A Place for Love: what we do

Did you catch it in there? If you weren’t careful you would have missed it? It wasn’t quite a “where’s Waldo” kind of a thing, but it almost could have been. I mean it was right there in the midst of a bunch of rules. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. It’s easy to hear that and begin to drift off into another place. So if that happened. You might have missed it. But it was there. It was really important, and it was really simple.

I’m talking about our Old Testament lesson for today. Boy are you in for a treat today; a sermon on a text from Leviticus. Actually, it’s not as bad as what it might sound. And this text is really very important, especially the part of the text that we are going to focus in on. I’m actually going to ask you to memorize it. By the end of the sermon you will be able to recite this all important text from memory.

Here it is. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. That’s it. Isn’t this amazing? Here we have this long text that is giving us a list of things we should do and not do. And that is not necessarily a bad thing, but then we get this: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. What this really is, is a summary. The New Testament tells us that the entirety of the law is fulfilled and summarized in one simple word, “love.” You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Our sermon series on life in the vineyard concludes today with a look at love. Faith Lutheran church is a place for love. Love is what we do. The themes that we have been focusing on over these last few weeks all build and connect together. The vision for this congregation is that Faith Lutheran Church is a place for life. This life is the life that we have in and through Jesus. He is victorious over sin, death and the devil. So in him and through him we participate in that same victory.

Your sins are forgiven. You have the gift of everlasting life. You stand victorious over the devil and the forces of evil. You have a relationship with God. You have life. These things God graciously and freely gives to us. We do not earn them or deserve them. But we are sure that we have them, because we know that they come from God, that God always does things right, and that God is faithful.

This means that we also have hope. Not the kind of hope where we are unsure about the outcome. But hope that is certain to happen, it is only a matter of time. This is the kind of hope the scriptures speak of. This hope is ours in Jesus. This hope rests in the promises of God, so this hope will never disappoint. This hope is what we hold onto. It is hope of life lived forever with our God; life lived and experienced the way that God intended it to be experienced. It is life everlasting.

God also gives to us faith. This faith is a gift from God that he freely and generously gives to us. This faith is a saving faith. We are saved by grace through faith. This faith is an active faith. It is what moves us. And if you had to guess what this faith that is grounded in the hope that we have because we have life in Jesus moves us to do, what one word that is theme for today that we are focusing on, that begins with the letter “L” would you guess that describes this? Love. That’s right. What this faith moves us to is love. And love is what we do. Hence our verse for this morning, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Now what is going on with that? Is this telling us what we have to do, or is it describing what we do? That is, is this prescriptive, as in, “you have to do this,” or is this descriptive, as in, “this is what my people do and how their lives look, they do this”? The answer is yes.

On the one hand loving another person can be hard. This is especially true if that love requires that we have to give up something that we might want. Our sinful natures like to tell us that we have to look out for number one. Our natural inclination to do act only in our best interest, and sometimes even at the expense of others. In that case we need to be told to love, in order to fight that sinful response of human nature.

On the other hand it is describing what we do as God’s people. This is what the lives of the people of God look like. They are lives marked by love. They are lives marked by love for their neighbors. The people of God love their neighbors as themselves. This doesn’t mean that we always feel the warm and fuzzy kinds of feelings that we might often associate with love. That kind of love is a feeling. And while it is a nice feeling, feelings come and go. But they are not the kind of love that we are talking about here.

The kind of love that we are talking about here is love that seeks the good of the other. It is a life that is marked with service and self-sacrifice. It is a love that drives and moves and motivates us to do things for others in order to defend, protect and make their lives better.

It is a kind of love that is rooted in and comes from the love that our God loves us with. You see the reason why the people of God live lives marked by this kind of love is because the people of God are loved by God with this kind of love. When I stand up here and tell you that God loves you; when we sing about the love that God has for his people; when you talk with each other about God’s love, you are not talking about warm and fuzzy feelings that God has for us.

Real love is much greater than that. Real love is the kind of love the moves us to action. It is the kind of love that moved our God. His love for you, for me, for all the people of the world was so great that he would not allow our sin to separate us from him. So he became a human being. He lived the perfect life. He gave up his life on the cross. He rose victoriously from the dead. Because of this you and I and all who believe have forgiveness, life and salvation. And we have this because God loves us. You have this because God loves you.

So as God’s people we receive his love. Our lives are surrounded and filled with his love. And that love is a changing and transforming love. It moves us to then love others. It drives us to love our neighbors as ourselves. It sends us to show love to our neighbors because we believe that God loves our neighbors too.

If you had a chance to look at the place for life document you saw in there a section that talked about the importance of all of this. It talked about service. Service is also the key to move us toward our vision.  It is the key to ministering to our community.  It is the key to our evangelism.  In a world where everything is relative; where you can believe what you want, but cannot tell me what to believe; the one thing you cannot argue with is love seen in service.  Love in service is our faith in action.  It is the proclamation of God’s love in Jesus in a language that the people of our world will hear. 

As we move toward our vision of being a place for life, service at Faith will have a twofold function.  First, it will be part of our proclamation and witness to God’s love in Jesus.  Second, service provides a door through which the members of Faith can invite friends, family, and members of the community to become part of our community.  For the one who extends the invitation, and sometimes for the one receiving it, it can be uncomfortable to invite someone to a church service, or Bible study.  However, inviting someone to be a part of a service opportunity is not threatening at all.  It allows for them to be a part of something bigger than themselves.  It allows for them to see the love of the people of Faith in action. 

As wonderful and important as service is, it is not the only part of the Christian life.  As much as the people of God are to love and care for the world around them, even more so are they to love and care for one another.  Through baptism we are connected to Christ and therefore to one another.  We are members of the same body. We are branches grafted onto the vine and each one is to care for each other, and work together in the mission that belongs to our God. 

The distinguishing mark of the people of God is the love that they have for one another.  This love makes the community that they share something that is attractive to people.  This community needs to be authentic and genuine.  It is not a community where one has to put on a smile and pretend that everything is ok, even when things are not ok.  It is not a community where you are not allowed to have questions or struggles.  It is not a community where everyone looks, talks and thinks the same way.  Rather this community of faith is to be a safe place where people can be themselves.  Where they can love and be loved no matter what.  This community is a place where people can safely ask questions and struggle through the things that they may be facing in life.           

Just as service is the door to community, so then community is the door to Christ.  As the members of the body of Christ, gathered together around word and sacrament, love and care for each other and the world around them, we are making a bold witness about the person of Jesus and the work that he has accomplished in our lives through his death and resurrection.  With Jesus in our lives, we experience a joy, hope and peace that surpass all human understanding. 

We can understand everything like this.  Service is the door that opens and invites people to be part of our community of faith.  Through the service that this community of faith does, people are drawn into and welcomed into the community.  As they live in the midst of the community of faith gathered around word and sacrament, the Holy Spirit works to connect them to Jesus, where they will eventually come to live life with him. 

However it does not stop there.  For those who live in a relationship with Jesus are not simply limited to that relationship.  Jesus receives us, but then he sends us back out.  He sends us back out to be members of the community of faith.  He sends us back out to live as brothers and sisters and to care for one another; to love each other and to serve one another.  But it does not end there either.  As a community of faith, Jesus sends us all out to serve and love the world around us. He sends us to love and serve our neighborhoods, so that through that service, people would come to know our community of faith, and through our community of faith they would come to know our Jesus.

This is what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves and to serve them. This is what it means to be a place for life. My vision for this congregation is that we would be a place for life. That is a place that is teeming with life and activity. That there is always something going on around here. That here people would see and know and experience that God love them. That this would be a place where we grow in our relationship with our God and in our faith. May this life in Jesus always been a blessing to you, and may you always find here a place for life. Amen.