying that all their many rules of social behavior can be summed up in two: Love God with your total being and love your neighbor as yourself. And this love is what we know as agape love. It is that love that is an act of the will rather than the result of a feeling — love that is a deliberate choice. It is the kind of love that looks beyond the ordinary. It is the kind of love that moves Mother Theresa to gather leprosy victims in her arms and touch them. It is that agape love that compelled her to hold AIDES victims close to her and to care for them tenderly. It is the kind of love that sent Albert Schweitzer to Lambarene to care for the people there when he could have had a very wealthy medical practice in a large city hospital. It is the kind of love displayed when some people decided, a number of years ago, that the Lenoir Soup Kitchen should be established where people could get a hot meal without being judged by their economic status, or just about six or eight years ago that the Helping Hands Clinic was opened where people could get medical care and wouldn’t be turned down because they couldn’t pay or they didn’t have medical insurance. It is this kind of love that causes people to go out and look for the poor and disadvantaged and try to life them up out of the slums and sewers into the rays of God’s Son, S-O-N, Son-shine. It’s the kind of love that is compelling these youth who are going to be staying in our church for the next two weeks to go out and do the deeds of loving kindness that build up God’s Kingdom on this Earth. It’s the kind of love that persuaded that young Korean Christian, just this week beheaded in Saudi Arabia, to want to go back to Korea and want to prepare himself to become a missionary and to go back to Saudi Arabia to witness and to preach the Gospel. It’s the kind of love that took Jesus to Calvary. It’s this kind of love that we love our neighbors with, as we love ourselves. Are we willing to love this way? Are we?

Jesus said in John 14, If you love me, keep my commandments. He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one anther. A new commandment I give you, That you love one another as I have loved you.

One of the scripture references for this loving relationship’s characteristic is John 13, verses 1-34, where Jesus gives this new commandment in verse 34. In the beginning of that chapter, Jesus has washed His disciples’ feet, and He says, “Do you understand what it is I have done to you? I have given you this example that you should follow.”

Now I don’t mean we have to go running around washing everybody’s feet. I have participated in a couple of foot washing services and they are very humbling experiences, especially when I had so much trouble getting up out of the floor when I knelt to wash the feet of the person whose feet I washed. I had to be helped getting up out of the floor. You can’t imagine how humbling that was.

The example that Jesus has given us there is the example of servant-hood — the example of being willing to do the most menial of tasks in the Church or for our neighbors.

Read Romans 9: 9-21 where Paul tells us how to love each other in the Church. Love must be sincere. We must be devoted to each other in brotherly and sisterly love. We must honor each other above ourselves. And consider what John the Apostle says in 1 John:4 beginning at verse 7:

And I won’t read Matthew 18 now, where Jesus tells us how to treat a believer who sins against us. You go home and read it. I have a feeling, maybe, that I have quit preaching and gone to meddling just a little bit. Believe you me, it is just as hard for me to preach this sermon to you as it is for you to listen, because I have spiritual corns too. And I never preach a sermon to you that I am not preaching to myself, and especially this one.

When we trust in Christ for the forgiveness of our sins we receive the Holy Spirit in our lives and it is only the power of the Holy Spirit operating in a person’s life that enables us to love like this. As Paul said, in Galatians 5: Since the Spirit leads us, let us also walk by the Spirit.

And the fruit of the spirit is love. Amen. Halleluiah.

Thank you Jesus for Your love that we can spread through the world — the building blocks of the Kingdom of Heaven. Help us to spread that love. Help us to go out into the world to show that we are Christians — by our love. Amen.