Jesus came to spark a revolution and to establish a Kingdom. We can learn a lot about that revolution by examining the life of its founder. What was Jesus known for? Love. He loved people no one else would love. His love was so radical, it restored souls and turned lives upside down. Time and time again, Jesus loved, and loved specifically. We can learn more about this revolution by looking at its motto. Jesus lived in a day before advertising on billboards and t-shirts. Before tweets and Facebook posts. Even still, his revolution had a motto. It had a creed. ‘Love God, love people.’
We don’t remember Jesus because he gave wonderful sermons urging us to embrace some innocuous general good, some theory of good. We remember him because when he was in our shoes, even as he was set upon by the powers and principalities, he found a way to love specifically – to specifically love a leper, an outcast, a traitor, a woman at a well, a soldier, a Samaritan.
If we are going to have any hope in this world, if we are going to have any happiness or joy in the world, we had better learn that the only answer for humanity, the only hope for humanity, is to love specifically.
“Not me” you say. I don’t have the training. God doesn’t want me. I’ve made too many mistakes. One of Thornton Wilder’s first plays was “The Angel That Troubled the Waters”. The play is based on John 5: 1-4, which tells about a pool in Bethesda where blind, lame and paralyzed people would wait for healing. Legend had it that occasionally an angel would stir its waters and the first person in the water after the touch of the angel would be cured of his infirmities. Wilder’s play imagines a physician who occasionally would go to the pool, hoping to get in the water so that he could be healed of his melancholy. Finally the angel appears, but blocks the physician just as he is about to enter the water. The angel tells the physician that the healing is not for him. The physician implores the angel to let him in, but to no avail. Finally the angel clarifies why he cannot allow the physician to enter the pool: “Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve.”
Jesus is calling you to serve … scars and all. Jesus is calling you to join the love revolution … to love God and to love others. To love specifically. Will you say “yes” to the call?
PastorKevinAustin 