On Sunday, we were asking the question, what's the measure? How do we, better yet, how does God measure our lives? The message began and ended with a quartet singing, "Seasons of Love" from Rent. Thanks to
Still Waters for the idea. Here are a couple snippets from the service, which incorporated the lectionary texts from Amos and Luke:
Back in the 8th century B.C.E. there was a prophet named Amos. Once, Amos had a vision from God. In it, he saw God standing beside a wall that had been built with the help of a plumb line - and in case you’re not sure what a plumb line is I just happen to have one with me today. A plumb line is a tool used in construction to make sure that the walls are built perfectly straight. If you hang it off the side of a building and wait for it to stop moving then that would give you a perfectly straight, vertical line to use as your guide.
So in Amos’s vision, God is standing in front of the wall holding a plumb line and God says “Amos, what do you see?”
“A plumb line,” says Amos. And God says, “I am using it to show that my people are like a wall that is out of line.”
Uh oh. God’s people are out of line. They’ve been dealing crookedly with one another. Even though God has given them a tool with which to measure their lives, something in the construction process had gone terribly wrong.
For Israel, the measuring tool or plumb line is, of course the Shema:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Love is the measure, the standard, the foundation upon which the community of faith is supposed to have been built, and yet, as Amos saw in his vision, the walls were crooked. Either the people hadn’t been using the tool correctly or they had thrown out God’s plumb line in order to use one of their own. Either way, the result is the same – the wall is crooked, the community is out of line.
Fast forward centuries later, to the first century of the Common Era, and some of God’s people still weren’t getting it. They were still using a faulty measure!
One day a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ The lawyer answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live."
But the lawyer, wanting to justify himself, asked Jesus a question, “And who is my neighbor?” Even though he already knew what God requires of him---that love is the measure---he was kind of hoping that he didn’t have to love everybody; he was kind of hoping that Jesus would interpret the world “neighbor” to mean only people who were like him - he was kind of hoping that Jesus would say that even God’s love has its limits – some people are in and some people were out. But instead Jesus tells a story. . .we’ll come back to this story in a minute, because first I’d like to invite the children forward to help me with something.
I have set out on the table a bunch of different pictures of people. Some of the people in the pictures are being good neighbors – they are acting lovingly toward one another. What are some of the ways that we can act lovingly toward our neighbors? They are caring and sharing and helping others. Those are some of the pictures. In other pictures, there are people who are not acting very lovingly. What do you think they are doing? They are yelling and fighting and hurting other people. They are not acting very neighborly. So here’s what I am going to ask you to do. I am going to give each of you some gold star stickers. And I am going to have you take these gold star stickers and look through all the pictures. And when you see a picture of someone who is being a good neighbor – they are caring and sharing and all of that, then you’re going to put a gold star on that picture.
So here’s a tough question. Out of all those people who do you think we supposed to love? What about the people who didn’t get gold stars? Do we have to love them too? Are they are neighbors?
Let’s hear what Jesus had to say about that. (I then read the parable of the Good Samaritan, and had the congregation help me by saying "boo" and "yay" when I held up the matching sign.)
Good job with the boos and the yays! You see in Jesus’ time, the Priest and the Levite were the gold-star people. They were the ones that everyone expected to help out. That’s why we said “yay!” for them. The Samaritans were different. They were outsiders. They worshiped in a different way and didn’t always get along with their Jewish neighbor. Though I personally would have rather said “yay” for the Samaritan, I wanted you to know what it would have felt like to be in the crowd when Jesus told that story. The people who were listening to Jesus probably would have been thinking “boo” in their heads when the Samaritan arrived on the scene. But then look what happened. Out of all the people in the story, who was the good neighbor? The Samaritan!
It’s one thing to love our friends and families and even all the gold-star people who obey the law and are kind to the friends, but what about the other people, people that are hard to love: people who are different from us or even people who are mean to us. Do you think we have to love them too?
So I have one more job for you to do: I am going to give you some more stickers, this time they are heart-shaped. In a moment I am going to have you go back to the pictures and look through them again, carefully, and place a heart sticker on every picture of a person that you think God loves and that God is calling us to love. Who is our neighbor?
