There's a Difference Between Watching and Doing

Scripture Lessons: Deuteronomy 30: 11-20 and 1st John 5: 1-6 Sermon Title: There’s a Difference Between Watching and Doing Preached on May 9, 2021 Our Second Scripture Lesson is a good one for today, with today being Mother’s Day, because the focus of the passage I just read is love. That sounds nice. Love is nice, but as every Mother in here knows, love isn’t just nice. When I think of love I think, not only of a mother’s love portrayed in a Publix commercial. I don’t just think about a warm dinner or a cup of coco. I think about this one afternoon when Cece was a baby. She was in a stroller and we were walking back to Sara’s parents’ mountain house, when a baby bear walked by in the distance, followed by his mother. Love is nice, but love will kill somebody, right? A mother’s love is not just warm, wholesome, and gentle, and so when I read that word love which occurs in our Second Scripture lesson five times, I think about how love is an intense and active emotion. Love is a verb, and there’s a difference between talking about love and really loving. That’s why I titled this sermon: there’s a difference between watching and doing. We’ve been watching so much lately, confined to our houses. How would we have made it through this pandemic without TVs and computers? But love calls us to do. Love calls us to fight. We have to remember that, especially as Christians. I once heard a story about a Sunday School teacher who was giving her young students a tour of the church, and before they went into the worship space, she let them know how she expected them to behave. You can imagine that at their church it was something like our Sanctuary, a place to be entered with reverence and respect, therefore, before they went in, she asked her students to be quite and to walk slowly. “And you know why we must be quite and must walk slowly when we’re in the Sanctuary, right kids?” One of them, maybe 7 years old, says, “Yes mam. We must be quiet in the Sanctuary, so we don’t wake up all the people who are sleeping.” That happens. So, I admire most those who preach briefly, eloquently, and passionately. I subscribe to the preaching philosophy of Charlie Chaplain, the comedian, who once advised preachers to begin their sermon with a good joke and wrap up a really strong ending, and those two parts (the joke and the ending) should be as close together as possible. That’s good advice. But when it comes to preaching, I also subscribe to the thoughts of the great Danish Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, who famously compared the worship space to the theater, and the preacher, not to an actor, but to a director. Kierkegaard wrote that the Sanctuary and the theater, look alike. Both rooms have a place for the director, a place for the actors, and a place for the audience. In the theater the director is backstage, the actors are on stage, and the audience is in the rows of seats where they are hopefully, well entertained. Here's the difference. The worship space is different in the sense that the audience is always God. Think about that for just a moment. The audience is God. I’m one of your directors. Up here, we are the ones who tell you when to stand, what to do, and try to inspire your worshipful thoughts. And this must always be absolutely clear: While you are sitting in the pews, you are not here to be entertained, because this is a place of worship. What we do in here is offer praise to the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of this world. Have you ever thought about it like that? The question is not just whether or not you get anything out of the service. The question is, what did you give? What did you offer God? There’s a different between watching and doing, both in worship and in life. Something I’ll always remember is how years ago, I was in Tim Hammond and Jimmy Scar’s Sunday School Class, and Tim told us that he doesn’t watch movies, because he doesn’t like to watch other people live their lives, he’d rather be out in the world living his own. I like that, because it’s true. We are not passive observers but actors on the earth, and before our short time here is over, we’ve been called on to play our part, to run our race, to glorify God and enjoy him forever, to love God and obey His commandments. In addition to our two lessons for today, Scripture is clear on this point in several places. In the Bible we are warned: Don’t be hearers of the word, but doers. Don’t just memorize the 10 Commandments or notice when your friends violate them but follow them yourself for your own good. In so doing you choose life. The author of 1st John is adamant on this point. Just two weeks ago we read: “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” That’s a good, clear, sound, and transparent admonition, which reminds us that Christianity is not a spectator sport, but a way of life marked by faith, hope, and the greatest of these: love. That’s the truth, and that makes us different from all the screeners and spectators around us, who are busy watching rather than doing. And being different from all of them is OK, because loving also requires distinctiveness. Now, not everyone wants to be distinctive. I haven’t always wanted to be. I remember being in Sixth grade and wanting more than anything else in the world, to be just like everyone else. To avoid being distinctive. I don’t think I had any opinions of my own. I don’t know what kind of shoes I actually liked. I just wanted the kind of shoes that everyone else had, even though they cost about $125. I remember asking my Mom to buy them for me. She wouldn’t, and probably said something like, “Joe, don’t you know that you don’t need those shoes to be special. You’re so special just as you are.” That’s love talking, and maybe love won’t get you through Sixth grade, but it will get you through life, and in this life, we cannot be afraid of what makes us distinctive. You may know already that the word “distinctive” is the key word Jeff Bezos used in his last letter delivered to Amazon shareholders He said that there are all these pressures to conform to this world, and conforming, while it might make life temporarily easier and less conflictual, it actually leads to death. Quoting a book called, “The Blind Watchmaker,” by Richard Dawkins, Bezos reminds us that, Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. This is a powerful quote, and I’m thankful that Dr. Jeffrey Meeks emailed me the article about Bezos where it’s quoted, because it points to our Christian calling, which is: to be set apart, to be distinctive, to be citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven even while living in established countries on the earth, and the only way we’ll be able to do it is if we know so well that we are loved and accepted by God that we stop working so hard to be loved and accepted by the world. Right now, the Church is getting all torn up again about who is in and who is out. Who can be loved and who can’t be? In the Marietta Daily Journal, I read about a preacher who spoke right to his son before the congregation during the worship service, “Son, I want you to know that your father wouldn’t kiss the bishops ring or kneel to the liberal theology sweeping this denomination which is really no theology at all.” He said this to his son to thunderous applause, and it made me very afraid and worried, because the most loving things are done when God is the only one there to applaud. Love so often comes without an obvious reward. Just yesterday I heard a sermon about that from Rev. Chelsie Wait who is one of the pastors at Ebenezer Baptist Church. She told a story about a 10-year-old boy whose mother asked him to do some chores around the house, even though he really didn’t want to do them. Finally, she said, “I’m going for a walk, and when I get back, they had better be done.” Well, she walked back in the house and they were. The whole house was clean, but there was a note on the counter, which turned out to be a bill. Took out the trash - $5.00. Cleaned the windows - $25.00. Vacuumed the kitchen - $10.00. Scrubbed the toilets - $35.00. The total came in to $75.00, which this mother wasn’t going to pay. Instead, she wrote a bill of her own to her son: Carried you around in my womb for 40 weeks – free. Labored for 5 hours – free. Changed all your diapers – free. Fed you, soothed you, even in the middle of the night – free. This is what love is. Love is active. It is doing, not watching, and so often it is done without celebration or applause. Mothers know that, perhaps better than anyone. Fathers are still learning it. I started picking up our girls from school on Wednesdays, and for the first two times I couldn’t remember to bring my numbers. When I finally got it right with my pick-up numbers proudly displayed, I pointed them out to Ms. Williams who runs the pick-up line and who is the twin sister of Stacy Jenson, one of our newest members. Expecting her to applaud for having showed up well prepared she said to me, “What do you want, a parade, for doing the minimum of what’s required?” I do, because some of us want a parade, but mothers know that love doesn’t often get you a parade, and most of the time love requires sacrifice, instead, which is much more like the love of God than anything else. The Lord, who sacrificed everything for us, his love looks like a mother’s love in the sense that to love a child, you have to allow a part, maybe several parts, of yourself to die. You have to let your independence die because a little child is completely dependent on you. You have to let your freedom die, because you aren’t free. Everywhere you go your heart is tied to someone else. You have to let your privacy die because you can’t even use the bathroom alone if there’s newborn in the house. My children walked in on me when I was in the shower yesterday, and a little part of my dignity died, and their eyes are still burning. But that’s what love is, and so those who don’t know much about it aren’t dying necessarily but that hardly means they’re living. In this terribly superficial and divided world where it can be so difficult to know what to do and what to say and where it becomes so easy just to conform, I realize that the love our Second Scripture Lesson calls us to is an active and risky thing: “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey His commandments.” As you think about that verse, think about how loving feels, and the next time you are faced with a choice between staying quiet and safe or speaking the truth of your heart you’ll know exactly what you should do. I remember those times I listened to love and risked something. It was scary, but love is scary. It’s the difference between doing what is easy and doing what is right. It’s the difference between doing what is popular and what is true. It’s the difference between slowly dying and really living. It’s the difference between watching and doing what we are called to do as his disciples. On this Mother’s Day think about those women who have loved you, and don’t just think of their hugs. Think about their terribly dangerous and sacrificial love and go and do likewise. Amen.