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Matthew 25:31-46 • November 20, 2011

Brothers and sisters in Christ grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

Today is Christ the King Day. It’s kind of like News Year’s Eve for the church. Next week a new church year begins with the season of Advent. A time when we wait with hope-filled anticipation of the coming of our savior in a little baby.

I’ve been blessed this year with several opportunities to travel and serve in the church in some pretty incredible ways and in some pretty incredible places.

One such place came to mind this week.

It’s about 90 degrees in the shade with little to no breeze in the air. My mission team brother in Christ Tim and I have just been given a new task. We are in the Gitsemane community of Los Buenos, El Salvador helping three families build new homes through Thrivent Financial for Lutherans’ Builds program and Habitat for Humanity in El Salvador. The homes we are building are extremely modest by our standards – the entire house would easily fit inside nearly every one of our living rooms. But they are miraculous homes of unimaginable size and beauty and safety to Salvadorian families who have lived most of their lives in homes with dirt floors and corrugated steel walls and roofs made from plastic sheeting.

So Tim and I had work to do. Our assignment was to relocate three dump truck loads of dirt with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The trick in this assignment was that the two loads of dirt that we could see on top of the pile were NOT the dirt that we needed to move. What we needed to move was the dirt on the bottom of the pile. Obviously, in order to get to the bottom of the pile, the dirt that we needed, we first had to move the dirt on the top of the pile, the dirt that we didn’t need.

I kept thinking, I’ve never moved a pile of dirt from one location to the next in my own yard – why in the world did I think this would make any more sense in northern El Salvador!? I was beginning to think that the entire enterprise that Tim and I were undertaking was quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I had ever done. And then I heard four little words.

“God’s work. Our hands.”

These four little words are the signature phrase of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I think they’re much more than just a catchy slogan that we can put on our letterhead. For me, they are quickly becoming a missional calling for every person in the United States who calls a congregation of the ELCA their church home.

As Tim and I continued to dig, my frustration grew. Come on El Salvador – haven’t you heard of this really cool invention called a Bobcat that is a whole lot better at moving dirt that Tim and me? With each shovel of dirt, frustration grew.

Professor David Lose wrote this on his blog week, “before we can ‘be Christ’ to our neighbor we also need to ‘see Christ’ in our neighbor.”

One shovel full of dirt, two shovel fulls of dirt, 180 shovel fulls of dirt. See Christ – are you kidding me? This was hard work that we were doing that didn’t make much sense in the first place, much less include Jesus in any way. And then out of the blue, we were joined by one of our Salvadoran brothers, one of the masons at this job sight. He stopped by to see how we were doing. To say hi and grab a shovel and work alongside us for a little while.

I saw Christ in my neighbor. In a place that I least expected. I saw Christ in a neighbor that walked beside me and pointed clearly to the importance of the work that we were doing in this little village.

And when our week of work concluded, these neighbors sent me home with a very special gift for being a pastor to them during the week. The stole I’m wearing today. It’s a gift that will help me remember the love of God that I experienced in a most unexpected place. In a most unexpected face.

How do you see Christ in your neighbor? And how do you respond when you do? The images that you’ve been seeing are just some of the people and places where I’ve seen Christ recently.

In today’s gospel text, I think Jesus is promising us something. Promising you and me, who are walking the earth centuries after Jesus walked, that we have face-to-face encounters with Jesus each and every day. When you see neighbors at school, or work, or church, or in a community halfway around the world – do you see Christ in their faces? As you complete your financial promise card to support the mission and ministry that God is calling Good Shepherd Lutheran Church to live out in 2012, will your see Christ in that financial promise?

A few months ago, Wendy and I were blessed to walk the same streets and garden paths that Saint Francis of Assisi walked nearly 800 years ago. Saint Francis gave up a significant inheritance from his family in order to serve the poor. I pray that the blessing I offer in the spirit of Saint Francis blesses you and me as we seek to see Christ in our neighbor. Receive this blessing today.

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that Christ may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

One last thing. Tim and I did get that dirt moved. And a beautiful tile floor is being installed this week in that home. Right on top of the dirt that we moved. That pile of dirt that we moved made this week’s flooring installation possible.

Click here to hear the audio recording of this sermon.

Matthew 22:34-46 • October 23, 2011

Brothers and sisters in Christ grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

Most all of us have heard the word “love” before we came to worship today. And many of us have heard this gospel reading before, whether in the gospel of Mark or Luke or in Matthew as we have today, which by the way is a little bit different. I challenge you to take a look at that when you get home.

I think Tina Turner might have shed light on this gospel text when she sang “What’s love got to do with it?”

Or maybe the lawyer in this encounter with Jesus is just prepping Jesus to see if he is ready to take the bar exam. By then end of the story today though, we clearly see that not even the lawyer is ready for this bar exam. I question whether any of us sitting here today is ready for an exam like that.

The challenge with encountering Jesus in texts like today, is that if you think of the Bible as a book of rules, you’re never going to be ready for the exam. To the Pharisees, there were far more than just a list of 10 things – there are actually over 600 laws that they were trying not to break.

To look at love in Jesus’ commandment today, it’s important to understand what the meaning of love is from a biblical perspective. In that song by Tina Turner and in much of our own understanding of love today, we think of it as an emotion. In other words, love is a passive response to something around us – outside of us. The challenge here is that is not the only aspect of love that Jesus is speaking about today. Biblical love is not just emotional love.

How do we connect with or even understand this kind of love? A pastor once surveyed several of his Sunday school children with the question, “What does love mean?”

Karl, age 5, said, “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving lotion and they go out and smell each other.”

Elaine, age 5, said, “Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Brad Pitt.”

Mary Ann, age 4, said, “Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.”

Tommy, age 6, said, “Love is like a little old man and a little old woman who are still friends even after they know each other so well.”

Bobby, age 5, said, “Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.”

And Jenny, age 7, said, “There are two kinds of love. God’s love. Our love. But God makes both kinds.”

Biblical love is not passive and it is far more than just being an emotion. Fuller Theological Seminary preaching Professor Clayton Schmit says this, “Biblical love is the active response of the faithful person to the love of God. To love neighbor as oneself is to act toward the other as one would act toward those close to you. We treat the stranger as well as we treat those that we love emotionally.”

Schmit goes on to say that, “We can love with our heart: through generosity to God’s people. We can love with our soul: by worshiping God and praying for our neighbors and ourselves. And we can love with our minds: studying God’s word and letting it correct us, enlighten us, and send us out in loving action to the world.”

Or this insight from one of my favorite thinkers in the world today and a member of one of the great bands that has written some of the most significant hymns of our time about life as God’s children in the world today. I’ve heard Bono from U2 say this several times, “True religion will not let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom. Love thy neighbor is not a piece of advice, it’s a command.”

I bet that there are a significant number of you that helped during the flooding this spring in our city and state. You may have worked on a sandbag line, helped someone move out of their house, cooked a meal for someone, or offered prayer for everyone affected by the whole situation. Whatever the case was, I want you to know that your response of love toward your neighbor began with God’s response of love toward you in Jesus.

Several weeks ago we asked our congregation to share their favorite scripture verses with us. An amazing number you offered your favorite verses. These verses are now being assembled into a booklet that will be given to over 400 children in Kindergarten through sixth grade as they continue to study scripture in Church School and at home with their families. Your response of love toward these children, more than 400 of them which I assume you don’t know all of them personally, began with God’s response of love toward you in Jesus.

Last weekend over 300 people attended a benefit breakfast for the Flood of Love in the Lynne Center. Flood of Love is an effort taking place throughout our synod to raise money and bring awareness to several congregations that were severely damaged or completely destroyed by flood waters this summer. Your response of love raised over $3,000 for our brothers and sisters in Christ, most of whom you have never and will never meet. It began with God’s response of love toward you in Jesus.

God loves us that much. And God’s love is way more than an emotion. God’s love commands a faithful response. Jesus’ words to us today give us direction on what that response is supposed to be.

Tina Turner may have given us a starting point as she sang “What’s love got to do with it?” But once again, Jesus shows us the way. A Pharisian lawyer tests him by asking what the greatest commandment is. To which Jesus replies with love – love with your heart, love with your mind, love with your soul, love toward your neighbor.

Love Wins is the title of one of my favorite books of the year. In it, Pastor Rob Bell writes, “Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came, and love is why he continues to come, year after year to person after person.”

So, I close this time in our worship with Pastor Rob’s final thoughts from his book. Pastor Rob writes this, “May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about. And may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins.” Amen.