Preaching text: Deuteronomy 5:1, 16-21, John 3:1-17
For God so loved the world... It is fitting in many ways that we get this particular Gospel text in the midst of our exploration of the Small Catechism and even specifically the second tablet of the Ten Commandments, which we are looking at today. But those ways are not completely obvious. John 3:16 reminds us of God’s love for us and yet it’s the first tablet (the one we reviewed last week) that deals with our relationship with God himself. Tablet two is about our relationship with our neighbors and seemingly has nothing to do with our relationship with God.
Or does it?
Let me tell you a story from my life. Eleven years ago, I was growing disillusioned with being a bachelor in my 30s and frustrated by my efforts to remedy that by unsuccessfully dating local women. So I decided to take a leap of faith and signed up for eHarmony, the online dating service. It introduced me to this wonderful single mother from the State College area named Sarah. I fell head over heels.
But I knew that being in love with Sarah was not enough. Her being in love with me was not enough, but there was a third element in our relationship and that was Sarah’s two-year old daughter, Emily. I knew that if I wanted to make a marriage with this woman, I was going to have to love her little girl just as much. And that was a bit of a scary idea. Contrary to what you might see here on Sunday morning, I’m not completely comfortable with kids. Mostly because even when I was a kid, I wasn’t much of a kid. They like sports teams and the latest toys and music. I liked dinosaurs and spaceships, stars and planets. The drawback of being a nerd.
But I knew I had to try. Sarah loves her daughter, and if I’m to love Sarah I must love Emily too. And that’s how things played out. As many of you know, Sarah is my wife and has been for these last 9 years. And Emily? She’s 13 now and that says volumes I’m sure. But even at her worst in the midst of her teen angst, she too is the light of my life and I cannot imagine my world without her.
If you love something, you will seek to love that which it loves. If you love someone, you will seek to love that which they love. Therefore, if God loves the world, we, as his followers and those who love him, will seek to love the world as well. And how do we do that? That’s the Second tablet of the commandments.
As Luther sat down to explain the Second Tablet to infant Lutherans 500 years ago, he took for his model Jesus himself. For as we saw some weeks ago in the lessons from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is not content to leave the law as it is written, but he expands it in two ways. One, do not forget there are plenty of ways to “thou shalt not” that are not explicitly forbidden in the commandments.
As Jesus himself said, it’s not enough to not murder someone, but don’t hold anger and hate towards them in your heart either. To desire a possession of your neighbor’s is both to covet something (forbidden by the later commandments) and is virtually the same as theft. To presume the worst of someone is the same as lying openly about them. To disobey lawful authority is the same as defying your own family.
And the really fun one here is commandment #6. There are a whole lot of ways you can commit adultery that do not involve one’s reproductive organs at all. Last week, I mentioned the idol of productivity and how we can work ourselves quite literally to death. That idolatry can drive us away from our family and spouse as well. We can commit adultery with our job. Or with our hobbies. Or with a bottle of booze or a bottle of pills.
Loving is avoiding those things as best we can. To love our neighbor is to strive, as much as possible, to not cave into those temptations.
The second way Jesus (and Luther) expands on the commandments is to remind us that it is not merely enough to “thou shalt not” the bad things, but “thou shalt” do the good things as well.
Don’t just don’t steal, but work to protect your neighbor’s prosperity. Don’t just don’t murder, but work to improve your neighbor’s well-being. Don’t just don’t lie about people, but presume their good intentions and act accordingly.
In many ways, you can sum up the second tablet by a phrase I’ve come to live by, and to avoid using profanity in church, I’ll put it this way. Don’t be a...jerk. Don’t be a jerk to people. Treat them with respect and dignity. Even if they’re a jerk to you, don’t be a jerk back.
We are called to be better than that. We are called to love those whom our God loves. And yes, they aren’t always nice to us. They don’t always show us the same respect. But God puts up with a lot more and sometimes he puts up with a lot from us who should know better.
For God so loved the world... In the original Greek of that passage in John, the word used for “world” is κοσμος. The universe. Everything and everyone. That’s a tall order. But if we love God, we will strive to love those that he loves. And the Second tablet shows us how. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment