Sermon delivered on Sunday, Trinity 7C, July 14, 2013 at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Amos 7.7-17; Psalm 82.1-8; Colossians 1.1-14; Luke 10.25-37.

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

In this morning’s gospel lesson, a lawyer challenges Jesus, asking him what one must do to inherit eternal life. This is a question that all of us are keenly interested in, especially as we grow older, and this is what I want us to explore briefly this morning. Before we look at how Jesus and the rest of our texts answer the lawyer’s question, let us be clear about what he was not asking. The lawyer was not asking if salvation by works is possible (it’s not as Scripture makes clear). Rather, the lawyer was asking Jesus how he could be sure that he would be part of the resurrection of the righteous when God’s kingdom finally comes in full on earth as in heaven. As God’s chosen people, this would have been a question many Jews of Jesus’ day asked and in today’s story it appears that the lawyer is testing Jesus to see if he could trap him.

The first thing we notice about Jesus’ answer is that he asks the lawyer what Scripture says, i.e., what the OT says. This alerts us to the fact that there are not two gospels in our Bible (one in the OT and another in the NT). There is just one and so we had best pay attention to the whole of Scripture, not just the parts of it we like. The lawyer responds correctly, citing what we rehearse every Sunday and call the Great Commandment. To inherit eternal life we must love God with our whole being and love our neighbor as ourselves. “Very good,” says Jesus. “Do this and you will live.” “So what’s the problem?” you ask. “Loving God with our whole being and our neighbor as ourselves sounds pretty straightforward. How are you going to get a sermon out of this, Fr. Maney?” Ye of little faith!

The problem, of course, is that we do not inherently love God with our whole being and our neighbor as ourselves. We are more inclined to love ourselves more than God and neighbor or to give our ultimate loyalty to all kinds of goofy causes and gods, and we get downright testy when we are confronted with a prophetic word from Scripture or from those whom God calls to be his spokespersons today. We see this clearly and painfully illustrated in our OT and psalm lessons. In our feel-good lesson from the prophet Amos, we see God’s prophet confronting the movers and shakers of Israel’s political and religious establishment. God’s people have misbehaved. They’ve not loved mercy, done justice, or walked humbly with their God (Micah 6.8). No, God’s people have run after other gods who are not real at all and who cannot give life the way the living God can and does. And as we already know, God is jealous for his people’s love and loyalty and wants them to be the people he called and created them to be, to bring his healing love to a sin-sick world. Of course they cannot do that when they worship other gods and follow their own broken and self-centered nature. So God sends his prophet Amos to call them on their waywardness and stubborn rebellion against God (if you want to know what the Bible means to have a hard heart, look no further than this story). God reminds his people that he has given them plenty of chances to turn from their evil ways and live like his people who will love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with their God. But they have refused and now their time is up. God’s judgment is coming and his people are going to reap the awful consequences of what they have sown. The places where idols are worshiped will be destroyed and so will Israel’s political and religious leaders. This is a chilling account of what will happen to anyone who decides they do not want to live as fully human beings and in accordance with God’s good will and intent for his human creatures, and we delude ourselves if we think it will be different for us as God’s people in Jesus if we choose to act likewise. More about that in a moment.

So what’s the answer? How do we inherit eternal life, a place in God’s new creation, when Jesus returns to usher in fully God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven and to consummate his victory over evil that God achieved in Jesus’ death? Paul has the answer for us in today’s epistle lesson. We inherit eternal life through God’s grace powerfully manifested in Jesus the Messiah. The Father has rescued us from the power of darkness–both our own and the dark powers’ and principalities’–and transferred us into the kingdom of his risen Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. As Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans, on the cross, God condemned our sin in the flesh by taking on his own just punishment so that we would be spared it. We don’t like talking much about God’s holy wrath these days, preferring instead to turn God into a doting old grandpa who really doesn’t care what the children do because, well, God is just old and it will all turn out well in the end anyway. But that is not the holy and just God of the Bible, either in the OT or NT, and when we realize what a costly and wonderful gift God has given us in Jesus to make it possible for us to have real life, it cannot help but change us and soften our hard hearts. Not only has God rescued us from the exile of our sin by becoming human and dying for us, God raised Jesus from the dead to vindicate him and to usher in his promised new creation. And until the new creation comes in full, God also gives us his Spirit to live in us as a guarantee that his promises are true. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, if Jesus is not raised from the dead, then we are still dead in our sins and our faith is futile (1 Corinthians 15.12-19). So we inherit eternal life in Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life. As Paul states boldly to the Romans, if we confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved (Romans 10.9).

“But, but” you protest, “that is not what Jesus says in our gospel lesson. He’s talking about doing things. And what about Paul in our epistle lesson? He seems to be focusing a lot on what we do, not what we believe. So how are we saved, by faith in Jesus or through our works?” You sure are asking a lot of good questions this morning, which means you must have eaten your Wheaties! The answer of course is both because faith and works are essentially two sides of the same coin. Our faith in Jesus must always translate into action, into what we do. Otherwise it is a dead and worthless faith, nothing more than an intellectual assent, which may or may not be able to command our allegiance and loyalty (cf. James 2.14-26). You know how it works. We say Jesus is Lord and then go about the business of life making it all about ourselves with little regard for the needs and welfare of others. We’ve all known so-called Christians like this and we all know what a farce their “faith” is. They are Christian in name only and as both Jesus and Paul make clear, that simply won’t pass muster (cf. Matthew 7.21-23; 2 Corinthians 5.10).

But when we realize what a massive and undeserved gift of life we have been given in Jesus, it makes us ripe for the Spirit to work in us to fundamentally change us into people who are empowered to overcome our selfish and disordered nature and desires so that we can truly love God with our whole being and our neighbor as ourselves. Paul tells the Colossians essentially the same thing when he talks about their faith in Jesus and the love they have for all the saints (all Jesus’ people) being a result of the hope they have kept for them in heaven. (This, BTW, doesn’t mean that our hope is that we will get to go to heaven when we die but rather that Jesus and the promise of new creation with our resurrection bodies are being kept for us in God’s space, in heaven. To put it another way, if I say to you when you come to my house, I have a beer waiting for you in the refrigerator, I don’t expect you to get into the refrigerator to drink the beer. I’m just keeping it there for you until the time is right to drink it. Just so with our resurrection bodies and the hope of new creation.)

Returning now to our gospel lesson, when the lawyer tries to justify himself by asking Jesus who is the lawyer’s neighbor, Luke is telling us that the lawyer’s worldview is still disordered for someone who desires eternal life because he clearly has in mind that only fellow Jews constitute his neighbors. This, of course, fails to take into account God’s call to Israel to be the light of the world and to embody God’s love for all people, a call that Israel failed to appropriate, which made it necessary for God to come to them in the person of Jesus to be for Israel what she could not be for herself. But Jesus would have none of the lawyer’s misguided thinking and he proceeded to tell the well-beloved parable of the good Samaritan. In telling it, Jesus reminded the lawyer that kingdom living in this fallen world of God’s is about seeing human need and reaching out in compassionate love to address it as best we can. The priest and Levite in the parable represented the religious establishment of Israel. They were the good and proper church people. And they failed to act when they had it in their power to do so. Notice that Jesus does not ascribe motive to either man. Sure they risked ceremonial defilement. But whatever their motive was, they failed to act and this is not consistent with kingdom living. Our ability to love God with our whole being is inextricably linked with how we treat our neighbor and as Jesus reminded the lawyer in a shocking and powerful way, our neighborhood must have no ethnic boundaries or other boundaries of any kind. Being a good neighbor means that we respond compassionately to real human need whenever we see it and are able to do something about it.

And lest we think this command applies just to the Jews of Jesus’ day, we need to think again because the same desire to restrict who lives in our neighborhood is alive and well today. This past week, for example, our governor spoke out against an attitude toward the poor that seeks to dismiss them as being inherently lazy. It’s their own fault, you know, and therefore they don’t deserve our help. The lawyer in today’s lesson would have been proud of this kind of thinking. But that is not God’s call to us as his people. That is not what kingdom living is all about. We live in a fallen world and are called as Jesus’ people to bring his healing love to others, and we must do that in ways that address all kinds of needs: physical as well as spiritual and emotional. This, after all, is how we will act in the new creation and if we are not prepared to love God and each other in this way, why would we even want to inherit eternal life? Think about it. How often do we hear people grumble about living under the rule of a particular leader they oppose. It’s no fun for them and they want new leadership. So why would we expect it to be any different living under God’s rule? Sadly, those who are inherently hostile to God will find no joy or happiness in living under his rule. But those who truly do love God and act like it will revel in the hope of one day living directly in God’s Presence forever in our new resurrection bodies, living in ways that reflect their love of God and neighbor in the new creation, whatever that looks like.

So this week, I want us to focus on looking at who is in our neighborhood and how to respond appropriately. This isn’t always easy because we’d naturally rather be doing things we enjoy. After all, who wants to visit a sick person in the hospital or nursing home? They are depressing places with lots of cooties that might make us sick as well. And who wants to be reminded about growing old with all its problems? We’ve got better things to do with our time and efforts. Or who wants to take a Saturday morning and go down to feed the hungry when that’s our day off and we would rather be golfing or sleeping in? You get the point. Loving neighbor according to Jesus’ definition of who’s our neighbor is not an easy thing to do. But God isn’t concerned about how easy things are for us. He’s jealous for our love and wants us to embody his love for others in the power of the Spirit, just like the saints of St. Augustine’s do overall. Of course there’s always room for improvement because God keeps expanding our neighborhood. Focus on that this week and of course take some time in prayer and Bible study to remind yourself of God’s great gift to you as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As you do, you will surely find any healing you need and discover that more often than not, you are finding joy rather than burden in loving your neighbor as yourself. This is a clear sign that you have inherited eternal life because you have a real and living faith in Jesus Christ your Lord in the power of the Spirit, which of course means that you have Good News, now and for all eternity.

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