Giving It All Away

The Rev. Joseph Winston

May 17, 2009

Sermon

Grace and peace are gifts for you from God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.1
Today the word love simply means getting something that you want.
Everyday experiences prove this fact. Listen in on a conversation between a
bunch of teenagers. “Where do you want to go to eat?” “I do not know. What about
you?” “Do hamburgers sound good?” “Not for me, I’d love to have some pizza.”
Loving pizza does not mean that you want to have a life long relationship with
bread, cheese, tomatoes, and toppings. Instead, loving pizza means that you like
the way that it tastes and that you would enjoy having a slice. More than likely, the
word love will come up in a discussion between men on what to do next weekend.
“What are you planning to do?” “I’d love to get away from the house for a while.”
Again, the action of loving means having something that you desire – a little bit of
1
Romans 1:7, 1 Corinthians 1:3, 2 Corinthians 1:2, Galatians 1:3, Ephesians 1:2, Philippians
1:2, 2 Thessalonians 1:2, Philemon 1:3

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free time. Women are not any better. They love to go shopping. They love to have
their hair done. They love to talk to their friends. All of the examples illustrate the
same point. In our everyday language, love means something that we like to do.
Today’s Gospel Lesson presents us with a completely different meaning for
love. Here Jesus plainly tells us that love is not getting what we want. Rather, love
is giving up the most precious gift that we have.
This way of speaking about love is not new for Jesus. Two weeks ago on
Mother’s Day, we heard the Gospel Lesson from John 10. In this teaching, Jesus
reminds us that He is the Good Shepherd. He also says that He is willing to die
for the sheep.
Jesus today continues with this same theme but instead of talking about love
in terms of sheep and Shepherd, He plainly tells what love really is. When you
truly love someone, you are willing to die for them.
We know the rest of the story. Jesus allows Himself to be arrested (John 18:5-
11). They try Him and find Him guilty. And He does die for us.
This act of love is the ultimate example of self-sacrifice. A perfect man dies for
the people who cannot save themselves. God’s Only Son dies so that His creatures
may live.
We all have greatly benefited from this gift. Our sins have been forgiven and
we will have eternal life with God and all the other believers.
In our own little way, we have taken this teaching of self-sacrifice to heart. For
generations, your great grandparents, your grandparents, your parents, have given
away their children.

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 Here at this baptismal font or one like it, a pastor met your parents and you.
Prayers were offered for your future life with Christ. If you were old enough,
you professed your faith in Jesus Christ, you rejected your life of sin, and you
confessed that you believe in the faith. If not, these promises were made by the
church on your behalf. Then the minister poured water on you and said that you
are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
This gift of God came at great cost to your parents. They literally gave you
away to God. This is what Baptism does. You were made a child of God. Your
parents no longer had a claim on you.
Only a few years ago, most people would have understood the price your par-
ents paid. For you see, families needed children just as much as children needed
families. Extra hands were welcome on the farm. Children pitched in and did what
they could. Children provide much more than inexpensive labor. They also helped
assure a good future for their parents. The children did this by living near their par-
ents. The members of the family helped one another make it through hard times.
And as the parents aged, it was their children who took care of them.
For the most part, we no longer live like this. Children do not stay on the farm
nor do they live close to home. The world leads them away from their families and
promises them a better life somewhere out there. The distance between parents
and their children makes it difficult for families to take care of one another.
Separation from our loved ones is painful in the best of times and in times of
crises even worse. We need someone to take care of us. Rather than turning to
God for help or to those people that God has placed near us, we reach inward and

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start relying on our own ability.
More often that not, it seems that we can find our way out of the bad situation.
Have this happen a couple of times and we will mistakenly believe that we saved
ourselves.
Our self-satisfaction with what appears to be our effort leads us to the next
step. We believe that we need some sort of reward for a job well done. So, we do
exactly that. We get what we desire.
Slowly over the years, our way of life has a deep impact on the way we think
so that even the meaning of words change. Now when we love, it no longer means
sacrificing for the good of the other. Now love means I want that.
We take and we take some more to make ourselves feel loved. But all the while,
we feel an emptiness inside that all our possessions cannot satisfy. Something is
very wrong.
If we are honest with ourselves, we can name our problem. We are greedy. We
want to keep everything for ourselves. Not only do we see this in the things that
we want for ourselves and the way we have redefined love but it is also clearly
reflected in our lives of faith.
Our own statistics prove this. We no longer have the time to worship the L ORD.
Our weekly attendance in this denomination has fallen by more than 190 thousand
members in the last twenty years.2 We also will not ask our children or grandchil-
dren come and learn about Jesus. Our Sunday School attendance during that same
2
Kenneth W. Inskeep, Life in the ELCA: The Brutal Facts, (Luther Seminary Board Address,
October 2006), p. 30.

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period dropped by 400 thousand. This horrible trend even includes the way we
view one of our most precious gifts from God, our children. We no longer give
them to God. Baptized membership in the ELCA or its predecessor bodies has
been on a decline for almost fifty years.3
The total result from our way of thinking is absolutely devastating. People are
not learning about Jesus. Lives are not being saved. Congregations are closing.
All of this has happened because we are not following Christ’s command to love
as He loves.
Even greedy people have a limit on what they want. They do not desire death.
But that is what we all deserve. Punishment for what we have done and left un-
done.
God does not give us what we have earned. Today’s Gospel Lesson shows us
this fact. Jesus told all the disciples that He loved them (John 15:12). Notice that
He did not withhold this blessing from any of them. He could of said only the pure
in heart are loved by God. He did not. Jesus told all the disciples that He loved
them. He might of set limits on His love and gave it only to those disciples who
never doubted. He did not. Jesus told all the disciples that He loved them. It was
within Christ’s rights to limit His love to those first disciples. He did not. Jesus
tells all the disciples, even those living today, that He loves them. The preferred
interpretation of “And I appointed you to go and bear fruit” in John 15:16a is
that Jesus selects all His disciples. Luke Timothy Johnson; Daniel J. Harrington,
S.J., editor, The Gospel of Luke, Volume 3, Sacra Pagina, (The Liturgical Press,
3
Inskeep, ‘Life in the ELCA: The Brutal Facts’, p. 45.

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Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991).
This is your gift also. Jesus loves you.
This love of Christ that gives everything away so that others might live might
strike us as very strange since we are so used to wanting everything for ourselves.
But this is the image that Jesus uses time and time again. He is the Good Shepherd
who lays His life down for the sheep. He is the true friend that gives up everything
so that others might live. He is the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and in
death gives much grain.
This is how we are to live and love. Jesus to this kind of life calls us.
The world all around us has a different understanding of love. They all think
that love is something that they want: I want a pizza, I want some time away from
the house, I want to go shopping. They cannot imagine anyone giving us they most
precious gift so that others can live.
By God’s grace, we know better. Jesus died so that we can live. Our calling is
to follow our risen Savior. Go into the world and share Christ’s love.
“The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and
minds through Christ Jesus.”4

References

Inskeep, Kenneth W., Life in the ELCA: The Brutal Facts, (Luther Seminary Board
Address, October 2006), Research and Evaluation Evangelical Lutheran
4
Philippians 4:7.

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 Church in America.

Johnson, Luke Timothy; Harrington, S.J., Daniel J., editor, The Gospel of Luke,
Volume 3, Sacra Pagina, (The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN: The
Liturgical Press, 1991).