“The Road to Jerusalem: Service”
Rev. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
March 15, 2009
Luke 10: 27-37; Mark 12: 28-34
On the front page of USAToday this past Monday, there were two side by side headline stories. One was entitled, “Almost All Denominations Losing Ground.” And a second headline right next to it, “Economy Inspires Public Service.” The first article was about how the percentage of Americans who define themselves as Christian has dropped 11% in the past generation and Protestants have unfortunately led that decline. The second article described how “community service” in America is on the way up. Online applications this year for AmeriCorps service program are coming in three times faster than last year, for example, according to the article.
The side by side headlines were ironic to me because community service increased as religious affiliation declined. Now, the article details some of the reasons. As a result of the recession, people have less money, but more time to volunteer, so many are doing so. People are sensing that others are hurting and are helping. But as a pastor, I would like to think that these two principles, religious belief and community service, are positively connected in a meaningful way.
We are on our journey this Lent, but with all the pressures we feel - economic, family, health - how can we find time to act in service to others. We can barely get to church on Sunday morning, how does public service fit into our lives?
As we explore our lessons for today, we discover that our faith and our service to others are directly and inextricably linked. Reading now from our second lesson from the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, and God’s holy word.
We are approaching the half way point of our Lenten journey, so now is a good time to take stock of the journey. Are we going the right way? I have greatly enjoyed my interactions with Sunny Schnitzer of the Bethesda Jewish Congregation. Sunny mentioned the concept of “derekh eritz” the other day and it resonated with me. “derekh eritz” means the “right way.” Asking are we on “derekh eritz” means - are we on the right road, getting closer to our goal?
Consider our second lesson. In the section of Mark’s Gospel immediately preceding our lesson, Pharisees and Sadducees, two significant religious factions within Judaism, were disagreeing about what happens after death. One of the men was by something Jesus said so he asked Jesus a most fundamental question – what is the most important commandment of all. Keep in mind this was a very religious Jew in the company of many very religious Jews, so fulfilling the commandments and observing the laws of the Hebrew Bible were very important to him.
The man asked Jesus a singular question, “What is the single most important commandment?” Jesus gave a plural answer. First, Jesus says the most important commandment begins with, “hear Israel the Lord our God is one.” In the Hebrew tradition, this section is known as the “Shema” for “hear.” If you asked for a mission statement for the Hebrew Bible that might well be it. The Israelites were surrounded by polytheistic peoples and pagans so holding to a single declaration that God is one was a point of distinction.
Secondly, Jesus says, “you should love the Lord your God with all your being (your hearts, mind, soul and strength)” everything you have. Then thirdly, Jesus says, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Notice how Mark describes the reaction of the religious man. He agreed with Jesus saying, “You are right, teacher,” for the commandments to serve god and neighbor come right out of the Torah – in Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and Jesus crystallizes this wisdom. And when the religious man affirms that loving God and neighbor are the greatest commandments, Jesus affirmed him saying, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
On our Lenten journey, we hope we are going the right way. We hope that any Lenten devotions or spiritual practices that we have added to our lives are starting to make a difference. We hope we are on the derekh eritz and that we are getting closer to the kingdom of God.
Jesus told the man in Mark 12 that loving God and neighbor gets him closer. Jesus does not stop with stating that devotion to God is all that is commanded. Jesus states that loving neighbor as oneself is essential as well.
Loving God and neighbor are, in many ways, one in the same. In 1 John 4, we read that if we cannot love our brothers and sisters, we cannot love God. Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.
Loving our neighbor as ourselves, doing unto others as we would have them do to us, is a principle listed in Matthew and Luke as well as Mark and John. Paul includes it in letters to the Galatians and Romans. Rod Stewart even includes means it in his song, Forever Young.
What does it mean to love our neighbor? The Bible has a radically inclusive definition of neighbor. We are to love people in need, both those we know and those we don’t know.
The words the Bible uses to describe how we treat those around us are two Greek words for love, agape and philo. When John says loving God means loving our brothers and sisters, those we know, he uses philo and the Greek for brother Adelphia. So Philadelphia is love of brother. The city of brotherly love. But the circle does not stop at familial relations.
Jesus commands that we love our neighbors, agape plesion, as we would ourselves. Those around us who aren’t family, but we interact with. Jesus uses that higher form of love, agape, the word that describes how God loves us, to describe how we should love each other.
But we are also to care for those who we don’t know as well when there is need.
Our first lesson is a stunning parallel to Mark 12. In Luke 10, a lawyer asks Jesus what must he do to inherit eternal life - getting close to God’s kingdom. Jesus again answers, just as in Mark 12, “You shall love your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and your neighbor as your self.” But the lawyer then asks Jesus, “what does it mean to love one’s neighbor as oneself?”
Jesus tells the well known Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Samaritan was traveling the road of life as we are, and came upon a poor man who had been mugged, beaten and left for dead. Other people were walking past, but the Samarian stopped and out of compassion, helped the man, a complete stranger. And given Samaritan-Jewish relations at the time, it was a risk for the Samaritan to stop and help. The Samaritan helped a stranger. The Greek word for stranger is Xenia. So similar to philo – delphia, philo-xenia is love of stranger, or hospitality. Phobo-xenia or xena-phobia, is fear of stranger. The example Jesus uses of the Good Samaritan, is of a person who demonstrates xenia-philo, loving someone who he doesn’t know and who he has no reason to help, except that we feels compassion and a call to serve.
That is faith in action. Faith is not an abstract concept. We demonstrate our commitment to God as we serve others around us.
Our Presbyterian Book of Order states that we become members of the church through our profession of faith in Christ. That gets us on the path. But what gets us moving on the walk is our ability to live out that faith as we love our neighbor as ourselves. Because that forces us to interact. In a world of scarce resources, that can require us to give us something to someone else. It can mean competitive people must act with generosity and compassion.
Theologian Henri Nouwen said that one of the major spiritual moments in a Christian's life is to go from the world-view where we regard the world as hostile to a place of hospitality. Winston Churchill once said, “"We make a living by what we earn, we make a life by what we give." Martin Luther King said that not everyone can be famous, but “everyone can be great because greatness is defined by service.”
Deaconia is the Greek word for service in the New Testament. From Deaconia, we get the word Deacon. We have a board of Deacons here at the church and if you are interested in helping with ministries of service, let us know.
Here at Bradley Hills, we are all Deacons this week. This coming Saturday is our Lenten Day of service. We have a full day of a variety of activities that all of us here, of all ages or gifts, can contribute to. We will be caring for our church grounds here at Bradley Hills, so our brothers and sisters coming to worship are helped. We will be spending the morning helping with landscaping at Dennis Avenue in Silver Spring and collecting groceries for Bethesda HELP to help our neighbors. We will be creating kits to help people, strangers, throughout our region. We will all be deacons, servants, this Saturday, just as we will be on our youth mission work this summer, our Young Adult mission trip next fall and whenever we act in mission to support people in our community and around the world. We are trying to cast the circle wide as Jesus did.
During Lent we talk about giving something up. But many of us here and many people in our greater community have given things up involuntarily this year. Some of us have lost a job or the hope for the retirement we wanted. Health care compromised. Vacations, shopping or dinner our canceled. And if not us, than some people we know who have given things up for Lent involuntarily. The need for service and compassion in our community is as great in many ways as it has been in our lifetimes.
So we act in service partly because we feel compassion for a fellow human being in need. The Good Samaritan responded to a human need on the side of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.
Yet on our road of life, we act in service as a response to our relationship with God. Community service and our religious faith are connected.
By answering the question about the greatest commandment with loving God and neighbor, Jesus connected our loving our neighbor with our loving god. We live out our love for God by loving our neighbor.
There is a spike in the need of the world and we are responding as a church. However, when the source of the service is not a response to events but to a relationship with God, when it comes from inside, than the service becomes the most permanent.
We are made in the image of God. Just as the nature of God is to be charitable to us and, through grace, to reach out to lift us up, so there is something natural about our desire to help. At our best, we act to serve not only because external influences, whether positive awards or tragic crises, pull us, but also because an internal, spiritual call from God pushes us. Our ultimate goal is not only to react to an event, but to respond to a relationship with God.
Service does something else. It brings people together. There is much disagreement in our communities, in our work places and in our homes now as a result of the economic crisis. Anxiety is high and people are fractured. As Mark tells it, the religious leaders were arguing and came to Jesus to help settle a disagreement. Our lesson from Mark begins with anxiety and tension. Jesus cuts through the rhetoric with the simple commandment. Then Jesus and the religious man demonstrated what it was like to love one’s neighbor. The religious man acknowledged Jesus as a great teacher and Jesus said that the scribe was not far from the kingdom of heaven. As they came together, the bickering stopped.
When we come together to love God by loving neighbor, we find our common humanity as people made in the image of God. We realize that we all are in need of service and that we all have the capacity to serve. And we realize we are a little closer to the kingdom of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.
