ACTION, DISCIPLINE, HOPE
I Peter 1:13-15, 22-25
Stephen Hamilton Wright
First Presbyterian Church, Wausau, Wisconsin                                         April 13, 2008

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             Heard the news lately?  It’s pretty sorry business.  Let’s see if we can sum it up: Muslims killing Jews, Jews killing Muslims, Muslims killing Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus killing each other, and let’s not forget: Christians on both sides with all those other faiths, and last, Christians killing Christians.  It is a sad state of things, made worse, perhaps, by the knowledge that this news is all centuries old.  It isn’t only war, either.  In the name of our great faiths and the gods we worship, we have neglected to provide food and health; we have divided education; we have killed spirits by putting people in jail instead of helping them become whole.  We can’t account for the sins of other faiths, nor do we need to.  We have plenty of our own.  What is the problem?  Why does this happen?  More than a century ago, the British writer G.K. Chesterton lamented that “True Christianity has been often admired, and seldom really lived.”  That’s the problem: the true way of Jesus, the path of loving the whole world, is one that even Christians seldom follow faithfully.  With the help of Jesus, we could change the world, if we chose to do it.  We could change that sorry news.

             Start with love.  Start with love.  The start and finish of the message about Jesus is love.  Remember the Bible verses?  You remember: God’s steadfast love endures forever; God so loved the world; We love because God first loved us; You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  The first and last word of our faith is love.  One of the goals of Sunday school is to provide a loving environment for kids, a place where they feel both safe and valued.  In a very basic way, we try to live out for them the love of Jesus for all people.  That is the best reason for the move by our church and so many others to require background checks and other security measures even for volunteers in our programs.  It might have the secondary effect of protecting us from lawsuits, but the main reason, the Christian reason, is love for young Christians as well as everyone else in this fellowship.  We start with love because that’s what God does, and we also hope to finish in love.  Sometimes we stray from that trajectory; it isn’t very loving to think of Lutherans in Riverview or Presbyterians in Schofield as competitors for our members—our members!—but we do, at some level, and they do, too.  We do not show much love in our continued arguments over ordination standards and sex.  In the news of this week, the Pope’s visit to this country highlights the sad truth that love still has much work to do, between Christian churches and even within them.  Churches and the whole church need to do better.  We need to get to a better starting point.  When Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists, Jews and Muslims work side by side to rebuild the Gulf Coast, that is love.  When we come together to move beyond prejudice in a community, by welcoming new immigrants, for example, or learning about other ways of believing, or creating helpful alternatives to putting people in jail, we live the way of love.  If we want to finish with love, we need to start there, too.  Do what Jesus does.  Start and finish with love.

             Love means we have work to do.  Love means work.  We may enjoy it, and value it, but it still takes effort.  The New Revised Standard translation of the Bible, the one we use, counsels that we should “prepare our minds for action.”  The older King James Version translates the Greek original much more literally; it says, “gird up the loins of your mind.”  The work of love is not for the faint-hearted, or people of weak will.  Mothers might understand it best.  Shaping all of our actions with love as the first priority is a mission that requires us to be constantly alert.  Think about how easy it is to drift away from this agenda.  In our country, arguably the greatest democracy on the planet, even a moderately civil presidential campaign has degenerated into such name-calling and character assassination that on one side, at least, activists are threatening to walk away if their candidate doesn’t get nominated, and good, thoughtful people are getting sucked into that cycle of spite.  That kind of attitude is weak-minded, and it certainly does not show thoughtful concern for neighbors.  Gird up your minds to help your neighbors!  Let’s think about economics, too.  Think about the growing gap between rich and poor, and the environment.  They are all related.  If every person on the planet used as many resources as the average North American does, the planet would need to be five or six times its current size to sustain that consumption.  Loving all of our global neighbors means we have to make the effort to learn how our decisions as consumers in woodsy Wisconsin affect basic health care, or the lack of it, not only in central Africa, but in fact for an alarming number of families in central Wisconsin.  It means choices about energy consumption: what vehicles we drive and how much, how we heat our homes, and turning off lights.  This is not only for the good of our own pocketbooks, but first of all for the sake of love for people around the whole globe.  Think about it.  Think about everything you do in terms of love.  Make your mind strong.  We have work to do.

             We will need discipline.  We need discipline.  The temptation to let things be is strong.  It’s easy to feel that life is good enough.  Even if you are way down the ladder, it often feels easier to make do than to make it different, and that might be true. So, we need discipline beyond what star athletes practice, and beyond the focus of business leaders, too.  The temptation to let things be is strong.  It’s easy to feel that life is good enough.  Even if you are way down the ladder, it often feels easier to make do than to make it different, and that might be true.  In the world we inhabit, the temptation to drift is everywhere.  The problem for most of us is not as big as Eliot Spitzer’s high-priced companions.  Instead, we face dozens of small compromises every day with the way things are rather than as we know they ought to be.  We think little of driving across town four or eight times a day, when half that number would be enough.  We let unthoughtful comments about poor people or foreigners or political opponents pass without objection, even when we know they are wrong, because it’s easier that way.  Some people spend forty or fifty dollars or more on dinner out, a couple dozen times a year, but feel hard pressed to give even half that amount to the church to help their neighbors and honor God.  It’s a matter of choice, people.  Do you remember being poor?  Remember being in your first job, or your first apartment, or a school apartment, with barely enough cash for bus fare?  You survived; in fact, you probably have good memories of those times.  You made do with what you had, because you had no choice.  That’s discipline.  Now, we can be more positive—we can choose to control our spending, our comments and the rest of our behavior to be consistent with the love for neighbors that we learn from Jesus.  It takes work, but we can do it.  Gird up the loins of your mind.  We can do it.  Control your behavior.  Discipline your thinking.  Take charge of what you do.

             Hope in the way of Jesus.  Hope in the way of Jesus.  This is what will keep us going.  His example sets our course of action.  His model drives our discipline.  Listen: church leaders disappoint us.  We church leaders even disappoint each other, and sometimes we get into very unloving situations.  Politicians annoy all of us.  Even the people closest to us whom we love most, family and friends, sometimes get going down the wrong path and try to take us with them.  Jesus is different.  Hope in His way.  He does not make impossible promises about taxes or war.  He doesn’t play power games over doctrine or church authority.  The way of Jesus is love: inclusive, forgiving, determined, disciplined love, the strongest aim of which is to bring everybody inside the circle.  It requires tough-mindedness in situations that are unloving.  How do you love someone who wants to hurt other people, or keep them out of the group?  It isn’t easy, but Jesus works to do it.  How can a police officer being attacked by drug dealers show love even to his assailants?  In every situation, the way of Jesus tries to find a way.  It is often hard, but any agenda other than all-encompassing love leads ultimately to division and temporary values.  Personal wealth cannot by the fundamental principle, because even for the very successful, it is tentative and ultimately beyond their control.  The nation cannot be our guiding principle, because nations do have some elements of community, but ultimately, they are about being separate and protected from foreigners, and even great nations change and even collapse.  If we choose to shape our priorities around family, that comes much closer to love.  What we discover very soon is that healthy concern for our own families pushes us out to others, and the circle grows and grows.  That is the way of Jesus.  Living the love of Jesus is our best hope.

             War, poverty, scandal, lawsuits: the list of trouble goes on and on.  Choose the way of Jesus to navigate through the mess.  His love is permanent.  The details of how we live it out in changing circumstances will also change, but the priority of love is permanent.  It is hard work.  It takes discipline and consistent action.  In the end, the only sure way through is following the path of love that Jesus shows us.  Follow Him.  He is our hope. 

 Let us pray.

            Holy God: train our minds to focus on Jesus.  Teach us to love as He does, and prepare us to act as His faithful followers, in all that we do.  Amen.