Matthew 22: 34-36
Jeremiah 32: 38-41
Christianity is a relatively easy religion to figure out. It doesn’t require much thought, it requires very little reading, and mostly it’s just an exercising in listening to someone else tell you what to believe. What’s easier, Christianity is black and white, the bible was written in English, is in its original context, should be read as historical fact, and the stories of the Bible happen in real time… In fact, Moses was able to write the first five books of the Bible including his own death
What’s more exciting than that is that Jesus’ words are historically preserved for us, like any good newspaper where the quotes are exact and concise. The story of salvation and of Jesus’ reason for being here is very simple. What’s better, Christianity was started by Jesus, the first Christian…And we can find this all out by turning on our radios and listening to the Bible answer man…who always has the answers… But there’s a big problem with all this….
Christianity is a lot more complex than that. Christianity is an extremely difficult and head and heart filled faith tradition (not like any of the other faith traditions are not) but Christianity has been diluted down to something that I can not stand for as a Christian. The dilution down of a religion that has soul, that has character, that has radically good news…but good news has gone sour… And now, it’s time to set the record straight.
For the next few weeks, we are going to explore what I would like to call Christianity 101. This series of sermons will focus on what I believe to be the core essentials of Christianity, where we strip away the doctrines, where we take away the expectations of belief, and move to the essentials of our faith. We’ll talk about Love, Grace, Salvation, the Kingdom of God, taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally, Sabbath, and Relationships. We might actually talk about the Jewish Jesus…because after all, Jesus was actually Jewish. But tonight… let’s talk about a most complex thing: Love.
Let us Pray: Just take over
There are millions of Americans today who can not believe in God, says Rob Bell, former pastor of Mars Hill Baptist Church in Michigan. That is because the God they know, the one that everyone has told them forever, is a wrathful, hate filled God who is ready to send them to somewhere called Hell most clearly outlined in the books paradise lost and Dante’s inferno.
The God they have come to know, and maybe some of you have experienced this yourselves, has been identified by Christians as the one who is separated from you unless you have and know Jesus, the one and only protective barrier from this wrathful God. Now it’s cleverly disguised, and people say “no no… our God is merciful, you just have to know God’s ways.” But I disagree. A God with that kind of wrathfulness and interest in sending people away is no merciful God at all. Instead, that’s a God full of malice, full of spite, and full of rage. And if that was what God was, who would want to worship that God?
And if that was what God really was, a wrathful God, that wrathfulness might be expressed in the fullness of creation right. We, the Children of God who are supposedly created as a reflection of the image of the one who creates us and this world as well… that would be a reflection of that God. So, at our best, we do the will of God, at our worst we rebel against the world God would want. So, if God is wrathful, the best reflection of that God in the world would be a world where spouses physically and emotionally abuse spouses, people hold grudges, are constantly angry at one another, and exibit their aggression through wars and the actual killing of others. Yeah, that sounds like the kind of God I’m looking for.
Perhaps we’ve been missing the entire point. Perhaps what we’ve created is a God is our own image to justify our actions. Maybe we’ve used a sense of fear in the world and have walked down a path to the image of a God who entirely misses the point. Maybe we need to look back at the scriptures and find a way to something different.
Loving Neighbor
What we find is remarkable different than what we’re talking about. We first encounter a Jesus who is telling us about the greatest commandment. And it turns out there are two. Love the Lord God with all your heart and your mind and your being…and the second is that you must love your neighbor as yourself… Now Jesus is setting the record straight. Love is the answer. It doesn’t matter what the question is. If you are angry with God, love God. If you are in frustration and anger with your neighbor, simply love God. If you look at the rest of the commandments, though show not murder, though shou not covet, though shou have no other God’s before me… and on and on and on. They are are all about loving God and loving neighbor. LOVE is the answer. If you consider coveting things, the answer is to figure out what it means to love God and love your neighbor.
So the question might naturally lead us to to another great question: who is my neighbor… And from there we gain the story of the good Samaritan.
It’s in Luke 10… And it’s about the Good Samaritan… Jesus is making a radical statement. Samaritans are the “others” of the Jewish world. They are the hated ones, the oppressors. Love your neighbor, and your neighbor will be everyone. Sometimes those people will be the people who hate you, others the people who you can’t stand yourself, others the very people you already know and love. It does not matter who or what. The answer is Love.
The sotyr
Not so easy I thinks
Well this is all great Cody. Love your neighbor. And it’s all great and good, but what’s the real meat of this argument. The argument goes back to who God is. We live in a world where things are broken and people are hateful all the time. We live in a world where other Christians are telling us we are going to hell and that eternal damnation awaits those who don’t come to follow Jesus… Like Ghandhi…that’s right… if we look at God’s love like the one where God is wrathful and Jesus is the only way to prevent it, well I guess Ghandhi’s in hell.
But the truth is, God can’t love like that. If Jesus is and was the incarenet Son of God then we might see wrath and fury and hatred in the person of Jesus. But what we see if LOVE. Pure unadulterated and unstoppable love. Love like we can’t imagine. A love for the lost and the tax collectors and the prostitutes and those in our society who we can not seem to get our thoughts around. If Jesus came back today, I imagine if he came to America he would be a poor migrant worker who was sold into slavery and outcast from society and sent back to the slums when the harvest was over. Jesus would hang out with those people. Probably he wouldn’t hang out with us, the privileged middle class.
The story of God is important for us to understand in its fullest context. The passage for Jeremiah is a reminder that God’s love knows no bounds. Perhaps what is best does is reminds us of the love of God throughout the gospel. One theologian once told me that the story of the Hebrew canon begins with the giving of the commandments and the claim that God will be the God of the people. The people rebel, God redeems them. The people rebel, God redeems them. And this happens over and over again. A hateful God would have given up. A loving God will never give up. Because the LOVE is greater than we can imagine.
A community without borders
We are a reflection of a God who calls us to something greater than ourselves. We are a God who calls us beyond OUR hatered, our anger, our fears, and into a world where LOVE is the answer to every question, the story that has no end, the reconciliation of all the world back to itself. As a community, that is our call. To love and to welcome all people. It doesn’t matter if they are black, white, Asian, American, Refugees, Immigrant, Male, Female, mixed, gay straight have or have not, it does not matter. Let LOVE win out.
This is the beginning of the core. Jesus provides for us the seedbed. The seedbed of good soil where communities grow and where a faith such as Christianity can nurture many things… social change, discipleship, good works, hospitality, care for all persons, a changed world. It all starts with LOVE. So let us LOVE. And let God’s story be our story. Because God’s story is and always will be LOVE.
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