WEBVTT 00:00:00.239 --> 00:00:16.849 The United Methodist Church has come together, our bishops, and they have put together what they're calling a guiding vision for our denomination right, our brand of Christianity. 00:00:16.849 --> 00:00:25.695 They're putting together a guiding vision for where we're headed as a denomination going forward. 00:00:25.695 --> 00:00:29.911 And so today, well, I can tell you it's three things. 00:00:29.911 --> 00:00:39.247 It's love boldly, serve joyfully and lead courageously, which I thought was pretty good. 00:00:39.247 --> 00:00:40.526 They've even got a little video. 00:00:40.526 --> 00:00:42.688 Maybe we'll send it out in the email this week. 00:00:42.688 --> 00:00:49.247 I thought I'm going to do a sermon series on the three and we'll have a little time to think about. 00:00:49.247 --> 00:00:53.521 Well, who are we United Methodists these days? 00:00:53.521 --> 00:00:57.244 So we start with loving boldly. 00:00:57.244 --> 00:01:01.689 And our bishops, they picked this passage from the Gospel of Matthew. 00:01:01.689 --> 00:01:06.534 It's chapter 22, verses 34 to 46. 00:01:07.534 --> 00:01:09.796 And a lot of our gospel passages. 00:01:09.796 --> 00:01:25.557 They are conversations between people like the Pharisees those who are running the church of the day and Jesus, and they're debating, to a certain extent, what they are supposed to be doing. 00:01:25.557 --> 00:01:30.186 They're debating theology about who God is, and the Pharisees. 00:01:30.186 --> 00:01:38.206 They ask Jesus a fairly straightforward question what is the greatest commandment? 00:01:38.206 --> 00:01:39.668 Right? 00:01:39.668 --> 00:01:45.560 And most of us know the commandments being the 10 commandments from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible. 00:01:45.560 --> 00:01:49.531 Does anybody here have their favorite commandment? 00:01:49.531 --> 00:01:53.168 What's your favorite commandment? 00:01:53.168 --> 00:01:58.871 Thou shalt not steal, all right. 00:01:58.871 --> 00:02:02.106 So not a big fan of Ten Commandment group. 00:02:02.106 --> 00:02:04.352 Okay, noted, noted, you take or leave of Ten Commandment group. 00:02:04.352 --> 00:02:12.092 Okay, noted, noted, you take or leave the Ten Commandments, all right, very good. 00:02:12.092 --> 00:02:17.372 Well, jesus, he not only has one, he actually offers two. 00:02:18.639 --> 00:02:37.834 And in some ways a lot of folks have summarized all of the Ten Commandments into these two, that the first one in many ways summarizes the first five commandments and then the second of his two greatest commandments kind of summarizes the back half. 00:02:37.834 --> 00:02:45.847 So in the first half we're talking about our relationship with God, in the back half of the commandments we're talking about a relationship with each other. 00:02:45.847 --> 00:02:54.456 So it comes down to these two things for Jesus love God and love neighbor. 00:02:54.456 --> 00:02:57.343 I might've showed you this before. 00:02:57.343 --> 00:03:12.451 I had somebody pointed out that for us Christians we're all about loving God and loving neighbor, that our cross itself is sort of a metaphor for how we understand our lives. 00:03:12.451 --> 00:03:18.804 We love God, our upward relationship, and we love neighbor, our relationships with each other. 00:03:18.804 --> 00:03:20.626 That was his answer. 00:03:20.626 --> 00:03:25.691 It's a fairly commonly agreed to answer. 00:03:26.512 --> 00:03:38.121 It is a belief, a theology that most people generally agree with, and even in biblical times, even post-biblical times there was general agreement. 00:03:38.121 --> 00:03:49.295 In fact, many people of faith would use this as if you're really going to barrel down the Christian faith, or even faith more broadly, into a statement. 00:03:49.295 --> 00:03:58.073 It might be that Professor Nicholas Shazer he's at Malacaster College and he works in workingpreachercom. 00:03:58.073 --> 00:04:00.687 That's a website I really like. 00:04:00.687 --> 00:04:08.641 He says Jewish sages who lived in Jesus's era described these biblical verses in very similar ways. 00:04:08.701 --> 00:04:19.944 For instance, according to the Jerusalem Talmud, it'd be around the fourth century in the common era, or AD as we have commonly understood it. 00:04:19.944 --> 00:04:33.476 Rabbi Akiva, who was born around 50 years after Jesus, says that the Levitical command to love your neighbor as yourself is the greatest principle of the Torah. 00:04:33.476 --> 00:04:35.163 So this is right. 00:04:35.163 --> 00:04:40.672 After Jesus' life, they're already claiming this as an important part of the teachings. 00:04:40.672 --> 00:05:04.511 Another famous story preserved in the Babylonian Talmud this would be 600 CE, so 600 years after Christ was living states that the renowned first century sage Hillel once paraphrased Leviticus 19.18 for a non-Jew by saying whatever is hateful to you, do not do it to your neighbor. 00:05:04.511 --> 00:05:06.973 That is all the Torah. 00:05:06.973 --> 00:05:09.016 The rest is commentary. 00:05:09.016 --> 00:05:12.343 Go study. 00:05:12.343 --> 00:05:13.404 I like that last bit. 00:05:13.404 --> 00:05:15.146 Go study. 00:05:15.146 --> 00:05:17.331 I've told you what is Now. 00:05:17.331 --> 00:05:19.634 Go figure it out, go live it. 00:05:19.634 --> 00:05:21.641 Make it real. 00:05:21.661 --> 00:05:29.692 In Matthew, jesus couples the same verse with Deuteronomy 6.5 and asserts on these two commandments, hang all the Torah and the prophets. 00:05:29.692 --> 00:05:57.889 Hopefully you're understanding a significant verse, a significant teaching, so much so that for many this barrels down what it means to live a life of faith, and not just for Christians, but in the Judaic tradition as well. 00:05:57.889 --> 00:06:03.692 Love God, love neighbor, love the lawnmower it's those three things. 00:06:03.692 --> 00:06:07.723 It can be a provocative message, right I? 00:06:07.742 --> 00:06:11.913 We often ask ourselves well, who's my neighbor then? 00:06:11.913 --> 00:06:14.228 Which is a complicated question, isn't it? 00:06:14.228 --> 00:06:33.079 Amidst our current focus as a nation, trying to separate certain parts of the community, it forces us Christians to be asking ourselves okay, maybe there's some economic reason we're doing this, but then again, my faith says love my neighbor. 00:06:33.079 --> 00:06:35.622 Are they my neighbor? 00:06:35.622 --> 00:06:38.867 What makes them not so? 00:06:38.867 --> 00:06:40.848 If they aren't, is it citizenship? 00:06:40.848 --> 00:06:41.629 Citizenship? 00:06:41.629 --> 00:06:49.944 Or is it possible that when Jesus says this, love God, love neighbor, he really only meant citizens? 00:06:49.944 --> 00:07:01.279 Or maybe he only meant Christians, in which case we ask another level of question what would it mean even to love them? 00:07:01.279 --> 00:07:08.600 What would it mean if they are of the body or even outside of the body? 00:07:08.600 --> 00:07:11.845 Then, what is Jesus asking us to do? 00:07:11.845 --> 00:07:14.559 What does that love look like. 00:07:14.559 --> 00:07:18.038 Does it mean we need to let people stay? 00:07:18.038 --> 00:07:23.680 It's a complex question, isn't it? 00:07:23.680 --> 00:07:25.297 It's one we wrestle with. 00:07:26.752 --> 00:07:31.574 So after he has this conversation, then Jesus, he asks his own question. 00:07:31.574 --> 00:07:39.254 He asks of these Pharisees whose son is, or at the time, will be, the Messiah? 00:07:39.254 --> 00:07:47.697 Provocative question, right, for many, jesus understands himself and others understand him as the Messiah. 00:07:47.697 --> 00:07:53.178 So when he asks the Pharisees who's the Messiah it's an interesting question. 00:07:53.178 --> 00:07:56.810 Their answer is the son of David. 00:07:56.810 --> 00:08:07.680 But that's sort of problematic too because, as they all would know, david refers to the Messiah as being at the right hand of God. 00:08:07.680 --> 00:08:14.184 This would be in a psalm written before Jesus came to take body in this world, on this earth. 00:08:14.184 --> 00:08:23.860 So now you have this question well, who's the son then, if Jesus was already in existence, right hand of God pre-David, but also is the son of David? 00:08:23.860 --> 00:08:37.642 So some of you who are wrestling with that last bit, that's kind of the overview and it was just a really interesting question that Jesus poses to them and overall it's an interesting conversation. 00:08:38.865 --> 00:08:46.177 Sometimes those conversations with Jesus and the Pharisees they get a little contentious and you can tell they're working at things. 00:08:46.177 --> 00:08:57.942 But this one felt like a real honest conversation about theology, but it brings us back to the meat of the passage today. 00:08:57.942 --> 00:09:00.575 What is love? 00:09:00.575 --> 00:09:03.034 Baby, don't hurt me. 00:09:03.034 --> 00:09:05.315 What is love? 00:09:05.315 --> 00:09:09.360 That was for all the Gen Xers, I don't know, did anybody? 00:09:09.360 --> 00:09:16.403 I apologize for my music reference, but hey, I'm a Gen Xer and we don't get a lot of pub. 00:09:17.370 --> 00:09:20.153 What is love, and what does it mean? 00:09:20.153 --> 00:09:29.385 To love boldly, I mean, we can assume it means in the scriptural sense, right, our bishops chose this. 00:09:29.385 --> 00:09:32.155 So what are we to make of this love? 00:09:32.155 --> 00:09:42.974 You know, when we think of love, just hearing it in our common culture and outside of the church, we often think on this range from romantic to kind of silly. 00:09:42.974 --> 00:09:52.076 Right, we hear of love out of a faith context and we're thinking well, ross and Rachel, should they have been together or not? 00:09:52.076 --> 00:09:56.543 Sam and Diane, right, did they fit? 00:09:56.543 --> 00:09:58.711 What was it? 00:09:58.711 --> 00:10:00.395 Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell? 00:10:00.395 --> 00:10:03.951 I'm trying to hit all the generations here, right. 00:10:03.951 --> 00:10:05.394 Right, I mean. 00:10:05.414 --> 00:10:09.650 But that's when we think love, right, we don't automatically go to agape. 00:10:09.650 --> 00:10:24.835 Godly love, right, we think love, oh, yeah, that's when you're 22 and you're oh, whatever, this and that and the other thing, and you know it's this thing that's really meaningful and yet we can kind of compartmentalize it. 00:10:24.835 --> 00:10:30.565 You know, that's just romantic things, the stuff of movies and TV. 00:10:30.565 --> 00:10:46.481 We don't generally think of agape love and maybe that's why when we hear this phrase from Jesus, love God, love, neighbor we have trouble kind of putting it first, neighbor. 00:10:46.481 --> 00:10:56.251 We have trouble kind of putting it first, putting it as the lead of our lives, because it makes us feel a little vulnerable. 00:10:56.251 --> 00:11:02.181 Wait a minute, I'm going to love, I'm going to give my heart, I'm going to make myself vulnerable to others. 00:11:02.181 --> 00:11:08.500 How am I ever going to succeed, how am I going to flourish in this world if I do something like that? 00:11:08.500 --> 00:11:13.442 I can't do it unless he's going to do it or she's going to do it. 00:11:15.011 --> 00:11:24.485 So I thought today it might be helpful for us to actually reflect on what we think agape love is Right and I'm going would this be old school? 00:11:24.485 --> 00:11:30.019 Yeah, on what we think agape love is right and I'm going would this be old school? 00:11:30.019 --> 00:11:34.201 Yeah, right, here I'm going old school. 00:11:34.201 --> 00:11:46.077 I've got an easel, I've got here some paper, right, we're gonna get this organized, we're gonna get it decided. 00:11:46.077 --> 00:11:50.654 See, and you don't think there's like choreography involved in this at all. 00:11:50.654 --> 00:11:53.322 But no, paul and I, we had to work together on this. 00:11:53.322 --> 00:12:01.390 We decided that this was a good spot for this, so all my brothers and sisters at home can make sure they see it. 00:12:02.131 --> 00:12:15.559 I would like to know from you, right here today, what do we think agape love is, and don't feel like you've got to embrace it completely. 00:12:15.559 --> 00:12:16.875 Just give me some words. 00:12:16.875 --> 00:12:18.455 What is agape love? 00:12:18.455 --> 00:12:22.332 When you think of agape love, just throw them out there, I'm ready to go. 00:12:22.332 --> 00:12:31.529 Kindness, kindness, respect, respect, respect, respect. 00:12:31.529 --> 00:12:34.052 Maybe I should have done two of these. 00:12:34.052 --> 00:12:35.797 Commitment oh, I like that. 00:12:35.797 --> 00:12:39.384 Grace, amen. 00:12:39.384 --> 00:12:41.197 I got a Methodist out there somewhere. 00:12:41.197 --> 00:13:01.674 Giving of oneself, giving of oneself I heard intentional Compassion, all right. 00:13:01.674 --> 00:13:06.509 Empathy it's a lot of stuff, see, maybe this is why it's hard. 00:13:06.509 --> 00:13:08.350 I heard one over here, but I didn't make it out. 00:13:08.350 --> 00:13:25.120 Unconditional All right, all right, we got it figured out. 00:13:25.120 --> 00:13:34.147 Unconditional forgiving, empowering I like that too. 00:13:34.147 --> 00:13:35.727 We often don't think about that. 00:13:35.727 --> 00:13:40.756 Does my love for you empower you? 00:13:40.756 --> 00:13:48.177 Pretty good list, service, service, service, service. 00:13:48.177 --> 00:13:55.639 I did alright, we got a pretty good list. 00:13:55.639 --> 00:13:59.278 Alright, we're doing alright here. 00:13:59.278 --> 00:14:00.422 I like this. 00:14:00.422 --> 00:14:02.554 That is a good list. 00:14:03.698 --> 00:14:10.881 Agape love isn't quite that unfamiliar to us Now. 00:14:10.881 --> 00:14:11.966 Some of you have been here. 00:14:11.966 --> 00:14:17.869 Well, many of you have been here long enough to remember Brother Walt when he was here and he had his mantra right. 00:14:17.869 --> 00:14:19.424 What was the mantra? 00:14:19.424 --> 00:14:23.485 Oh, if I say it, you're going to go. 00:14:23.485 --> 00:14:26.865 Oh yeah, let love lead. 00:14:26.865 --> 00:14:30.023 Right, let love lead, amen to that. 00:14:30.023 --> 00:14:31.207 Right, let love lead. 00:14:31.207 --> 00:14:34.369 Now, we had poster up. 00:14:34.369 --> 00:14:38.006 It was on a website, it was in the emails. 00:14:38.006 --> 00:14:41.990 You know, it's a good phrase, it's a good mantra, it's a good motto. 00:14:41.990 --> 00:14:48.308 Now we took it down because we're thinking, all right, new guy, we probably ought to do something different. 00:14:48.308 --> 00:14:52.326 But on a day like this it does make me think. 00:14:52.326 --> 00:14:55.673 You know, should we be bringing it back? 00:14:55.673 --> 00:15:03.711 Are we really good at letting love lead, which really love God, love neighbor. 00:15:03.711 --> 00:15:05.413 That's kind of what that means. 00:15:08.500 --> 00:15:13.493 It's been a difficult week for this scripture, am I right? 00:15:13.493 --> 00:15:15.938 This kind of passage for this scripture? 00:15:15.938 --> 00:15:16.299 Am I right? 00:15:16.299 --> 00:15:17.815 This kind of passage? 00:15:17.815 --> 00:15:40.092 We had a big event this week to follow other big events, a couple big events a couple weeks ago, as I mentioned in prayer time 358 big events since Jan 1 in our country, and it hits us this one this week right in our polarized weak spot. 00:15:40.092 --> 00:15:44.687 See, you guys think my job is easy. 00:15:44.687 --> 00:15:48.147 I've got to come up here on Sunday. 00:15:48.147 --> 00:16:08.067 I've got to preach something when this happens In this society where we have committed and entrenched, we're not only on two different sides, but we're trying to figure out how to undermine, how to take the legs out, how to take each other out, a little difficult to preach in. 00:16:08.067 --> 00:16:09.745 I'm just going to say it. 00:16:09.745 --> 00:16:13.072 So we have a young man. 00:16:13.072 --> 00:16:16.269 He was killed and he's mourned by many. 00:16:17.860 --> 00:16:26.335 He's seen as this conservative activist who was able to ignite passion in young people, especially young white men. 00:16:26.335 --> 00:16:33.951 He really was getting them organized and it's a time where young white men are nervous a little bit. 00:16:33.951 --> 00:16:35.842 They're nervous. 00:16:35.842 --> 00:16:50.076 You know, america has been a place where white men had a lot of say and as it evens out, it makes young white men get nervous, get anxious. 00:16:50.076 --> 00:17:09.015 At the same time, in doing his activism, he said a lot of things that were very polarizing, super aggressive things said about pretty much every non-white culture and about women. 00:17:11.681 --> 00:17:41.263 These are things that, if they had been said about us or about our own families, we would be led to be scared, to feel unsafe about the society around us, about the people around us, worried that we might be oppressed, we might be harassed, worried that we might be oppressed, we might be harassed, we might even be killed at some point. 00:17:41.263 --> 00:17:47.353 That is the environment that we're living in, so I don't want to pick a side. 00:17:47.353 --> 00:17:58.994 I'm going to let you all live into your own beliefs and how you understand this situation, but what's clear to me is that the killing is wrong. 00:17:58.994 --> 00:18:02.208 I think that's an obvious thing to say. 00:18:02.208 --> 00:18:22.415 Not only is it wrong, but we really can't afford for people to be getting killed for their opinions, any more than we can afford people being oppressed or even killed for their skin color, for their gender, for their sexual identity. 00:18:22.415 --> 00:18:31.875 We can't live as a society where that kind of jeopardy, that kind of violence, is a reality. 00:18:31.875 --> 00:18:39.673 It's a world that is left blind and toothless for you scriptural orientators. 00:18:39.673 --> 00:18:56.653 This is why this morning, I'm pointing to the tone, to the way that we relate with each other and how we work through our disagreements. 00:18:58.016 --> 00:19:08.015 You know there's a lot of philosophies, approaches, guidelines that we can put ahead of love on our list of things. 00:19:08.015 --> 00:19:09.682 There's a lot of them. 00:19:09.682 --> 00:19:15.413 Instead of letting love lead, we could defer to power. 00:19:15.413 --> 00:19:18.627 Let's let the strong lead. 00:19:18.627 --> 00:19:19.825 That's why they're there. 00:19:19.825 --> 00:19:23.546 We could defer to money. 00:19:23.546 --> 00:19:24.710 Let money lead. 00:19:24.710 --> 00:19:28.308 We can let government lead. 00:19:28.308 --> 00:19:32.309 We can let caustic words lead. 00:19:32.309 --> 00:20:04.915 We can let destroy the other lead, we can let caustic words lead, we can let destroy the other lead, we can let division lead, we can let hate lead, we can let fear lead, we can let disengagement lead, we can let anger lead, but can we all agree, at least for this moment, on this day, that none of these actually work? 00:20:04.915 --> 00:20:37.013 Can we all agree that none of these really bring us to any sense of justice or peace, or equity, or fairness or harmony or, most of all, love, the thing that Jesus claimed as the most important, the thing that most believers, for 2,000 years, have claimed as the most important? 00:20:39.461 --> 00:20:58.704 I wonder if Jesus is telling us to love God and to love neighbor, not because he thought life was just a really silly sitcom where we could all be tutti frutti, silly, in love with each other and let all the flowers and the hearts grow around us. 00:20:58.704 --> 00:21:16.513 Maybe Jesus is saying it is because it's the only thing that works in a society in which we are engaging each other daily, where decisions that we make affect everyone, not just mine. 00:21:16.513 --> 00:21:20.324 I am not just affected, ours are not just affected. 00:21:20.324 --> 00:21:29.528 We are all affected by our own decisions as a society, and we're in a society in which we all disagree on things. 00:21:29.528 --> 00:21:39.780 Not only that, we're in a society, as human beings, where mistakes happen, we hurt people and it's not always intentional. 00:21:39.780 --> 00:21:48.009 We live in a society where mortality is real. 00:21:48.009 --> 00:22:00.612 Maybe Jesus was telling us this 2,000 years ago, because it's the only thing that really works. 00:22:03.002 --> 00:22:16.549 Our question for today and I'll put it to this community because I know and I'm learning this community we are a heart community, we are a head community, we want to be blessings in this world. 00:22:16.549 --> 00:22:23.613 So I put it to this community Are we ready to believe Jesus? 00:22:23.613 --> 00:22:31.425 Are we ready to trust in that scripture, to love God and love neighbor? 00:22:31.425 --> 00:22:32.607 Because I tell you what? 00:22:32.607 --> 00:22:33.429 It isn't easy. 00:22:33.429 --> 00:22:42.224 Today we have moved in our society so far from any trust in that scripture. 00:22:42.224 --> 00:22:45.893 We've convinced each other we really need to destroy each other. 00:22:47.183 --> 00:22:59.468 Are we ready to hold each other accountable and by holding each other accountable, I'm not talking about holding the other guy accountable, the other gal accountable. 00:22:59.468 --> 00:23:03.310 I'm talking about holding your own folks accountable. 00:23:03.310 --> 00:23:18.548 I'm talking about holding yourself accountable when something is said to convey that anyone else or anything that anyone else in this world is anything less than a child of God. 00:23:18.548 --> 00:23:21.574 Are we ready to hold others account? 00:23:21.574 --> 00:23:29.998 Are we ready to hold them to account to say hold on, we are all children of God. 00:23:30.077 --> 00:23:41.303 We need to figure out how to live in this way, in this place, with peace, because I think that's what it's going to take. 00:23:41.303 --> 00:23:52.316 Are we ready to accept accountability for our sense of humanity, even in the tough decisions we need to make as a society the economic decisions, the political decisions? 00:23:52.316 --> 00:24:00.528 Are we ready to be held accountable to a sense of humanity in the way we deal with each other? 00:24:00.528 --> 00:24:04.161 And I'll tell you what it doesn't mean nothing if we're just going to believe it. 00:24:04.161 --> 00:24:06.163 We got to live it. 00:24:06.163 --> 00:24:25.446 The United Methodist Church is taking on this mission to love boldly, and it will take boldness in this world for what we have allowed to come to fruition, to come to existence. 00:24:25.446 --> 00:24:29.273 I, for one, am going to be praying for them. 00:24:29.273 --> 00:24:40.122 I'm going to be praying for us as we seek to live out our part of that mission to love boldly, and I pray that you will too. 00:24:40.122 --> 00:24:41.924 Amen.