2017-10-31
Brooke Strong
Scripture: MATTHEW 22:34-46
REFORMATION SUNDAY
I thought I knew where this sermon was going to go. Having heard the scripture reading, maybe you’d have some guesses about its general direction, as well. Only late this week, though, did it take a turn in an entirely different direction. This is sometimes the way it is with sermons. In fact, it’s often the way it is. The wonderful thing about sermons, and the scary thing about sermons, certainly for me, and maybe for you, is that they have a life of their own.
Today is Reformation Sunday. It’s when we mark the founding of the Protestant churches, of which we are one. Five hundred years ago, under the impetus of Martin Luther, the western church came to a breaking point. As many of you know, after our exploration these last seven weeks of themes of that Reformation, the snapping point happened as Luther and others came to see that the church of their day was manipulating salvation. The church hierarchy was assuring people that they were saved if they did the right things. Church leaders were conveying the message that being right with God demanded some sort of payment to the church. These indulgences were the straw that broke the camel’s back, and led the so-called “Protestants” in a reforming direction.
So now let’s jump 500 years ahead to this moment. Today I want to do a kind of sermon anatomy lesson. Some of you may have wondered how it comes to be that Mark, Susi, and I say what we say when we preach. What guides us in how we prepare and preach sermons?
I can’t speak for Susi and Mark, of course, so I will speak only for myself. I want simply to walk you through the process of what it’s like to preach on a weekly basis, and to give you a sense for how these things called “sermons” take shape, and to so by reflecting on the process of preparing for this particular moment.
Preparation for today’s service began six months or a year ago. For a long time, Susi and I have been acutely aware of this 500th anniversary of the Reformation. It’s been circled on our calendar. Susi and I, along now with Joshua, plan weekly worship, and it was clear as could be that the Reformation needed to be front and center today.
About five months ago, our church staff planned the calendar for the church year, and we determined that today would also be what we call “Commitment Sunday,” the day when Federated members and friends make financial pledges for the coming year. So, long ago we knew that Reformation and Commitment would be central emphases for this day.
Next comes the process of choosing scripture for the day. Some of you know that many churches, including ours, make use of what is called a “lectionary” to select scripture for each Sunday. A lectionary presents the preacher with usually four, but sometimes as many as six, passages of scripture from which to choose. Sometimes those four readings are related to each other—so they may have a common theme. This happens on Easter and Christmas, for example. Sometimes, though, the readings follow the course of a book of the Bible. You will notice, for example, that for the past year, most of our gospel readings come from Matthew’s gospel. Coming up, on the last three Sundays of November, we will conclude our year-long focus on Matthew with three consecutive bracing parables of Jesus. And then for the next church year, beginning in December with the Sundays of Advent, we will switch our focus to the gospel of Mark.
So for today, the lectionary choices featured readings from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, I Thessalonians, in addition to the passage we just heard, the account of a lawyer asking Jesus about the greatest commandment. And for me, the choice was really obvious: that text from Matthew. In fact, one of my UCC clergy colleagues, in commenting on the scripture choices for this week, said that all those other passages “share the colossal bad luck of running against the mother of all lections” (Allen Hilton, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 4, p. 213). Little doubt that the love commandment was going to win out today!
Because church musicians and worship planners—read Joshua and Susi—need to know scripture passages and themes long in advance, we had selected this passage weeks ago. Preachers, though—or at least this preacher!—are often last-minute creatures. Well, maybe not last-minute but definitely last-week. Other than choosing the passage itself, I never do any work on a sermon until the week before it is preached. Preparation and writing all happen in the week of that sermon. Joshua and Susi have done the lion’s share of their work already, and now, in the week before I preach, I do the lion’s share of mine.
The work of preparation has a certain rhythm about it. I always begin by making notes about things I notice about the passage. Is there a word or phrase that dominates? Is there a context to the passage that shapes it in a way that may not be obvious at first glance? I read the passage over and over again, often in several different translations, and seek to open myself to what God may be saying to me and to us through this passage. This is a key part of the process: I’m not just focusing on what I think. I’m listening for a word from beyond us, a word that may be reassuring or disturbing or nudging; a word that may simply be holding us in fond embrace, or that may be prodding us to act in a particular way. However I’m finally led, I presume that God is at the center of the reading.
Next I join a conversation with scholars and other clergy about their sense of the meaning of the passage. This week, for example, I read what nine other people said about this passage. Sometimes I don’t hear anything particularly new in what these others say. But usually I’m awakened to something or prodded to something by what I read in them.
So now my own perceptions have been deepened and extended by what other thoughtful people have written about the passage. In the case of this morning’s reading, I had a pretty good idea, weeks ago, about where this sermon might head. It seemed sort of obvious, in fact. In a culture fraught, as ours is, with the whole gnawing question of who our neighbor is, it made all the sense in the world: the sermon would have something to do with the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, with identifying our neighbors and reminding us all—me included—that at the heart of our faith is the need to welcome all people and to love them even, and especially, when it’s difficult. As the direction for a sermon, what could be more obvious, right?
Until a monkey wrench is thrown into the mix. And this is the monkey wrench. I was ready to jump, right away, to that second commandment. It’s a great commandment, no question. And Jesus says it is “like” the first—meaning it’s equally important and worthwhile. When we reflect on how to be in relation with immigrants and prisoners and people of different races and faiths and backgrounds and political persuasions, nothing is more important than loving these various, sometimes difficult, sometimes demanding, neighbors as ourselves.
But then a little voice inside my head, or my heart, whispers to me: “Uh, didn’t you miss something? It’s all fine and good to issue a stirring call to action, to rebuke the cultural voices of division and hate, to urge an all-embracing, universal love. But look what you did,” the voice says to me. “You left out a whole chunk of the passage. Did you find it inconvenient? Did you not know how to talk about it? Did it not seem cool in a world focused on action and change and results?”
So, much against my will, I have found myself dragged back to the verses that precede that great second commandment. “A lawyer asked a question to test [Jesus]. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ Jesus said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment”’(Matthew 22:35-38).
This is not at all what I had planned. All the various ideas that had been sprouting up? Out the window! I had been caught up short. How quickly I, and we, want to jump to solutions and practicalities and palpable steps—the work of social action and justice! And yes, that work is phenomenally important. It is the work of Jesus, after all. But it’s also not the first commandment. The first commandment is to love God with our whole being. It’s to love the God who gave us life. It’s to love the God who showed us the heart of existence in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s to love the God whose love of us undergirds every moment of our lives. Yes, I need to be about the work of justice and love—let none of us be unclear about that today! But first of all, I’m called to love the giver of life, the conqueror of death, the donor of our days. Love? You bet. But my first love is to be love of God.
One of the secrets many of us preachers harbor is that it’s much easier to talk about loving each other than it is to talk about loving God. I can give numerous examples of great human need, and share stories of how people have responded to that need, and urge us to go and do likewise. And there’s nothing wrong with that—loving our neighbors will indeed be the subject of many another sermon.
Loving God, though? What does that even mean? Even though I often don’t do it very well, I have at least some idea what it means to love Mary and our sons and my mother and my extended family. I have some sense, too, of what it means, as your pastor, to love you. But loving God? How do I do that? I can’t give God anything; God doesn’t need me to visit or listen in a pastoral way; I can’t bring God a meal. Not only that, but what good does it even do to love God? If I love you or my family, I presume that makes the world at least a slightly better place. But loving God? Does that improve anything? Is that a value-added proposition?
As I was taking my morning walk on Friday, suddenly it dawned on me that loving God isn’t about giving anything to God that God doesn’t already have. Loving God is instead about praising the Source of all that is, and remembering who I am. Loving God is about not running any more from a love that chases me down like the proverbial “hound of heaven.” Loving God is about turning toward that relentless affection and acceptance, and finally letting it envelop me and kiss me and hold me. Loving God is about remembering that nothing I’ve ever done is bad enough for God to turn away from me. Loving God is about letting go of the incessant pressures that I put on myself, and that the culture puts on me, as well, to be better, better, better. Loving God is about refusing to be overrun by the pressure to perform and the incessant demands and the feeling that I’m inadequate. Loving God is to remember that I am enough just as I am.
Loving God? He’s the Heart of my existence. Loving God? She’s the One whose smile and affection are the relentless rays of light in my life. Loving God? It is God alone who makes all our other loves possible. Yes—let’s say it again—that second commandment is vital. As the first letter of John says, if you don’t love your sisters and brothers, you can’t really love God (I John 4:20). But the inverse is also and centrally true: you can’t really love your sisters and brothers unless you love God. I cannot force myself to love people who are cruel and mean-spirited and treacherous. It is not possible for me to will myself to such heroic deeds. I can, though, remember that God has loved me precisely as I am, with all my faults and limits and small-mindedness, and that if God has loved me that way, maybe God loves everyone else in precisely the same way, and that maybe, just maybe, God can spark in me a love beyond what I am capable of on my own.
On Friday, I was struck by how little I open myself to that awesome love. So I went outside and took a walk on a beautiful afternoon, down by the falls in the village. Just to absorb some of that love, just to remember who I really am. I thought, “How strange and wonderful that this is part of my work today—to take a walk.” As Mary does in the biblical story of Mary and Martha, though, I was doing what we’re all called to do each and every day: to choose what that story calls “the good portion” (Luke 10:42), to immerse ourselves in the very heart of the universe, to give ourselves whole-lifedly to the source of everything good and beautiful and true.
Stewardship, in the church, is of course about supporting this church. It’s about sharing in the work of programs and staff and buildings that let us live out the second commandment, the need to love our neighbors as ourselves. You and I make financial pledges because we want the mission of this church to thrive and grow. This is our second and extremely important reason to give. And it takes money to make that happen.
But you know the real reason, the first reason, we give? We give as a way to show that we love God. Financial commitment is one of the most palpable ways we have of showing our love for the One who has created us and loved us and forgiven us. Rejoice in the programming that makes Federated such a vital place. But rejoice most centrally in the love that will not let you and me go. Find your home in the embrace that gives you freedom. Find your reason for being in the affection that holds you with tenacity and fierceness and relentless affection.
I invite you, in just a moment, to bring forward both your offerings for today and your pledges for 2018, or hand them to a neighbor if that’s easier for you. Unlike during communion, come down the center aisle this morning. You will see the cross above you and the baptismal font in front of you. When the great reformer Martin Luther felt anxious and afraid and alone, he would say to himself: “Remember your baptism.” So put your fingers in that water and touch your forehead with it. And remember today the baptismal promise that God delights in you. Be bathed in the incredible holy love in which you are soaked and buoyed and cleansed. Then turn toward the side aisle and put your pledges and offerings in the basket provided. Next to the basket is a container of little stones. On each stone Susi has written one of the sustaining themes of the Reformation. Take a stone for yourself and keep it with you as a reminder of the “mighty fortress” God who adores you. The sermon for today, after its circuitous route? This is it in its entirety: do nothing else in these next few moments other than accept your acceptance and love God in return. For it is that that will free you and empower you to extend your love and care to everyone. Come forward now to love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.