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One Last Thing
One Last Thing
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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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.