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September 21, 2003
The Platinum Rule
The Platinum Rule
Psalm 19 / Deuteronomy 6: 20-29
Luke 6: 27-31
September 21st, 2003
My theme this morning is commonly referred to as “The Golden Rule.” “As you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.” How often we all have heard this gentle rule quoted. But who can follow it? This behavior is harder to find than gold, so we should call it “The Platinum Rule.”
In the Sermon on the Plain, as we refer to Luke’s version of this teaching, Jesus amplifies the Second Great Commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The first Great Commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength,” was thought about a lot by devout Jews in Jesus’ day. They had refined ways of insuring that people loved God right by keeping the commandments to the nth degree. Indeed, they went beyond what we think is reasonable in trying to insure that it was clear how to love God.
But it is far easier to love God whom we cannot see than to love people whom we can see. So Jesus bore down on the harder part of the Twin Great Commands, the part having to do with my neighbor. The result was the Sermon on the Plain.
In a world filled with animosity, Jesus said: “Love your enemies.” Your enemy is the hardest neighbor to love, but she is still your neighbor. Love her.
In a world contaminated by hatred, Jesus said, “Do good to those who hate you.” The one who hates you is your neighbor. You might find him lying beside the road as the Good Samaritan found the Jewish fellow lying beside the Jericho Road, beaten and bleeding. Jews despised Samaritans, and the Samaritan knew it. He treated this wounded enemy as his neighbor.
In a world where people cursed each other an awful lot—Jews cursing Romans, and Romans cursing Jews, and even Jews cursing fellow Jews, He said, “Bless those who curse you.” In a world where the strong abused the weak, Jesus prescribed the cure, “Pray for those who abuse you.”
In a world where assault and battery was a regular practice, Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek when someone slaps your face.” In a world where there were no electronic security systems, Jesus offered this cure, “Give your coat to the one who steals your shirt.” Today’s application would be, if someone runs off with your TV set, chase him and give him your VCR. When we walk down the street in Chicago and are approached by annoying panhandlers, Jesus offers this solution to this annoyance, “Give to every one who begs from you.”
This spells out who is my neighbor and how to treat him. It shows you and me how to do to others as we would wish them to do to us. It points us in the direction of the Kingdom of God fulfilled, when everyone will be able to turn the other cheek, and everyone will be able to love his enemy. And because everyone is doing this, no one is hitting anyone to begin with. This was Jesus’ goal: the Kingdom of God. Attaining this can only come at great cost. The cost is what Jesus spells out in this Sermon on the Plain.
“These principles will not and cannot work,” we tell the Son of God who said them. They would violate every principle that keeps our grievance lists long and our jails full. But we cannot deny that Jesus said each of these sentences we just read.. They explain the Golden Rule.
I’m tempted to ask then, “Do we believe the Golden Rule?” It is“the royal law according to the Scripture.” It is all about grace as it operates on the human level. We love God for His grace to us. But we must show grace too. Grace, you remember, is favor that is not deserved.
I sometimes ponder the irony that in a land where grace is proclaimed from every pulpit, we so rarely apply it. “Amazing grace that saved a wretch like me” is what will save a wretch like thee. If only grace didn’t have to be extended to wretches. How much easier it is to shower grace on kind people. Grace is impractical in responding to difficult people. Grace will not work to inhibit crime. Don’t get mad, get even, we think. Vengeance is the only thing that will work. Yet vengeance does not work. What do we mean by “work”? Violence works to trigger more violence. We’ve not tried the way of grace that works to interrupt the cycle of the many forms of violence.
We have two problems with Jesus’ Golden Rule. We have a doctrinal problem with it and a practical problem. Doctrinally, we stand with the Apostle Paul against Jesus. Jesus said to do it. Paul said it’s impossible. Why? Because we’re contaminated by sin. Reformed Christian doctrine has elaborated this contamination. The Bible simply says, “All have sinned.” But we have built a fence around this statement as the Pharisees built a fence around the law in Jesus’ day. The Law said, “on the Sabbath you shall do no work.” The Pharisees defined “work” beyond reason.
St. Augustine refined the Scripture’s teaching about sin by defining the idea of “original sin.” Scripture teaches us that Adam’s sin was transmitted to us as part of our nature. But that’s not all Scripture teaches about this. Paul told us that as in Adam all die [because death comes by sin], even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Augustine remembered only the first part of this comparison.
He amplified that sin is more a part of our nature at birth than the instinct to eat. It is possible to stop eating, but it is not possible to rid ourselves of the sin-nature. He deduced the doctrine of “original sin,” from David’s confession in the 51st Psalm, “In sin did my mother conceive me.” We are helpless because it’s genetic.
Thus, an ingloriously refined debate has festered in Christian history between those who say that God would not command us to do what we cannot do, and those who say that God has indeed commanded us to do what we cannot do.
We read this morning in Deuteronomy 6: 24-25 that God commanded Israel to obey His statutes. “It will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us.” This was long after the Fall of our first parents contaminated everything. But Israel did not obey the commandments of the Lord. Paul showed us that the benefit of the Law was only in pointing out what sin is. It identifies sin, but doesn’t enable us to live without sinning.
Our Reformed heritage is well known for emphasizing this point. It explains how the Fall of Adam infected the human race with sin. The principle of disobedience to God is part of our warp and woof. Years later the prophet Isaiah remarked, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.”
We seldom see our good deeds this way. You and I may be proud of good things that we do. We keep a tally of them, even if others don’t. You think the prophet is being harsh to say, “All these good deeds are like so many polluted garments.” He’s a mean-spirited fellow to say this.
I’ve told a few of you the story of my mother’s experience in India that has stood out to me as an illustration of Isaiah’s words. My mother came into the kitchen to find our cook straining tea through a sock. She was aghast. When Mohammed saw the look on her face he said, “Don’t worry, memsahib, the sock wasn’t clean!” He thought he was doing a doubly good deed by straining tealeaves while not soiling a clean sock. It is an illustration of our good deeds, as Isaiah put it. Our good deeds are like straining tealeaves through a dirty sock. We cannot help it.
So, it is impossible to do what we say we believe, that we should obey the Golden Rule. We are programmed to fail. Even if we’ve come to Jesus in faith, we’re programmed to fail. We cannot follow Him because the new nature given to us in Christ is at war with the old nature. So we are totally incapable of obeying Jesus’ command to love our neighbor as ourself.
Do we really believe this? I don’t. Are we to take every description of the Christian life Jesus gave us and declare it impossible for doctrinal reasons, sinking back into helpless acceptance that we’re programmed to fail? Is God still the potter or not? After Isaiah made his dreary remark about our righteousness being like a polluted garment, he wrote, “Yet, O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou art our potter; we are all the work of Thy hand.”
Paul wrote that we cannot earn our salvation by being good enough, but he also wrote, “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” By “good works” Paul referred to these commands of Jesus, “As you would have others do to you, so do to them.” “Love one another as I have loved you.” “Forgive one another seventy times seven times.” “Gird on a towel and serve each other as I have served you.” Jesus was not wasting breath to say these things.
If you have come to Jesus by faith, Jesus’ words are the definition of how you can increasingly come to live—if you’ll beg God’s help and try hard. The issue is not one of earning our salvation, but of working out our salvation. Of course, we can’t earn our salvation, but then, we don’t even need to. “Jesus paid it all; all to Him I owe.”
We have treated the commands of Jesus that are difficult as though they are not only impossible but also contradictory to good doctrine. We have capitulated to the weakness of human nature as a defect even God is unable to improve. It is as if God is no longer the Potter and we the clay.
We have justified this line of thinking by emphasizing the doctrine of Grace in a certain way. God’s grace, His amazing grace, saves wretches like us, we sing so plaintively. Grace, thank God, abounds all the more where sin abounds. Grace is continually at work behind the scenes as we plod along on our hapless, sinning way.
But do you believe Grace operates behind the scenes and has no bearing on behavior? Indeed, is to think God’s grace should have some effect on our behavior “perfectionism,” an incorrect doctrine? John Wesley was accused of teaching “perfectionism” by people in the Reformed heritage, as though this were a defect. He wrote in his Journal, “I will do all the good that I can, in any way that I can, to every one that I can, in any way that I can.” That’s what grace looks like in operation!
If at the end of time we hear Jesus tell us that we have misused grace, treating it as the reason for not trying to do what He commanded, we may wish we’d never heard about grace at all. God did not let us know about His grace in order to make us think obedience to Him can have no good effort.
After every worship hour you have attended in this place you have heard me pronounce over you the benediction, “Now the God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus . . . make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well pleasing to the Lord.” Should I no longer say this?
I think you would tell me not to give up on that benediction. We are, after all, God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has before ordained that we should walk in them. To use a good Reformed term, it is a Divine decree that we should exhibit the traits of God’s workmanship, God’s pottery making, abounding in good works. This begins with doing to others as we would have them do to us, and then loving one another as Jesus loved us, forgiving each other seventy times seven times, serving each other tirelessly without thinking of reward.
We do wrong to shape an airtight theology of the impossibility of obeying God. It is an attempt to exonerate our laziness of heart to try. In place of trying to obey Jesus we have substituted an unspoken doctrine of respectability. Regardless of our theological type, all of us have succumbed to an idealism of respectability. It is a way of life that emphasizes keeping up appearances.
A pastor of an earlier generation spoke to his congregation one Sunday morning, “If you should ask me the most common sin here, I should say, ‘respectability’.” By contrast, “The deepest obligation of a Christian, I should suppose, is to be maladjusted to the status quo.”
I ask you this morning to reflect on yourself. Can you see how you essentially perpetuate the status quo? Defuse the tendency at this moment to think I’m speaking to others. It is not I but God who speaks to you on this score. In deepest honesty, before the bar of your own justice, how are you now treating someone, some neighbor, friend, or relative, as you would not wish to be treated? How have you kept this up so that it has defined you? It has shaped your face as well as your heart. What if you were to treat that person who annoys you as you would want to be treated, how would you act differently? Jesus said “Just do it.”
If you and I cling to the doctrine of grace, God’s unmerited favor, convincing ourselves that we do not even need to try to follow the Golden Rule, we are making a scandal of grace. The sin of saving face, of maintaining respectability according to a common tolerance, may be your most grievous sin.
You recognize it in me, but you won’t recognize it in yourself. Jesus says to you, as He says to me, “As you would have others do to you, do so to them.”
Don’t wait until I treat you as you’d like me to treat you. Of course, I’m responsible too, but you can do nothing about me. You can only do something about you. Don’t wait until she forgives you before you’ll speak to her. Don’t wait until that person has apologized to you for what you’ve cherished as a grievance. Jesus tells you and me, “You take the initiative.” If you are a re-actor and not an actor, the ball will never get rolling that will grow from a snow ball to a snowman of grace.
You and I will either continue to be part of the problem or a part of the solution to the problem of this world. You demean God’s grace if you don’t try. Grace will still be needed, because as hard as we try, we’re still infected by sin, and fail. But we can do surprisingly well. The Holy Spirit is not inept. Dare to try to live as you say you believe. Remember “it is God that works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.”
Let us pray: O Lord God, We ask for grace to yield to Your will, and so to help spread your grace in this troubled world, lifting high the banner of the cross. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at September 21, 2003 09:30 AM