Author Ron Dykstra tells about a young and successful executive who was traveling through a neighborhood, driving a bit too fast in his new Jaguar. Suddenly a brick smashed into the Jag’s side door! The young executive slammed on the brakes and backed up to the spot where the brick had been thrown. He then jumped out of the car, grabbed the nearest kid and pushed him up against a parked car, shouting, “What was all that about and who are you? Just what the heck are you doing? That’s a new car and that brick you threw is going to cost a lot of money. Why did you do it?”
The young boy was apologetic.
“Please mister . . . please, I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do,” he pleaded. “I threw the brick because no one else would stop . . .”
With tears dripping down his face and off his chin, the youth pointed to a spot just around a parked car.
“It’s my brother,” he said. “He rolled off the curb and fell out of his wheelchair and I can’t lift him up.”
Now sobbing, the boy asked the stunned executive, “Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He’s hurt and he’s too heavy for me.”
Moved beyond words, the driver tried to swallow the rapidly swelling lump in his throat. He hurriedly lifted the handicapped boy back into the wheelchair, then took out a handkerchief and dabbed at the fresh scrapes and cuts. A quick look told him everything was going to be okay.
“Thank you,” the boy said. Too shook up for words, the man simply watched the boy push his wheelchair-bound brother down the sidewalk toward their home.
It was a long, slow walk back to his car. Funny, he never bothered to repair that dented side door. He kept the dent there to remind him of this message: “Don’t go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at you to get your attention!” (1)
In Mark 12, we discover the Pharisees, the Sadducees and some of the Herodians trying to trap Jesus. They knew he was stirring up the people. They viewed him as a trouble maker and they wanted to find some grounds by which they could bring him up on charges. However, what they discovered was a man who knew the Law better than they did. More importantly, he understood the heart of the Law rather than just a surface view. And some of them were impressed.
One of the teachers of the law heard them debating and asked Jesus, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
In the Jewish books of the law Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy scholars have counted 613 laws. Of these laws, 248 are considered to be positive in nature, while 365 are considered to be negative. That is, some compel the righteous person to do certain things while others forbid certain activities. These 613 laws formed the basis for Jewish belief and practice. In his answer to this teacher of the law, Jesus boils all the Law, the Commandments and all the teachings of the prophets down into one word: Love. Love God; love your neighbor. (2)
What does it mean to love? One thing it means is that a person in need shouldn’t have to throw a rock at our car to get our attention. Christians are called to do more than have warm feeling toward people. Followers of Jesus are called to seek out people who are hurting and minister to them.
It’s easy to be a Christian if that means simply keeping the “thou shalt nots” of the law. “We don’t smoke and we don’t chew . . . and we don’t go with the girls that do,” as the little country ditty went. If that is what it means to be a Christian, then we’ve got it made. It would be hard to keep all 365 of those laws that prohibit certain behaviors, but most of them don’t apply to us anyway.
And it is easy to be a Christian if all it means is coming to worship from time to time and putting some change in the offering plate. We’ve got that covered. Look at us. Whoopee! We’re followers of Jesus.
I’m sorry to say that many of us who think we are following Jesus have missed the mark altogether. The most important thing Jesus told us to do was to love God and to love our neighbor. What is love to you? A squishy emotion? The way you feel about dark chocolate? A romantic whisper in your ear?
Let me tell you what love meant in one church. It’s a story that Dr. Barbara K. Lundblad tells. It’s about a friend of hers who’s a pastor in New England.
“How’s your building program going?” Dr. Lundblad asked her friend one day.
“Oh, we ran out of money before we got to the worship space,” this pastor said.
Dr. Lundblad thought to herself, “What could be more important than the worship space?” But she kept her thoughts to herself.
“We renovated the basement,” this pastor explained. “You know, we have a shelter there for homeless men. We put in new showers and renovated the old kitchen. The basement was so drab, and the showers well, there was only one shower and it was lousy.”
Then this pastor added these very moving words, “On the Sunday before the shelter opened, the worship service began as usual in the sanctuary. When it came time for communion, the people carried the bread and the cup downstairs to the basement. The whole congregation gathered around the empty beds. They passed the bread and the cup around the circle. The body of Christ given for you.” Then this pastor concluded with these words: “That night the shelter beds were full, and the worship space still needed a lot of work.” (3)
What does that story say to you about love? It says to me that this congregation didn’t need a rock thrown through its window to get its attention concerning the people in their community who were hurting. Now I’m not saying that we ought to convert some of our space into a homeless shelter. I am saying that there are hurting people in our community. Some of them are lonely. Some of them have emotional problems. Some of them are single moms who are overwhelmed by the needs of their family. Some of them are being crushed by some form of addiction. We can be nice people and wait for them to come to us if they ever do and then apply a few band-aids. But friends, that is not love. I’m sorry. It’s not.
Love requires that somehow we find out who the hurting are and go to them. Sometimes it’s hard to identify those who are hurting.
I read an interesting story recently about a college student named Chris van Rossmann. Chris answered a knock at the door of his apartment in Corvallis, Oregon one day to find police and civil air patrol and search‑and‑rescue personnel standing there demanding to know why he was sending out a distress signal. Chris clearly wasn’t in any apparent distress, and he was completely unaware that he was doing any such thing.
After a little investigation, the response team was surprised to discover that the signal was being emitted by Chris’s year‑old flat screen television. There was some freakish problem with the flat screen that was causing it to emit this weird signal that was very much like a distress call. This distress call had been picked up by a very sensitive satellite and routed to the Air Force Rescue Center at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. “They’d never seen a signal come that strong from a home appliance,” the 20‑year‑old told reporters. They had apparently expected to find a malfunctioning transponder on a boat or small plane, the usual problem in incidents such as this.
As the response team left, they told Chris not to turn on his TV set or he’d be facing a $10,000 fine for “willingly broadcasting a false distress signal.” Fortunately, the manufacturer of the TV offered to provide him with a free replacement. (4)
It would be helpful if everyone who needed help emitted a distress signal that we could pick up here in the church. Then we would know where to go to share the love of Jesus. But they usually don’t send out such signals. That means we will simply have to go to some of the most obvious places and find them.
That wonderful preacher and teacher Tony Campolo tells about a church deacon he knows of who did exactly that. This deacon wanted some place he could share the love of Christ. The youth in their church led a worship service once a month in a nursing home. One month this deacon went with them. He stood in the back of the room. The young people were performing and this old man in a wheel chair rolled his chair over to where this deacon was standing, took hold of the deacon’s hand and held it all during the service. That was repeated the next month and the next month and the next month and the next month.
Then they went one Sunday afternoon and the man wasn’t there. The deacon asked the nurse in charge, “What happened to that man?”
“Oh,” she said, “He’s near death. He’s just down the hall, the third room. Maybe you should go in and visit him. He’s unconscious, though.”
The deacon walked down and went into the room. It was a typical nursing home setting. Sparse. There was a chair, a bed, and a man with tubes attached to him, near death.
The deacon went over and took hold of one of the old gentleman’s hands. He felt moved to say a prayer. When he said “Amen,” the old gentleman in the bed unexpectedly squeezed his hand in recognition. The deacon was so moved by that squeeze of the hand that he began to weep. He shook a little. He tried to get out of the room and as he was leaving the room, he bumped into this woman who was coming into the room. She says, “He’s been waiting for you. He said he did not want to die until Jesus came and held his hand, and I tried to tell him that after death he would have a chance to meet Jesus and talk to Jesus and hold Jesus’ hand. But he said, ‘No. Once a month Jesus comes and holds my hand and I don’t want to leave until I have a chance to hold the hand of Jesus once more.’” (5)
Where can you go, my friend, to show somebody the love of Christ? A nursing home? A Big Brother organization?
Here’s what we need to see. Every time we perform an act of love we glorify Christ. The first commandment is, of course, to love God. When we love somebody in Jesus’ name, we are showing our love for God.
Deacon Eric Stoltz tells about a report that was on “60 Minutes” about a group of New York City paramedics. A year before this broadcast the Kashmir region between India and Pakistan was hit by a gigantic earthquake. One hundred thousand people died in that earthquake. When these 13 paramedics heard about the disaster, they immediately decided to go help.
When they arrived, they discovered that they were the only foreign aid workers for miles around. No one else had come. That didn’t stop them. They made some rudimentary tents and began treating the thousands of injured people who streamed to them. Parents carried injured children from destroyed villages, walking days to reach them. The 13 paramedics worked day and night. They estimated they saved one life every half hour for several months.
None of the people in that region had ever met an American. One of the paramedics told “60 Minutes”: “We are not just healing people. We are inoculating an entire valley against Islamic fundamentalism.” That’s not why they went, but it’s something they discovered by being there. (6)
If they had been Christian missionaries, they would have said, “We have been glorifying Christ by showing his love to those in need.”
Wouldn’t you agree with me that a lot of cynicism in our society toward organized religion would disappear overnight if we just carried the love of Christ out these doors?
Let me read you something that President Abraham Lincoln once said about religion. These are important words: “When any church,” said Lincoln, “will inscribe over its altar as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior’s condensed statement of the substance of both law and Gospel, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church will I join with all my heart and all my soul.” So would a lot of other people in our society with a negative view of religion.
A teacher of the law asked Jesus: Of all the commandments, which is the greatest? “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, Jesus said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
That’s where I want to live, don’t you, near to the kingdom of God? How do I do that? One answer: Love.
1. Ron Dykstra, Clean Jokes, Inspirational Stories and More (Kindle edition).
2. Alan Carr, http://www.sermonnotebook.org/new%20testament/Mark%2012_28-34.htm.
3. The Rev. Dr. Barbara K. Lundblad, http://day1.org/938-whe_pentecost_ends_too_soon.
4. By Gary Swanson, source unknown.
5. Tony Campolo, http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/campolo_4519.htm.
6. http://www.stbrendanchurch.org/blogs/index.php?/archives/62-Twenty-third-Sunday-in-Ordinary-Time-B-Ephphatha!-Be-Open!-911.html.