How to do the Impossible (and Why You Might Want to Try)

Sermon delivered at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Sunday, October 23, 2011.

Lectionary texts: Deuteronomy 34.1-12; Psalm 90.1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2.1-8; Matthew 22.34-46.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s gospel lesson, our Lord cuts to the chase when talking about ethics and morality. He tells us that if we are going to be God’s called-out people, then we are to love God with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves. At first blush this all sounds good. There aren’t a bunch of arbitrary rules to follow so we don’t have to constantly go over a mental checklist to see if we are doing what we are supposed to do (e.g., Go to church regularly? Check. Read my Bible regularly? Check. Act syrupy sweet to everyone? Check.) and avoiding what we are supposed to avoid (Not cheating on my spouse? Check. Not embezzling the company’s funds? Check. Not frolicking in La-La Land while Maney delivers another awesome sermon. Oops!).

Yet if you are like me, when we think about Jesus’ summary of the Law, i.e., the Mosaic Law, we can’t help but feel uneasy and often we don’t know why. Then it hits us. While we might want to love God with our whole being and love our neighbors as ourselves, we realize that we just don’t have it in us to do that. We don’t love God with our whole being because we sometimes would rather love ourselves more than God. When things are going well for us, we often get sassy and take all the credit for our success. And when things go terribly wrong for us, we are tempted to blame God and walk away from him.

Then there is that loving our neighbor thingy. That’s really hard because frankly not all of our neighbors are nice people like we are and so they deserve what they get. I mean, really. Who wants to love an unlovable person? We’d rather punch him in the mouth. Even the most faithful of us sometimes make life about themselves, not others.

And when we read stories like today’s OT lesson and hear psalms like today’s psalm, we can really get discouraged because they remind us of our destiny as mortals. St. Paul tells us that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6.23) and we realize that when we don’t love God with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves, we miss the mark. Our OT lesson reminds us that even a man like Moses who had such a unique and wonderfully intimate relationship with God died, and we wonder what is in store for us. We hear the psalmist pleading with God to relent from his holy justice and to show compassion on his people. We instinctively relate to that because we are among those people the psalmist is talking about. Try as we might—and I am willing to bet that all of us here do try to live our life in ways that we hope are pleasing to God—we know that we are not equipped to live up to the standards that are inherently contained in Jesus’ summary of the Law. We are just too profoundly scattered and broken to live our lives like that.

But just when we are about to lose heart and hope, we remember that Jesus summarized the Law when he was only a couple of days away from the cross and so we have real hope. In becoming human and dying for us, Jesus showed us what it looks like to live out the two great commandments faithfully. By his wounds we are healed and are reconciled to God once and for all. This, in turn, makes us profoundly thankful to God for his outrageous gift of love and grace offered freely to each of us, even though we deserve none of it.

Not only that, but we are also people who have the hope of resurrection and New Creation. Because we have peace with God through the blood of our Lord Jesus and because we have the promised gift of his Holy Spirit living in us as individuals and collectively as Christ’s body, the Church, to help us mature into the humans God intends and created us to be, we have been given everything we need to enjoy our new life in Christ. The Christian faith never has been a program of self-help because we are incapable of that. Instead the Christian faith is all about the project of God’s help in our lives as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

All this frees us from the intolerable burden of having to try to do the impossible of loving God with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves to be made fit in God’s eyes. We no longer have to worry about being worthy to live in God’s direct Presence for all eternity because what God did for us on the cross has guaranteed that we have been made clean in God’s sight. Instead, through the blood of Christ shed for us and with the Spirit’s help, we are freed to work on developing the habits of character that will allow him to use us to bring God’s healing love to his broken and hurting world and the people living in it. I am talking, of course, about developing the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, which in turn open us up to display the fruit of the Spirit (cf. Galatians 5.16-25).

But what does this all look like in practice? Let’s take one example using today’s epistle lesson because we want to grow this church and Paul tells us how to do that by being good Christian ministers. When we put on the nature and character of Christ, we not only show that we are trying to love God with our whole being by becoming the kind of humans he created us to be, we also demonstrate our love for our neighbors by bringing Christ’s love to bear on them, which is the key ingredient we need to introduce Jesus to others and grow this church.

It all starts, of course, with our relationship with God. As we work at developing the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love, we have to put in the required sweat equity. In other words we have to do our part so that we can be open to and shaped by the Spirit. He does this primarily through word, sacrament, and fellowship. In practical terms this means we read and study God’s word, both as individuals and together in small group Bible study on an ongoing basis. The sweat equity we invest is to work on developing the discipline we need so that this habit of reading and being shaped by God’s word develops. It’s hard work because we are a busy and distracted people. That’s why we need each other so that we can encourage each other when the going gets tough.

Likewise we come to worship each Sunday so that we can not only hear and reflect on God’s word (hopefully without me putting you to sleep—it is hard to reflect when you are asleep) but also to feed on our Lord’s body and blood when we come to his Table each Sunday. There is a profound mystery here and I cannot explain to you exactly how the Spirit uses word and sacrament to form and shape us so that we become like Jesus over time. I just know this happens, and not all at once, so that we increasingly see the fruit of the Spirit in our life and relationship with others.

Notice carefully that as this happens, when we are growing in our relationship with God through Jesus and becoming more like him, we become better equipped to imitate Paul in his ministry to others because all Christians are called to be ministers of the gospel. I’m not talking about ordained ministry. I am talking about being image-bearers of Jesus to others who do not know him, and we do that most powerfully in the way we live our lives. As Paul notes today, this isn’t always fun or easy because as we start to become like Jesus we will arouse opposition and persecution. Some will see us and hate us because we are not playing by the rules of the world.  They will mock us and call us ignorant and intolerant haters, among other things. But there will be others whom God sends our way who will take notice of us in a more positive way. I can’t be more specific than this because this usually happens in a very idiosyncratic manner.

But it will happen and when it does we will discover that we have the character traits of the Spirit that he will use to help us talk to others about our faith when the time is right and in the manner Paul talks about in today’s lesson. As we reach out to people with the Spirit’s help, we will discover a boldness to live out our faith and talk about it freely to others, even in the face of fierce opposition, just the way Paul was able to do. Why? Because we keep our eyes on the cross and have a resurrection hope. Our future is secure. This will also help us eventually to stop worrying about whether we are worthy (we aren’t except by God’s grace) or have what it takes to live out our faith and talk to others about it (we don’t on our own). Instead, we will just get on with living our lives faithfully, remembering we are not responsible for producing results. That is God’s job and God’s alone.

Our love for God and others will lead us to treat everyone with gentleness, love, and respect. We will be willing to speak the truth in love about Jesus to others because we know him and know what it is like to be transformed by his great healing love. We will be like hounds of heaven in our pursuit of others because we know that without a real relationship with Jesus, there is not much hope to offer people, either for living life in this world or the next. Because we really love people, we want better for them than to be separated from the love of God in Jesus. Accordingly, we will not succumb to political correctness or have some goofy notion of love that tells others to follow their hearts and be themselves because we remember that Jesus told us that it is out of the human heart that all kinds of evil come, and this evil has the ability to separate us from God’s love, both now and forever. Notice carefully that all this faithfully imitates Paul’s description of his ministry and how we as the Church are to behave toward everyone.

Again, none of this is easy and none of it will ever happen without the Spirit’s help and our willingness to develop the habits of mind and heart that will allow the Spirit’s Presence in us to grow. But as we learn to become more and more like Jesus we will discover that this really is how to grow our church, not for the sake of getting more numbers but for the sheer joy and privilege of allowing our Lord to use us as instruments of his healing love and peace. We won’t always get it right. In fact, initially we will probably get it wrong more often than not. But we keep at it because we keep our eyes on the prize and are willing to do the work necessary to open us up to God’s healing love made known to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And when, by God’s grace, we dare trust Christ in all this so that we develop the Christian character that will equip us to live with him here in our mortal bodies and forever in the promised New Creation, we know that we really do have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.