Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 24:37-44
 

I.       Happy New Year!

A.  That might seem like an odd thing to say, since January 1 is still over a month away

B.  But this is the beginning of the Church Year

1.    The First Sunday of Advent

2.    We start all over again today: Year A

a)    Working our way through Matthew

C.  Today is symbolic of the way the Church tries to get people to work on its time, when they want to work according to their own

1.    The New Year is more Jan. 1 or the first day of school, than Advent 1

2.    Christmas is more about buying presents and leaving milk and cookies out for Santa, than about Jesus

D.  And it’s not just the big holidays: it’s each and every Sunday

1.    Because pretty much every week

a)    No longer every week, thanks to Lucy

2.    I read over the lessons and try to find something that grabs me to preach on

3.    Sometimes something jumps out at me, and just seems to fit the day

a)    But other times, like today, it feels like I’m preaching to a deaf world

b)    That rather than reflecting a common understanding, I’m trying to pull people out of where they are into some other, more spiritual place

(1)  And often there’s a lot of weight on the other end of that rope

(2)  And it becomes a tug-of-war, where people are quite happy to stay right where they are, thank you very much

II.    The readings today certainly have something to say

A.  But whether we want to hear it – or whether we can hear it at all – is another story

B.  The Collect talks of the last day when Jesus shall return

1.    Yet this week seem more interested in day-after-Thanksgiving sales than respecting the day commemorating the other time Jesus came to Earth

C.  In Isaiah we hear the famous prophetic words about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks

III.  National shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

1.    And yet all around us there is war

a)    Pictures of people dying in Iraq are on TV all the time

b)    There’s talk of invading Iran

c)     43 wars on a pull-down menu

B.  The Gospel talks about people being taken up to heaven, and others being left behind

1.    Yet it seems like we go on our merry way

a)    Trying to live forever

b)    To look younger as we grow older

c)     To accumulate as many treasures on earth as we can

2.    And the only people are talking about being “Left Behind” are the two guys who’ve sold over $400 million worth of books in the “Left Behind” series

a)    screen savers, regular prophecies sent to your mobile phone, children's versions of the books, audiobooks, graphic novels, videos, calendars, music and a $6.50-a-month prophesy club

3.    A recent editorial asked, though, why they are keeping all that money when people are starving and the Rapture’s going to happen anyday now, anyway?

C.  And in the midst of all this apocalyptic language – of people being taken up to heaven and a war-torn world being overcome by peace – there’s a tiny little bit in Romans that’s easy to overlook

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet"; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

IV.That sounds too easy

A.  Too simple

B.  We have so many rules and regulations – you can’t just boil it all down to one commandment

1.    But the primary purpose of rules and regulations is to tell you what you shouldn’t do

a)    Their purpose is to judge, and mostly to judge others

(1)  You broke the law!

(2)  The reason you’re going to be punished is because you did something wrong

(3)  There is justice in the world

b)    The flip side is that rules make us feel good

(1)  We obey them

(2)  We deserve something good

(3)  We can control our own destinies

C.  But here Paul – who’s no stranger to rules and regulations – seems to throw them all out

1.    Don’t get so bogged down in the specifics, he says

a)    Don’t condemn that person because he had an affair

b)    Don’t look down on that person because he killed somebody

c)     Don’t judge him because he coveted

d)    Because you’ve done all those things, too

(1)  You lusted after somebody, which Jesus said was as bad as committing adultery

(2)  You hated somebody, which Jesus said was as bad as killing them

(3)  You’ve coveted a bigger house or a nicer car or the just the assurance of knowing you’d be able to pay your bills

2.    The reason we make it so complex is so that we can pick and choose

a)    We can judge people for doing things we find easy to avoid

(1)  And the stuff we have a hard time avoiding, we don’t pay much attention to the rules about them

b)    We can justify ourselves by doing things we find easy to do

(1)  That commandment about not coveting thy neighbor’s manservant is a pretty easy one for me

(2)  First of all, none of my neighbors have manservants

(3)  And the only coveting I do is for a dishwasher, because I hate doing dishes

c)     So long lists of rules and regulations don’t ask very much of us

(1)  Sure, we have to do certain things, and not do others

(2)  But we don’t have to become anything different than what we already are

(3)  We can limit, control

D.  In one fell swoop that’s easy to miss if we’re not looking for it, Paul got rid of all the rules and regulations, except one

1.    They’re all caught up in one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

2.    The Golden Rule, and it’s as hard to follow as gold is precious

a)    Because love doesn’t mean warm fuzzy feelings

b)    Love means forgiving people when they don’t deserve to be forgiven

c)     Love means preferring to experience pain yourself than ever to inflict pain on anybody else

d)    Love – in the way Jesus used the word – means being willing to give up anything and everything for the sake of others, even your very life

V.   It’s no wonder, then, that churches seem to be walking to the tune of a different drummer than the world

A.  Because they are, or at least they should be

1.    Often we churches aren’t as counter-cultural as we’d like to believe

B.  Churches make two mistakes

1.    The first is that, for all our talk of salvation by faith alone, we fall back into rules and regulations

a)    We replace the Old Testament rules about what you consume and how you dress and how you spend your time with other rules about consuming, dressing, and spending time

b)    Sure, you don’t have to follow the Old Testament laws any more, which means you can eat pork, wear clothes made of different fabrics, and mow your lawn on Saturday afternoon

c)     But in their place come other rules

(1)  Like not drinking alcohol, even though Jesus didn’t seem to have a problem with that

(2)  About having to dress in certain usually old-fashioned ways in order to honor God

(3)  And about spending a certain amount of time praying, or going to church

2.    The reason we replace the old set of rules with the new set of rules is that the one rule that sums all the rest is too hard to follow

a)    Which leads me to the second mistake that churches make, and the one that I’m most prone to

b)    We try to say something new each week

(1)  We try to wring an original kernel of truth out of the Gospel, which can speak for itself just fine

(2)  We try to expand on the Golden Rule by telling you how to love your neighbor as yourself, or when to, or who your neighbor, or why God told us to love that person in the first place

(3)  And while those might be noble goals, we each need to figure out the how/when/who/why’s for ourselves

(a)    Because only I know who my true neighbors are

(b)   And only I know how hard that rule is to follow in my own life

(4)  The real reason why people like me try to add detail to the Golden Rule is because we don’t trust in the Rule – and in God – enough

(a)    Because it’s all there in black-and-white, right there in front of us

[All the other commandments] are summed up in this word, "Love your neighbor as yourself."

(b)   If we preachers really believed what we were preaching about, and if we really trusted God with all our hearts, I think maybe we’d have the wisdom and courage to just read those words – “Love your neighbor as yourself” – out loud a few times and then sit down

(i)     Let the congregation mull them over, week after week

(ii)   Without all the extra rules and regulations that actually make things simpler, and also obscure the truth

(iii)  And the truth is that what Jesus told us to do is clear, and simple, and the hardest thing we’ll ever do in our lives

(iv)  True faith is loving others as ourselves, every day, every way, no matter what it takes

(v)   Now there’s a New Year’s Resolution, if I ever heard one

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