Know this, my dear brothers and sisters: everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to grow angry. This is because an angry person doesn’t produce God’s righteousness. Therefore, with humility, set aside all moral filth and the growth of wickedness, and welcome the word planted deep inside you—the very word that is able to save you.
You must be doers of the word and not only hearers who mislead themselves.Those who hear but don’t do the word are like those who look at their faces in a mirror. They look at themselves, walk away, and immediately forget what they were like. But there are those who study the perfect law, the law of freedom, and continue to do it. They don’t listen and then forget, but they put it into practice in their lives. They will be blessed in whatever they do.
If those who claim devotion to God don’t control what they say, they mislead themselves. Their devotion is worthless. True devotion, the kind that is pure and faultless before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their difficulties and to keep the world from contaminating us. James 1:19-27 (CEB).
Words.
That’s what we’re going to talk about tonight. Words.
Words are pretty powerful, aren’t they?
They have the power to build people up.
They have the power to tear people down.
Words can create. Words can destroy.
Words have power. Words have the power to transform.
God’s Word has the power to transform.
We know of the power of God’s Word in creation. With simple words, God transformed chaos into an ordered world. With simple words, God created humankind in God’s very own image.
In the Hebrew scriptures, God’s spoken word calls Israel to live as his holy people. God’s Word promises blessing and judgment. Through God’s Word, God reaches out to his people and expresses his emotion toward them. God teaches Israel, through the Word, about who God is and how to live in relationship--both with God and with each other.
This is the basic premise of the Ten Commandments--which in the time of Israel was known as God’s Ten Words. It is in these Ten Words that God teaches Israel and us about what it means to live in a full and loving relationship with God and in relationship with one another. The Ten Words aren’t about shaming us or tearing us down. Instead, they lift us up, they encourage us to live into our relationship with God and with each other in the way God intends for us.
But, mostly, the Ten Commandments--God’s Ten Words-- teach us about love.
Remember the words of Jesus in Matthew as he summed them up: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
I am a regular listener of a weekly program on NPR called “On Being.” Krista Tippett is the host of this program and she regularly brings on guests who talk about many of the central questions of human life. What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live?
About a year ago, she had a guest on her program--Dr. James Doty. Dr. Doty is a brain surgeon who teaches neurosurgery at Stanford University. He’s also a researcher and is the founding director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.
During the interview, Dr. Doty spoke at length about his research, which studies the physical connection between the brain and the heart, how each organ affects the other, and how powerful this connection is. It’s amazing work.
One thing they’ve discovered, for example, is what happens to the brain when one practices compassion, when one speaks and responds to others in a way that builds people up rather than tears them down.
Each of our brains contains the amygdala, which is the very primitive, basic part of our brain that houses our tribal “fight or flight” instinct. When we are threatened, this part of our brain sends a message--either to stay and fight or to flee.
In their research, Dr. Doty and his colleagues have discovered that, when someone practices compassion with others, there is a physiological change in the brain. The amygdala--this primitive part of our brain--begins to shrink. And, as a result, we begin to see ourselves and the world with greater clarity. And we begin to approach others and the world with a more open heart. The more one practices compassion, the more the physical body changes and inclines one toward practicing even more compassion.
What is even more amazing, though, is the work he has done with gang members--work of compassion and love that not only seems to transform these gang members, but, in the process, has transformed Dr. Doty as well.
That is the gift of living into the Ten Commandments, God’s Ten Word. The more we love God and one another, the more we are all transformed.
In the animated movie Despicable Me, Gru is a world class villain. But, his reputation has come under attack. And so, to maintain his reputation, Gru devises this elaborate scheme to steal the moon. In the process, he kidnaps and uses three young, orphan girls as pawns in his outrageous plan to steal the moon and assure his reputation as the biggest, baddest villain in the entire world.
As he carries out his plan, however, Gru unknowingly becomes affected by these three little girls and by the love they show him. In the process he is transformed. In the process, they are all transformed.
Let’s watch.
It is this work, the work of coming alongside other people, people who, just like us, are created in the image of God...it is this work that, through Christ’s saving act on the cross, God has freed us to do.
You see, being a believer isn't just about hearing God’s words. It is about doing God's word, about doing God’s Ten Words.
Have you ever noticed in scripture that with God’s Word there is always action connected to it? God speaks and the world is created. God pledges to deliver his people and rescues Israel from Egypt. God promises through the prophets that he will send a Messiah and Mary gives birth to Jesus. God’s Word is always connected to action.
It is to be the same with us. With God’s Word and with the simple elements of the earth--the water, the bread and the wine--through these simple elements God acts to work faith in our hearts, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And, through this gift of faith, God acts to transform us. To free us. To free us, then, to act. To become the righteous people that God already sees us to be. To free us to be transformed into vessels--the vessels of clay that Paul writes about in 2nd Corinthians. Vessels of God’s love.
Now our clay may be weak and our vessel may be a little broken, yet God, through Christ, uses that brokenness and our weakness and turns us into doers of God’s Ten Words. Doers of love. Doers of God’s transforming love.
“You must be doers of the word and not hearers only...”
May we all begin to see the Ten Commandments as that guide to our relationships--to our relationship with God and with all others. And to be more than simply hearers of those Ten Words, but doers also. God grant it. Amen.
Preached March 8, 2017, at Grace and Glory Lutheran Church
First in a series of five sermons on Luther's Small Catechism, Midweek Lenten Service 1
Readings: Exodus 34:27-28, James 1:19-27
No comments:
Post a Comment