Hilton Head Island, SC – November 11, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
John 3:1-16; Luke 6:27-36
Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” – John 3:5; “Your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High.” – Luke 6:35 (RSV)
Are you interested in individual improvement? There are a thousand books on the market to help you. They tell you how to improve your diet, your attitude, your health, your fitness, your length of life, and anything else you might think needs to be improved.
Are you interested in improving society? There are a thousand books on the market to do that as well. However, they are less likely to be best sellers, as compared to self-help books. Probably more people are moved to spruce up themselves than to try to spruce up society. Besides, nobody can fix all the ills of society, but perhaps we can fix ourselves, or at least attempt to improve ourselves.
In this sermon I shall be making three very broad-brushed claims. I will tell you shortly what the first two claims are, and then, later in the sermon, I shall tell you what the third claim is. You may not agree with any of these three hypotheses, but I think they are worth pondering anyway. And, unless you have already tuned out, you may as well listen to my theories, or otherwise you’ll just be twiddling your thumbs for the next 20-some minutes or so.
Is the Bible more interested in each of us improving ourselves, or in all of us working together to improve society? Obviously it is interested in both, but which receives the greater emphasis? Which is more important? Or are they equally important?
Here is Theory Number One. The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) is somewhat more concerned about us than about me. That is, more words are devoted to how Israel was to live than how individual Israelites were to live. Jews were and are a remarkably communal people. They identify themselves by means of the entire worldwide Jewish community. On the other hand, the Greek Bible (the New Testament) is somewhat more concerned about me than about us. That is, it concentrates on how you and I can get right with God more than it tells how we, all of us, can get right with God. Jews assumed that by being born Jewish they were already in with God, whereas Gentiles didn’t see themselves as being automatically on God’s good side. They had to “win” their way in, either by believing the right things or doing the right things or thinking the right things. Compared to Jewish self-identity, Gentile self-identity was shaky, because there was thought to be no genetic factor to guarantee divine acceptance.
How can I further clarify what I am trying to say here? Consider the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments have to do with our relationship with God, and the first three are not especially concerned about either individual or social improvement. We are to have no other gods who take precedence to God; God is to be our only God. We shouldn’t create any man-made images of God. We shouldn’t take His name in vain. But the fourth commandment, which also has to do with God, is about improvement, and it is primarily social improvement. Not only should you and I individually honor the Sabbath day to keep it holy, and we should not work, but additionally, we are to see to it that no family members or household servants or anyone else for whom we have responsibility works on the sabbath. The fourth commandment thus is social as well as individual in its intent.
The last six commandments all are basically directed to all of society, rather than merely to individuals. We are to honor our parents, and not kill or commit adultery or steal or bear false witness against anyone or covet anything that belongs to anyone else. Those commandments tell us how we are to live with others (in society) and not just by ourselves (as individuals.) There are over 600 laws in the Torah, and most of them have to do with how we live with others, not how we are to get along with God. Judaism is a supremely communal, and social, religion.
Christianity, on the other hand, is somewhat more concerned with how we are to be related to God than how we are to be related to our neighbor, which really means to society at large. But even within Christianity, some aspects of it focus on individual improvement, and others on social improvement.
And that leads to Theory Number Two. Of the four Gospels, Matthew and John are somewhat more concerned with individual improvement, and Mark and Luke focus somewhat more on social improvement. This, however, is an extremely generalized statement. I did not stumble upon this notion myself by reading the Gospels; I stumbled upon it by reading what somebody else observed about the Gospels. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you who said it, because I read it, and then promptly forgot who said it. But in a cursory scan of the four Gospels, there seems to be some truth in the observation, even if it is difficult specifically to quantify.
For certain, the Jesus who is presented in the Gospel of John speaks almost exclusively about how each of us is to become properly related to God by means of proper faith. There is little attention paid to how society can be improved or how all of us should become more concerned about all of us.
The most widely recognized verse in the Gospel of John is John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” If you believe in Jesus, this verse declares, then you shall be granted eternal life.
The story which leads to John 3:16 begins with a Pharisee named Nicodemus who came by night to talk to Jesus. He didn’t want to risk anyone seeing him visit Jesus during the day, so he came when it was dark. Nicodemus began by giving a genuinely high compliment to Jesus: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him” (3:2). Then, in a typically elliptical Johannine response, Jesus says that unless a man is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God. But who was talking about the kingdom of God? Certainly not Nicodemus! The conversation continues on in this circuitous fashion, leading up to vs. 16, which is the main statement John wants to make about Jesus. But in the midst of it, Jesus says to Nicodemus, and presumably to every other individual who has ever lived, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” It is cryptic, but it clearly is directed to me, not to us.
In none of this is there even a hint of trying to improve the world. If you or I or anyone else simply believes the right things, we will attain the improvement we need personally, and that should suffice. If we go on to work on the improvement of the world, so much the better, but the primary goal is for each of us personally to have proper faith.
Much of the 6th chapter of Luke is a repetition of what Jesus says in Matthew as parts of the Sermon on the Mount. The emphasis here is on doing things for the betterment of society. Because Matthew and Luke say almost the same thing, it does little to support the idea that the Jesus in Luke is more society-oriented, while the one in Matthew is more individual-oriented. Be that as it may, here are some of the things Jesus says in Luke 6. Love your enemies. Give to those who beg from you. Do to others what you would have others do to you. When you do these things, you will become sons and daughters of God, for God also is kind to the ungrateful and selfish. Be merciful, as your heavenly Father is merciful.
All of these actions are directed toward social improvement. But by them, Jesus says, our relationship with God also shall be solidified. Thus we may deduce that when we work on self-improvement, it results in social improvement, and when we work on social improvement, it results in self-improvement.
Dan Buettner recently had an article in The New York Times Sunday magazine about Ikaria, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. There is a much higher percentage of people in their 90s and even 100s on Ikaria than just about anywhere else on earth, and Dan Buettner was trying to find out why. People there are two and a half times more likely to make it to 90 than Americans, and Ikarian men are four times more likely to become nonagenarians than American men. Part of the reason for this is diet, the writer concluded, part constant exercise into old age, part genetics, and part that the 10,000 people on Ikaria are very social. They spend a lot of time with one another, just hanging out and having fun.
The Ikarian physician Dr. Ilias Leriadis has some theories about why Ikarians live so long. Buettner wrote, “Pointing across the Aegean to the neighboring island of Samos, (Dr. Leriadis) said, ‘Just 15 kilometers over there is a completely different world. There they are much more developed. There are high-rises and resorts and homes worth a million euros. In Samos, they care about money. Here, we don’t. For the many religious and cultural holidays, people pool their money and buy food and wine. If there is money left over, they give it to the poor. It’s not a “me” place. It’s an “us” place.’”
What would you guess, that the people on Ikaria are more interested in self-improvement, or in social improvement? Either answer is acceptable on the basis of the little either Dan Buettner or I have said about their enchanted island, but what would you guess? And what does it mean to be a “me place” as compared to an “us place”?
Alexandra Frean is a British journalist who is the chief of the Washington Bureau of The Times of London. She wrote a column for her newspaper with the title “The Big Society comes naturally to America.” Its subtitle was “Welfare may be a dirty word in the US but community spirit and generosity fill the gap.” She began by saying that two weeks after she and her husband moved from New York City to Washington, he died very suddenly of a heart attack one Saturday morning. Alexandra Frean had met only one neighbor, a lady named Annie. Annie put a cooler box outside Ms. Frean’s door, and organized a group of people to fill it with food each day before she came home from work. This continued daily, not just for weeks, but for several months. She asked the wife of a colleague why this had happened. Brook told her that “it’s what Americans do. This is your safety net. It’s the pioneer spirit – the idea that if people in the next wagon don’t rally round to help, nobody will. It doesn’t matter what they do or where they live, they know that when the time comes, you will do the same for them.”
But, said Alexandra Frean, there was also another explanation. “Brought up in a ‘we can fix this’ culture, it’s natural for Americans, seeing trouble, tragedy or disaster, to rush toward it rather than away.”
It is heartwarming to hear that from a woman whose home is in one of the primary welfare states in the world, the United Kingdom. What an outstanding human being person was Annie, the neighbor, who organized this chain of compassion, and everyone else, known and unknown, who provided food for a busy widow who knew almost no one in her new community in the US capital. In this case, individual improvement (people improving themselves) resulted in social improvement (assistance to a stranger in need of help, which ultimately helps to improve the lives of everyone).
All this leads into Theory Number Three. People who by nature are politically and religiously conservative tend to focus more on individual improvement, and people who by nature are politically and religiously liberal tend to focus on social improvement. We may deduce from this, if it is a valid observation, that the world gets better if both kinds of people do their thing.
Let me give some examples from the sphere of religion. Christian fundamentalists are more concerned about whether they personally believe the right things on behalf of their own salvation than whether they do the right things on behalf of others. They are concerned about both, but they are more consumed by what they believe than what they do. Christian liberals, on the other hand, tend not to care very much about what they believe, but they give much talk, and often much action, to improving the world. They have an unusual predilection for the poor and dispossessed. Evangelical Christians tend to be more like fundamentalists in this regard, whereas mainline Protestants and perhaps most Catholics tend to be more like Christian liberals.
Nonetheless, fundamentalists on average give away a much higher percentage of their income for others than do liberals, and evangelicals and mainliners are somewhere in between the two. What are we to make of this?
Here is what I conclude: God uses all of us, self-improvers and social improvers, for His own purposes. Few people are equally motivated by both of these polarities, and most of us lean one direction or the other.
And here is The Corollary of Theory Three. Republicans tend to seek self-improvement more than social improvement, and Democrats tend to seek social improvement more than self-improvement. If that is true, then the United States of America should be in very good shape for the next four years, because we have a very evenly divided Congress, and the President we elected won a very close race over his opponent. Therefore both political inclinations are evenly divided in our government. If both parties over the next four years do better than they did over the past four years (which should not be hard at all), their inclinations should work together for the good of every American and for all Americans together.
God can and does use both individual improvers and social improvers further to deepen the foundations of His kingdom on earth. Each assists the other, sometimes despite themselves. But it would be good if individual improvers occasionally gave conscious thought to some social improvements, and if social improvers occasionally gave conscious thought to some individual improvements.
I don’t know if every day in every way we’re getting better and better. But if all of us, regardless of our personal inclinations, get with God’s program, getting better could actually happen. And what an improvement that would be over what we have had over the past four years!