Garrett Vickrey 10.29.17 Reformation Sunday What s the Hang Up? Matthew 22:34-46 Woodland Baptist Church San Antonio, TX A blogger from Dallas who is a lay person in the church wrote to the editor of the Baptist Standard this week asking columnists to respond to a question. It s the question posed to Jesus by the rich young ruler What must I do to be saved? Since, I am one voice in the Voices Column of the Standard I was asked to respond. But, before I get to my response I want to share a story with you from my father-in-law who was in town this week. He told a story from his childhood recently in a sermon. George attended a Lutheran school growing up. His mother s family was Lutheran but they attended a baptist-like Evangelical denomination called the Free Church. The church, like most baptist churches put a lot of emphasis on being born again by making a profession of faith. If you prayed the sinner s prayer and believed in Jesus, you can be saved. One day in school a religion teacher wrote a spiritual equation on the chalkboard: Grace + = Salvation. George s hand shot up in the air he had the answer. Typical, for us preachers; we love to have the answers. FAITH! he said. Grace plus faith equals salvation. Turns out it wasn t a question, though. It was a statement. 1 The blank wasn t there to be filled in; it was there to signify nothing. So the question from the rich young ruler and the rich young blogger in Dallas, What must I do to be saved? Nothing. And this question is connected to the question of the lawyer in Matthew 22. What must I do to be saved and, And what is the most important commandment these are both ways of asking what this whole thing is about? Give us your summary of faith. Or for us today what does it mean to be Christian? When I hear this conversation or this debate between Jesus and the pharisees, I think, things haven t changed much. We still try to pin each other to positions based on how we answer these questions. Based on how we fill in the the blank (Grace + = Salvation). 1
There s so much we can get hung up on in order to fill that blank. Whatever it is the reformers of 500 years ago had a name for it works righteousness. The work we do to make ourselves righteous before God. And reformers like Martin Luther, Calvin and the later radicals like the early baptists emphasized the grace of God. 500 years ago this Tuesday an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. His intent was not to condemn the Catholic Church and start a new church. His intent was to reform the practices of the church. The church had become big business a power player on the international scene. It was basically selling assurances of salvation in order to finance its vast building projects. The church sold indulgences which were certificates issued by the church that promised forgiveness of sins for a price. You could even buy indulgences for deceased family members to shorten their stay in purgatory. Luther challenged this despicable practice on October 31, 1517. And the result was the Protestant Reformation. The church was trying to add something to the grace of God. Grace and the favor of the church make for salvation. Grace + indulgence; grace + the blessing of the pope. We are always trying till in that blank. Luther took on an empire to keep that blank blank. He risked everything to remove the barriers propped up to direct us to a certain kind of salvation. There was another who did that. He took on an empire, laid down his life, and won. God has kept that blank empty, but we keep trying to fill it up. The best way to keep that blank blank is by loving God and loving neighbor. If you do that then you re leaning on grace. And grace is all we ve got; the good news is it s all we need. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6, the Shema as it is known in Judaism. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Like any good Jew (or any good baptist) Jesus goes straight to scripture. And he adds a second scripture verse to it from Leviticus 19, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The Shema already was the central verse around which the rest of the commandments were defined. And other Rabbis of this time had said 2
similar summations of the law. Jesus highlighting of these 2 verses along with his statement On these 2 commandments hang all the law and the prophets this makes these commandments the lens through which the rest of scripture is to be read. Essentially, Jesus is saying love is the test of one s true understanding of the law. And if we had any doubt about his credentials, the second half of this passage we read today shows Jesus mastery of scriptures. He stumps the Pharisees, and notice the Sadducees are quiet too. He gives his summation of the life of faith (the great commandment on which it all hangs) and then he exhibits his scriptural skills. Jackie Moore spoke this past Monday night at a ceremony honoring her mother Babs and the Baugh Foundation as they were given the Founders Award by Baptist New Global. Most of the people in the room were baptists from this church and others and from baptists organizations around the country who have benefited from the generosity of the Baugh Foundation. But, Jackie wanted to say something to the non-baptists in the room. She wanted to let them know what kind of baptists we were talking about. She talked about baptist principles and the she said to summarize, We want to default to the love of Christ, the red letters, always. On this hangs all the commandments. What kind of love are we talking about here? The link between these two scriptures quoted by Jesus gives us a clue. Loving God is central. It s, of course, at the heart of our tradition. But, let s be honest for a moment. We haven t always portrayed God as good. We ve portrayed God as just, wrathful, hating sinners. Martin Luther used to spend as many as 8 hours a day sometimes in confession confessing every sin he could think of; at times even confessing for sins he had accidentally committed and forgotten. Why? Because he never thought he was good enough for God. He had heard that God was good, even graceful. But, all his focus was on God s wrath, and God s righteousness that far surpassed his own. He couldn t escape feeling like he needed to DO something to earn God s grace. Maybe this same perspective was around in Jesus day. If so, then maybe these words from Jesus are meant to reorient our whole understanding of the history of God and God s people. If 3
this is your thinking that God is a God of wrath and justice; I encourage you to rethink your image of God s wrath and justice. Don t get hung up on these things. Instead, remember that God is a God of love. And that we were born out of that love. Jesus gives us the great commandment so that we can live the way he dreams for us to live, but also so that we can better understand God and scripture. So, now that we have this commandment we need to look at the whole of the bible through the lens of God s love revealed in Christ. Our 5 year-old likes for Cameron to tell her bible stories at bed time. But, she doesn t call them bible stories; she says, Tell me a story about what happened up in heaven. She tells her the story of creation most nights. But, she tells it through the lens of the Triune God revealed in Jesus. Before God created the world, God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were best friends, and they thought that they would really love to have more friends to share their love with. So first they created a place to put them, and then oceans and water, mountains and beaches for them to play in. Then they thought flowers and birds and butterflies. And then came the cows and ducks and bugs. And finally came you and me. 1 John answers the question of why should we love God by saying because, He loved us first. And this is the reason why: we were made to share in the life of God Father, Son, and Spirit. Maybe that s why Jesus links loving God and loving neighbor because part of loving God is loving what or who God loves. I was talking to one of our members who lives in a skilled nursing care facility this week. When she first got there last year she found out that a friend of hers who is Catholic needed prayer. So she went to the priest and deacon of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church that come by every week to do visits and she asked them to come and pray with her friend Beverly. And then for the next few weeks she would go throughout the halls and she would find anyone who was Catholic and needed prayer. Then she would go to the priest and the deacon to tell them who they should visit, and who needed prayer. It got to the point where the first thing the priest and the deacon would do when they got to the nursing home was to go see this old baptist woman. She was 4
basically the unofficial Bapto- Catholic" chaplain of the skilled nursing facility. Because she knows that the love of God is a love that seeks, finds, and covers us no matter where we go. Several years ago a father was standing on the train platform waiting on the subway in New York City. He was standing there with his two young daughters who were 4 and 6. When all of a sudden a man a few steps away began to have a seizure and his body was convulsing out of control. It shook the man so intensely that he fell onto the tracks. And the father looked down the track and he saw the headlight of the oncoming train. It was coming fast. He had to make a split second decision. And so he jumped down on the tracks and laid on top of the man pinning him to the ground to stop his convulsing. There wasn t time to get him off of the track, so the father just covered him and laid down between the tracks as the train rumbled just inches over their heads. The train s breaks screeched to a stop. Five cars rolled overhead before the train stopped, the cars passing inches from his head, smudging his blue knit cap with grease. We re O.K. down here, he yelled, but I ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father s O.K. The father said later that he didn t feel like he did anything spectacular. He said, I just saw someone who needed help I did what I felt was right. 2 And he said upon thinking back on that moment, When I jumped down there on the tracks and I covered that man. As the train rumbled over my head I felt like something was covering me. I felt like I was covered. Truth is there was nothing there. Nothing + grace. 5
1 George Mason, Just Faith, 15 October 2017, sermon from Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, TX. http:// www.wilshirebc.org/download_file/view/4549/ 2 Cara Buckley, Man Is Rescued by Stranger on Subway Tracks, The New York Times, 3 January 2007, http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/nyregion/03life.html. 6