Free Indeed

 January 31 2021

Luke 6:20-49

         One of the great things about our life together as a church family is that we sing together. I mean, have you ever stopped to consider just where else do people sing together except church and perhaps a karaoke bar? The thing about singing is that there is something about a song that sticks in your mind like nothing else and a song can take you to back to places you haven’t been to for a long time. So, the hymns we sing each week to praise our God are part of our collective memory, they are part of what unites us. That being said though since they can be such a powerful way of affecting who we are we have to be careful that the message the hymns communicate to us send the right message or else they could be a means of reenforcing perhaps a wrong belief. Those who write the hymns we sing may not always get it right. I say all this to speak about a hymn most of us love to sing, “My Hope Is Built On Nothing Less”. I agree with most of the song that our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus and his righteousness but what I take issue with is the use of the imagery of standing on the solid rock and all the other ground being sinking sand. Now what’s my problem you might ask? Well, as we read in todays scripture there is a very important part of story that has gotten mixed up. I mean as Jesus teaches us here and in the seventh chapter of Matthew, it isn’t about just choosing Jesus and standing  on Jesus or with Jesus because he is the solid rock. No, what makes the difference between a life that is built on a solid rock or being built on sinking sand is that a person hears the words of Jesus and does them.I’m more than a little bothered that in the song nowhere is there any mention of the teaching of Jesus, or how important it is to listen to those teachings or how once we hear what Jesus teaches we then have to actually do what Jesus teaches because then and only then will we be standing on solid ground. This hymn implies that all is necessary to have a life on solid ground is for us to place our faith in Jesus. Just trust in Jesus, in his righteousness that’s the ticket to solid ground living and it sounds correct until we actually find where this imagery of solid rocks and sinking sand comes from that is when we run into a problem. Now, the hymn reflects the Protestant over correction of emphasizing faith alone but as Jesus himself tells us in the sixth chapter of Luke, we can have faith that confesses that he is Lord, but what Jesus expects is that we do what he tells us. This is what is meant by having faith that we trust that what teaches us is the right way to live and because we have faith that his teachings are true we are going to actually live them out.  All of this is kind of glossed over in the hymn, “My Hope is Built on nothing less”. I still like the song but I also realize that the songwriter has used an image from the Bible without fully realizing what it meant. The bottom line is that we have to let our biblical knowledge inform our hymns instead of the other way around.

         So, that concludes my rant on the hymn, “My Hope is Built on nothing Less”. But the question remains is just why is it so important for us to do what Jesus teaches us to do instead of just passively confessing a statement of faith and letting it go at that? Well, as we will find out, actively doing what Jesus calls us to do is a very important part of the equation. To understand just why this is so we have to to remember that in the previous chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus had an encounter with a fisherman named Simon. Jesus was preaching the word of God to the crowd which had become so large along the shores of the Sea of Galilee that Jesus got in Simons fishing boat and asked him to go a little ways off shore so that Jesus could continue teaching the people. Then as you might recall,  after the people left Jesus told Simon to put his boats out into deep water because there Simon would be able to find an abundance of fish. Simon at first objected having fished all night catching nothing but then he agreed to trust the word Jesus spoke. What Simon discovered is that the word of Jesus was true; they caught so many fish that their nets began to break and the boats were in danger of sinking. Simon realized in that moment that Jesus was a man of God, and he confessed his sin. Jesus then told him to not be afraid but from that moment on Simon would be catching men. As we learned last week, this meant that Simon would, through his words and actions, witness to an understanding and wisdom of trusting the word of God so that those whose attention were caught by what he did might come to learn the understanding and wisdom that Simon possessed. In this way, the devil could no longer snatch the word of God out of their hearts after they had heard that word of God spoken to them by Jesus because now they knew the wisdom of God’s word for their life.

         So, this in a nutshell is what has come before our scripture for today. There Jesus said he was going to make out of Simon and his friends James and John, people who would be able to catch people, capture the attention of those who watched them. And here, in the sixth chapter is their training on how to be those who catch people, how to live a life that captures the attention of those who hear them and watch them. What is implied in all of this is that there are two different approaches to life, the way that the world is living and another way, the way of God.  These two ways of life are so vastly different that to live the way of God is to live a life that is noticeable, a life that stands apart from how the rest of the world lives. So, in knowing this then we begin to understand the importance of doing what is taught because it is only in the doing that we are different. Only as we are different can we capture the attention of the people around us so that through the sharing of this understanding and wisdom of why we live the way that we do the devil can no longer capture them by stealing God’s word from their heart.

         Now what Jesus teaches us in this sixth chapter of Luke is not a radical departure from the wisdom and understanding found in  the essence of Jewish teaching found in what we call the Torah. I recently completed a study of the book of Leviticus written by Rabbi Johnathon Sacks which was very fascinating. His teachings helped me immensely understand the teachings of Jesus. One of the big ideas that I took away from my study of Leviticus is that as Rabbi Sacks explains it, is that in the face of suffering and loss there are two questions that can be asked that can lead to quite different outcomes. The first question is that we ask ourselves, have I done anything that has gotten me into this situation and if so what must I do to correct it.In other words, what is my next move? This is the way of personal responsibility. The second question people might ask is this: Who did this to me? This is the question that leads to what is called victim culture. Some one else is to blame. It is not I that is who is at fault but it is rather some external cause this is why I find myself in predicament I find myself in. This kind of thinking is very dangerous because it leads people to see themselves and others not as subjects but rather as objects. As objects, people who ask this question are people who see themselves as people who have things done to them instead of people who see themselves as people who can do something. The end result of this thinking is a person ends up with anger, resentment, rage and a sense of injustice. This way of life where we blame others always leads to slavery because when we blame others we are in effect stating that it is the person we blame who has control of our life not us.Instead of people of actions we instead become people of reactions. It is the way not of justice but the way of vengeance. Now, I say all this because this way, the way of blaming others is the way of the world. It creates a situation where people who see themselves as victims seek out victims on which to blame their conflicts upon, someone they can be responsible for the problems that they face as a community.

         This is exactly the world in which Jesus came to transform. The way Jesus transforms our world is by teaching us that no matter what we always have a choice, we alone are responsible for our life and no one else. As Moses told the people of Israel in the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life…” We hear echos of these words of Moses in the teachings of Jesus in this sixth chapter of Luke, as Jesus begins with the words,”Blessed are…” Now, if you stand back and look at the description of the person Jesus describes as blessed, you discover something pretty interesting. Listen to how Jesus describes the one who is blessed. They are poor, which in the Greek, this word means one who crouches, cowers who is bent over and destitute. They are not only poor but they are also hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, insulted, and rejected. For us, this is a description of what we would call a victim. These are people we would expect to want to blame someone one for the mess they have themselves in. These are the ones that Jesus states are blessed, the ones that God has knelt down and offered his very self to them. This is what is meant by the term, “blessed”. This is exactly what Isaiah records in the fifty seventh chapter of his book that God dwells with those who are broken, those who have a lowly spirit. God dwells with them to revive the spirit of the lowly, to revive the heart of the contrite”.When we are told that God is with the lowly to revive their spirit, this means that God is with them to give power to their life, and when he revives the heart this means that God is with them to give them the courage to move forward from where they are at. This is why they are blessed because God is with them to empower them to act.

         In contrast, those on which Jesus announces his woe upon are those who are rich, those who have abundance, fully resourced, those who full, those who are laughing, the people others speak well of. These are the ones Jesus tells us will grieve because it is they who will be hungry and weep. In context with what Jesus is teaching here, what wealth is seen as is a solution to the suffering experienced by those Jesus describes as being blessed. Those who are rich have done so in order to insulate themselves from the suffering of the world, to create their own private heaven here on earth. Yet by walling themselves off from the suffering of the world they also wall themselves off from God. The reason for this is something God had already taught his people found in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy. There God warns his people that when they enter the Promised Land that when they enjoyed their life there they were not to say in their hearts, “My power and my might have gotten  me this wealth”. You shall remember the Lord your God for it is he who gives you power to get wealth…” You see what wealth does is that it makes one forget God. This is what Jesus says should be the reason the rich should grieve is they have already received their consolation. The word translated here as “consolation” is the same word used in the gospel of John to describe the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the helper and comforter. So instead of finding help and comfort through the Holy Spirit the rich find this help and comfort in their riches. So while Jesus advocates personal responsibility and the ability to make choices, choosing to escape suffering through creating ones own personal heaven here on earth is not the choice to make because it will only end up being a source of grief in the end.

         So what is the right choice to make? The right choice in every circumstance is to love. Jesus can command us to love because the love he speaks of is not an emotion, something that is unable for someone else to cause us to feel but rather to love as something we do. The basis of this action is to simply to do others that which we would want done to us. In other words, in every person’s face we must be able to see our own face, to see them as not the cause of our pain but rather the focus of our care. This means as Paul teaches in the twelfth chapter of Romans, if our enemy is hungry you feed them; if your enemy is thirsty you give them something to drink. Why would we do this? We give food and drink to our enemy because obviously we eat when we are hungry and we grab something to drink when we are thirsty. So, these are the choices we make; we choose to bless others why, because we have been blessed, we pray for those who harm us because we have been prayed for. We choose to give and to not hold back in giving because in this way we state our freedom to choose. This is what sets us a part from a world held in slavery to sin, a slavery that comes through blaming others. Why do sinners only love those who love them? They only love those who love them because everyone else is someone that they blame for their suffering and problems. Why do sinners do good to those who do good to them? They do good to those who do them good because everyone else is the source of the bad that they experience. Such is the way of slavery but the way of Jesus is the way where we know we always have a choice to love, this is the way of freedom. Unlike the slavery of sin whose wages are death the wages of the life of Jesus is life, a life as a child of God. This life is not about judging others or condemning others which is yet again a way to separate ourselves from others and make excuses as to why a person is not worthy of our love. But the life Jesus calls us to is a life of choosing to make no excuses, to love extravagantly, a love of good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over. This is the way of God; this is the way of our teacher, Jesus. So, our ability to love others is always within us not with the person we are called to love. This means when we fail to love them it is not because of the speck in their eye but rather it is the log in our eye that has caused us to be unable to see them as a person worthy of our love.

         This then is how we are to be known, our reputation as being the fruit of a good God, the good fruit. The good we do comes out of what we treasure in our hearts, the treasure of a good God, who is worthy of all that we are, worthy to be served by all that we do. Why is God worthy of our life? God is worthy of our life because we were worthy of his love while we were yet sinners. God so loved, he made a choice to love, the world, a people enslaved to an idea that others should dictate how they should love, the very enslavement of sin, and to this world God out of love gave the most precious gift of his Son, Jesus. Jesus loved us with the greatest love of all. He made a choice; he was no victim. He made a choice to love us and he acted upon that love by laying down his life. It was always love that controlled his destiny. Through Jesus we at long last understand how much God treasured us and now in return we treasure him in our hearts and out of this treasure our lives are to produce good, the same goodness of God. 

         This understanding that we are free to choose, even in the most wretched of conditions, we are free to choose this is the understanding, the wisdom that catches the attention of a world held in slavery.It is when we realize that when we are poor, downtrodden,  excluded, insulted and rejected this is when God draws near to empower us and encourage us to make the right choice to love. The wrong choice is to withdraw into our own self-made heaven on earth using the resources God has given us to care for the suffering of others in order that we might insulate ourselves from suffering. No, the right choice is always to love, to see in the others face the very face of ourselves no matter the cost, no matter the hurt, no matter the pain. In doing so we defeat the Devil who desires nothing more than to keep us enslaved in a life blaming others, thinking of ourselves as victims filled with anger, resentment and a burning sense of injustice.

         The sad thing about understanding what Jesus is teaching us is that I am not sure just how many Christians really understand it. I seem to sense that there are many followers of Christ who seem to be busier playing the blame game then they are busy loving others. Part of being free is to be brutally honest  about how we are doing accepting the responsibility for our own life. My prayer is that the Lord will bless you with an honest assessment of just how you are doing in loving others as God has first loved us, so that you may experience the great freedom promised to you by Jesus. Amen.