LIFE MATTERS-6
Deuteronomy 24
February 9, 2014
One of my favorite bits on Saturday Night Live happens when Seth Myers does a section he calls “Really?” “Really” is heavily tinged with sarcasm and is aimed at something or someone that seems incredibly, ironically messed up. It goes something like this: “Really? Gas prices are four dollars gallon? Really? It cost me $80 dollars to fill up my car and the Exxon CEO makes that much money in half a second. Really?” It’s a simple rant that normally springs up from a sense of injustice or disdain or hurt.
I tell you this, because I have had countless “really” moments in ministry. Most of these moments have to deal with serving. Serving in difficult circumstances and seeing it go wrong any number of ways. Whether it is short-term mission trips, sermons, serving the poor, volunteering with kids, or any other number of places, there are plenty of ways for it to go wrong. You can run into ungrateful people, unreceptive people and angry people who think you are condescending to them. You can see people get hurt or sick while they are trying to serve. And even harder, maybe you have served for a long time and seen that nothing has changed, and that is hard. It has led me to countless “Really?” moments. Maybe you have felt something like this before too.
“Really? We want to help this school but widespread ineptitudes and red tape keep us from helping? Really? We have money and people that want to help and ask nothing in demand and you can’t find something for us to do. Really?”
“Really? You say you need help finding a job but can’t stop doing drugs for more than a day, which ruins all of your chances. Really?”
“Really? We give free food and clothing to some of these families but they still spend the money that they do have poorly. Really? Some of these people can’t pay for their kids’ lunch but they have $4,000 worth of rims on their truck. Really?”
“Really? We have people sign up to help and they bail out at the last second leaving me holding the bag? Really?”
Here is a big one. “Really? God we have poured thousands of dollars, thousands of man-hours and great amounts of prayer into this effort and nothing seems to have changed. Really, God, really?”
What you are hearing is my frustration with serving the city. It is a frustration with the recipients of our service, a frustration with those who are serving with me and a frustration with the God who calls us to serve.
Here are the two foundational truths; God called us to serve and service can be insanely frustrating.
You see this in the church, and you see this in our culture. You see idealistic college grads applying to Teach for America where they take their Ivy League degree into the inner city to teach only to get spit out two years later, jaded, cynical and angry. We see social workers depressed and alone after seeing the dark underbelly of our broken cities. We see those who serve in soup kitchens discouraged after the newness and excitement of helping others fades away. Collectively, those who have served are looking at a broken culture and they are throwing up their hands in despair and shouting, “Really?”
I have to share with you this morning a simple yet foundational truth: If your service to others is not anchored in your love for God, you will crash. If you do not have a theological/ Biblical foundation for your service, you will be disappointed by the recipients of your service, the participants in your service and sometimes even with the God who called you to serve. If your service is founded upon a feeling or a video or one good sermon, you will crash.
So, today I want to give you a Biblical framework for why we serve.
Deuteronomy 24:17-22
I am indebted to Tim Keller for some of my thoughts in this sermon. Check out his book Generous Justice. It is a quick and potent read and it is an apologetic for why, how and where we serve.
We serve because everyone has value
Genesis says that we were all created in His image. Man and woman, he created them, he created humankind in His image. We are image-bearers. This doesn’t mean God has a face that looks like mine. Thank God for that. This is not a physical resemblance. Being image-bearers means there is something distinctive and special about humanity. He didn’t put his image on any other created thing.
In Genesis 1:26-27, God set this paradigm from the very beginning. You will look like me. You will be able to love, be able to learn and be able to choose. You have certain faculties that no other created being has. You are special. Anytime anthropologists talk about humanity and say we are nothing more than animals, I cringe. We are special and different. We are image-bearers. We find out later in Genesis 3 that you are also sinful and broken but even still, you are special.
In Genesis 5:3, this image is passed down to a son. This passage shows the hereditary nature that Adam didn’t bear this image alone but he passed it down. We also see the special relationship that it implies when God gave us his image - it is like a parent/child relationship.
In Genesis 9:6 it says, whoever sheds man’s blood, has a steep price to pay. Why? You aren’t stepping on a dandelion or hunting a deer, you have killed something special, something unique.
So, we serve because everyone has value. Everyone has value because we are all image- bearers. Take your time, talents and treasure to benefit other people because they have value, even if they don’t seem to have value. This is a biblical precedent.
That brings us to today’s text. Do not deny justice to the orphan, widow or foreigner. You say, “Yeah of course - that makes sense - of course we care for orphans and widows and out-of-towners.” We forget that we are living in a culture heavily influenced by 2000 years of Christianity and other cultural developments. We have systems and philosophies that lead us to have governmental aid, orphanages and work agencies. However, in this ancient Near East culture, this was groundbreaking. Widows, especially older widows who couldn’t remarry because they were past their prime child-bearing years, (which was everything in a culture obsessed with preserving family lines and passing on the family lineage,) was a liability not an asset. She was something to be avoided. She couldn’t work, she couldn’t own property, which means she added nothing and took everything. Being a widow in the ancient Near East was not an enviable position.
The same was said of orphans. A child not of your lineage was a liability not an asset. Furthermore, children were seen as a nuisance and third class citizens. We forget sometimes and we implement our understanding of kiddos into the text, we love our kids, we cherish and prize them. We take them to baby yoga and make sure they get a ribbon. We let them run our calendars and set our life agenda. Not so in this time period and if you want proof, look at the state of things over 1000 years later at the time of Jesus. The kids try to come to Jesus and they are rebuffed by the disciples. Scram kid. Get out of here. Adults are doing important things here. Orphans were a liability not an asset.
Orphans, widows and foreigners were all exactly the same thing - a liability not an asset. A foreigner in your land and in your midst meant imposition upon your resources and time. It meant the communal economic pie was getting sliced a little thinner because someone else was draining resources. Foreigners were liabilities not assets. The point here is that we should respect and serve these groups but even more importantly these are types and they were the “least of these” in their culture. Our calling is to help the least, to assist everyone in our culture who is normally viewed as a liability not an asset.
Now, God says, “Serve these people. Do not deny them justice, do right by them. Create peace for them. Even them.”
We serve because everyone has value. They are all image-bearers. The disconnect is that it is relatively easy to love image-bearers that look like you, talk like you, wear deodorant like you and think like you.
I want to show you a photo of Bennett, he is my image-bearer and it is easy to love him and serve him. What about the messy people? What about the ungrateful people?
Just like the man at the gas station. I bought him $10 worth of gas and he was trying to scam more. Really? Really?
We serve because everyone has value, even cheating scammers, even ungrateful liars, and even incompetent bureaucrats. We serve because everyone has value. We bless others because they are image-bearers.
We serve because God owns it all
Deuteronomy 24:18-21
This passage isn’t very American, is it? We are taught from a young age, when you are eating dinner to do what? Clean your plate. Sit there until you clean your plate. Don’t be wasteful. We grow up as plate cleaners and then we go to work as plate cleaners. Squeeze every economic drop out of every single situation. Clean the economic plate.
This passage says, give justice to the fringe people, those on the edge, those who are liabilities not assets. And as opposed to simply having good feelings for them, it gives you a way to care for them. Limit your intake for the sake of others. Sacrifice. Don’t clean your plate. Leave some for others to taste.
This makes some of us uneasy. Think about it for a second. I doubt many of you in here are farmers but I bet you can picture this situation. I spend my money to buy seeds. I use my time to plant the seeds. I use my time to work hard growing and cultivating these plants. I use my effort to harvest and sell the crop. I put a lot of myself into this, and you want me to leave some. You want me to limit myself for the sake of others. The flawed but very common problem with this line of thinking is the mine and my talk.
We serve because God owns it all. My time. My effort. My money is flawed. We serve people who the world views as liabilities because we are briefly holding on to and have been asked to be stewards of money, talents and time. A major objection that some people have and a reason many people get discouraged is that we believe we have earned what we have. We don’t believe it is a gift to be stewarded.
Two things happened recently that reminded me of this idea. Sally Kearn, representative from Oklahoma, said the reason that minorities don’t earn as much is because they don’t work as hard. By extrapolation you can hear in her voice, I have worked hard and I deserve what I have earned.
Another example is a pastor that I know said that it is our choices not our circumstances that determine the type of life we live. And I couldn’t help but wonder if an orphan roaming the streets of Delhi, India would agree with that statement.
We are incredibly blessed to live in 21st century America. I think our circumstances and context has a huge impact on our trajectory and life course. Let me ask you a simple question, if Bill Gates were born in the Tibetan mountains in the 13th century, would he be as successful as he is today?
Here is another example. If you make more than 25k a year, you are in the top 10% of earners in the world. Ninety percent of the world makes $25,400 or less. That top 10% has 50% of the world’s wealth. This is about 20 grand less than the median income of the average American. What does this mean? Americans are either really hard workers who have earned everything they have…or we are extremely lucky to live where we live.
If you have a money flier in your bulletin today, please stand. You represent the 10% who are rich. You received those at random. If we went outside and entered again, do you like your chances of getting a green flier and being a part of the lucky 10%? Probably not. With that in mind, if you knew the chances were slim that you would be in that special 10%, wouldn’t you hope for a world where those with a lot helped those with a little? It is easy to come up with objections when you are in the 10%; it is harder when you picture yourself in the 90%.
A very good objection or accommodation to this idea is our modern day idea of taxes. I pay taxes and a portion goes to under-resourced orphans, widows and foreigners. In Jewish culture, we often mistakenly think they were only called to give a 10 percent tithe. In all actuality, the mandated giving was closer to 23 percent. During the time of Jesus, not only did Jews have to pay 23% a year in tithes, they had to pay whatever Roman tax collectors squeezed out of them. This act of willingly limiting your grain field was in addition to the mandatory giving. How do I know this? In Matthew 12, the disciples are walking through another man’s field and they harvest some grain. The heart of worship is moving past mandatory and into sacrificial.
We serve because God owns it all. This takes away our “mine” mentality and leads us to realize how lucky we are to have what we have and how responsible we now are. Don’t clean your plate. Leave margin. Limit yourself so that others can thrive. It is a wild thought, and it is God’s command.
We serve because God first served us
Verses 17 and 22 bookend this section. You are to do this because. This is the clearest motivator of the three. We serve because God served us. God says in this passage, if you need motivation beyond the simple fact that I commanded you to do it, here it is: You were in bondage and I set you free. Spend some time setting others free. The Exodus is the major shaping narrative of the Old Testament just as the cross is the major shaping narrative of the New Testament, and they are strongly related. They both are the moments where people were released from bondage. In a similar sense then, you might look to the New Testament and hear a similar idea in Romans 5:8.
While we were yet in bondage to sin, Christ set us free. Therefore, serve others. We serve a God who stoops and serves. And if you think you have excuses for why you shouldn’t serve, listen to this.