Yesterday's Sermon for Justice Sunday

Yesterday I was in charge at church, which means I preached the sermon.  It was a Justice Sunday, which we do periodically, so the service was set up with several speaking opportunities for others before I preached my sermon.  So I tried to keep my sermon short.

I started my sermon by saying that we had heard about our justice projects, and I was going to talk about justice and God and Valentine's Day.

I talked about my spin class friend who on Friday, talked about the flowers he bought his wife and how he would take her out to dinner.  I asked him, "What are you doing March 14?"  He said, "What's March 14?"  I said, "Exactly," and gave him a brief sermon on allowing the forces of capitalism to dictate to him how he showed his love for his wife.

I talked about how much we spend on Valentine's Day and about whether or not that's how we want to show our love.  Maybe we want someone to make an extra mortgage payment; maybe we say, "I love you" by keeping a roof over our heads and a door that locks.

I talked about how God wants us to show love, or how we've thought that God wants us to show our love for God.  If we were ancient people, we'd save our money to buy the biggest beast we could, so that priests could slaughter it and burn it.  But we have the text from the prophet Isaiah that tells us that God doesn't want burnt offerings.

Through the ages, we might have been taught that right behavior is the way to show our love for God.  What that right behavior is has changed through the ages:  attending church every Sunday, avoiding premarital sex, avoiding alcohol, supporting missionaries, becoming a missionary.

I talked about Jim Wallis of the Sojourners community reading the Bible through various lenses and counting references.  There are about 12 references to homosexuality in the Bible, but thousands about economic injustice.

I talked about God's vision of the world, and that it's not the world we currently live in.  I talked about God inviting us to be part of creating that world.  I talked about God's desire to be in relationship with us, and that it's through these relationships that the work gets done, the work of creating the world that God envisions for us.