Sermon:
October 25, 2020 When We Mismanage God’s Expectations Matt 22:34-46 Rev. Peter Hofstra
Our passage today is in two
contrasting parts. The first is, I hope,
very familiar to us. It is the what is
expected of us as Christians. It is also
the whole law, love God and love neighbor.
Here is the give and take of yet another debate the leaders are having
with Jesus. In this case it is the
Pharisees, the ‘teacher’ class of the Jewish faith and law. Their question, Teacher, which commandment in
the law is the greatest?
Then it is Jesus’ turn. He asks them what they think about the
Messiah. Whose Son is the Messiah? Their response is that the Messiah is the Son
of David. That tracks with what we know
about the birth of Jesus. He was born in
the City of David, for Joseph, his father, was of the house and lineage of
David. Even more, in the gospels there
are two genealogies that connect Jesus back to David. Both come down to Joseph and then to Jesus,
but they are different. The best
explanation I have heard is that one of these comes down through Mary’s family,
but the practice of the day was to list by father. So Jesus is connected to David.
And the Pharisees respond according
to their tradition, that the Messiah is, indeed, the Son of David. To which Jesus responds, “Okay, the riddle me
this. Why does David say, in Psalm 110,
“The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand while I put your enemies under
your feet.’?” Or, to sort out the titles
and pronouns, “The Messiah said to me, ‘Sit at my right hand while I put your
enemies under your feet.’” Then Jesus
asks the Pharisees, “And if David called the Messiah Lord, how could the
Messiah be his Son?” In that culture,
the son did not outrank the father. It
was not done.
So Jesus has just taken their most
profound expectations of the Messiah and knocked them down by looking at what
the Bible truly says about things. And
the wind up is that none of those present could give him an answer and, after
that moment, they did not ask him any more questions. They may not have asked Jesus any more
questions, but I think there are some legitimate questions that we can ask
today. And, although it sounds
disrespectful, those first questions boil down to something like, “So
what?” It might be a little less
dismissive to phrase it “So what does that mean for us?”
To understand what it means for them
will help us understand. “Son of David”
is a warrior’s title, because David was a warrior king. He conquered to create he largest empire the
Jews were ever to hold in their time as a nation. And though blessed by God, the Lord would not
let David build God’s temple, because his hands were too bloodied from all the
wars. The building of the temple would
fall to his son, Solomon, who reigned in the peace won by David’s wars. In the politics at the time of Jesus, the
Promised Land under the thumb of the Romans, and the expectation of the
Messiah, as the Son of David, was a Warrior solution to the Roman
occupation. In fact, that first verse of
Psalm 110 has special appeal. “The
Messiah said to David, I am going to put your enemies under your feet,” is
considered a prophecy of hope for their present age.
This returns to the beginning of our
passage. What is the whole law? Love God and love neighbor. This is not done by the conquest of a new
David over the oppressive Romans. In
fact, the work of Jesus in the earliest church is going to cross over into the
Roman world within the first years after the coming of the Holy Spirit. In the mindset of the leaders, the love of
God is expressed in God’s granting to them of the Promised Land. God’s love is expressed in restoring their
freedom in that promised land. Jesus
would say something profoundly different.
No greater love does a man have than to give up his life for his
friends. That is the love that underlies
Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is by
love that Jesus died for us, by love that he rose, for us. It is God’s plan to restore us to right
relationship with our Father in heaven.
In the Old Testament, the precedent
for violence leading to holiness, leading to sanctification, came when the
people entered the Promised Land. God
gave them the land and led them into battle to conquer it. That is amply demonstrated at Jericho, where
the Lord caused the walls to come a tumbling down. The call to drive out the Canaanites, God
made the people holy through warfare. While
we are not called to actual military conflict, the process of sanctification
can feel like a culture war today. There
is a call to exclude and to include various groups in our society by different
branches of the church because that is the right thing to do. And we don’t need to get into lists, we know
these cultural battles. And they turn
into political battles, especially as we run up to the election in another week
and a half.
But Jesus sweeps that all aside in
how he demonstrates the way of sanctification, the way of being made holy. It is in that first summary statement of the
law, love God with your mind, body, soul, and strength (if I may
paraphrase). He loved God all the way to
the cross, for us. And in the love from
God, we are made holy. In fact,
sanctification is “a work of God’s grace, whereby we, who God has, before the
foundation of the world, chosen to be holy, are, in time, through the powerful
operation of God’s Spirit, applying the death and resurrection of Christ unto us,
renewed in our whole person after the image of God; having the seeds of
repentance unto life, and all other saving graces, put into our hearts, and
those graces so stirred up, increased and strengthened, as that we more and
more die unto sin, and rise into newness of life.”
It is the transformation of the whole
person, the renewal into the image of God (in which we are created according to
Genesis). And that is what we come to
church to celebrate, to extend, to give thanks unto the Lord through our
worship of our God. And here is where we
have to tease apart the work of God’s Spirit working to apply the death and
resurrection of Christ unto us and the work of being citizens of this wonderful
nation where we are guaranteed the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. And while I am blessed to be
a citizen of this country and to enter into the spirited (and mean-spirited)
debates that go on, while my point of view is based in who I am as a child of God,
it is a mistake when sanctification gets mixed up with the freedom of
expression.
I will be frank that I have fallen
into that trap. Point to a public sin or
a public wrong and presume it is the call of our holiness to go out and make a
change. That is not sanctification. That is missional activity, that is
evangelism, that is social justice. All
of which are important to the Christian and to the church, but they are not the
most important.
The most important is, as the
definition of sanctification says, that we die unto sin more and more and rise
into newness of life. The first focus of
church is to share and strengthen our salvation, to know and understand more
and more wonderfully what it means that Jesus died for us. It is a transformation of the individual and
the body of believers into people who are more holy, closer to fulfilling the
perfection that shall come to us at the end of time.
In times and places where the church
has been oppressed, gathering for worship was a time of profound peace in the
knowledge that the power of God protects no matter what might happen. One of the dangers of a free and open society
is that we lose the visceral feeling of knowing that God is in control. We can know it intellectually. We can agree to its truth. But if we are not careful, we can lose the
heart-felt conviction of what it means that God is in control.
One of the most powerful
opportunities for sanctification that comes to us on a Sunday is the Sabbath
rest. It is a holy rest, laid down when
God rested on the seventh day of creation.
Imagine the visceral feel of God’s power when we can truly lay down the
burdens of the week and come to God in worship?
Because America is a beautiful place to be, but it is the busiest place
I know of. How often can we really slow
down? On purpose? Because God gave us the opportunity?
Well, according to the latest
statistics I could find, Sunday is an opportunity for two thirds of us. One third of Americans work on Sunday. But something Covid pushed us into was the
online service. When the Sabbath rest
cannot come to some of us on a Sunday, the service is there for when we
can.
So God’s work in us toward holiness
offers two disentanglements from the nation around us. The first is the assurance of God’s power for
us against a culture filled with sin.
That is one consequence of living in a free society. And I would prefer the freedom of speech and
expression that we enjoy in this country over its suppression. But there is a price to be paid in the sex,
violence, exploitation, and all the rest that ‘sells’ in the media. So the church can then become a place where
we can step from that for awhile, where we can come into the healing and
forgiving presence of the almighty to bring a measure of God’s love upon
us.
God’s work toward holiness
disentangles us from the craziness that is the culture around us. Everything is always going at full speed, and
getting faster. It is like Elijah
waiting on the Lord on the mountaintop.
There was a ferocious storm and a wind that shattered rocks, but the
Lord was in the still, small voice.
Worship is the place to slow down, to be very deliberate in the moments
we share in the shadow of the divine. In
the music, in the prayers, in the message from our Holy Scriptures of the
greater truth we have in Jesus Christ.
There is a metaphor that I have
shared, as a chaplain, with our police that speaks to this. The officer is a sponge. He and she go out into the community and they
absorb all the crime and corruption and all that is bad and worse in our
culture. In the beginning, that sponge
is clean and can absorb the chronic trauma to which police officers are
witnesses to. But if the officer cannot
find a way to wring out that sponge at the end of the shift, to take all the
sin and evil to which they were exposed and find a place to drain it away,
their sponge is just going to fill and get dirty and their lives as officers
are going to be drowned in the misery of the human experience.
We too are sponges that take in all
the good, bad, and indifference that the world has to offer, prayerfully not on
a level like law enforcement. But we
have this place to come and to worship and to wring out that sponge, knowing
that the Lord will cleanse that sponge in God’s holiness, that we will be
cleansed in God’s holiness and be made ready for another week. For the police officer, the mechanism by
which they take care of themselves may not be the church. And that is okay so long as they are wringing
out that sponge. I cannot think of a
better way of cleansing the heart and the soul than coming to our Lord.
The leadership in Jerusalem, they
had expectations for their Messiah. They
wanted a war to drive out their enemies.
But Jesus had other ideas. By his
death and resurrection, in God’s call, our lives are ever renewed, dying to sin
and living to Christ. That is our
sanctification. But there are a lot of
other voices out there, in and out of the church, that are going to seek to
call us away. And I will confess that I
have let some of those voices come into the very interpretation of God’s
Word. But when that distracts us from
the purpose and peace and joy of worship-even for the best of intentions, that
is something that even the pastor has to watch out for.
There is ample opportunity to take
on the woes of the world, to fight the good fight with all our might, to seek
justice and mercy. There is plenty to
fill our sponge. But here, in this
moment of worship, we come to the wellspring of our life and faith, we come to
our Lord. Here we are cleansed, here we
receive a measure of God’s holiness, here we come together in joy to celebrate
the gift of our faith. Here is where we
come to communally love our God with all our mind, body, soul, strength, and
spirit. Amen.
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