June 3, 2018 – Mark 2:23–3:6
Mark 2:23–3:6
The Bottom Line
Lectionary 9 –June 3, 2018
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
I started preparing for preaching this sermon right after worship last week!
Ha!
I’ve been working on it for a while!
During coffee, I was having a conversation with a person who used to be in business,
but is retired now.
He said he got out when he did because guys his age were dying from stress-related illness
like heart attacks and strokes.
Was it that stressful, I asked?
Oh yah, he said. It was crazy. The owners pushed for more and more profits,
trying to squeeze every last ounce of productivity from every division of their business.
Constantly pushing to improve the bottom line.
I said to him, “It seems to me that business used to be about more than the bottom line.
It was also about providing a quality product or service, and about relationships:
relationships with employees, relationships with customers, relationships with partners.”
Oh yah, he said.
But most of that has gone by the wayside. So I got out.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
A couple of nights later I was having drinks at Rae and Jerry’s with a new friend of mine,
who is a small business owner.
He is questioning what he is doing with his life and
wondering if this is really a good use of his time on earth.
When I asked, “How come?”
we ended up having almost the identical conversation that I had with the guy on Sunday.
He said his business has become all about the bottom line.
And when I suggested the exact same thing I suggested to the other guy, that my perception was that business used to be about more than the bottom line,
he completely agreed and said that that had come at the expense of quality product and
quality customer service, and
certainly at the expense of relationships with customers and with partners.
Hmmmm. Interesting.
I thought about these conversations as I studied Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees this week.
First: let’s get a few things out of the way.
To begin with – and I can’t stress this enough –
Jesus is not here completely disparaging Judaism and
promoting Christianity at its expense.
Jesus was a Jew – and there was no such thing as Christianity when Jesus was alive.
Jesus was, in fact, probably trained in the tradition of the Pharisees as a rabbi.
Jesus is most like the Pharisees of all the groups he encounters.
And he not here doing away with all Jewish laws.
And he is certainly not disparaging the Sabbath.
The Sabbath is a good thing, in scripture and in life.
In our increasingly complex and busy world,
the notion of Sabbath rest is something we all desperately need.
Jesus is simply making the point – and this was actually not novel to Jesus –
he was simply making the point that
the point of the Sabbath is to preserve and nurture and sustain life.
It’s for human benefit.
The point is not keeping the rule of Sabbath itself.
God gave the gift of Sabbath rest out of love for us, for our benefit.
Not so at the end of the day we could be all proud of ourselves for not working –
even though someone went hungry when
we could have alleviated their hunger on the Sabbath,
or even though a man with a withered hand continued to suffer when
we could have alleviated his suffering and returned him to the work force
the following day.
Yes: Sabbath rest is important, Jesus is saying.
But following the rule is not the most important thing.
Love is the most important thing.
Compassion is the most important thing.
Alleviating hunger is the most important thing.
Alleviating human suffering is the most important thing.
Love is the bottom line, according to Jesus.
And everything else must be measured by it.
What could more timely than Jesus’ reminder?
For my friends in business, it was abundantly clear that profit was not the bottom line.
Now obviously you can’t run a business without considerations of making a profit!
Like Sabbath rest it is obviously important.
But it is not the only consideration in life.
Relationships in which all those involved in transactions benefit is important.
Service and relationships of trust are important.
Profit is one important consideration in business, but not the only one.
We are a non-profit organization at First Lutheran Church,
so we are not really tempted to make profit our bottom line.
But churches are tempted to make survival a bottom line.
As if that were the only or ultimate consideration in our life together.
Just to keep it going.
But for Jesus, that is not our bottom line.
Building relationships within which people and communities can flourish is the bottom line.
Building relationships of trust and care is the bottom line.
Compassion is the bottom line.
Being of some use is the bottom line.
Love is the bottom line.
It is the same for our lives, right?
If I had a nickel for every conversation I’ve had lately with people where at some point
the person has reflected for a moment and said,
“Well, I guess you can’t take it with you” I’d be a wealthy guy.
I think we all know this.
The bottom line in life is not accumulating stuff.
The bottom line is the love we receive and the love we pass on.
Love is the only absolute.
Love is the one thing that shares in the quality of the eternal.
Love never ends, says Paul in I Corinthians 13.
And truer words were never spoken.
Paul is saying that when everything in the universe crumbles and fades away as we know it will,
only one thing will remain: and that is the love we have received in this life and
the love we have given.
It is why Christians affirm with First John, “God is love.”
Love is the one thing in life that is eternal.
Love is the bottom line.
Today, young Ashlynn is being baptized into this love,
the love that is shared between the three members of the Triune God.
Today, Ashlynn is being welcomed into that safe circle of love,
where she will be appreciated and loved for just exactly who she is,
where she will come to know that
she is making this day special by just being herself.
Where she will be loved by an infinite love that God has for her,
and where she will discover her own gifts for loving in her own unique Ashlynn-y way.
This congregation, we pray, will be place where she will experience that love,
where she will be loved and where she will find opportunities to exercise her gifts in
loving ways.
And where she will discover that love is the bottom line.
Where she will discover that compassion is the bottom line.
So, with Ashlynn and all the baptized,
with the disciples who had their hunger alleviated on the Sabbath and
with the man with the withered hand who had his suffering alleviated:
Let us affirm that love is the bottom line.
Let us praise Jesus for incarnating this love.
Let us praise the Spirit for bearing that love to us and in us.
And together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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