Sermons

“The Gospel Lens”

Psalm 127:1-2; Mark 12:28-34 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – November 8, 2015

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might learn to live our lives with our love for you at the very center. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

When I was almost 8 years into my first pastorate, back in Anniston, Alabama, the congregation made the decision to celebrate our 125^th anniversary by hosting a Regional Miracle Day. A Miracle Day is when a whole Region full of people descends on one congregation to do a big project or two all – well, more or less, all in one day. Our biggest project that day was a major renovation of the sanctuary. The building had been built in 1866, so it was what you might call antique. But there’d been a fire in the early sixties, so the sanctuary was partially covered in really ugly, really cheap fake wood paneling. It was quite an undertaking. But perhaps most frightening of all, this project meant that we were going to have to decide upon a color for the new carpeting. And not just for the carpet, but also for the walls and the woodwork.

If you know anything at all about churches, you know that we are famous for having arguments about what color the carpet should be. So as a still relatively new pastor, I was really hoping that we could avoid having this decision-making process become a big deal. The thing is, there isn’t much biblical guidance about how to choose a carpet color. And there’s nothing about paint colors either. There isn’t clarity about whether this sort of thing should be the work of an existing committee, or whether you should form a whole new committee, specifically for that particular project. There are no teachings about whether such decisions should be made by the committee alone or whether the whole congregation should get to vote. And that’s okay. Do you know why? Because Christianity isn’t about choosing carpet colors. Somehow though, churches have become notorious for behaving as though such things are central to our identity. We have been caught far too often, majoring, as they say, in the minors.

“Which commandment is the first of all?” asked the scribe. The way Mark introduces the challenge, I almost wonder if the questions Jesus was being asked before this one were the first-century equivalents of “What color do you think the carpet should be?” But then, cutting through the minutiae and trivia, “which commandment is the first of all?” What are we really supposed to be about here? Tell me where the bottom line is.

And so Jesus did: “God alone is God; you shall worship the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and all your strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And really, that’s all we need to know about picking carpet colors.

One of the most important things I learned in seminary was something my Regional Minister, Chuck Blaisdell taught me. You’ve got to know what you think the gospel is, he said. Because without an understanding of the essence of the gospel, you won’t have any way of measuring everything else. But once you know what the gospel is, that becomes the lens through which you view everything else. [slide] You’re already seeing the world through some kind of lens, so it’s vital to identify what your lens is, so that you can be sure it’s actually the gospel and not some other more trivial, idolatrous something-or-other. This was Chuck’s way of talking about what seminary professors would have called hermeneutics, or methods of interpretation. But I like calling it the gospel lens, because it gets right at the heart of the matter. What is the Good News? Is the thing you’re trying to figure out good news or not?

In a sense, this is the question Jesus was answering when he responded to that scribe. Here is the heart of the matter, the thing by which all else should be measured: Love God with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself. I figure if this is how Jesus answers the question, it’s probably good enough for me too.

Once you’ve embraced the idea of having a gospel lens – that is, that there is core principle that is the standard for the rest of your life – it becomes easier to figure things out. In theory. Perhaps we should stick with saying, it becomes easier to know what the right thing to do is, whether it’s easier to actually do it or not.

So if loving God and loving our neighbors is our lens, what do we do with that? I think it’s important to note that we can use this lens in a variety of contexts. First of all, it can become a way of relating to scripture. Let us start by assuming that the whole of scripture is sacred, in some sense, because it is a record of humanity’s search for connection with the Divine. But let us also admit that that search took some unfruitful twists and turns, and that much of scripture is bound by its original context in ways that make it less relevant for us today. It seems to me that our passage today from Mark provides explicit permission for this. The scribe, in repeating Jesus’ answer back to him, proclaims that this first commandment and its corollary are “more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” That right there is telling us it’s okay to prioritize certain scripture passages over others. The trick is to find the ones that serve as the measuring stick for the rest. And I believe Jesus’ declaration about the first and second commandments is one of them. If there are other places in scripture that do not reflect a whole-hearted love for God and a cherishing of our neighbors as our own kin, they go in a different pile. There may still be lessons to be pulled forth from them, but they do not qualify as proscriptive for our lives, that is, they are not the good news we are aiming to share by our living.

So our gospel lens is useful for biblical interpretation. It’s also useful for church life in general. And that bit about “all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” is on point here as well. We may know what we like to do at church. We may know what we’ve always done and how we’ve always done it. We may know what the church up the road is doing and think we should try that out too. But we will do well to run all of these ideas and the way we’re implementing them past our gospel lens. It’s when we forget to do that on a regular basis that we end up divided over things like the color of the carpet. Too often, we make idols of our modern day “burnt offerings” or even worse – the proper way to char those offerings just right – instead of keeping our eyes on the larger goal, bringing glory and praise to the God of Love. Too often, we get so focused on how we think church should be done that we railroad the process, in the meantime, being anything but loving to those we’re working with. We forget that is it not our church, but God’s church. “Unless the Lord builds the house,” the psalmist warns us, “those who build it labor in vain.” Sometimes we get so excited about our plans, that we forget to stop and make sure that they are in line with God’s goals and desires for our congregation and our community. We forget to spend time in study of the gospel and prayer seeking God’s will, and instead just light out on our own. And then we wonder why things aren’t working out. It doesn’t have to be that hard, the psalmist says.

This can happen in our own lives as well. Loving God with our whole self and loving everyone else as we love ourselves is a good, if hard, standard for life. We do tend to live our lives in routines and patterns. But sometimes things come along and disrupt the normal flow of things. Those moments can be traumatic, but they can also give us a chance to stop and reflect on how we’ve been living all along. Is our life demonstrating our love for God? Are we acting like we’re the most important thing, or are we living in humble thanksgiving for all our blessings? Do our relationships and the way we use our resources reflect God’s priorities for our lives, or do they simply put us and our desires right at the middle of things?

We could spend an entire season on this verse, talking through all the ways in which these two simple commands give us guidance and direction for life. We could spend – and I hope we are – a lifetime figuring out how to love God with our whole being – our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength, our understanding, our resources, our talents, our jokes, our tears, our prayers and our decisions. That is what it means to have and actively use a gospel lens. It doesn’t just shape the way we interpret scripture or the way we make decisions at church. It shapes who we are and what we do, how we relate to others and what we put our energy into.

In the end, “Love God and Love People” does give us guidance for deciding what color the carpet is. But it’s not about the content of the decision. It’s about how we make the choice. It’s about making sure that throughout the process, we keep in mind that our main goal is to bring glory to the God of Love, to treat one another as Jesus treats us all. Which means that we listen carefully to one another, we hear what these choices mean to one another, and most of all, we keep in mind that there is no good reason to get too attached to one result or another. They chose blue carpet. I voted for the burgundy. But you know what? The process wasn’t painful. It was wonderful. Because the whole project became about the people of God working together to do something far larger than we could have accomplished on our own. It was clear in taking on this renovation, we had bitten off more than we could chew. So how could we help but approach it with humility and thanksgiving, knowing that God would be amongst us, making a way where there was no way? The color of the carpet was but one tiny step in the process of that community of faith growing together in love and growing closer to God.

There is a reason that churches hold worship services every week. We do a lot of other things, and most of them are important ways of acting out our faith. But unless we’re coming before God on a regular basis, reminding ourselves that God alone is God, that God’s priorities are the ones we’ve committed ourselves to working toward, and that we are called, most of all, to be mindful of the process of that – how we work together more than what we do together – unless we’re reminding ourselves of these things, this gospel guidance, we are very likely to wander off in our own directions, seeking our own ends and eating the bread of anxious toil. May we re-commit ourselves this day to seeking God’s presence and God’s will, and give ourselves to that Love, heart, soul and mind. Alleluia and Amen.