Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 11/11/07
Serving the World
Isaiah 1:11-17
James 2:14-17
These last two months we have been looking at the various characteristics that identify a follower of Jesus. We’ve been calling them the “marks of an apprentice”. Just as we know a plumber’s apprentice or a carpenter’s apprentice by the tools they carry; so it is with us – the follower of Jesus should be recognizable by certain defining characteristics.
The first is obvious. The apprentice of Jesus will be Christ-centered; not because they have to be, but because they have come to believe that Jesus truly got it – that he was the smartest to walk this earth and understood life as God intended it. What Jesus modeled and what he taught show us the way to life in the Kingdom.
Because we are Christ-centered, we embrace sacrifice. This runs counter to our every instinct, but we see in Jesus the unique power of sacrifice to change lives and to change the world. We are scriptural. We look to scripture as Jesus himself did for our understanding of God and of God’s intent for our lives. We are spiritual. We voluntarily assume certain disciplines such as prayer and study not as a way to impress God or to merit God’s love, but as a way to nurture that deepest part of who we are.
Finally, the apprentice of Jesus is committed to service. We move through life with our heart and eyes focused outward – out beyond ourselves, out towards this world which is in such desperate need. We are committed to service, first and foremost, because that is what we see of God’s own heart.
Why did Jesus come into this world? Why did God take on the form of human flesh, live in our midst and die for our sakes? God had nothing to gain. The incarnation, rather, was the expression of God’s very nature. It was the out-working of God’s love. The incarnation was all about God reaching out to us.
As apprentices of this Jesus, then, our eyes are going to be turned out towards the needs of those around us. We are going to stop asking “what’s in it for me?” and ask instead “what can I do for the world around me?”. There are, then, these two components in our faith journey. There in an inward journey as we nurture and grow in our relationship with God. And there is an outward journey as we express that relationship in our day to day lives. We inhale, and we exhale.
Look at much of the Church today, however, and you might conclude we’ve developed a bad case of asthma. We do okay with the breathing in. It is easy enough to show up for worship, to spend some time in prayer, to study scripture on occasion. But when it comes to breathing out our muscles seize up, the air passages swell, and we find ourselves hitting a kind of wall. For many of us the real struggle is bringing our faith into our daily lives.
God has some pretty strong feelings about that kind of faith. Take a look at what God says through the prophet Isaiah (1:11ff):
What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? Says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more…
God is talking about worship here. He is saying he is fed up. He doesn’t want anything to do with it anymore. Why not? Verse 16: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes…”
God isn’t interested because what people are doing in worship has no connection with the rest of their lives. Instead of being the culmination of everything else, it is a cover. People are shifting between two very different modes. They have got world mode and then they’ve got worship mode and there is no connection, no integration between the two.
What’s God looking for? He is looking for congruity – a consistency between what is expressed in worship and what is expressed in life: “Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
God’s looking for behavior that reflects God’s own heart. You can’t read scripture and not encounter God’s heart for the poor and the oppressed. You can’t read it and not see just how much God cares for those who are suffering, and cares for those who have been pushed out towards the fringes.
The orphans and the widows aren’t just people who have lost key family members. In that society they are the ones who had no rights. They couldn’t own property. They had no way to make a living. They were absolutely dependent on the generosity of others, and were too easily pushed to the edges and forgotten.
“Seek justice,” God says. The Hebrew here for justice is “mishpat,” a word that occurs literally hundreds of times throughout the Old Testament. This is a God of justice and judgment, a God who is passionate about that which is right and good and caring.
Look at Isaiah 58: 6 – very similar message: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” Go forward another couple of chapters, 61:1, “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners…”
Does that sound familiar? It is the very passage that Jesus later chose to define his ministry: “Today in your hearing,” he said (Luke 4:21), “this scripture has been fulfilled.”
Eyes outward. Lives focused on a world in need. Why? First of all, because that is the very nature of the God we worship. The second reason that the apprentice of Jesus is committed to service is because of the needs of the world around us.
This past August the Census Bureau released its report, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United State: 2006.” Some of the statistics are sobering, and even overwhelming. In this remarkably affluent nation, 36,460,000 people are living below the poverty line (p.12). 12,827,000 of those people are children. In a nation with the most advanced medical care in the world, 46,995,000 have no insurance coverage and are unable to get the care they need (p. 63) – 8,661,000 of them are children. We aren’t talking here just about people who don’t have private coverage. These are people who aren’t covered by the government either.
Scripture tells us God cares about these people. God cares about their need.
Most of you have probably heard about the growing economic disparity between rich and poor in our country. In a PBS interview last August, Pulitzer prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston shared that the top 300,000 people in this country (one tenth of one percent) have almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. That’s one tenth of one percent compared to what is almost exactly the bottom 50 percent.
Or consider this: 80% of all the income gains over the last thirty years is in the hands of the top 1%. One of my favorite journalists, Bill Moyers, says that is like inviting 100 people over to your home for desert. You pull out a pie and slice it into five different pieces. Then you give four of those slices to just one person. You leave the other ninety nine people to wrestle for the remaining one.
There is something deeply wrong when a nation’s income gains are monopolized by so few. This isn’t about Republican or Democratic. This is a systemic issue; an issue about our political system in general. There is something profoundly wrong with a system in which those who can afford lobbyists and can afford political contributions are disproportionately favored in the legislative process.
What scripture tells us is that God cares about this stuff. Those aren’t just numbers to God. Every one of those numbers is an individual, every one of those thirteen million children living below poverty is a human being.
We are committed to service because that’s God’s nature. We are committed because the need is so great. And we are committed, finally, because we, ourselves, need to be. It is part of where we find real life.
In our Christian walk we can come to church every Sunday. We can listen to the message. We can spend time in scripture throughout the week and even get our doctrine down cold. But then we have a choice. We can do all those things and still live our lives exactly as we did before. Or we can do them and then choose to put what we’ve heard and learned into practice.
What does James say in our New Testament Lesson? “Faith without works is dead.” The real measure of our faith, he is saying, is the impact that it actually has upon our lives. It is the things we do differently because of what we believe, because of who we worship and proclaim – that’s what matters.
That’s the message of the Old Testament. It is the message of the New, as well. Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ is going to enter the kingdom heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). Real faith is a faith that works, a faith that serves, a faith that turns our eyes out beyond ourselves and out towards this world with all its need.
Have you ever met someone who has turned away from the faith? Given up on it, claiming that is has no real power? The spiritual landscape is littered with their corpses.
But what was it that they were really rejecting? Was it truly the living Christ, or was it instead some pale reflection of their own creation? A Christ they tried to keep in some small box of Sunday mornings and an occasional prayer? A Christ they could control?
Showing up on Sunday is part of the journey, but it doesn’t begin to approach the whole. It doesn’t begin to embrace the fullness of that life which God longs to share.
Can you imagine someone climbing into the cockpit of an airplane and then sitting back and doing nothing? Sitting there and waiting for something to happen? Showing up on Sunday and offering a few prayers isn’t all that different. It is true, you’ve got to climb into the cockpit before you can fly, but climbing in is only the first step in a far greater commitment.
It is the one who puts what they have learned into practice who is actually going to fly. It is the one who risks pushing those throttles forward and commits their entire well-being to this seemingly fragile craft and the physics of flight who is going to soar.
Only in breathing out do we create the space to breathe in once more. Only in putting our faith into practice do we open our lives to that fresh breath of God’s own Spirit within.
In an address to the General Synod of the United Church of Christ last June, the wonderful journalist Bill Moyers, said:
This new struggle for a just world – it’s not a partisan affair. God is not a liberal or conservative. God is not a Democrat or Republican… to see whose side God is on, just go to the record. It’s the widow and the orphan, the stranger and the poor who are blessed in the eyes of God. It is kindness and mercy that prove the power of faith, and it’s justice that measures the worth of the state, not empire. Kings are held accountable for how the poor fare under their reign; Presidents, too. Prophets speak to the gap between rich and poor as the reason for God’s judgment. Poverty and justice are religious issues, and Jesus moves among the disinherited.
For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink…
We can’t be apprentices of Christ and not have a heart for this world… We can’t know the life Jesus offers without taking this faith of ours and committing ourselves to service.