BUILDING GREAT RELATIONSHIPS

‘What a Waste!’

10-00am Sunday 22 November 2009

Mark 14:1-11; Deuteronomy 15:1-11 TNIV

Today is Christian Love Link Sunday. For those of you unfamiliar with Christian Love Link, it is a ministry set up by a number of churches in Mt Roskill twenty years ago to put the churches in touch with people who have needs within the community. Initially it covered a wide variety of activities. As well as delivering food parcels which is about 80% of what it does today, it also provides transport for people to appointments, visiting those who just want someone to talk to, providing furniture, and firewood - virtually anything that was feasible for people within the various churches to do. In the past on Christian Love Link Sunday members of the congregation were given the chance to fill in a Servant Survey indicating what they were willing to do and when they were free to be called on. We no longer do this as as over the years a number of these activities have stopped and we make the needs for help known as they arise. Our church has supported Christian Love Link for at least eighteen years, and many within the church have been involved at some time or other over that time, particularly manning the phones in the Referral Centre, taking calls from people in need and referring them to where they can receive help, as well as in the food bank. Having a ministry such as Christian Love Link has been a great help to the churches in that whereas before we would get a number of people who would do the round of all the churches asking for money for petrol or food or other needs, now we have a central point of contact to which we can refer them, where records are kept of all who ring in and the appropriate help can be offered. This is helpful in ensuring that those with genuine needs are cared for. (Blank screen)

Leon to share about the Referral Centre and the Food Bank

The value of the way it operates is that although people’s initial contact is with the Referral Centre, it is people within the churches who provide the help. It is providing a link between the church and the community. It is putting you and I in contact with people in the community whose needs are within the church’s capacity to meet. Also, because someone from the church has called with a food parcel or visited, it gives churches the opportunity of following up the contact and going back to see if there are other ways in which we can help and just to be a friend to these people. When we did Forty Days of Love a few months back we learned that love is spelt t-i-m-e. Whenever you give a person your time you are showing that you care, that they are important to you. It was something Jesus did throuighout his ministry, as we saw when we looked at the story of the healing of blind Bartimaeus two weeks back. Listening and sharing in this way is being what God calls his church to be. It is making Jesus Christ known through love in action.

Woojong to share

Why should we care for those who are in need? It all stems from what we believe. Your beliefs and worldview determine how you act. For example, there are worldviews that hold that if a person was born in poverty, that was their lot in life. It was what they were destined to be. To seek to change that would be interferring with the way life was meant to be. It is a very fatalistic outlook on life, and there are many cultures that subscribe to it. Not so much ‘what will be will be,’ but ‘what is will be.’

The biblical worldview runs counter to that. As we read in Deuteronomy, God’s people were commanded to look after the poor. In fact it says in the passage that we read that there was no need for anyone of God’s people to be poor if they would share the blessings God would provide for his people in the land he promised them. However, these words in Deuteronomy are also in touch with reality in that it says, “There will always be poor people…”[1] words which Jesus repeats in our reading from Mark. And because that is so, God makes provision for them in his law. His people were told not to be “hardhearted or tightfisted,” or “show ill will toward the needy and give them nothing.” Rather they were commanded to be “openhanded,” to “freely lend … whatever they need,” to “give generously” and to do so “without a grudging heart.” It was wrong if they did not do this. Moses said, “They (the poor) may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin.”[2]

The poor have a special place in God’s heart. We know this not only from these provisions made in the Jewish law, but also from the life of Jesus himself. At the very outset of his ministry when he announced his manifesto, it included proclaiming “good news to the poor.”[3] No wonder the poor people heard him gladly. Here was someone who really cared about them, and who identified himself with them through his own simple lifestyle. We catch a glimpse of what Jesus did from the reading in Mark when the disciples complained about the wasteful extravagance of the woman in the story. The said, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.”[4] John adds a further insight when he says that when Judas left the upper room to go to the authorities and offer to betray Jesus to them, the other disciples’ suspicions were not aroused because, “Since Judas had charge of the money, some thought Jesus was telling him to buy what they needed for the Festival, or to give something to the poor.”[5] John also tells us that Judas did not really care about the poor and would help himself to what was in the money bag. It never ceases to amaze me that Jesus chose a thief to hold the purse-strings of the apostolic band. God will often put us in places where our weaknesses will be tested to help us overcome them. By giving him the responsibility of looking after their finances, Jesus was giving Judas the opportunity to learn honesty.

The reason why I chose this passage is not only that it is found in Mark which we have been going through this year, but also in that it shows how Jesus used the money he and the disciples had. Jesus not only taught that we are to help the poor, he did it himself and instructed his disciples to do likewise. When John tells us that the disciples thought Jesus was telling Judas to “give something to the poor,” it indicates that this was his regular practice. Jesus practiced what he preached, and he met people’s physical and material needs along with sharing the good news of the kingdom. These went hand in hand throughout his ministry here on earth. And so it is appropriate for us to consider this as we observe Christian Love Link Sunday for as I shared before, the poor are dear to the heart of God.

When we look at the Gospels we can see this in the stories Jesus told. An example is the story of the Great Banquet where the master commanded his servant, “Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.”[6] Jesus was stating that the poor will be welcome at the feast in the kingdom of God. The same message comes through in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16.[7] Lazarus was a beggar, covered with sores who lay at the gate of a rich man. The fact that Lazarus “lay” at the rich man’s gate indicates that he was most likely a cripple. When they both died it was Lazarus, not the rich man, who found comfort at Abraham’s side. There are responsibilities with being wealthy. The rich man could not claim ignorance of Lazarus’ plight as he would have seen him every time he came and went from his home, and yet he closed his heart to this man’s need, exactly what Deuteronomy said they were not to do. Maybe this is why when he pleaded with Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them about this place of torment, that Abraham replied, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”[8] Not only had this man closed his heart to Lazarus, the beggar on his doorstep, but he had also chosen to ignore the clear command in the law to give generously and be openhanded to the poor.

Throughout the rest of the New Testament the same emphasis on helping the poor is present. When Paul and Barnabas met with the church leaders in Jerusalem to check out what was required of them as they took the gospel to the Gentiles, he said, “All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along.”[9] Another book that has clear instructions about helping the poor is the Book of James. Obviously things were happening in the life of the church that James was writing to that were inconsistent with the Gospel. Believers were deferring to the rich and discriminating against the poor. James goes on to talk about putting one’s faith into action, to not just talk about helping people in need, but actually doing it.[10]

I remember either reading or hearing someone say that if we have loose cash in a jar, we are among the top 5% of the wealthiest people on earth. If you are tempted to think that you are not very rich, to think of it in those terms puts a different light on wealth.

There are three thoughts I leave with you from the story we read this morning.

1. You can be exceedlingly generous with your wealth, but if it is not motivated by a genuinely caring attitude it does not count in God’s sight. As the Apostle Paul reminds us in his great chapter on love, “If I give all I possess to the poor … but do not have love, I gain nothing.”[11] True help is when you do it because you genuinely care. And as you give generously and cheerfully in this way, God promises to “bless you abundlantly, so that in all things, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.”[12] God is no one’s debtor. As Proverbs says, “Those who are kind to the poor lend to the LORD, and he will reward them for what they have done.”[13] When you give generously out of love, God will bless you abundantly.

2. True love gives and does not count the cost. This is what we see in the story of the woman, identified as Mary in John’s Gospel, who broke the alabaster jar of very expensive perfume and poured it on Jesus’ head. True love always has a certain extravagance about it. The Bible says that the Lord loves a cheerful giver, not a careful one.[14] The cost of the perfume would have been the equivalent of a year’s wages for the average person at that time. No wonder some of those present exclaimed, “What a waste!” But the woman obeyed the prompting she felt led to do. She sensed a rightness about both the act and the timing of it. The Bible says there is “a time to keep and a time to throw away.”[15] Jesus said a beautiful thing of this woman: “She did what she could.”[16] That is all Jesus asks of you and I, to do what you can. We need to be obedient to the Spirit’s prompting. Jesus saw this woman’s act of spontaneous and uncalculating devotion as entirely appropriate in that it was preparing his body for his burial. Now every time the gospel is preached what she did is told in memory of her. Her spontaneous, uncalculating and timely gift is a call to us to love Jesus in this way too. It is also a reminder not to judge the way others express their love for him. It is worth noting that Mark places this woman’s act of selfless devotion between the account of the Chief priests and the teachers of the law looking for some “sly way” to arrest and kill Jesus, and Judas offering and getting paid for betraying Jesus. Their evil scheming stands in stark contrast to this expression of genuine love.

3. In the end it makes no difference whether you are rich or poor, because material wealth does not and cannot save you. Outside of Christ we are all spiritually bankrupt. There is absolutely no hope of a better tomorrow, for we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.[17] We stand in desperate need of the grace, the undeserved kindness of God revealed in Jesus Christ. When the Christ candle was lit this morning you were reminded that it symbolises the presence of the One who “though he was rich, yet for your sake … became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”[18] Receiving God’s gift of eternal life and following Christ is what makes you rich in the things that really matter. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” - in other words those who recognise their spiritual poverty - “for theirs is the kingdom of God.”[19] The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.