(a message shared with the people of Friendship Church, January 9, 2005)
My wife and I had been married just a short time and we were hanging out with married friends we'd known since our junior and senior high school days.
The man looked at my wife and with a smile said, “I used to hate you in junior high school.” When he explained himself, it turned out to be a story we'd heard before. “All the teachers loved you,” the guy said. My wife was a teacher’s pet.
Being the favorite can be a burden. It was for my wife. Others can misunderstand you and call you a “suck-up.”
But some can think of themselves as being the favored ones in life and not suck up, but be stuck-up. It was the fortieth anniversary of Saint Ann’s Roman Catholic Parish in Frankfort, Michigan. My young family and I were on seminary internship in that community. Saint Ann’s priest, Father Seavey Joyce was a wonderful guy who had retired from a lifetime of teaching economics at Catholic institutions and ultimately, from the presidency of Boston College. He had invited other clergy, including the Lutheran seminary student, to the anniversary Mass and subsequent party. Preaching that day was Saint Ann’s founding pastor, a priest in his eighties who stood erect and spoke clearly.
“Imagine,” this retired priest said about a third of the way through his homily--a fancy word for sermon or message, “all the truth necessary for salvation and relationship with God can be found in the Roman Catholic Church and nowhere else.” He seemed to be looking at all the Protestant pastors who were sitting together in the front row as he said that.
Father Joyce, a great man I came to love and respect, was mortified. Immediately following the Mass, he made a beeline toward all of us and apologized profusely. “That’s okay,” one the Protestants assured him, “we’ve got people who would embarrass us pretty badly if a bunch of you guys worshiped with us.”
Does God have favorites? All of Jesus’ early followers, of course, were Jews. That’s because, starting with their ancient ancestor, Abraham, God called the Jewish people into being. His purpose was to cultivate a relationship with them so that the world could understand that there is one God, a God not like the petty tyrants that others in the world worshiped, but a God of love Who would forever transform the lives of those who surrendered to Him.
The Jewish people were to be the maternity ward from which Jesus, the Savior of all the world, was to come.
They were to be, according to the Old Testament portion of the Bible, a “light to the nations.”
But instead of seeing them as the recipients of God’s charity, as beggars fed on God’s love and blessings through no merit of their own, it seemed that most of God’s people saw themselves as being better than others. Better than Samaritans. Better than all Gentiles, non-Jews. And certainly better than the Romans who occupied their land.
Peter certainly thought that his people were God’s favorites. But Peter underwent a change of heart. Today, observing the faith in Jesus Christ he sees in a Roman soldier, Cornelius, and his family and friends, Peter says, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him.”
Now, there are three things about our Bible lesson that I want to point out, things that have relevance for us as we begin the Year 2005.
First, as we’ve already pointed out, God has no favorites. No one has the inside track on God or the gifts God gives.
Second, Peter says that anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God. What does that mean? Peter explains what it means at the end of our Bible lesson. He says, “All the prophets testify about Him [Jesus] that everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His Name.”
And this is the third thing I want to point to (and it’s the most important): The work of the Christian is to believe in Christ. That means, to trust Him. To put Christ first in our lives. To turn from sin and death and to turn back, day in and day out, to Jesus Christ and the life that only He can give. In a sermon he preached back in 1540, Martin Luther said that this was the nub and the central point of Peter’s words in our Bible lesson, that the work of a Christian is to believe in Christ.
There is no way of overestimating how stunning an insight this would have been for Peter. For the first time in his life, Peter truly understood that God is willing to have an everlasting relationship with anyone who trusts Jesus with their lives.
Being part of God’s family has nothing to do with all the religious stuff that some think goes into being a follower of Jesus Christ. Being in God’s family boils down simply to trusting Jesus as our God and Savior.
And that tells us something about the mission of Christ’s Church, about the mission of Friendship Church. We Lutherans, you know, have a basic set of confessions that are collected in something called The Book of Concord. (That’s not a book about grapes, but a lengthy series of statements about Biblical faith to which we all agree.)
One of my favorite statements contained in The Book of Concord comes in a document called The Augsburg Confession, written in 1530. Those of you who have seen the movie, Luther, may remember its climactic scene. Luther is walking with his wife, Katherine von Bora when they hear approaching hoofbeats coming over the crest of a nearby hill. Luther is certain that it means his doom, that the Holy Roman Empire would at last make good on its threat to take his life. He turns to Katy and thanks her for loving him and kisses her. Then, a friend calls out--I take it to be his Wittenberg University colleague, Phillipp Melancthon--that the princes of Germany have held firm. They have written a statement of faith in defiance of the Empire. That statement was The Augsburg Confession.
At the risk of putting you to sleep, I want you to listen carefully to this portion of that document:
“...it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church [notice it says Christian church, not Lutheran church] that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments [those are Holy Baptism and Holy Communion] be administered in accordance with...[God’s] Word. [Now pay close attention here.] It is not necessary for the true unity of the Christian church that ceremonies, instituted by men, should be observed uniformly in all places...”The point is this. For most of his life, when Peter thought of someone converting to belief in God he thought that meant becoming good, practicing Jews. It meant that the males would be circumcised. It meant observing Jewish dietary laws. It meant doing worship in the synagogue in a certain way. But when Peter saw that God’s only expectation was that we turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ, his eyes were open to just how big and available God’s love is!
We need to have our eyes opened sometimes too.
God doesn’t love just Lutherans.
And being a Lutheran, according to our confessions, isn’t about traditional or contemporary or blended worship styles.
It isn’t about whether the pastor wears a collar or a robe.
It isn’t, as some of my high church friends would put it, about “smells and bells.”
You see, it’s very possible for people to become good Lutherans, in love with all the traditional trappings of Lutheranism, and still not know Jesus Christ.
Being a Lutheran, as is true of Christians of other denominations or of no denomination, is about being a follower of Jesus Christ.
It’s about understanding that God has no favorites. He loves us all and He wants us all. It's also about letting others get a clear view of Jesus, not our preferred habits.
Here at Friendship, we see it as our mission to tear down the walls of religious tradition that sometimes keep people from seeing Jesus and to lift Him high.
As we start this new year, I want to ask you to do two things:
(1) Make it your business each and every day, to tell God that in the power of Jesus, you want to turn from your sin and let Jesus be Your King.
(2) Make it your business to let others know that, truly, God has no favorites, that anyone who will trust Jesus with their lives will live with God forever. Period.
These are rooted in the two central truths that Peter came to understand that day with Cornelius.
God holds out those two same truths to us today and frankly, even though we preachers can muddy things up, I don’t know how to make the message of our Bible lesson more complicated than that. This year, you and I need to: Turn to Jesus and let others know that they can too.
Will you commit yourself to those two things? If you will, I can guarantee that there are going to be a lot of Peters and Corneliuses in our neighborhood in 2005!
[The general direction of this message--dealing with God's favor--was inspired by a sermon written by Pastor Michael Foss of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Burnsville, Minnesota.]
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