It's All You Need
Speaker: Rev. Matt Henry
Location: Whitney United Methodist Church
Date: May 17, 2009
Now I have a question for you this morning. What is required to be a member of this church? What’s required to be a member of this church? To come here….that’s a good answer. Yeah, we’ll start with that one. Yes, to come here. Once a year? Six times a year? Every Sunday, okay, that’s a requirement to be a member of this church. Very good. Next? Worship our Lord….good. Our Lord, the president and CEO of GM? No. Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Very good. Excellent. Anything else required to be a member of this church? Linda. Find a way to serve God. Excellent. What else? Yes? A desire to join….oh, these are very good answers. So I was going to ask you what should be the requirements. Ah, we’ve got two in back. What should be the requirements to join this church as a member? Huh? Support it financially….oh, that’s…ummm. Ah, that’ll preach won’t it? Betty? Oh, having a heart full of caring and love and respect, and treat them with respect at all times, something like that? That’s really good. Yes? The in service to glorify God. Very good. So, you all have just defined for, I think, all of us what’s required to be a member of this church. Think about what you’ve heard and what should be the requirements….love and self-respect for one another, service, steady worship attendance and joy.
In the Book of Acts this morning, what we’ve just heard, in this scene we have the very first Europeans, this would be Romans, in fact its Cornelius the Centurion and his servants he brought from Rome, the very first Europeans received membership into the fellowship of salvation of Christ. He is our predecessor so he has now received, as the first European, fellowship into this salvation of Christ, something hitherto predicated on race, which is Asian, ethnicity, which is being a Hebrew, religion, which is belonging to Judaism. But as of this moment it is now membership into the fellowship of salvation of Christ is now based on, wholly, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. That’s what we have.
So the new mark of entry of church membership, if you will, is now baptism, which Paul will refer to as our spiritual circumcision. The physical thing, Paul will say, is no longer needed, and that is based on what is witnessed by previous believers as evidence of proof: speaking in tongues and worshipping God. So Peter puts it to his peers….what more do they need? Now, it’s interesting actually, unfortunately there are some even in our day, being inheritors of these tongue-speaking Gentiles, nevertheless they make the same mistake as Peter’s Jewish peers. In other words, unless one evidence is speaking in tongues, one does not show evidence of the Holy Spirit and thus is not truly saved. Yes, there are Christians and Christian churches who really propound this. Yet, while speaking in tongues is indeed helpful, it’s not needed when it comes to being saved.
There’s no one you can save that can’t be saved. Jesus says it himself. All we need to do is to keep his commandments. Simple isn’t it? Well, what is his commandment? It’s all we need and it’s what we all need. It’s the easiest and yet most profoundly difficult thing human beings can do, brothers and sisters. This is my commandment, Jesus says, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.
You may remember last summer I was gone for three weeks back in New Jersey for a three-week intensive….I was in my Doctorate of Ministry project at Drew and I was taking a couple of classes at a time. And one of the classes I took was an in-depth exegesis class, or an interpretive class on the Book of Job. Now, I want to tell you friends, the Book of Job is very disturbing, it’s very difficult. It’s amazing that the Jews actually left that Book in the Canon. I can’t go into the details now, but suffice it to say, don’t let anyone try to whitewash the Book of Job for you. It is disturbing from beginning to end. And as part of our study of the Book of Job we saw a PBS documentary on September 11, 2001. So picture us…there is about ten of us students in this small stuffy classroom, stifling in June, and there’s a big flat screen TV facing us and the teacher puts on this documentary as an illustration of Job’s dilemma, and it was a documentary on 9/11. And all of a sudden we were subjected to these images that I hadn’t seen since the event, now in a small enclosed room, footage taken by tourists in New York City, accidentally caught on camera, and you could feel the pressure of just being pushed back in your seat.
And the documentary was a series of interviews, interviewing people who were alive who had been there or family members of those who had died, and one Roman Catholic man who had been a devout, loving, believing Catholic his entire life, had lost a brother as a fireman in that tragedy. And he’s crying and he’s looking at the camera and he’s saying, “I used to believe and love God but I never will again. Any God that would allow that to happen is a monster.” And it was, like, one interview after another like that until finally there was a Jewish Rabbi who had lost family, and he was standing at a window of about a 10 story building downtown, a window from which he had seen the whole thing. He had watched his loved one die in that, the he started singing the Psalm The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He’s singing it in Hebrew as he has sung it every morning out that window since that event happened.
As the camera rolled on it touched on one person who said what they all were wondering, “Where was God that day?” Some people felt that God was in the cockpits of those airliners. After all the pilots, the last thing they said was, “Praise be to Allah!” So for them, God was in the cockpits of those airliners. But for the family of some survivors, it was as horrific to think that God would be in those cockpits as the thought that God was NOT in those cockpits. ‘Why weren’t you in those cockpits?” they were thinking, because if you had that probably wouldn’t have happened. You could have done something about it.
So as we in the class then watched this and wrestled ourselves with the deep, deep question….where indeed was God in all that….the only answer that made sense to me, and it’s not a perfect one, if God was anywhere, God was with those firefighters going up those buildings knowing probably that they were going to die. But they were going to die trying to save someone and those policemen down at ground zero on the bottom trying to keep everybody out of harms way. If God, I think, was anywhere on that day God was with those people. No greater love than this, to lay down one’s life. That’s where God is.
So, the question. Do we have to die in order to prove our love? By which we know that we love the children of God, Jesus said, when we love God and obey his commandments. But, my friends, the corollary is also true….by this we know that we love God and obey his commandments when we love the children of God. In giving up his life to death Jesus was foreshadowing what God was really up to. It was an unquestionable act of love indeed and one shared by those brave <city><place>New York City</place></city> servants, one not involving speaking in tongues. And in terms of proof of their salvation, they’re abiding in God no matter their spiritual status as bona fide followers of Christ, or claiming Christianity, or going to church every day of the year, or any of the stuff we said. We would have to proclaim as one with Peter, “What more do they need?”
But is love that complicated, having to lay down your life? No, it’s actually quite easy. Every time you offer a word of compassion and encouragement to someone, every time you lift someone up in prayer, every time you refuse to judge someone based on what others are saying, every time you willingly give up your ego, every time you worship God in profound gratitude you prove the Holy Spirit is at work in you even though you may not be speaking in tongues. You prove you are keeping God’s commandment. You are abiding in love. Forty-seven years ago our famous song writer in a fit of inspiration realized how true this was when he wrote down these words….there is no one you can save that can’t be saved. There is nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time. There is nothing you know that isn’t known. And there’s no where you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be. It’s easy. All you need is love. Love is all you need.
These words I speak to you this morning I give you in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.