Sermons

So here are two sermons I have recently preached in Kenosha...

"What's love got to do with it?"

This semester at Northwestern, I took a class called “Religion and Peace” and it was one of the most inspiring classes I’ve ever taken. I have always considered myself an advocate of peace and nonviolence, but I had never really put any of my peaceful ideals into practice… probably because I just didn’t know how. But this class really inspired me to stop just believing in things, and to actually start acting on my faith. This is what Jesus urges us to do- to not only have faith, but to act out our faith in the name of love and social justice. One of the most touching stories we read in class was about a woman named Magda Yoors-Peeters. She was a Belgian woman who lived during WWI. And she hated the Germans. She preached hate, and got other people to hate the Germans too. But one day, while she was walking to town, she saw something lying in the mud on the side of the road. She got closer and realized it was a man. Not just any man, but a German soldier. His shoes were broken, and his feet were muddy and bleeding. He needed help- he was faint with hunger and cold. Magda could not just leave him there, even though she brutally hated Germans. So she brought him home! She sat him down and began to wash his feet, and she suddenly realized that this man was a brother. A German was her brother, The Germans were her brothers. She needed to get him some food, but food was sparse, they each only got one egg apiece every two weeks. But she begged her landlady for two eggs! And even though the landlady also hated Germans, she gave Madga two eggs and some jam because she was so moved by Magda’s kindness and the suffering of the German soldier. They both came to realize that even though the Germans were their enemies… they were also human beings and deserved to be loved and cared for.

Loving our enemies- it isn’t easy. It fact, I think its one of the most challenging things Jesus asks of us. Loving our enemies requires us to love a person even if we cannot approve of their actions. We do not have to love the action of a person that causes us hurt, pain, suffering or injury. But, God is very clear that it is a Christian's obligation to love that person!! But what does that really mean?
I think it means that we are to help the person in times of trouble. We are to forgive them for the things they do that hurt us. We are to try to understand them. We are to speak kindly to them. We are to return good for evil. We are to treat them as a fellow human being.
Christians aren't instinctively forgiving and loving. It is something we must work at and cultivate. To help us understand the true meaning of all that God had commanded, Jesus shared a new commandment with us. " This is my commandment, That you love one another; as I have loved you.”
Can't you see John sitting there listening to Jesus as He shares this new commandment. "Wait a minute. You want me to love Peter? He's ill-mannered. He's a loudmouth. He's brash. He's nothing more than a fisherman. For me to love you, Jesus, is one thing, but to love Peter that's another. Are you serious? You can't be serious?" As he looks into Jesus' face he realizes Jesus is dead serious. "Yes, You are commanding me to love Peter!"
Now, Peter isn't going to let these remarks pass by. "Huh, you want me to love John. He is always trying to get the upper place around here. He wants to lord it over the rest of us. Jesus, John's not too lovable you know? You can't want me to love him. Are You serious?" He too looks into Jesus' face and realizes Jesus is serious. "Oh, You mean I have to love him, boy, oh boy."
Yes we are called to love people who are rude, and selfish, and mean, we are called to love the people who hurt us, people who are weird, and strange, and smell funny. The people who cut in front of us in line at the grocery store, the people who believe in different things, and live their lives in different ways. We are to love them all.
If I can't love you, I have no right to call myself a Christian. To not love you and call myself a Christian is to insult the name of Christ! John says "If a man say, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar: for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. The commandment we have from Him is this, those who love God must love his brother also" (I John 4:20-21).
How can I refuse to forgive or love any of you when I consider how patient God has been with me, what He has forgiven me of, what amazing and beautiful gifts he has given me, how greatly He has loved me? How can any of us refuse to forgive and love others? If we as the body of Christ would simply practice this one thing - we could turn the whole world upside down for God. "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another" (I John 4:11). We are called to imitate the love that God has shown us. . In our passage from Isaiah, we are reminded that God created the heavens and the earth, and humankind. He created us. And he loves us. He even sent Jesus to die for us. We love God because God loves us and provides for us. And those who love God are commanded to love their brothers and sisters as well.
John Paul II once said that worship and prayer are not pleasing to God unless they are accompanied by practical works of justice and charity.
It’s very easy to say we love other people, but what can we practically do to show that we "love one another?"
We all remember the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. Through this event Jesus demonstrated that love happens when we can reverse roles. He became the servant who washed the feet of his disciples, rather than the other way around. We can imitate this in our daily lives- helping the hosts of a dinner party clean up afterwards, picking up trash in a park, washing someone’s car, helping someone cross the street, raking someone’s yard. Doing work that you ordinarily would leave for someone else to do.

Secondly, love means death to prejudice. We remember that Judas was not excluded from the communal supper. Love means we are willing to accept everyone. In Yugoslavia we bombed the Serbs because of their "ethnic cleansing." It’s easy for us to point the finger to people we don’t know and condemn them for their prejudice against people who are different. We may not be committing those same atrocities but how frequently do we talk about people in our midst who are different? How often do we exclude others because they dress differently, come from a different neighborhood or associate with people we don’t like? Or maybe we are suspicious of them because they believe in a different religion, or worship God in a different way?

For Jesus, love has no boundaries. Jesus taught his disciples a whole new concept of what it means to be people of the faith. He taught and demonstrated through his communal supper that we are a community. We are to love one another even more than their own families. What bonds us together has nothing to do with nationality, race, or vocation. What bonds us together and makes us unique is our unconditional love of one another.

Finally, love means we are willing to forgive. "Just as I have loved you," Jesus said, "I want you to love one another." The loving thing Jesus did for us was to forgive us. To forgive another person in the household of faith is to act out this new commandment.
These are actions that we can begin in our lives with people we encounter on a daily basis. But how amazing would it be to someday apply these actions to people all around the world- to children who are starving in Somalia, victims who are suffering in Iraq, families who are being murdered in Darfur, strangers whom we do not even know, but people nonetheless who deserve our love and understanding. Could we even one day extend this love to the perpetrators of these crimes?
On this Memorial Day, I will not only be praying for and thinking of the brave men and women who have fought or are still fighting on our side, but I will also be praying for and thinking of all the casualties of wars and crimes- the good guys and the bad guys, all who are involved in the horrible atrocities in the world- even my most brutal enemies.
Jesus did not just command us to love our neighbors… he wanted us to love our enemies too. He didn’t just preach love, he promoted social justice- helping all people who are suffering. If we each do our own little part, we can begin to see the kingdom of God on Earth. If each of us strives to think before we speak or act, to learn more about other cultures, faiths, and traditions, to begin to do things for other people, to care about others and not just ourselves, and to smile more at strangers, the world will begin to be a better place. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist peace activist once said, “I can tell you that if you are unable to smile, then the world will not have peace. It’s not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that you can get peace. It is with your capacity for smiling, breathing and being understanding that you can make peace. Practicing smiling, breathing, enjoying the blue sky, we can bring a new dimension to the peace movement.”
Magda Yoors-Peeters learned to smile at, understand, and love her enemy.
Can we?


"I am tired, I am weak, I am worn"

How many times have we said or heard the words:
…with liberty and justice for all?

How about these classic words from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator certain inalienable rights- that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Or these words, that greeted exhausted immigrants after their long, painful journey over the Atlantic Ocean to America, the land that promised freedom:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, temptest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
These are calls to freedom, justice and equal rights for all mankind- ideals that we are supposed to believe in, ideals that we want our nation, our government, our world to be built on. These are ideals given to us by God; God has endowed us with these inalienable rights. This fourth of July, we will celebrate the time when 230 years ago, our 13 original colonies declared their independence from England and began to work towards an American Dream of freedom. 230 years ago, the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania State House and approved the Declaration of Independence, which not only gave us our freedom from the oppressive power of England, but also gave us a foundation for an ideal American Dream of freedom for all people to always look up to. It is a marvelous and great thing that we have an American Dream, that constantly challenges us, that gives us a sense of urgency, and reminds us to strive for universal justice and love. That is what the American Dream is- and it really is a universal dream. Our declaration of independence says that ALL men are created equal.. it doesn’t say some particular, special men that someone has hand-picked are created equal, but that all men are created equal! I believe that now, more than ever before, we are challenged to respect the dignity and worth of all humankind. We are challenged to really truly believe that ALL men (and women) are created equal. And I believe that one day we will realize that God has made us to live together as brothers and sisters. But unfortunately, our nation and our world do not currently reflect this dream. We need to realize that we are not living the American Dream of freedom, justice and liberty, when our brothers and sisters are housed in unendurable slums, when our brothers and sisters attend inadequate schools, when 3 billion of our brothers and sisters are suffering from poverty under an abusive economy, when 850 million of our brothers and sisters are starving, …. When our brothers and sisters are killing and being killed overseas. When 35 wars are being fought all over the world and the US in involved in all of them, selling weapons to both sides… We need to recognize that every human being is a child of God, that all life is sacred. But these statistics do not support such an ideal.
Now is the time to make the United States a better nation. If we really are patriots, if we are truly concerned about America, if we earnestly want God to bless us, if we really believe in the words of our Pledge of Allegiance, then we need to live a life in harmony with the will of God. When Abraham Lincoln was asked if he thought God was on America’s side, he said, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My great concern is to be on God's side.” To be on God’s side is to live the will of God. The will of God, I believe, is to love and care for all people, and I do not believe that America is doing everything we can to ensure rights of life, liberty and justice for all of mankind. There are people all over the world right now who are in pain and are suffering, and I mourn for them, I cry out to God for help. Psalm 130 that was read today is a lament to God. The Psalmist is moaning to God, saying, “LORD! I am crying to you because I am in great trouble.” The Psalmist is waiting for the Lord and has eternal hope in God’s promise of salvation. The Psalmist asks for forgiveness, he is sorry for his sins. And true repentance means not only being sorry for the wrong things we have done, but also promising God that we will try not to do them again. We aren’t supposed to be proud of our sins, we are supposed to be sorry for our sins. Can we be patriotic and proud of a country that does wrong things all the time and instead of learning from these mistakes, continues to do them over and over again?
In our reading from 2nd Samuel today, David has just learned that his best friend, Jonathan and Jonathan’s father, King Saul, have been killed in battle. David responds to grief with a deep, sorrowful lament. He is sorry for their deaths, even for the death of Saul, whom he himself has tried to kill on several occasions. He is sorry for deaths that he may have felt at least in part responsible for. He grieves because it is a travesty that two members of the body of Christ have died, even though one was his enemy. Grief, like pain is one of God’s good gifts because pain and grief motivate us to take action.
Do we grieve for our nation? Do we grieve for the deaths that occur every minute of the day because of our nation? Does our grief motivate us to act, to put our ideals of love into a firm active practice?

One day, a man named William Booth was brushing his manelike white hair when his son Bramwell stepped into the room. "Bramwell!" he cried. "Did you know that men sleep out all night on the bridges?"
"Well, yes," the son replied. "A lot of poor fellows I suppose do that."
"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself to have known it and to have done nothing for them!" his father retorted. And when the son began to talk about the Poor Law program, General Booth waved a hand and said, "Go and do something! We must do something!"
"What can we do?"
"Get them a shelter!"
"That will cost money," replied Bramwell.
"Well, something must be done. Get hold of a warehouse and warm it, and find something to cover them.!" And that was the beginning of Salvation Army shelters.
We all have the ability to do something, say something, give something, in name of justice. We may be tired, we may be weak, and we may be worn, but our Precious Lord has taken our hand to lead us on and help us stand against the injustices of our world to bring freedom and liberty to all people. We have a great dream for America… and for the world… it started way back in 1776, and I pray that God helps America be true to her dream in 2006, and in all years to come.