God’s People

Matthew 22:34-40

May 1, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

So this Tuesday is the primary election here in Indiana, and though it seems to have snuck up on us, or at least on me, I do hope you will get out and vote if you haven’t early voted already. There are a lot of important issues in our community and in our state, and we should not take our privilege of voting lightly. That’s not to say that politics will save us; politics can become as much an idol, a false god, as anything else. I’ve quoted Chuck Colson on many occasions, that salvation will not arrive on Air Force One. But I do still believe it is our duty as Christian citizens to vote, to fight for our values at the ballot box. One time, several years ago, I was encouraging someone to vote and they said, “Well, don’t you want to know who I’m voting for before you tell me to do it?” And I said no. I honestly don’t care. Well, that’s not true, I do care, but I want each person to vote their convictions, just ike I will be doing, and I’m convinced that if that happens, we’ll be all right because God is still on his throne.

Not everyone believes that. Some folks fear and fret around each election because they are convinced that if the election doesn’t go their way the world is ending. That’s been increasingly evident in the last few years, but honestly it’s been prevalent in our culture since at least the 1960’s. Historians, sociologists and theologians for the most part agree: the sixties were when, in our country, we traded gods. We removed God from the throne of our lives and we put our selves in the middle. Some say the fastest growing religion in America today is the “Gospel of the Autonomous Self.” Me, myself and I. I am in charge. I am in control. I know what is best. And I don’t need some supernatural God (or anyone else, for that matter) to tell me otherwise, thank you very much. The Gospel of the Autonomous Self has led a lot of people to characterize themselves as “spiritual but not religious” or even “non-religious.” It’s also led to a declining church as even self-professed Christians put God on the back burner, someone to whom they will get around to if there’s any leftover time.

Not surprisingly, historians and sociologists have also documented what one calls a “crescendo of brokenness” that has taken place since the 1960’s and the rise of the autonomous self. Listen to these statistics that have been carefully documented. From 1960 to 2000, “America doubled its divorce rate, tripled its teen suicide rate, quadrupled its violent crime rate, quintupled its prison population, sextupled out-of-wedlock births, and septupled the rate of cohabitation without marriage (which has been established as a significant predictor of divorce)” (qtd. in Williams, Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth, pg. 32). There’s a simple reason for all of this; we were never meant to be the center of the universe. We were not meant to be god. There already is a God; he is “far more brilliant, strong, and loving than we are” (Williams 32). You and I don’t need to apply for his job. We simply need to become his people.

In these weeks after Easter, we’re looking at some of the things the Bible has to say about idolatry, about the things we worship other than God. Spoiler alert: the Bible’s against that. Last week, I gave you a quiz to help you think through some of the things that might be idols or might be temptations for you. Surprisingly, some of you even thanked me for that. I guess I didn’t ruin your day as much as I thought I would! This morning, though, I want to think about this idol of “self,” and we’re going to get at it from a different direction. Even from that short snapshot of cultural statistics, we can see the idol of self is a problem. A visitor to our culture would only need a few minutes to look around our city (or any city) and see the way we glorify the individual, the self, and how so much has become mostly about what is good for “me” no matter what anyone else thinks. But that’s not the Biblical worldview. In Scripture, it’s not so much about “you” or “me” as it is about “we.” Personal worship is not a thing; worship takes place as the community gathers. It matters less than I am God’s person as that we are God’s people, and to that end, Jesus himself gives us a glimpse into how we fight idolatry. We do it by becoming more and more God’s people.

So the passage we read this morning comes in the middle of a series of questions and challenges Jesus is getting from various religious groups. One theologian has said it’s not accurate to talk about the Judaism of Jesus’ day; it’s more accurate to talk about the Judaisms, that they were not a single group but rather a collection of individual interest groups. Sort of like talking about “Christianity” today; you almost want to ask, “What flavor?” We know some of the Judaisms well: Pharisees, Sadducees, Chief Priests, Scribes, Herodians, Essenes—a bunch of different Judaisms, all with their own emphasis and beliefs. This Q&A session Jesus is holding takes place in the Temple courts, as group after group comes to Jesus with a challenge for him, giving him impossible scenarios and, they assume when he gives the incorrect answer, that will discredit him with the people. So the chief priests and elders challenge his authority, then the Pharisees ask him about paying taxes (a hot topic in any generation), and the Sadducees ask him a complicated legal question about eternal life (which they don’t even believe in—Card, Matthew: The Gospel of Identity, pg. 197). And then the Pharisees come back and they ask this question: “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” (22:36).

This was the most actively debated question in their religious world. If social media had been a thing then, this question would have spawned endless tweets, posts and comments. I mean, after all, according to the Pharisees’ count there are 613 commandments in the Torah or what we know as the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. That makes this a complicated question (cf. Card 198). Which one, out of 613, was the most important, the greatest? For Jesus, this had to be like a parent choosing your favorite child; I mean, Jesus is God and God gave the Torah to the Hebrew people. All 613 commandments were his. Which one is the greatest? Which one is your favorite, Jesus?

It seems, at least from reading the text, Jesus doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t engage in a debate with the questioners. You know, today, we would turn it back on them. “Well, which one do YOU think is the most important?” Jesus does that on occasion, but not here. He answers them directly (for a change), first pulling out “the central creed of Judaism,” the one command that all of the Judaisms could agree on. It’s the Shema, the prayer every good Jew would pray every day, the first text every Jewish child commits to memory, the sentence that still opens every Jewish worship service: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (22:37; Deuteronomy 6:5). But Jesus doesn’t stop there; he adds a “second” command, though I contend it really is the flip side of the first. “Love your neighbor as yourself” (22:39; Leviticus 19:18). You can’t love God if you don’t love your neighbor, and if you don’t love your neighbor, you’re not really loving God. These “two” commandments are really one, and we’re supposed to live this out with everything we have: heart, soul and mind. If we’re going to be God’s people and not people who worship the autonomous self, this is how we are to live, this is how we are become God’s people (cf. Card 198; Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Volume 2, pg. 278). So what does that look like?

Love God with all your heart. This means we must become kingdom people, living under the reign of God (Wright, Here Are Your Gods, pg. 124). The early Christians lived by a single, simple creed, two words in Greek and three in English: Kurios Iesous or “Jesus is Lord.” We sort of take that phrase for granted today, but in the first century, it was a radical and rebellious statement. The prevailing creed of the culture was “Caesar is Lord.” One author said that the early Christians didn’t even make up their own creed; they stole it from the emperor’s marketing team. Well, sort of. But theirs was true. Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God, and he called his followers to love God enough that his kingdom was what mattered above everything else. I’ve heard (and even said) that Christians have dual citizenship. We’re citizens of the kingdom of God and citizens of the earthly nation we live in, but lately I’ve become convinced that’s incorrect. We are meant to be so sold out in our love for God that this earthly kingdom is only where we live; it’s not where we belong. His kingdom is what matters.

Now, again, do not hear me saying that this world doesn’t matter, that we should just ignore this world. Jesus announced that the kingdom of God had come (cf. Matthew 4:17) and that it is like yeast being worked through all of the dough, that even when you don’t see it, it’s growing and having an impact (cf. Matthew 13:33). God made this world; God loves this world. He intends to redeem this world. In the end, his kingdom will fully come here. New Jerusalem will descend; heaven will come to earth (cf. Revelation 21:2). So we work and we vote and we serve in the light of kingdom values so that this world is ever becoming more suitable for the kingdom of God to come on earth as it is in heaven, just like we pray. For kingdom people, love for God directs everything we do.

There is a movement these days to get rid of the word “kingdom” because some people don’t like the image of having a king. To some ears it sounds oppressive and violent and old-fashioned. Why can’t we just focus on loving each other, like one big family? Why do we have to talk about a kingdom with a king? Well, for one, Jesus talked about a kingdom, and for that reason alone I believe it’s appropriate language to use. And two, God is still the ruler over all of creation, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. He is seated on the throne (cf. Revelation 21:5). Denying it won’t change the reality. He is the king; he is the standard by which we live our lives. We can’t love each other until we love God the king with all of our heart. To defeat the idols of our world, we first must become kingdom people.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. This means we must also become Gospel people, committed to the mission of God (Wright 116). Loving God has never been about putting our time in on Sunday morning, checking that off the list, and going about our business the rest of the week. Loving God has never been just about our own personal salvation, me and Jesus, going to heaven, spending eternity on a cloud. When we choose to follow Jesus, we are given a mission, the same mission he gave those disciples of his on a mountain in Galilee after the resurrection. “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). You often hear me express that mission this way: our calling is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Different language, same mission. When the church is focused on anything else as primary, we’ve lost our way.

I’m not saying there aren’t good things the church can and should be doing. But a lot of those things can also be done by social service agencies or nonprofit charities. We have keep the main thing the main thing. And the Gospel is our main thing. We do Celebrate Recovery to help people get out of addictions, to deal with their hurts, habits and hang-ups, but the main reason we do Celebrate Recovery is to help people find Jesus, to move beyond their addictions to the love of a savior. We just hosted the biggest party of the year a few weeks ago, Grace Gala, and it was a lot of fun, and special needs folks flooded this place. But we don’t do that just to have a party. We do it to have the opportunity to tell them they are loved by their creator God, that God did not make a mistake. They are kings and queens in his eyes. And that event opens a door for us to have the chance to speak into their lives the rest of the year. We host a preschool; some of you may not know that. And while we have had some people become part of the church because of that preschool, most people looking for a Christian preschool are already connected to a church somewhere. But they want a place for their children where they hear about how much Jesus loves them. Not too long ago, I was talking with Sara, our preschool director, about other preschools in the community, and I loved Sara’s passion when she said, “But the difference is, they get to hear about Jesus here.” That’s why we do what we do. And if we’re not committed to the Gospel mission, we might as well shut our doors.

I could go ministry by ministry and tell you why we do what we do but it all comes back to Jesus. Youth ministry, children’s ministry, funeral meals, Yarn Spinners, everything. One of the things that the pandemic helped us do is to refocus on why we do what we do. It’s easy for a church and for Christians to do a lot of nice things, but we’re called to more than that. We’re called to love God with our soul by being unapologetically committed to the Gospel mission.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This means we must become Bible people, living by the story of God (cf. Wright 111). Most of us would probably say we are already Bible people; we have a Bible and we know some of the stories in it. We remember the big ones from Sunday school—Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath, and Jesus dying on the cross. But it always scares me to think that for some folks, the only Scriptures you get is the little bit that I read for you on Sunday morning. The most recent studies say that only 11 percent of Americans read their Bible daily. And though we claim it’s because we don’t have time, those same studies revealed that Bible reading dropped during the pandemic lock-downs, when we had nothing but time. Pew Research found that 44% of us, Mainline Protestants, seldom or never read the Bible. Almost half of us. How are we going to be people of the Bible if we don’t read it and don’t know it?

I get it—there are a lot of misconceptions about what the Bible is. Some think it’s a book of rules, others think it’s just a book of promises that you pull out when you need them, and still others think it’s a book of doctrine. Certainly, those things are all in there, but primarily the Bible is a story. It’s a love story of God for his people and a history of the way God has worked with and for his people. It’s also a story we don’t largely know. People today know more about the life of their favorite celebrity than they do about the story they say they base their lives on. Here’s how Christopher Wright describes it: “Many Christians are simply living in the world’s story and trying to make the Bible somehow relevant to that. That is, they shape all their assumptions and decisions along the same lines that the rest of the people around us in the world do—but try to add a dose of Bible gloss by ‘applying’ Bible verses here and there…Or, sometimes, worse, we use the Bible selectively to reinforce our own personal aspirations, social and political views, or delusions…We have forgotten the story we are in” (113).

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that in a time when the Bible has never been more available we’re in danger of losing it? I mean, you can download it to your phone for free in hundreds of versions. And if you’re like me and you still like actual books, you can get a Bible designed around just about any need you have. We have no excuse for not knowing our own story, for not loving God with our minds. And when we don’t fill our minds with God’s story, the gods of other stories will fill our minds. I know I pick on Pastor Rick a lot, but I’m going to say publicly how much I really do admire him because I don’t know anyone who knows more Scripture by heart and who tries to live it out faithfully. I want to be like him when I grow up, loving God with all my mind.

Love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Then you will love the people whom God has made. Becoming God’s people reorients our focus from the false Gospel of the autonomous self to the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. Worshipping ourselves is a fruitless pursuit; if I am the highest being that I know, we are all in a lot of trouble! There’s a marvelous passage in Isaiah—I probably love it so much because the prophet is being highly sarcastic when he talks about how a man takes a piece of wood, cuts it in half. With half of it he fashions an idol and bows down to worship it, then takes the other half and cooks his meal over it and warms himself with the fire (Isaiah 44:14-20). The prophet basically says, “How do you not see the contradiction? You’re worshipping something you have made!” The same thing can be said for those who worship the autonomous self. You’re worshipping something you have made. And that something cannot satisfy. We’re called to more. We’re offered better.

On the last night he spent with the disciples—a night we explored in depth during Lent—Jesus began the evening by taking some ordinary items and infusing Gospel meaning into them. Common bread, the stuff that was on every table, now meant to represent his body. Whenever they saw bread, they were meant to remember Jesus and their calling to be his people. Common wine, the drink that was on every table in a land where the water wasn’t generally safe to drink, now reminding them of his blood. Every time they saw wine, they were to remember their calling and his kingdom. They were his people—and so are we. Every time we come to this table, we are reminded again that our God is so much better than the idols we build for ourselves, and he alone will win in the end. With that in mind, let’s come to the table this morning as God’s people. Will you pray with me?