Sermon manuscript:
Being able to understand how things work is one of the
special privileges of being a human being. We have been created differently. We
have been created in the image of God. We understand lots of things.
And it is not just we who are living who have understood how
things work. Generations before us have understood how things work too. For
hundreds of years people have been writing down what they have learned about
how things work. Each generation teaches the next. We’ve built up a vast amount
of knowledge about how things work.
Understanding the truth about how things work has always
proven to be a great blessing. If you have a job, no matter what job that might
be, you’ve probably been taught how best to do things, and that is usually
based on how things work. Farmers have learned how plants and animals work.
Doctors have been taught how the body works. Mechanics have been taught how
engines work. It is very beneficial to know how things work, and then to act
accordingly.
But it is not just for our work-a-day lives that we learn
how things work. We are taught how things work in every area of life, although
these kinds of things might not be talked about as seriously or as carefully.
So, for example, we’ve been taught how we can be happy. We’ve been taught what
is acceptable behavior and what is unacceptable. We’ve been taught what life is
for and what we should strive after.
These are, in fact, very religious topics. Let’s match up these
things we’ve mentioned with the way that the Bible talks. We talk of being
happy. The Bible talks about being blessed. We talk about what’s right and
wrong, the Bible talks about being justified or being condemned. We talk about
what life is for and what we should strive after. The Bible talks about the
holiness of God.
The way that the Bible talks is often dismissed in our times
as being unimportant or unknowable. Even Christians can’t agree about
everything. How to be happy, what’s right and wrong, and so on—there’s a lot of
debate about all that, and maybe it’s not true, and so on and so forth. There’s
a tendency to throw up one’s hands.
Instead, what is really important is understanding how
things work in those topics with which I began. It is our understanding of stuff
like chemistry, hydraulics, electronics, etc., that has made our civilization
as advanced as it is. Plus, if you understand how this so-called practical
stuff works, then somebody will pay you for that. And that should make you
happy, right?
So it’s assumed that this blessedness business just isn’t
very practical. Therefore, we are prone to politely ignore anything that we
don’t already know. Life is hard enough the way it is as we are trying to do
our job, be entertained, and feel good about ourselves.
I suspect, therefore, that at least many of you might have
run out of patience when you heard our Gospel reading being read. Jesus’s words
won’t teach you how to have more money. They won’t teach you how to make
technological advancements. “What’s the point then?” our flesh can’t help but
ask. “If this talk won’t advance my bottom line or create more labor-saving
devices for society, then it must be just a bunch of gobbledy-gook.”
I can understand why people might react that way if they
don’t know how things work in this realm. I would probably have a similar
reaction if I were to crack open a physics textbook: “What are all these
letters and numbers doing? I can’t make heads or tails of this stuff.” But a
physicist, who knows how physics works, is going to understand something of it.
In like manner we Christians should approach Jesus’s words.
Jesus himself says in our reading, “If you love me, you
will keep my commandments.” If you don’t want to hear what Jesus
teaches, if you think you know everything that you need to know already, if you
think it’s all just a bunch of gobbledy-gook, guess what that’s saying about
your supposed love of Jesus! You love Jesus, but you can’t be bothered to learn?
You don’t like it when he talks unless he only talks in a way that you want him
to talk? That’s quite the love that you’ve got there. Imagine if there were a
physicist who never wanted to study physics. Or he only wanted to understand
the physics according to what he already knew and understood. He probably
wouldn’t be much of a physicist.
We Christians are called disciples. Another word for
“disciple” is “student.” We are students—students of Jesus. Why? Because we
believe that what he will teach us will make us happy. Some of what Jesus
teaches us is easy; some of it, less so. The Bible even makes this distinction.
The apostles speak about milk and about solid food. There’s a time for drinking
milk. There’s a time for eating solid food. You can’t give solid food to a
baby. On the other hand, you can’t forever keep feeding milk to people either.
They would be weak and malnourished.
There has been a tendency among us to do just that, however.
It is very common for people to refuse to see spiritual solid food as being
necessary. That’s another way of saying that it is not necessary to grow. It is
not necessary to study. But you should perceive that there’s something wrong
here if you compare it to who we act with the other things in life. With other
things in life we learn how they work, and we adjust our actions accordingly. Shouldn’t
that also be true in this spiritual realm as well? When was the last time you
learned something from Jesus and adjusted your actions accordingly?
And we pastors and teachers have been at fault too. We do
not always love Jesus enough to treasure what he commands or to believe what he
has promised. There is an occupational hazard for us pastors and teachers to
rattle off the same old tired phrases. Nobody gets upset at old tired phrases.
Nobody tends to repent or change their ways with tired old phrases either.
This is not good. It’s not good for anyone. Those who refuse
to learn anything more than what they’ve always known and always assumed to be
true are never going to feel at home with Jesus’s commandments. Many of the
things that Jesus commands don’t sound too good or very advantageous when we
first hear them. How does “Love your enemies,”
sound to you? How does “Take the lowest spot,”
sound to you? A recipe for success? Jesus gives a grand summation at one point:
“If you wish to be my disciple, then deny yourself,
take up your cross, and follow me.” There’s nothing easier than ignoring
or dismissing what we don’t want to understand. There’s also nothing more
common.
But refusing to understand how things work, refusing to
learn from Jesus, doesn’t do anybody any good. On the other hand, if we do learn
from him, it will do us good and it will do good to other people. What Jesus
teaches is good and true. It works! And we are in such need of it!
Despite what seems to be agreed upon as the most important
and the sure-fire way for society to succeed, it certainly doesn’t seem like
it’s working very well. Perhaps never before in this history of the world has
there ever been so many riches accumulated as we now enjoy with all our
advancements, but where’s the happiness? Jesus can teach you how to be happy,
but it takes guts. Try following his commandments if you dare. You will be
happy. Try them out!
But before you try them out, you probably first just need to
learn what they are. I’m sure you’ve heard them before, but I’m not sure that
we’ve actually listened to him. Which of you were listening intently to what
Jesus said in our Gospel reading? I wouldn’t be surprised if, after a couple
sentences, you kind of checked out. He went from one topic to another. He
talked about asking the Father for the helper, the Spirit of truth. He said, “You know him, and he is with you and in you” and I
wouldn’t be surprised if you just figured that this was all too difficult for
you or too much work for you, and what good would it likely do you anyway?
We have been tricked. We have been tricked into thinking
that what is really good, really beneficial, is to understand how things work
so that we can make a living. This is deemed to be all-important. One’s
relationship with God, one’s happiness, one’s sense of self, the meaning of
life—these and similar things have been deemed unimportant. That means the vast
majority of what the Bible teaches is unimportant. The Bible then just gets
mined for inspirational sayings that fit in with how we already think about
being happy.
So here is my recommendation for the next time you come
across some Scripture that you don’t immediately understand. Don’t ignore it.
Don’t let it pass through one ear and out the other.
If anything, you should have the opposite reaction. Instead
of lazily dismissing it, you should perk up your ears. Here you might be
learning something about how things work when it comes to happiness, to the
meaning of life, to your relationship with God and so on. These topics are not
the sidelight of your life. They are the main thing. They are the eternal
thing. Be patient and attentive. Be a student of Jesus. Pray for the Holy
Spirit himself to teach you, which Jesus has promised to give those who ask
him.
So, in closing, I’d like to do something we don’t usually
do. Let’s ask for the Holy Spirit, and listen again to Jesus’s words. Pay
attention to his many promises. Listen to what he says about the Holy Spirit. At
the end of the reading he says something very important about you, the Father, and
him. These are practical teachings about what is most important in life.
[Jesus said:] “If you love me, you
will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you
another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the
world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him,
for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I
will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you
will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that
I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and
keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my
Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”
You might not have understood everything. That’s okay. The
Holy Spirit will keep teaching you if you keep listening to Jesus’s words.
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