Church of the Good Shepherd

June 29, 2008
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)
Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42

I heard a stewardship talk that changed my life one year. The speaker stood up and held up his checkbook – it was back in the olden days when we actually wrote checks for things instead of using debit cards and on-line banking – and he said a checkbook register is like a spiritual thermometer. You can tell what you value in life by examining how you spend your money. At that point with four kids and not much money, my value was food. I spent it all at the grocery store. It was a good lesson for me, and one that is even transferable to our modern way of spending money also for instead of a register you can, of course, use a bank statement.

The reason I am telling you this story is not to make a pitch for our stewardship team – though, of course, that is not a bad idea; we are in the summer doldrums as far as pledge receipts – but the reason has nothing to do with money. It has to do with the gospel lesson for today. This lesson from the gospel of Matthew is about how God is made known in the world today. It doesn’t matter if we are modern or old fashioned, the only way God in Christ can be made known is through the actions and being of Christians, the acts and being of those who follow the way Jesus taught.

And it made me think. If someone were to make a checkbook-like register out of my life and use it as a spiritual thermometer of who I thought Jesus is and how I follow, would people be able to know Christ by that register? If you were to have your life put out there for examination as a tool for making Christ visible to the whole world, would people see Christ as worth following? Godly?

Each week right before we depart from this service, I say the blessing that I started using many years ago, “Good people, go from this place in peace; proclaim Christ; serve other; love abundantly; and forgive freely, etc.” I say this blessing as a reminder to me of what I think the register of my life should look like. I say it knowing I sometimes fall short and knowing sometimes I hit the mark. I say it because if we were all to live into that blessing and admonition, God would be apparent not only to this community but to the whole world.

To go in peace is to go with a quiet heart and a restless yearning for God’s justice and concern for others. Peace is not about feeling all warm and gushy inside. It is about knowing that God’s way is the way your heart wants to go and is trying to go, usually at a stiff cost to the warmth and coziness of your life.

To “proclaim Christ” is not to stand up in a pulpit. Alas, that would be too easy! Rather it is to pattern one’s life in a way that expresses God’s great love for all people, a way that doesn’t point fingers at others’ imperfections and wrong doings, without realizing that to point one finger outward is to point three back toward one’s self. Proclaiming Christ is not about knowing the right words and phrases by memory or quoting bible verses; it is about living in the real world and using one’s life to reflect the ways of Jesus, not by using your words, but by using your life of serving and giving.

“Serve others,” I say each week. That is something that we are called to do with great diligence and faithfulness. Indeed, serving others may be the only way Christ becomes known to the outcast and stranger. Serving others is likely the most visible way for there we are the hands and mind and heart of God and the service we do for others is a true measure for our life-register. The definition of serving varies, of course, and I would say there are as many ways to serve others as there are people and others! But true serving comes without strings attached, not for what the servants gets but for what the servant can give. A servant is not a slave who does the job because he or she has to, a servant is not one who is manipulated or ordered into serving, or one who is told how to serve and what to do, or who decides to serve without asking the person or people served if such service is even wanted! Rather when we are called to serve, which we all are, it is servant hood we are called to, servant hood from the heart that gives of one’s self so that others might have more and be more. Servants serve from their abundance of gifts and resources, not counting the debt or cost, but rejoicing in the sheer ability to take care of someone else; not imposing the servant’s will on the served, but empowering the served to a will of their own. Sometimes it is at the cost of the servant having to let go and move on just as Jesus moved on and left us, his servants to do the work of ministry in the world.

“Love abundantly,” I say each week. Certainly God is the ultimate source of abundant love, from the smallest insect to the creatures of the deep we never see. God sees and knows them all in abundance and with profound love. The kind of love God has for all of us is in total acceptance of us just as we are. Just as God loves those deep sea creatures God love us, broken, whole, quirks, phobias, fears, weaknesses and strengths. Our uniqueness delights God, but so does the uniqueness of those we ourselves find most difficult to love. Abundant love loves those we don’t want to love and loves them unconditionally. I think this is the hardest part of being a Christian. And when we can love with this abundant love, then God is truly working in the world.

Finally, God is known, my friends, through the act of forgiveness. Sometimes the forgiveness of God is too abstract, for people, intangible. But forgiveness from another human being is a very tangible way of expressing who God is to others. “Forgiving freely” is an act of faith and a sign of a human being struggling to live as a follower, a sign of being the heart and hands and mind of God in the world today. “Forgive freely” and the freedom of such forgiveness that it gives back to the one who forgives is the most powerful illumination of God the world can see.

This week as I read about forgiveness, a quote stuck in my mind. “The only way a victim overcomes being a victim is by forgiving and becoming free.” It is that freedom in Christ that I would wish for all of us, the purity of heart and soul that is the byproduct of forgiving even the most unforgivable, even when they do not want to be forgiven.

So when I send you off each week, it is to myself I am speaking. I am giving myself a reminder of the values and truths that I hold the most sacred. But I think they form the basis of what I would like my “register” to look like. I invite you to take part of this week to look at your own life with these measures as a yardstick and imagine how visible God is by the witness of your life. Would you want people to know about God using your life as the only witness? What if you were the only way God could be known in the world today! What would people know of God? These are tough questions and there are no easy answers. But I think as people of faith, we are called to keep asking them. We make God known by our lives: that is the only way God can be known, by the life witness of human beings to other human beings. Find the “register for your life:” the measurements of proclamation, servant-hood, love, and forgiveness that are the hands and heart and mind of God. And make God known in the world over and over again.

Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd