Messages and Messengers

Micah 6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-12

February 2, 2014

I believe there’s a football game this evening. Experts in these sorts of things predict that more than 100 million people will watch on TV. That’s a whole lot of eyeballs watching TV screens, and, of course, advertisers are eager to take advantage of the opportunity. So eager, in fact, that they’re willing to pay about $8 million for one minute of air time – not to mention the additional millions they’ll shell out to put their commercials together in the first place.

That’s a whole lot of money to get your message across, so advertisers tend to seek out the most famous, glamorous, and beautiful celebrities possible to sell the message. Scarlett Johansson, David Beckham, Arnold and a host of others will be shilling for one thing or another tonight.

So, if you had a spare $10 million, what message would you share with more than 100 million people? Who would you get to share it? How would you package your message? What themes or memes would you employ?

I don’t know how such decisions are made, but I’m going start with the message first. It seems to me that what you want to say should help you decide how it gets said and by whom.

I was asked in a church job interview once what Biblical texts I would preach from if I was choosing texts to preach what I considered most central to the proclamation of the church. Micah 6:8 was on my list: what does the Lord require of us? Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with our God.

There are other passages that I understand as central and foundational to the gospel, to the good news that we are called to share as followers of Jesus. The Beatitudes, the blessings that open Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew would also be on my short list. Also from that sermon, the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – would make the list. The Great Commandment: love God and love your neighbor. The New Commandment: love one another as I have loved you. The simple reminder from 1 John: God is love. Amos’ powerful exhortation to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an everflowing stream.

These are the messages I would share. These are the core of my proclamation of the good news. At their heart, each of them is about relationships – the relationship between Creator and creature, and relationships among and between creatures.

We are invited, always, into a loving relationship with God. We are called, throughout, to treat one another with love and with justice, and we are called always to practice, with humility, a particular concern for the poor, the outcast and those marginalized by the wider culture.

That’s the message.

So what about the messenger?

I don’t know that you could have come up with a less likely messenger than Jesus. Imagine the Madison Avenue ad team trying to deal with him. “Jesus, first, you gotta get rid of the fisherman. They’re only marginally employed. They’re poor as dirt. They don’t smell very good. Seriously, they are not at all presentable. Oh, and you gotta stop hanging out with tax collectors. Nobody likes them. And the prostitutes – that’s gotta stop. We don’t care what you do with you free time, but you cannot be seen in public with them. And about the lepers – if you want to champion some disease that great, but let’s find one that photographs better. We could get you into a juvenile diabetes clinic. Those kids are cute, and people will eat that up. Now, about your wardrobe. I think we can do a bit better than those worn-out sandals. Oh, yeah, and lose the beard.”

Appearances aside, Jesus was pretty much a loser. No authority recognized him, and the leaders of his own people completed rejected him. He was publicly humiliated, and then brutally executed by the state. He died penniless, alone, abandoned by almost everyone who knew him.

Nevertheless, here we gather, some 2,000 years later, and we remember the messenger even if we’re still a bit unclear about the message. How did that happen?

Well, at least in part, it happened because the movement Jesus began survived him. Inspired by resurrection life – whatever that was like for them – the followers of Jesus overcame their fears and continued to share his message. Eventually, they became the community of the church, and the church – the body of Christ in the world – became the vessel for the message.

The church is, and always has been, the only less likely messenger for the good news than its initial proclaimer. After all, no matter what else you may think about Jesus, he clearly had the reputation of being not only a decent communicator, but, more to the point, of being a fundamentally decent, loving, compassionate human being with really good connections to the divine.

We, on the other hand, are a broken bunch – fearful, addicted, often less than fully honest with ourselves, prideful and arrogant one moment, cowering in escapism the next. Longing for God, but scared to death of actually encountering the Divine. Oh, to be sure, at our best we are beautiful, powerful, faithful, loving, creative, and caring disciples. But, let’s be honest, we are not always at our best, and, often, we are far from it.

Yet, as the apostle Paul put it, in Christ Jesus God was at work reconciling the creation to its Creator, and we have been entrusted with this message of reconciliation. I really hope God didn’t spend the entire treasure of heaven on the message the church delivers!

Yet, here we are, with an incredibly important word for the world.

We, the church of Jesus Christ, “can teach, and witness to, and act out an alternative way in the world” through the practices of hospitality, generosity, and forgiveness, as Walter Brueggemann said in a recent interview.[1]

A world that fears the stranger desperately needs the witness of hospitality. A world that scratches out and clings to and hoards every nickel, and that, as a result, creates a great and growing gap between the haves and the have nots, needs nothing so much as a witness to profligate generosity. A world weary with one eye traded for another, longs for the witness of forgiveness.

These are defining characteristics of the church, and when we live into them in the world we can be the messengers of grace, gratitude and love that God calls us to be.

Our first, simplest and still most profound witness to these practices comes when we gather at this table to recall the message of Christ and to remember the messenger. Let us come to the table, and learn again as we gather that we are called to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. Amen.

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[1] In “An Alternative Way,” a film produced by The Work of the People, 2014.