Matt 7:7-12

The Beauty of the Bride - One Last Thing

Sermon preached Nov. 23, 2014
Opening
When we lived in Virginia we bought a big Sauder entertainment center to hold our TV,
stereo and CDs and videos. It came in three flat boxes that were each really heavy made of particle board which weighs a ton. Saturday morning, about nine, I get my tool
box and open the boxes, sort out the wood and the fasteners and the rest of the hardware
and pull out the instructions.
Instruction sheet is about 3 feet by 4 feet. 47 steps. And about what youd expect from
easy to do it yourself instructions - pencil drawings with almost no instructions. I start
putting it together. But some of the instructions dont make sense. Calls for attaching the
top piece of the unit to the back panel in such a way that it looked backwards. Thought,
that must be a mistake and put it on the way that I thought it should go on.
Proceeded with the rest of it, and, six, yes, six, hours later got ready to put the last piece
on - that back panel with the top piece it that by now had a bunch more stuff attached to it
- and found out the instructions were right after all. Spent another hour disassembling
that piece and correcting my mistake. Seven hours later, my whole Saturday shot, weve
got an entertainment center in our family room
Some years later, we get ready to move to South Carolina. We decide were not going to
take the entertainment center because its gotten scratched and dinged and kind of beaten
up. So I get my big rubber mallet and with great glee, knock the thing into pieces and
drag it to the curb for the garbage truck.
Instructions can be so complicated...And what about the instruction manual for being a
follower of Jesus Christ. Got this big book. Lots of stuff in here. All kinds of different
material. Law and history and prophecy and poetry - like the psalms - and wisdom
literature and gospels and letters and other stuff. Lot to read through. Lot to learn.
Wouldnt it be great if you could kind of just boil it down to the essentials?
Well, wouldnt you know that Jesus thought of this!
Context
In Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is the new lawgiver bringing the law of Moses down to
the heart level - says he has not come to abolish law and prophets, but to fulfill them - and
does this thing weve noted before - you have heard, but I say to you..

and what hes doing is pushing to what at the heart of the law and the prophets.
There are 613 laws in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy - thats a lot of
instructions...
and additional teachings in prophets like Isaiah and Amos - a library of material
plus all the commentary on the law that had accumulated over the centuries .
And in our reading, Jesus begins to sum it all up, the whole Sermon the Mount. Its like
the Lord takes a deep breath, and he begins with the Greek word ouv - therefore, heres
what I want you to do, heres the heart of the matter, as simple as I can make it, and so
Jesus says in vs. 12: In everything do to others as you would have them do to you...
Its like the Lord is saying, It all comes down to this - do to others as you would have
them do to you.
Genius of this
Back then - and now - you had experts, well, kind of like me, whose job was to learn and
teach the Bible. You went to school to become an expert back then, today we
Presbyterian ministers, we have to go to seminary.
But what Jesus does, according to Martin Luther, is to take away from the experts the
question of how we are to treat others, and give it to us in a form that is really simple to
understand. All our relationships with other people come down to one simple question
that not even a trained professional can mess up, one simple question we ask ourselves, s
How would I want to be treated? Luther says Thus you are your own Bible, your own
teacher, your own theologian, and your own preacher.
It works something like this.
You heard of Beer Goggles? How alcohol makes people look better than they
really do? Well, how about Golden Rule Goggles? You put on your Golden Rule
Goggles, and in every interaction, in Starbuckswith somebody at church, in a
few moments, when you go to work....when youre at school, with people in your
family. Dont just respond the way that Im apt to in kind of me-centered
autopilotmy hopes, my dreamsand everybody else is just kind of little bit
players in my movie. Dont do that. Instead, just pause. Notice the other person.
Take a moment to think about, Whats their story? Whats her dream? Whats his
hope? Then think, What would I want if I was in that persons shoes?
Now, this not always easy or simple. Two things this requires. First thing - weve got
this automatic reflex to take care of me first. You go to the doctor and she hits your knee
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with that little hammer and your leg reflexively kicks up - well, theres a reflex in here
that makes everything about me - what I want, need, desire. Youve got to be self-aware
and stop yourself from exercising that its all about me reflex
And then exercise the second quality - that of empathy. And thats not easy either - you
have to get out of your bubble where its all about me and really work to understand the
other person - what they want and need.
Think of this in terms of your marriage - its a cliche but true nonetheless - that
women and men have different love languages - if youre a man, its a Saturday
afternoon, what you would like others to do for you is to leave you alone, maybe
bring you a cold beverage so you can sit in the recliner and watch some college
football and you may think do unto others...well, for my wife that would mean
invite her to watch football with me - but - if you are going to love your wife - you
have to get inside her head and understand her love language - that maybe what
would make her happy, would make her day, is if you would go outside and work
in the yard with her to prune some bushes and mulch some beds and plant some
bulbs.
Challenge of this
Centrality of this - Bruner - this critique of me and Jesus spirituality - Jesus is saying that
most of what God requires of us involves how we treat other people - the messed-up,
broken, contentious, obnoxious people we encounter everyday.
And there are no limits to this - in everything do to others...and remember, in Luke, how
Jesus got challenged about who is my neighbor? Answer - everyone - everyone is to be
treated with the Golden Rule. Geez. Everyone.
In one of his radio spots, Chuck Colson tells a story from Iraq about a U.S. triage
facility doing its best to save the lives of two Iraqi insurgents. The team had done
everything possible to save the lives of the insurgents, but one of them was not
going to survive unless he got 30 pints of blood. The call went out through the
facility for volunteer donors, and within minutes, dozens of American soldiers had
lined up to donate blood. At the head of the line was a battle-hardened soldier
named Brian. When a reporter asked if it mattered to him that he was giving his
blood to an enemy soldier, Brian replied, A human life is a human life.
How we get this - this not moralism, this flows from an encounter with the one who is love
So how do we actually do this, hour by hour, day by day? Write it on the back of our
hand with a Sharpie? Look in the mirror in the morning and give ourselves a pep talk to
treat others as we want to be treated?
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Well, if you know yourself at all, you know that something deeper is required. Its not
enough to remind yourself, make a resolution to treat other people better - because weve
got that problem with the me first reflex and then with other people, our default
towards them is that we tend to avoid people who might want somehting from me, or
figure out how that other person can benefit me.
Great thing is that what Jesus requires, he provides. The Lord doesnt lay down the law
in order to hit us over the head with it. He gives a law like this for the flourishing of
human society - and then enables us to do it. Not perfectly...but over time, more and
more consistenly. And not out of fear. But out of love
The apostle John, in his first letter, says we can love, because he first loved us.
And according to John Ortberg, you can see how this worked in his life.
Do you remember what Jesus nicknamed him and his brother? The Sons of
Thunder. He called them that because they were a lot of hot air. When a little
Samaritan village gave them a rude reception, they looked for weapons of mass
destruction to come down from heaven.
Do you know what they called the apostle John by the end of his life? The
Apostle of Love. How does somebody get so utterly transformed, so turned
inside-out? John gives us a clue in his gospel: again and again, he describes
himself in his gospel as "the one Jesus loved."
John understood that despite all his fallenness, all of his folly, all of his flaws, all
of his murderous thoughts towards Samaritans, all of his desire for advantage,
Jesus Christ looked at him in with the eyes of love.
John had a head-on collision with love...and so we must we. When we come to know and
love Christ, the center of our identity changes and we understand ourselves as I am the
one whom Jesus loves.
An illustration
I read a book called Same Kind of Different as Me - true story - highly recommend
About a man nicknamed Denver who grew up an illiterate sharecropper in Louisiana who
ends up homeless in Fort Worth, angry, bitter, mean as a snake, encounters the love of
Christ through a woman who works faithfully at a homeless shelter and is changed by the
love of Christ - he keeps pushing this woman away, keeps pushing anyone away who tries
to get close - but finally the love this woman shows him wears him down, her love leads
him to accept the love of Christ, and kind of like the Grinch his heart grows - how much
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did the Grinchs heart grow? Anyway...

Begins to live by the Golden Rule and look for those Holy Spirit moments when he can
live it out - a old man named Mr. Ballentine is abandoned at the shelter - Denver tries to
get to know him - Ballentine curses him and calls him the N word - Denver finds out
that he was a mean old drunk whod earned his familys contempt and that he hated black
people. Hated Christians too, but at this shelter, if you wanted your meals you had to sit
through a chapel service. Ballentine refused so Denver would take a meal up to him
every night for the two years he was at the shelter. And every time Ballentine would
curse him and call him the N word.
One night Ballentine was out on the streets and got jumped and beat so bad that he had to
go to a Medicare nursing home. Denver and the co-author of the book go to see him and
this is the scene:
When we entered Mr. Ballentines room at the nursing home, the smell hit me first - the
stench of age, dead skin, and bodily fluids. The old man lay on his bed in a puddle of
urine, naked except for a neon orange ski jacket. His ghostly chicken-bone legs sprawled
across a sheet that once had been white but was now dingy gray, streaked with brown and
ocher stains. Around him lay strewn trash and trays of half-eaten food..scrambled eggs,
crusted hard yellow...shriveled meats...petrified sandwiches...
The co-author said he had to leave the room because he was about to vomit - yet Denver
kept going back, over and over, to clean up the room, to clean up Ballentine - who never
said thank you and continued to call him the N word.
After years of going and taking care of Ballentine, who was now 85 years old and
decrepit, his heart finally started to soften...Denver was able to share Christ with
him...Ballentine said Ive lived too long and sinned too much for God to forgive me...on
the other hand, Im too damn old for much more sinning - maybe that will count for
something. Denver got him to go to church, wheeled him in and that sat in the back first time Ballentine had been in a church in his eighty-five years...and during that service
Ballentine got it - that he was loved - by Denver and by Jesus Christ.
r
This is what really matters in life, not worldly success
Im at the stage in life when I wonder about the worth of my life...
I guess we could have an interesting conversation about the question, how do you
measure the worth of a life?
But Ive decided that the two things that really matter, in the end, are the quality
of your own character, and how youve loved the people in your life.
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And this church - what are we going to be known for?

Been to a lot of conferences designed to teach and inspire you how to get your
church to grow, redesign your church to be hip and cool - Velocity Confernece,
Exponential Conference, Catalyst Conference - and after a while, theyre all the
same - pretty much the same lineup of pastors speak - and they lead churches that
are pretty much the same - rock bands, lighting systems and smoke machines,
topical sermon series about how to get your life together - and all the pastors there
are so desperate to learn the formula that will help them to have a cool, hip, fastgrowing church. Because thats the standard of success we secretly worship.
Central, ten years from now - is not going to be the biggest church in Franklin County.
Its not going to be the coolest and hippest church in Franklin County. Not if youre
stuck with me up here anyway.
But maybe we can be known as a church that really loves other people. And that love is
palpable when you walk in here - youre a guest and youre treated warmly and
respectfully, you get a warm and sincere but not overbearing greeting and people are
startled and delighted by it. That love is palpable, out in the community, as we love and
care for people, some of whom the world despises. Thats not the easy way to grow a
church. Its the hard way. And I think, its Jesus way.
The church has lost a lot of credibility in the minds of so many people. Some of that is
not deserved, but a lot of it is. Christians and churches have been judgmental moral
scolds, have ignored injustice, have excluded and hated on people because of race and
sexuality. Philip Yancey notes that a lot of people in our culture are reacting negatively to
our faith because it no longer sounds like good news. He goes on to relate how when hes
on an airplane, he has the practice of asking the person next to him, What is the first
word that comes to mind when I say Christian? Not one time has the person responded,
Love. And yet love is at the heart of the Gospel; love is the very substance of Gods
being.
I heard of a church in Colorado that started a ministry called Hands of the Carpenter.
Church members do painting, carpentry, house repairs for widows and single mothers. I
heard of a church that monitors parking meters. Volunteers patrol the streets and add
money to meters with expired time and put cards from the church on the windshields that
read, Your meter looked hungry so we fed it. If we can help you in any other way,
please give us a call. In Cincinnati, college students from a local church sign up every
Christmas to wrap presents at a local mall - no charge. People could not understand why
I would want to wrap their presents, said one student. I tell them, we just want to
show Gods love in a practical way.
Back in the first three centuries of the churchs history, the culture was indifferent and
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hostile too. But the church earned a right to be heard because it loved, radically loved,
even people who hated them. Maybe we can do the same.
I think thats what Jesus had in mind all along. Amen.