Our Relationship with God

Sermon        Proper 7 A     All Saints        6-21-20

Jeremiah 20: 7 – 13      Psalm 69:8 – 20      Romans 6: 1b – 11      Matthew 10: 24 – 39 

Answer me, O Lord, for Your love is kind….

The Concern of Scripture is always our relationship with God through Jesus Christ and our relationships with each other before God.  Obedience and disobedience, sin and repentance, redemption and punishment – all of these are descriptions of healthy and un-healthy ways to relate to God and others.  We pull out certain verses to support our concepts, our understanding of relationships as a way of describing the kinds of relationships we want. 

For example, the command to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and body is a reminder, a commitment to put God first in all things and to avoid the worship of false gods.  Love others as you love yourself is a reminder, a commitment that we must give the respect, dignity, freedom and peace to others that we wish to enjoy in our own households and pursuits. 

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us – now that is a hard one.  We are asking God to apply the same rules to us that we apply to others.  We are asking God to hold a grudge against us if we hold a grudge against another.  If we rub another’s nose in their sin and never let them recover or grow beyond it, we are asking God to do the same to us for our sins.  This is not asking God to remember the other person’s sins.  We are asking God to collect and hold onto our sins as we choose to collect and hold on to sins done against us.

I love stained glass windows – you know that from how much I exult in our church’s architectural beauty.  I love artist’s renditions of stories in Scripture.  I find icons to be extremely useful in settling my mind as I pray as well as reminding me of the glory and power of the One to whom I am praying.

Today’s Gospel from St. Matthew reminds us, however, that Christ Jesus is not a stained-glass window or a beautiful painting.  “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” is not the presentation of Jesus in this reading.  Jesus is here teaching about the real world in which the Disciples will be living once Jesus is crucified and risen, a world not much different from ours.  A world where choices have consequences and where the making of choices is not avoidable. 

Jesus lays this out quite clearly:

          If you deny me before your friends, I will deny you before God the Father.

          I have not come to bring peace to earth, but a sword of judgment.

          I will set family members against each other, even to killing each other.

          You cannot love anyone – especially family members – more than you love Me.

          You must take up THE CROSS and follow me, or you prove yourself unworthy

                                         of Me.

Notice that Jesus did not say you must pick up A cross for Me.  We do not get to designate any trouble or despair or trial in the plethora of troubles available as THE cross we bear.  We are called to the CROSS of JESUS CHRIST.  Only the Cross of Jesus is our service to God.  So how are we to understand what Jesus means by His instructions?

The essence of Good Friday is that Jesus CHOSE to go to death on a Cross.  Jesus was not forced to go there by any earthly power.  Judas Iscariot was right in thinking that Jesus could call on armies of angels to save Himself.  Jesus could have said No! not doing this! to God in the Garden of Gethsemane.  As Jesus did in Nazareth a couple of years earlier, Jesus could have disappeared – simply poofed out of reach – when the soldiers took hold of Him.  Several years of playing whack-a-mole with the Temple leaders and Roman soldiers could have ensued.  But Jesus did none of these things. 

Why?

Jesus chose the love of sacrifice for no reason other than LOVE.  Now, I must tell you that I am not comfortable with all the nuances of blood sacrifice.  I do not at all understand that kind of relationship with God.  I find the act of killing someone – anyone! – painful to contemplate.  I do understand the act of putting oneself between me and danger.  My beloved husband has done that for me.  That is a love whose depth I cannot begin to plumb.  But I know it is real. 

I know that Jesus Christ made the sacrifice for me and that nothing I can do will ever repay that or measure up to that love.  I know that Jesus chose you, chose me, over His own body and breath.  That is the Cross that Jesus asks us to take up.  The Cross of God’s eternal love for each man and each woman we meet.  The Cross that openly shows the worth of each person we meet, whoever, whenever and wherever that person exists. 

We cannot turn our back to any person or to his or her needs.  We cannot write off any person no matter how many tattoos or piercings he displays.  We cannot give up on any person no matter how different her life is from ours.  We are given only one shot at this life of service and witness for Christ Jesus.  If we save ourselves and ignore others stranded far away from God, what good are we to the Kingdom of God?  Jesus says that we save ourselves only by losing ourselves in Him, only by giving ourselves fully to the love and grace of God, the Father.         

Amen.