This is my final weekend as pastor at St. Peter Lutheran Church in Greene, Iowa, and today’s sermon covers the (hopefully) familiar topics of God’s love and faithfulness to us, and our response to God’s love, which is loving our neighbors.
I’ve gone off-lectionary for the week, so this week’s Scripture readings are Micah 6:1-8, Psalm 36:5-12, Romans 8:28-39, and Luke 10:38-42.
Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the risen Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Well, this is my last sermon at St. Peter—at least until the 175th anniversary, maybe you’ll invite me back for that—but at least for a while, this is my last time with you, and so I gave quite a bit of thought to what I wanted to leave you with.
I thought about standing up here in the pulpit today and preaching a real barn-burning of a sermon, hitting all the hot-button political topics like abortion, sexuality, immigration, stuff like that to sort of help you encourage me on my way out the door, but I decided not to do it. Scripture and our faith have something to say about all those topics, but I’ve never thought a sermon was the best place to bring them up.
Instead, I picked the scripture for today to focus on a couple of themes I want to leave you with, and basically, these are the same themes I always preach on: God’s love and faithfulness to us, and our response to God’s love, which is loving our neighbors.
In the landscape of the Bible, the Old Testament lays the foundation, telling the story of creation, the fall, and God’s chosen people, Israel. The Gospels tell the story of Jesus, the center of our faith, the story of God coming to be with us. But in my opinion, the Mount Everest of the Bible, the absolute peak, the part that summarizes the whole point, is the 8th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Last weekend, I shaped my sermon around the confirmation verses our students had selected. Today, I want to share with you my own confirmation verses, Romans 8:38-39. Paul writes, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That’s the heart of the Biblical message, the point of the whole thing, right? The whole story is about God refusing to be separated from God’s created people, God’s beloved children, you and me.
No matter what happens in this life, no matter what this broken world throws at us; no matter what we do, how badly we mess up, or how far we run away from God, nothing has the power to separate us from the love of God revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.
As the Psalm says, God’s love extends to the heavens, God’s faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Hold on to that promise.
And of course, the beauty of that promise is that it’s not up to us. God doesn’t love you more if you come to church more often, or if you give more, or treat people better.
God doesn’t love you less if you do bad things, if you don’t keep your promises, if you underestimate how much you have to pack and don’t get the lawn mowed before you leave town. God loves you because God loves you!
Everything depends on God’s grace. Jesus died for you whether you like it or not, whether you ask for it or not, whether you accept it or not.
You can ignore God’s love for you, live as if it’s not true, you can even run away, but God’s love pursues you. Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That’s the good news. That’s the gospel.
I hope you’ve heard that good news in my preaching. I had a professor in seminary who talked about the importance of remembering as a pastor that the congregation is not about me. She’d say, “There were people there long before you got there, and there will be people there long after you’ve left.”
That’s true for all of us, right? 150 years so far in this place, and many more in the future, I trust, long after all of us are gone. This community has proclaimed the gospel for a century and half, centering everything we do around that good news of God’s love. Keep it up!
The other theme of our readings and my preaching and our entire witness as church, is “So what?” God loves you; what are you going to do about it? How does the gospel impact how we live?
I picked the reading from Micah 6 not only because we named our son after this book, but because the last verse, Micah 6:8, is the most clear, straightforward summary of how we are to live as God’s people in response to God’s grace.
Our response is not what the world expects. It’s not “I did this for you, so now you owe me” – sacrifice some burnt offerings and cattle to pay God back, as if God can be bought off or manipulated. Instead, it’s much deeper: God doesn’t want our stuff, or rather, God doesn’t just want our stuff; God wants our whole lives.
God invites us to live in response to the Gospel, spending our lives doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. God asks for life change, not merely religious rituals.
Our response to God’s love for us is to love our neighbors. Our call is to speak for justice, to speak for those without a voice. It’s the feeding sheep we talked about last week.
Our call is to look at the brokenness in this world and say, “Even in this mess, God is on the move. Even right here in Greene, Iowa, and in Wisconsin, there is need, and God is at work, and I want to get involved. Here I am, Lord. Take me, use me, work through me.”
Sometimes that work is public, public advocacy, maybe even on some of those hot-button issues, and that’s important. The world needs the good news of grace we’ve been trusted with.
Often God uses us in more quiet, individual ways, acting humbly, working for justice and loving mercy with the people in our own families or right next door. The call is for God’s love to shape your whole life.
Today’s last reading is the Gospel, Luke 10:38-42, the story of Mary and Martha, and I picked this passage because it was the reading appointed for my very first sermon here at St. Peter, nearly six years ago.
It’s coming up again in July, but it’s assigned for the week Bishop Kevin will be here for the 150th anniversary celebration, and he’ll be preaching on the ascension window above the balcony, so I wouldn’t want you to feel cheated of hearing this reading.
In that first sermon, I said that in a sense, this story frames our calling as a congregation. We are called to serve like Martha, to practice hospitality, to get things done.
We’re called to get to work, to participate in God’s mission of justice and reconciliation for the world. Martha did a great job serving Jesus!
And even more importantly, we are called to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to his teaching, as Mary does. In that first sermon, I talked about the temptation as church to fforget why we do what we do, to lose sight of our purpose.
I’m going to quote now from that sermon:
“I’ve met a lot of people this week, and one of the first things people say about themselves is what they do, what their job is or was.
I do it too. We let what we do become who we are. That’s why we need to stop and sit at Jesus’ feet, to hear that our value in God’s eyes doesn’t depend on how much we do or don’t do.
We need to gather each week in worship to hear that message of God’s love again and again, so we don’t get so caught up in our work—even in good work—that we forget God loves us for who we are, not what we do. That’s a message our messed-up, broken world desperately needs to hear.
Gathering together here, in worship, around this table where Christ gives himself for us—this is our fundamental activity as a church. We come to sit at Jesus’ feet…
The heart of everything we do as the body of Christ, is gathering and sitting at Jesus’ feet, to praise and give thanks, to listen to the scriptures, to experience Jesus through preaching, baptism, and communion, to offer what we’ve been trusted with for service to our neighbors, and to go back out into the world.
We do lots of things, and there’s always more we could do. But before we do anything, we sit at Jesus’ feet and worship.”
Beloved of God, thank you for being church together in Greene for the sake of the world, in the past and in the future. Thank you for including me, and teaching me, and serving with me.
As you continue to live and proclaim and serve in response to God’s love, may you always come back to the truth that God loves you, and cling to the promise that nothing can separate you from that love shown in Jesus Christ our Lord. God bless you.
Amen