Sermon for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Pentecost
START ME UP
Theme: Sometimes we must love our neighbor—or our neighbor must love us—using a
cattle prod.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen. According to what is written in today’s Epistle, God our heavenly Father
wants each of His dear Christians—including you and me—to “consider how to stir
up one another to love and good works.”
Dear Christian friends:
God wants you to be premeditated and deliberate when He says to you,
“consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.” God wants you to
think carefully beforehand about ways you can stir up your neighbor. He wants
you to spend time mulling over and pondering various things you can say and do
to your fellow Christians that will help them to do better in showing love and
doing good works. Scheme, map out, outline, devise, plot and plan various ways
you can deal with your Christian brother or sister in order to get the job
done. Then do it.
Do not worry about being overly gentle or diplomatic when you carry out
your schemes “to stir up one another to live and good works,” either. Yes, I
know that the book of Ephesians talks about “speaking the truth in love”
(Ephesians 4:15), but sometimes love demands that you be rather blunt and
direct with your neighbor. Otherwise he might not get the point. Blunt does not
mean unkind and besides, we are not using the book of Ephesians today. Today we
are using the book of Hebrews. God says to you today in Hebrews, “Consider how
to stir up one another to love and good works.”
The word “stir up” might even be a little rough-and-tumble. God wants you to
consider and plan how to goad or prod one another into love and good works;
stir up the pot in a way that will prompt acts of love and good works; poke
each other; motivate, stimulate, incite and provoke one another. We might go so
far as to say that God would like for you to be a feather on your neighbor’s
nose, even irritating your neighbor so that he finally does the right thing, if
for no other reason than to get you off his back (Luke 11:5-8).
There are two people in particular who need very much for you to
“consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.” Your neighbor is
one of those people, and you are the other one:
· Actually, there are a couple of reasons why your neighbor needs you to
stir and provoke him or her up “to love and good works.”
o First, your neighbor needs your help to overcome the sedentary and lazy
nature of his flesh. You have heard before about what Luther called “the mutual
conversation and consolation of brethren” (Smalcald Articles). This means that,
in addition to the Sacraments and the preaching of the Church, God wants to use
you personally to bring the good news of His Gospel—His assurance of
forgiveness and life—to your Christian brother or sister. In a very similar
way, God also wants to use you as His special tool for kicking your Christian
neighbor in the seat of the pants, as it were, stirring him or her up “to love
and good works.” The flesh is very weak, dear saints, and not just your flesh
alone. Like you, your neighbor also falters. Like you, he or she, too, needs
also a continual call to repentance, to changed living, and “to love and good
works.”
o Beyond your neighbor’s need to be stirred up, due to the weakness of
his sinful flesh, your neighbor also needs to see from you exactly how much you
love him or her. Does your devotion to your neighbor go beyond a handshake and
a warm smile on Sunday morning? Do you tiptoe around your neighbor, for fear of
offending him, and if so, have you given your neighbor the impression that you
simply do not care deeply enough to speak? “Consider how to stir up one another
to love and good works,” dear Christians, because this is how you show your
neighbor a greater love; a risk-taking love; a self-effacing love; a
sacrificial love such as the love that our Christ has first shown to us.
· Just as there are some good reasons why your neighbor needs you do stir
him up “to love and good works,” there are also good reasons why you personally
benefit from this stirring up, too. Yes, you need your neighbor to stir you up
and provoke you, just as much as he needs you do it for him (and for all the
same reasons). But even more than that, you also need this act of you stirring
up your neighbor. You receive great personal benefits from God when you
yourself go about provoking and inciting and goading your neighbor into “love
and good works.”
o First, your act of stirring your neighbor up “to love and good works”
will change and improve your view of your neighbor. Through this process, you
will increasingly see your neighbor as very much together and united in this
business of struggling against the sinful flesh and of considering others (as
St. Paul says) “more significant than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3). When you
“consider how to stir up one another to love and good works,” you yourself are
actively engaging in “love and good works.” You are serving your neighbor when
you do this. You are showing compassion and mercy when you do this. You are
giving your neighbor the same kind of love that Christ first gave you.
o Not only that, but this is the game everyone can play. Even you are no
longer able-bodied, or if there are already have many responsibilities on your
plate, you can still benefit many people in our congregation and in the whole
Church by stirring up “one another to love and good works.”
o An additional benefit you receive from stirring up your neighbor is
that you overcome your fear of your neighbor. In particular, you will no longer
fear what your neighbor thinks of you (and that fear is fairly common to all
people). Stated another way, when you deliberately say and do things to your
neighbor that will stir him or her up “to love and good works,” you will find
that the Word of God likewise will continue to do its good work also in you (2
Thessalonians 2:13). This Word will convince you that it is far more necessary
for you to do right by your neighbor than it is to be liked or tolerated by him
or her. So you plan ways to stir up your neighbor “to love and good works” and
your neighbor ends up getting mad at you. Big deal! At least you have made
certain that your neighbor is under no illusions, and that he or she has
clearly heard what God wants His people to say and to do. For that matter, what
is the worst your neighbor can do
to you in response to your love? Nothing—not even your neighbor’s
antipathy—can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus your
Lord (Romans 8:39).
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the
blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the
curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the
house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith,
with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed
with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering,
for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another
to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of
some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing
near.
A couple months ago I read an appalling news item. (It might have been
in the Reporter or some other church newspaper.) It was joyously announced that
a Lutheran congregation recently canceled its worship service so that everyone
could spend that Sunday morning going out and performing acts “of love and good
works” for people in the community. I assume that those who organized this
disaster had only the best of intentions stir up their neighbor “to love and
good works.” I also fear that they might have sorely misunderstood what God is
saying in today’s Epistle. It would have been good for them to continue reading
the rest of the sentence:
Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not
neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one
another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
Here is the point: there is no better way for you to “stir up one
another to love and good works” than to point your neighbor toward the benefit
worship.
· Here is where God the Father almighty assures you of the forgiveness of
all your sins on account of Jesus’ death and resurrection—and again I say to
you, YOUR SINS ARE FORGIVEN.
· Hereyour Lord Jesus renews His commitment and His vow to you, that He
will remain faithfully with you in every circumstance of your daily life.
· Here is where God the Holy Spirit establishes and builds His miraculous
gift of faith within you—a faith that produces the miracles of “love and good
works” within you. “[Love and] good works certainly and without doubt follow
true faith—if it is not a dead, but a living faith—just as fruit grows on a
good tree” (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration [McCain, 483). Stated another
way, when God continues to supply and sustain His gift of faith through His
Word and Sacraments here in worship, good works cannot help but result.
Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not
neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one
another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
With these Words, God is telling you that worship is among His greatest gifts
to you. He is also telling you that worship is one of your great gifts to your
neighbor, for here you receive what is necessary to for you to “consider how to
stir up one another to love and good works.”
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