Last Sunday's sermon

Those of you who heard me preach Sunday, firstly, I'm sorrry, secondly this is how I'd written the sermon. Those of you who didn't you'll see it when you read this that it wouldn't make for a good sermon quite simply because it's both too long and there are too many things happening at the same time. However, when I wrote this (and it has been 1,5 years since I last wrote a sermon) I was kind of pleased with myself simply because I'd been worried that I couldn't get a sermon going at all. So, be merciful, ok? It was the theme of the Sunday anyway :).

The Message tells to Gospel of this Sunday like this:
About that time some people came up and told him about the Galileans Pilate had killed while they were at worship, mixing their blood with the blood of the sacrifices on the altar. Jesus responded, "Do you think those murdered Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans? Not at all. Unless you turn to God, you, too, will die. And those eighteen in Jerusalem the other day, the ones crushed and killed when the Tower of Siloam collapsed and fell on them, do you think they were worse citizens than all other Jerusalemites? Not at all. Unless you turn to God, you, too, will die."

Remember what I said in the beginning of this service? The theme for this Sunday is Be merciful! And this is the Gospel for this Sunday? The Good news? You've got to be kidding me.
But no, it isn’t a joke. For reasons that escape me this is what the lectionary has as the Gospel for this Sunday. I’m not saying that you should omit anything of God’s word from the Lectionary. Although for practical purposes it isn’t possible to read through the entire Bible in a Church Year and therefore a lot of the Bible really is not a part of the Lectionary. What I am saying is that I don’t quite get how this text is connected to the theme of this Sunday. If the theme were Repent, yes, but Be merciful?
However, this is the reading and I’m done complaining now. So, let’s see what we have here. A high ranking officer of the occupying force had ordered people to be killed and they’d been killed at the temple in the middle of a service and not spearing any blood either. No wonder the people were in shock and probably seeking both Jesus’s condemnation of the murders and His consolation. But Jesus, true to himself, didn’t respond the way they expected - at all.
Have you ever encountered the abbreviation WWJD? It stands for What would Jesus do? Now those bracelets have always annoyed me somewhat. The truth is, though, that this is because I never knew their background. The reason they annoyed me was that I think it just plain silly to think that we could know what Jesus would do in any given situation. If you study your Bible you’ll notice that most of the time He never ever did what was expected of Him. Moreover He is the Son of God so do we really think we know how God himself thinks? Seriously. Of course we don’t. And if we think we do, we need a reality check fast.
But. There is a but here and that is that the question is not What would Jesus say or How would Jesus react but What would Jesus do? The point of the question is in the doing. It is not an introvert but rather an extrovert question. It begs you to look around you and act.
The question itself originates from a book by Charles Sheldon written already in 1896. It was actually subtitled “What Would Jesus Do?"
In it Rev. Henry Maxwell encounters a homeless man who has difficulty understanding why, in his view, so many Christians ignore the poor. This is what he says:

"I heard some people singing at a church prayer meeting the other night,
'All for Jesus, all for Jesus,
All my being's ransomed powers,
All my thoughts, and all my doings,
All my days, and all my hours.'
"and I kept wondering as I sat on the steps outside just what they meant by it. It seems to me there's an awful lot of trouble in the world that somehow wouldn't exist if all the people who sing such songs went and lived them out. I suppose I don't understand. But what would Jesus do? Is that what you mean by following His steps? It seems to me sometimes as if the people in the big churches had good clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and drunkenness and sin."

Good question. Isn’t it?

I don’t claim to be a brilliant theological scholar or a scholar of any sort. I’m a stay at home mom and a pastor at the same time. I understand very little and to be honest I’m not sure that the things I claim to know are even right. I think they are but I may be wrong, too. But I also believe that I have not been left to my own devices to deal with life but that there is God and He is at work with me so that if I have gotten something wrong I will eventually be led to see it.
Now, this is what I believe. I believe that God is love. I believe that Jesus is God’s son. I believe that He died so that all sin including every single most horrifying deed of mankind would be forgiven. And I believe that the Holy Spirit will lead, guide, and comfort us. I believe that in Holy Spirit God’s wisdom is poured into our hearts together with all of His love, joy and compassion.
How does this then relate to both WWJD and the Gospel of this Sunday then? To attack the latter question first. From God’s perspective sins are never miniscule. They are always huge. To Him there isn’t a difference between murder and thinking that someone is an idiot. For us there is and that’s why we have such a hard time understanding many of the comments Jesus makes. From our perspective surely a child molester is a much much bigger sinner than someone who steals their neighbor’s Sunday paper. This is why courts sanction people with anything from a fine to a life time in jail and in some countries even death. We think that sins are of varying degrees. Jesus didn’t. God doesn’t.
Each sin even the very smallest one in our perspective rips right into the heart of God. We may be horrified with genocide, hideous murders, rapes and all of that which gives fuel to the tabloids but God’s perspective is different. The sins which result in the headlines they all start somewhere. It is that very first sin - be it indifference to someone else, apathy in the face of injustice or just plain lying to yourself - that is equally horrible than the end one. There are no levels of sin. All sin leads to death.
This is what St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans and taken out of context is unnerving. However, what the point is this: no one, not a single person on earth can claim to be without sin but God can. He is without sin.
The problem with sin is that sin manifests the existence of evil in our lives. Nothing less. Sucks, doesn’t it, but that’s the way it is. That is why it cannot be ignored. That is why God cannot just say let’s forget about it I’m sure you’re a good person deep down. No, he wants evil out all together. And he sees evil as it is; in the smallest of our sins as much as in the biggest ones. Therefore weather there had been a horrible massacre at the temple or not was not of significance to Jesus. All sins were to Him equally horrifying.
For Him there was no element of surprise he knew that we as humans are capable of great evil. It is a scary thought and one that will not make me popular and certainly didn’t make our Saviour popular. But we all are. Therefore, right then, Jesus’s concern was for those who came to Him expecting Him to either be horrified with them or to say that those who had died deserved it in some way.
He makes it abundantly clear that by concentrating on the sins of others, in other words, by judging others you were both committing a sin yourself and not in any way or form any better than anyone else. We all have sinned and we all need to both acknowledge it and turn to God to ask for His forgiveness. To put it in biblical terms: we need to repent.
The good news – and one wonders at times how people are supposed to see the Gospel as good news if all we say is that you’re a sinner and you should repent. That was what John the Baptist did in preparation to Jesus’s arrival. With Jesus the story continues further. The good news is that God forgives. Not only that but He loves so much that He gave His Son to die for us so that the power of evil would be broken. And it was and is.
You are right, there is still sin in the world, masses of it. But evil has lost. God’s love won. And with that the Holy Spirit was poured into the hearts of mankind. We are living in the church year the time after Pentecost. This is especially the time of Spirit’s work. So, we’re not only talking about the fact that God has forgiven all mankind and that his forgiveness is absolute but that His love has been plentifully poured into our hearts, to the core of our very existence in His Spirit. He is in us.
And here is where we return to the WWJD. We do not know what Jesus would do. Lets just face it. Even better lets just say it to ourselves, I do not know what Jesus would do! But the Holy Spirit does. And this is both the Gospel, the good news and our calling. We are called to action. We are called to let love manifest itself in our lives in every shape and form it will. Because love is God.
When I became the pastor of this congregation back in 2003 I came with one thing I wanted to have in each service. It is the words I say at the very end as the words of dismissal. They come from St. Paul:

Go forth into the world in peace;
be of good courage;
hold fast that which is good;
render to no one evil for evil;
strengthen the fainthearted;
support the weak;
help the afflicted;
honour everyone;
love and serve the Lord,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

They are what Christianity is all about. Loving God, living our lives honoring, loving, serving and being merciful to each other and ultimately rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit. Being a Christian can be hard work, yes, but the reward is huge. It is God’s joy over us poured into the very center of our being. What could be better?