Love Jesus

Last week the Gospel Lesson defined what it means to believe in Jesus. It is more than knowing or saying the words, “I believe.” Jesus himself defined believing by teaching, “If you believe in me you will do the works I do and even greater works than these...” He basically teaches his disciples, that's us, that he will not make a list of things that one has to believe in order to be Christian but instead he calls upon us to live as he lived and be involved as he is involved.

This week our Gospel Lesson continues this crash course going on with his disciples then and now about what it means to be a disciple. Once again, Jesus does not give us a list we can use for grading ourselves as to how well we're doing as Christians. Jesus apparently did not anticipate how much those raised in the Western culture would need to have check-off list to go along with our proofs.

This week Jesus calls for us to love him. “If you love me...” he begins, and then tells us how we can know if we love him. He tells us that if we love him we will “Keep His Commandments!” Immediately, I thought, “What are the commandments of Jesus?” This was the question asked both Bible Study groups and it was clearly a momentary stopper where silence was intense but moved on to be enlightening.

Both groups began with the commandment of all commandments – You shall love God with all you heart, mind and soul. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. It is from here that I believe the following Jesus commandments are born. And I certainly do not think that I'm exhausting his commandments but am offering a way of Bible study that opens us to hear differently than Pharisaic. It opens us to a way of hearing with our imagination as well as with words.

There is no list of his commandments and so we have to look at how he lives rather than words that we can memorize. His call to us to live with him rather to know about him and it is in living with Jesus we find his commandments.

Jesus and those original disciples were constantly in trouble because they broke the religious rules that folks depended upon for pleasing God. Let me give just a few biblical examples:

Matthew 12:1 – Jesus and his disciples walking through a wheat field on the sabbath and the disciples began picking the grains and eating them.

The 9^th Chapter of John is the crowning event of Jesus ignoring the accepted Sabbath rules when he healed the man who had been blind from birth.

It seems clear to me, Jesus would say that people are more important than rules and that we are to help them when the need is present.

Jesus did not ignore the Sabbath and the need for followers to gather to worship. If you look throughout all the Gospels we find that he regularly went to Synagogue to worship. He often led worship even when it meant that some would turn against him.

We raised in the Western Culture, specifically in American Culture, over the past couple hundred years have made an idol of ourselves. We worship self-esteem. We brag about being self-made persons. We teach our children that they must be individuals. And we live as though we are entitled to use the rest of the world any way we desire that makes us excited or comfortable.

Jesus, on the other hand, consistently spoke of hearing God rather than ourselves. He worshiped God and met God in the scriptures. There are no self-made men and women; there are only God made men and women. We gather to worship the God who created and continues to create us. If we are to have any esteem it needs to be God-esteem rather than self.

You know, there is very little new in the words spoken by Jesus. Nearly every word and lesson reaches back to the scriptures of his days on earth. It is clear that Jesus not only knew the scriptures he lived them and Eugene Peterson states that we can do the same – both Old and New Testaments.

Let me share a couple of quotes from Peterson: “But as it turns out, in this business of living the Christian life, ranking high among the most neglected aspects is one having to do with reading the Christian Scriptures. Not that Christians don't own and read their Bible. And not that Christians don't believe that their Bibles are the word of God. What is neglected is reading the Scriptures formatively, reading in order to live.”

We have Bibles. We read our Bibles. We even seriously study our Bibles. But Peterson says there is much more, “What I want to say, countering the devil, is that in order to read the Scriptures adequately and accurately, it is necessary at the same time to live them. Not to live them as a prerequisite to reading them, and not to live them in consequence of reading them, but to live them as we read them, the living and reading reciprocal, body language and spoken words, the back-and-forthness assimilating the reading to living, the living to the reading. Reading the Scriptures is not an activity discrete from living the gospel but one integral to it. It means letting Another have a say in everything we are saying and doing. It is as easy as that. And as hard.”

As God said to Ezekiel, Jeremiah and John, “Eat my words.” We are to eat the Bible so that it becomes a living part of every cell in every part of our bodies. Knowing the most words of the Bible has no meaning whatsoever if they are not lived in the manner that Jesus lived them – it appears that this is one of his commandments.

It seems to me that we like to talk about trusting God, we defend our national words of trusting God. We are not putting our money where our mouth is, for example. We do not spend nearly as much money on justice, orphans, and the poor as we do on military might. Our spending on education is not even a drop in the bucket compared to military and keeping people in prison. It is very obvious over the past few years that personal greed is much more important than sensitivity to the needs of most people.

In an article published in April 2004, the following numbers tell a sad story about who we trust and how we live that trust. It list the average hourly wage of the following: Army private, $6.03; Bank teller, $9.97; School bus driver, $11.01; Average worker, $17.10; Tire worker, $17.30; Architect, $30.06; Doctor (family practice), $65.51; George Bush, $200.00; Colgate-Palmolive CEO Ruben Mark, $67,836.00. (Side bar) Even more telling to me is this statement, “In 1982, the ratio of CEO pay to the wages of the average worker stood at 42 to 1. Today, it is beyond 300 to 1. If the minimum wage had increased as quickly as CEO pay since 1990, it would be $15.71 an hour today.”

It is certainly an oversimplification to say that we trust more in profits, wealth, power, and status than God but it sure looks that way to me. Winning the game is more important today than playing the game. Getting to heaven has become more important than serving the Lord right here and now today.

Is there any question, as one studies the Gospels, that prayer is a primary command of our Lord? It was so important to Jesus that those original disciples, living with him daily, became interested themselves and asked, “Lord, teach us to pray!” How often do you pray? How do you pray when you pray?

There is an on-going discussion about whether we should ask for whatever we want or to simply pray, “Your will be done.” Now, I take the side that we pray whatsoever is on our mind, heart and soul. There is no limitation as far as I'm concerned. I ask God for what I want. I do this with a full recognition that God will do God's will every time and I really feel no need to remind God that it's okay with me. It's not always okay with me because I want what I want when I want it and I suspect that will always be the case. But I'm clear that I don't always get what I want in life from God or others.

However, it may do us well to join those original disciples and ask Jesus to teach us to pray. Let's experiment a little and just go to a room, live the scriptures we're reading, and say, “Jesus, teach me to pray.” Then, silently wait for his lesson.

Jesus will know that we love him if we keep his commandments. I've proposed a few of them but there are untold numbers of his commandments. You see, we have the Gospels that I've drawn from this morning but we have ever so much more in that Jesus has asked we have an Advocate, Counselor, Helper, Holy Spirit to keep us in relationship with Jesus throughout the ages. I've pointed out a few things that I see clearly but there is so much more that I don't see or that will even change from what I see today.

What is Jesus commanding of you today? What is Jesus commanding of New Oregon today? Oh, to be sure Jesus has called us to be in relationship with him and this world and we must live his today-commandments if he is to know we love him. We love Jesus today by keeping his commandments today. Amen.

Ibid., p. xii.

“Corporate America's CEO pay heist,” Nicole Colson and Alan Maass, Socialistworker.org, www.socialistworker.org/2004-1/497/497_05_CEOPay.shtml, p. 5.