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Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
Thanks for being with us. Have y'all ever been a part of a church, maybe visited a church that had the most amazing worship but ignored inequality within its own walls? Most amazing worship or the most amazing kids ministry, you know, bounce houses like every week, but still overlooking some injustices within its own people. Or maybe you know someone whose commitment to justice is fierce. This is what drives them. This is what fires them up. But they couldn't tell you the last time that they prayed. Does that ring a bell for anyone? I have. I feel like I've led that church and I've also been that person at different points in my life of monas. And you can sense one or the other sort of taking an emphasis in someone's faith life. You can also sense how exhausting it actually is to do one without the other. The person who seeks God while ignoring neighbors will never find the God of the Bible. The person who serves without stillness with God will be drained and burned out. Right? We know this. I think Jesus shows us this example of how to do this perfectly, perfectly well. But it's also something he just really knew. Jesus was brilliant. He knew how to do this, how to keep these two things together. And when he was tested publicly by this lawyer that we just heard in the gospel reading, he refused the false choice of having to pick one over against the other, the love of God or the love of neighbor. A lawyer came to challenge him, the story goes, that we just heard. And this challenge wasn't like in good faith, you know, like seeking an actual answer. It was actually more of a trap, a gotcha. Think Twitter, right? Okay. And the Pharisees, having watched Jesus silence the Sadducees, stunning them with his brilliance, they sent in a legal expert to trap him, to corner him. And he said, teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? And just, I don't know if this is a bad idea or sacrilegious or what, but I put this into AI and said, only using Hebrew Bible, right? The Old Testament. What is the answer to this question? And do you guys want to know what AI said? Of course you do. Yeah, which one? I guess we could, you know, we could rate them on this. It said this, the question has no answer within those texts. So to be fair, I think that's actually technically true. And to be fair to this lawyer who was challenging this rabbi, Jesus, this was a pretty good trap. But Jesus, as always, gives an answer that gets to the heart of the entire Hebrew Bible, the entire Old Testament. He says this, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, pulling from Deuteronomy 6.5. I imagine the Jews are hearing this. We're like, yeah, yeah, keep going. What else? This is the greatest and first commandment and the second is like it, he says. Now drawing from Leviticus 19, 18, patching these together. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all of the law and all of the prophets. One way to think about it. These are the two beams upon which the entire structure of our faith rests. And with only one or the other, it collapses. It doesn't work. The love of God and the love of neighbor is the animating principle at the center of the Christian life. Can I say that again? I mean, if you never hear anything else about Christianity, this is a good one, I think. The love of God and the love of neighbor is the animating principle at the center of the Christian life. Well, Jesus is saying is that's it right there in a nutshell. Love God. Love your neighbor. Everything else is derivative. If you get these two right, the rest follows. If you neglect either, following Christ gets twisted for you and for everyone else. So if that's the case, if we're supposed to love God and love neighbor as the animating principle of our lives, what does that look like? How do we do that? How do we love God and neighbor? Not as a checklist of tasks to make sure we did that every day and not as something that we're like always minding, like trying to balance and just obsessed with, making sure we get the equation right. But as one truly animating principle for someone to live in, for us to live in, Paul's guidance, I think, is actually really helpful here. It's both simpler and more demanding than I expected. I always expect. But this is what he says. I appeal to you, Paul writes to us to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship, not just your prayers, not just your Sunday attendance, your body, your hands, your real calendar, your time, your giftedness that Paul ends up going through later. The particular ways you show up for other people, Paul says, is what God desires from us. The way you show up in worship and the way you show up for your neighbor is what God is inviting us into. Worship that makes this is, by the way, these practical actions. It's not really rocket science. These practical commitments that we can make to show up for God and worship and show up for our neighbors in real life is the kind of life, is the kind of worship that is true to who God actually is. Does that make sense? This is the God that wants to be worshiped this way. This is the God who has loved us in that same way and now is inviting us into the same thing. God is not asking us to do something that God hasn't led us in doing already. And it may look a bit different for each one of us. There's no one size fits all for loving God and loving your neighbor in the pew today. They're all unique. You'll have different gifts. You'll have different stages of life. I remember being with my wife, an exhausted parent, my wife sitting in the pew. I'm preaching about serving your neighbor thinking all she's thinking about is I'm exhausted, bro. And thinking, you know, and realizing eventually, oh, there's a stage of life where we need to be cared for and served by our neighbors. They are the recipient of that gift. So you may be in a place where what you need to hear is, oh, I need to be cared for. I need to rest. I need to be taken care of. And we all have those gifts to play in those people's lives. It's not one gift. Not everyone's the same. Paul lists them prophecy, ministry, teaching, exhortation, generosity, leadership, compassion, all different gifts and all gifts that friends I have seen really specially in you. You all exhibit these different gifts because you're different people. There's so many different ways of serving God and serving your neighbor. And yet, in all of this beautiful diversity that even make up our community here at Rez, we are one body. All of these members individually, members of one another. Gustavo Gutierrez, if you are around long enough, you're going to hear a lot of him when I preach. But he notes something about the Hebrew in the Hebrew of love your neighbor as yourself that I think is actually kind of helpful and insightful. It deepens this for me. The word yourself, it carries a sense of something like your own familia. Love your neighbor as your own familia, your own family. To love your neighbor as yourself means to love them as if they are your own kin, part of your own household. That strikes a little bit different, doesn't it? As one of your own. To be concerned about those just as you would those who are in your family. Where are they going to sleep tonight? Do they have enough food to eat? Are they taken care of? Are their needs met? Are they OK? Do they need someone to be present to them? Not treating your neighbor from a safe distance as if they're outside the family, right? But as your own sister or brother. And I know that sounds expensive in all the ways, right? I know that. And I'm not saying you should just have no boundaries and just have no discernment and just sort of give, give, give and burn out. I'm not saying that either. But I do think there's something for us to push here that works against the way that our world arranges us in community. And to notice that the church is being called to something different and deeper. We are one body and we are here for one another. That's what it means. I want to walk this out just a bit practically here if we can. Some of us have organized our relationships in our life largely around ourselves. We wouldn't see it this way maybe or be aware of it. Honestly, I think we were aware of it. We may have adjusted this. But to be honest, we sort of arrange our lives to serve ourselves. Even our relationships largely around ourselves, our conversations, for instance, they find a way to circle back to our own concerns. You know that tendency? I see it when I do it. I'm like, oh, boy, here it comes. Don't do that, man. Our needs, it take up most of the oxygen in our friend circles or in our community. We're thinking of what we're going to say next when we're listening to someone rather than actually listening really deeply, carefully to someone. By the way, I know all this stuff because I'm good at this stuff. I do this and I see it. So I'm not judging you. I'm just naming my own stuff. Maybe you can relate. And sometimes receiving, it comes more easily than giving in your life. Paul's words are, I think for those of us who can relate to that, they're gentle, but they're really true. Don't think of yourself more highly than you ought. I mean, remember who you are. It's an invitation, honestly, not to condemn you, but an invitation to free yourself, to be liberated from this self-centered way of seeing yourself in the world and to find a truer self. The one that God has made and loves that learns to love God and love neighbor very intently, even when it cuts against the grain of our default modes. That awareness, friends, if we can notice that and strive toward it, it opens up something. It shows us this possibility of having a really godly reciprocal relationships that truly love God and truly love our neighbor in more profound ways. And we find that we can show up for people. Even when we didn't notice it before, we start noticing we're able to show up for people in maybe ways that we haven't before. But the opposite. So if that's one side of sort of living as a sort of maybe a self-centered tendency, there's another side of this is just as real. Some of us give constantly. We love to give. We love to serve. We love to keep the chaos out there. We like to stay busy so we don't have to recognize that we actually, too, also have needs. You guys, you don't like to be still because being still, things start to come to mind and you got to maybe keep busy. Constantly give, really difficult to receive. We deflect when someone tries to care for us as if needing something were a failure of some sort on our behalf. But we know this isn't true. Membership in a body like this, being a brother or sister, being in a family like this, it runs both ways. If you can't receive, you're also cutting off someone else's gift to serve you, right? Learning to receive, let yourself be known, helped, supported, and carried is how the body of Christ actually functions. So if that's you, I want to give you permission. You can be served. You can be loved. You can be received. You can learn to receive. There is a card that is in the seat back, a new card in the seat back in front of you. And we don't usually do this, but we thought it'd be kind of a cool, concrete way of just responding to this charge on rally day as we think about how we arrive, show up for God and worship, but also show up for our neighbors in service. It's not a sign up sheet. We're not going to like check your cards in order to get brisket tacos later or something like that. Although the idea did come up in our staff meeting. Felt like that was a little coercive. Friends, this card is an act of worship. That's what we hope that this can be for you. You can pull it out. You can read it. Kids, there's a side of the card just for you, too, because kids, you also have a really important part to play in serving your neighbor and being served. If you are visiting or this is your first time here, this is like, don't worry about this card for right now. Like, you're good. There's some family, some Rez family business we're taking care of. You're welcome to jump in, though. This card, Rez, is a symbol of intentionality around your sacrifice to give your time, your gifts, your energy and offer that to your neighbor and offer that to God as an act of worship with some intentionality. It's a commitment to the person sitting right beside you saying, I actually want my life to be spent caring for and serving others and worshiping God. That's what this card is a symbol of. It's also an invitation maybe for some of us to think in new ways, not just the people sitting next to us, but the people who aren't sitting next to us, our neighbors down the street, our neighbors who are feeling vulnerable and scared, our neighbors who are in need. This is the Christian life, thinking of those neighbors, praying for them and finding ways to serve them. We want to offer this card as a space for you to fill out and place it in the offering baskets when that comes up. This is why, because those offering baskets are actually the fruits of our labor, our giving, our tithing. If you notice those, what are they, the wooden tokens out on the welcome table. If you give online, our folks grab those wooden tokens and they give it in the offering basket as an act of worship to say, actually, I'm giving of my money as well, the fruits of my labor. And so this card is going to be dropped in the same offering basket and brought up here and with the bread and the wine at the offertory and offered to God as a living sacrifice for us. So you'll get to see that offering. The offertory is where those two commandments that Jesus taught us, those two most important ones, go from being something we heard in a Bible story, something that's a theory and being translated, converted into a concrete act of love. That's what we hope this card can be for us today, a way for us to love God and our neighbor. So today we practice both of those loves, really one love combined, loving God and loving neighbor in the offering of our hands, our time and our presence, just as Jesus taught us. So friends, I ask, may God give us the courage, self-awareness, maybe healing. May God give us the spirit of Jesus to readily offer our lives like this as a sacrifice to God and of service to our neighbors. And friends, when we do that, we start to notice something really beautiful happen in the church. We become the body of Christ. Our community begins to resemble Jesus of Nazareth and the world delights in it. So may we offer ourselves this morning. May we take a moment of silence to just invite the spirit to ask us to look at this card together and think through some of these questions on the card. I'm going to give us a minute to do that. Amen.