Sermon For October 24, 1999
Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost
HEBREW TESTAMENT: “Loving With Our Entire Being” ~ Matthew 22:34-46
“Lord I want to be like Jesus in my heart”. WWJD. Do you know what that means? WWJD? How many people know what that means? Only a few. Must not have been enough advertising. WWJD. What Would Jesus Do. Over the last number of years you can buy WWJD bracelets and WWJD pendants. WWJD t-shirts. Anything you want with those initials on it. What Would Jesus Do? It was started by some youth workers somewhere in the Mid-West, Michigan comes to mind, they did it with their youth group and it caught fire and went across the nation. There were a lot of people, Christian and non-Christian alike who made lots of money selling WWJD. It’s maybe because of the commercial aspect of it that it doesn’t really leave a good taste in my mouth. It’s not initials that I want to be using. I think, like everything else, in churches across the country, there are people who wear WWJD bracelets for the wrong reason. They wear it because everybody else is wearing it. They wear it because the colors match their outfit. They wear it because it was the thing to do at the time. People come to church because they want to be seen, they want to make contacts for their business. Their parents always did. They know it is the right thing to do. You can have people wearing WWJD bracelets that don’t think at all about “What Jesus would do” during the week, when they are involved in their normal activities. You can have people who are coming to church who don’t stop to think why they are coming to church, nor is there any commitment to live out those values in their daily lives.
It’s a well intentioned idea. What Would Jesus Do? It’s difficult to think about our historical ideas of Jesus and then translate those for today. I remember an example that my English teacher gave me of an anachronism. An anachronism is a knight in armor riding down the street in a convertible. It is something out of time and place. So when I think about WWJD, not only am I concerned about all those commercial aspects, I also have some sense of anachronism. That here is Jesus in his robes and dusty sandals trying to make decisions about what kind of clothes I buy to go to school or whether I cheat on a test. Whether I smoke with the kids at the corner or whether I lie a little bit on my income tax return. Those aren’t situations that Jesus would ever encounter, and I think that Jesus would be just a perplexed as we are about them. The root meaning of WWJD is to say, “How did Jesus make decisions?” He made decisions based on what he believed God wanted him to do in his life. If we use that as the foundation we are closer to something that can work. Not a simple example of Jesus meeting up with 20 century concerns, but instead saying, “When I have to make a decision, I will try to think about what God wants me to do in my life. What abilities have I been given? What opportunities have I been given? How do I use those for God’s proposes in the world?” That is a question that I am very comfortable with. The last spring of Confirmation class we start to talk about theology. About ideas of who God is and Jesus. What it means to be a Christian. Why we would want to be part of a church. During that time we use some translations of church words. In place of God we say, “What is most important.” If you look at what is most important in your life, then you will know what serves as your God. If your job is the most important thing, that is essentially your God. If you husband or wife is the most important thing, your God. Your children? If your children are the most important thing in your life they serve as your God. Whatever provides the context, the information that you need to make a decision in your life, is functioning as your God. When Jesus was asked what was most important of all, He said, “What is most important of all is to love God with all your heart, your soul and your mind.” So if we ask WWJD, whenever Jesus makes a decision, he first of all loves God with heart and soul and mind. If you love God with heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbor and love yourself, then everything else flows along. If you choose to do something that somehow conflicts with loving God, loving self and loving neighbor, then you know there is a problem. Somehow you have missed out. Now this isn’t something that can be done on a part-time basis. It’s not something that can be done when I feel like thinking about it. Instead it has to be something that functions continually in your life, because you are always faced with decisions. When you are faced with that decision you go through some kind of a thought process to chose something. Whenever you chose something, it should be loving God with your heart and soul and mind. In the sixties there was a phrase, “Not to decide is to decide”. If you say, “I’m confused about this issue, so I’m not going to make a decision.” You have already chosen not to act. If you say, “I don’t really want to do what I think God wants me to do in this situation” Your decision not to act is already in opposition to what God wants for you and your life. You are either for God, or you are against God. Those are pretty stark terms, aren’t they? You either chose to make your decision based on loving God, self and neighbor, or else your decisions are against that love.
There is a character that I have dressed as in the past…a circuit rider preacher. As a circuit rider preacher I have liked to borrow some stories from a traveling evangelist by the name of Billy Sunday. Sunday grew up in an orphanage in Glenwood, Iowa, very close to the first church that I served. He traveled around from town to town preaching. Billy Sunday had little time for what he considered lukewarm Christians. He said, “Either you are a Christian or you’re not a Christian. You need to make a decision. You need to make a commitment.” He was always calling on people with a revival enthusiasm to make a stand. He also was very much an exclusive Christian. Either you were Christian or you were headed for the coal bins, you were headed for hell. You had to choose Christianity. I have some problems with some of that as you already know. His ideas about making decisions, I think, were exactly on the mark. Now remember, not only was he a functioning out of this dislike for lukewarm Christians, he also caught people’s attention. He was a performer. He had been a professional baseball player, he was very athletic. He would bounce from side to side on the stage. He would throw chairs when he had disputes with the devil. He would challenge people with humor and anything else that he could do to get their attention.
This is just a short section of Billy Sunday:
“At the Crossroads”
Right where the two roads through life diverge God has put Calvary. There he put up a cross, a stumbling block over which the love of God said, “I’ll touch the heart of man with the thought of father and son.” He thought that would win the world to him, but for nineteen hundred years men have climbed the Mount of Calvary and trampled into the earth the tenderest teachings of God.
You are on the Devil’s side. How are you going to cross over.
So you cross the line and God won’t issue any extradition papers. Some of you want to cross. If you believe, then say so, and step across. I’ll bet there are hundreds that are on the edge of the line and many are standing straddling it. But that won’t save you! You believe in your heart, confess him with your mouth. With his heart man believes and with his mouth he confesses. Then confess and receive salvation, full, free, perfect and external. God will not grant any extradition papers. Get over the old line. A man isn’t a soldier because he wears a uniform, or carries a gun, or carries a canteen. He is a soldier when he makes a definite enlistment. All the others can be bought without enlisting. When a man becomes a soldier he goes out on muster day and takes an oath to defend his country. It’s the oath that makes him a soldier. Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile, but public, definite enlistment for Christ makes you a Christian.
“Oh”, said a woman to me out in Iowa, “Mister Sunday, I don’t think I have to confess with my mouth.” I said, “You are putting up your thought against God’s.
M-O-U-T-H doesn’t spell intellect. It spells mouth and you must confess with your mouth. The mouth is the biggest part about most people, anyhow.
So Billy Sunday called people to decisions. He said, “Decide where you stand. Make your decision. Do what you believe God wants you to do with your life. Don’t put it off until tomorrow. Don’t say, “Well, I’ll take a half step that direction. Instead, make a decision in your life.”
It is important advise for all of us. What Would Jesus Do? Make a decision in your life. Live the way God wants you to.
Billy Sunday was hard on Christians and hard on Churches, but he also said that the church is still the best place to try to do what God wants you to do. The truth of the matter is that all of us, when left to our own, might tell ourselves that we are loving God with all of our heart and soul and mind. We might say that we are loving our neighbor as ourselves, but many of us have trouble loving ourselves. If we have trouble loving ourselves, we generally have trouble loving our neighbor. If we are having a whole lot of trouble loving ourselves and loving our neighbor, chances are we aren’t loving God very well either. So we go through life saying, “Well I’m a Christian and I go to church, and I try to do good things, but we are not loving ourselves or our neighbors or God very well. There is a lot of disagreement, a lot of conflict, a lot of backbiting, a lot of gossiping and bickering along the way. The reason that we come together as a congregation is so we can help each other WWJD. Help each other live the way God wants us to live. If somebody says, “Well I’m living my life the way God wants me to”, and we know that that’s not true then we can say, “Well, what about Friday night? What about the job? What about your wife? What about?” They go, “Oh yeah. I didn’t think anybody knew about that. I didn’t think it mattered.” But it does matter. It matters all the time. So we come together as a congregation to support each other, so that together we might be better lovers of self. Better lovers of neighbor. Better lovers of God.
The same is true when we talk about our whole planet. Our country might do a good job at trying to make life better for people. We still have a tendency to look at things through American eyes. To interpret the world the way we want it to be interpreted. Just as individuals are susceptible to distortion, our country is susceptible to distortion. We need the whole world community to help us to decide what is best for those who are deepest in need in our world.
We come together in an imperfect organization, like the United Nations, but it is the best organization we have to try and all care together for the people of our planet. I think it is a crime that we have not paid our dues to the United Nations. We of all nations should be providing an example. We should be doing everything possible to bring people together to make decisions, to make this a better planet for all God’s people.
We come together as a group of people, as a congregation. We come together as a group of countries, in the United Nations, to make the world a better place. We do all of this so that we might love God with all of our heart and soul and mind, so that we might love our neighbor as ourselves.
May God’s Spirit be with us as strive to be faithful. Amen.