Law and Love
Jeremiah 17:5-10, 1Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 6:17-26
anonymous

One part of our Old Testament reading may bear repeating: "The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? "I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give to each man according to his ways, According to the results of his deeds.“ One of notes on the meaning of this passage explains that ONLY GOD can truly understand a person, and therefore ONLY GOD has the ability to truly or properly judge a person.

The reading says that human beings have not been given the wisdom or the understanding that is required to wise, responsible judges of one another. That is why God gave the Israelites The Law. If they would simply follow the law faithfully, with the understanding that it was God’s gift of wisdom to them, they would, in fact, judge as wisely and as fitly as if God were doing it for them.

But you and I know that if the people of Israel HAD followed the law faithfully, then there never would have been any need for prophets like Jeremiah.

If the people had remembered and followed the law faithfully, there never would have been any reason to remind people of how weak and fragile they were. Jeremiah never would have had to compare them to a shrub in the desert. “Nothing good will ever come to it,” Jeremiah says. The tree does not supply its own water. The difference in a tree that prospers and a tree that withers and fails is not in the tree itself, but in the water and the sunshine, and these are only to be found as gifts of God.

If the people of Israel had followed the law faithfully, they would never have to be reminded, in one of the most powerful condemnations in the whole Bible, “CURSED IS THE MAN WHO TRUSTS IN MAN.”

This is a powerful. horrendous curse that strikes right at the very core of who we are. After all, everything we see all around us is the work of human beings!

God has placed a colossal stumbling block in our way, and there is only one way to get around it. First, let’s talk about the stumbling block.

How many of you have ever heard a psychologist or somebody say, “Don’t spank your children when you are angry.”?

What was you reaction when you heard that? For a lot of people, it was, “IS THIS PERSON IS CRAZY?! Why am I gonna spank a kid when I’m not angry? If I wait until I’m calmed down I’m not gonna spank him at all! Do you have any idea how many spanking opportunities this is going to ruin?”

But the idea is, “Don’t spank your kid when you’re angry. Wait a few minutes. Get a glass of water or something. Cool down. And THEN if you decide your kid STILL needs a spanking, the go ahead and spank him. But DON’T spank your kid in the heat of your anger because you’re not doing it as a correction or as a punishment, you’re doing it as an outlet for your emotions.

All right, yes, You know that if you spank a kid when you’re angry you are a lot more likely to hurt the kid or spank too hard or say something you’ll regret later. And here it is, here’s the point, the parents say, IT MAKES ME FEEL BETTER.”

It makes ME feel better. Do you want to know why Jeremiah had to tell the people of Israel “CURSED IS THE MAN WHO TRUSTS IN MAN?” Because God had had enough of Israel worshiping other Gods and idols.

God said, “They have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable idols and have filled my inheritance with their abominations. And Israel said, “It makes me feel better.”

So it is no real surprise that Jesus has to deal with a lot of greed, a lot of selfishness, and a lot of foolish pride all through his ministry. we see him facing up to it in the sermon we have in our Gospel reading today. woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full.

“Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. "Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for in the same way their fathers used to treat the false prophets.”

And you know by now how those well-fed, laughing, well-spoken of people are going to answer: “It makes me feel better.”

The stumbling block, in the way of everything righteous and Holy, is “It makes me feel better.” We have been taught that the way we FEEL about something is everything. And that might not be so bad, except that our FEELINGS are all messed up.

We feel anger we feel greed we feel pride we feel loneliness we feel sadness, and we’ve been taught to think that if we just heed those feelings and ACT upon those feelings, everything will be fine.

In the movie CABARET there’s a scene where a young man walks into a cafe and begins singing a song in a beautiful clear tenor voice. And as he sings about the sun shining on the hills, and the dew in the valleys, and the chorus is, “Tomorrow belongs to me.” People join in, and everybody gets caught up in the song, and everybody is enjoying it. In the last eight or so bars of the song, the the young man puts on his Hitler Youth cap, and everybody singing joins him a a Nazi salute.

“The heart deceitful above all things And is desperately corrupt.” Yeah, but it makes me feel better.

So what do we do? How do we lift ourselves out of this idolatry to ourselves and our own feelings? How do we emerge from this darkness? If now we see through a mirror dimly, how do we polish away the tarnish to see ourselves and everything around us clearly? There is only one answer: LOVE.

So now everybody says, “LOVE?!!! LOVE???!!!! Didn’t you say we couldn't TRUST our feelings? I did say that, yes.

WELL THEN, WHAT IS LOVE IF NOT A FEELING?

Love is ANYTHING BUT A FEELING. Love is not a product of the human heart, or any other part of a human being. Love is a gift of God. It is the love that was poured out in Christ, and it is the love that binds a bunch of selfish, stubborn, sinful into The Body of Christ.

Are you sick of hearing about LOVE? I’m about halfway sick of preaching about it. Well, we’re not half as sick of it as Jesus is -- watching his Church get along without it.

If we are sick of hearing “Blessed are the poor and woe to you that are rich,” That’s nowhere NEAR as sick as Jesus is of seeing the great gulf that divides the rich and the poor.

And if we are sick of all this blessing and cursing and prophesying and preaching, Paul says, there is one simple cure for all of that. Start loving one another. Start showing people the love of God. Start feeding the poor and taking in the sick and comforting the suffering.

And if someone asks us why we are doing all this, we may answer, "Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord And whose trust is the Lord. "For he will be like a tree planted by the water, And it will not be anxious in a year of drought Nor cease to yield fruit.”

Or when someone asks us why we are dealing thoughtfully and kindly with someone who is saying bad things about us, we might answer, “"Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and cast insults at you, and spurn your name as evil, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets.“

OR we can go home, turn on the TV, and forget everything that has been said to us about the Law and the Love and the Will of God. And when somebody asks us asks why we’re doing THAT, we can answer, “It makes me feel better.”