Do You Give Up on the Do-Gooders?

By

Eldridge E. Fleming, Ph.D.

New Hope Presbyterian Church

Rienzi, Mississippi

February 27, 2000

Children's Sermon:

This week we have had in our church a special kind of event. We had people who had surgery that we knew about. We also had on Thursday a very special kind of celebration. This was the funeral of one of our long-time members.

There is a special, special thing that goes on with people in the church and that is the need for them to have special love for one another, a special kind of caring about one another. As I look out at the congregation, I think about people who have been here for a while that may have gone away and not been here for a while, and then they come back and then they disappear again. I'm concerned about that.

So the question is, "How do we, as members of the church, how do we deal with this issue of one another and what we do in keeping ourselves in the fellowship." Being in church is very, very important and the importance comes from being able to see one another and do things with one another.

We can think for a moment about persons who are not here. We always say that preachers preach to the choir. That means they preach to the people who are doing the things that should be done and that is why they are there. So that is not the group to fuss at.

I grew up in a Baptist church -- well, I grew up from twelve years of age on in the Baptist church -- and the preachers were not counted, first, to be a very good preacher if he didn't shout. So I have to watch that and you can see that sometimes I get excited about things and that is when some of that tradition comes through. The other thing is, they weren't counted to be very good unless they criticized people for what they were doing. They have a term for that and it is called "stepping on your toes."

Have you ever had anybody step on your toes? Yes. Sometimes stepping on your toes is not a painful thing. They may just catch the toe of your shoe and hold it in place and that might cause you to fall down. But if they step on the toes just right, it hurts like crazy.

So they measured their ministers by how well he could step on your toes. That just meant that he could point out all of your sins and that was supposed to be good. And, of course, the big sinners were those people who weren't present and they got that term, "preaching to the choir," because the choir was usually there and all those who really needed preaching to were gone.

I don't do that so much because I didn't see Jesus doing it. But I did see Jesus having a concern about the people who followed him. He was concerned about the hungry. He was concerned about where they would sleep. And so, as a member of the congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ, we are concerned about one another, about how they are surviving. I'm saying all of that to say that one of the things that we learn to do in the church is to know how to care for one another.

Our modern world is a fast world and it doesn't give us opportunity, always, to do that. In fact, we're doing more and more things with one another without seeing one another. The more we do things by the internet or by telephone, we don't see each other. So how do we get that kind of seeing one another? We get it by getting together and that coming together is one of the reasons why we are here this morning and why we will be here tonight. That's the time we get to share with one another, get to see one another.

For the young person in a church that doesn't have a lot of young people, your friends aren't here. That is really hard. And one of the things we are hoping to get done is to get more young people here. That is a real challenge because bigness is what attracts. If you get a group of people together, they attract more people. If a group begins to disintegrate, that is, they begin to drop out one by one, the first thing you know there is nobody left for the group. That is a dynamic that we as a rural church have to really be alert to because it is so easy for them to go somewhere else or for them not to go anywhere. We really need to be aware. We need to love one another, help one another, bring one another together, and join one another when it comes time for worship and fellowship. Those are really critical times.

I'm always delighted when our youth is here, when our children are here. Today just happens to be the day when you get the whole load of hay instead of just a part of it. I wanted for all of our children to understand that it is important that they do things with one another and that they work together and care for one another. We'll talk some more about that in a moment, but I was really impressed with the ladies and the men of the church on Thursday and how they did a great thing. That gives you an idea of what I'm trying to say and next week I'm going to start an organized study dealing with issues that relate to developing good, strong young people in the church. So don't run away from me. Just stay in the church. Let's have our prayer together.

Father, thank you for the blessing you give us of being a part of your church. Help us to sense and understand the needs that each of us has for the other so that as we live our lives, we live them in harmony with one another and in caring for one another. For we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

The Scripture Reading:

Our Old Testament reading this morning comes from Hosea 2:13-20. Hosea is a book that we haven't done much with in recent days. I don't remember us reading from it in quite a while. Hosea is one of those accounts of a prophet in Israel who had a special commissioning. He was told by the Lord to find a wife and she had to be of a certain kind, of a certain type. The Lord said to Hosea, "Go and find you a whore." Now that is what it says. And so he went and found him a wife and she had children and the Lord told him what to name the children and so on and so forth. The reason for that was that the Lord was going to show to Hosea what Israel was like to Him. In the reading of that you really get with it to understand it and the passage that is selected for today as part of the lectionary will fit in with the rest of our scriptures for the day. It comes from Hosea and it can be romantic. Well, just listen to it.

The epistle reading for the morning comes from 2 Corinthians 3:1-6. You will remember that the Apostle Paul is writing to the group of Corinthians and this is classified as the second letter, but we know there are other divisions that could be made with it. He is trying to solve some of the issues that are present in the church.

The gospel reading for the morning comes from Mark 2:13-22. And if you can and are able, would you stand with us as we hear the gospel read?

The word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

The Sermon:

This week Past Monday Mrs. Bessie Doty died and her funeral was set for Thursday afternoon. The celebration that was planned went off pretty well except for the minister goofing up in a couple of spots. Unfortunately the mike that I wear was still on when I went back to greet some folks in the fellowship hall, and all the rest of you who were still out here and weren't talking, could hear some conversation. I understand that nobody could say what I was saying, and I turned it off as soon as cautioned. So hopefully that went away without too much trouble. If I embarrassed you, I apologize.

It was a great time for several reasons. One of the reasons was that I saw Joan with all four of her children. I saw Mr. George with his sister and with Ms. Bessie. They came from shore to shore. Can you believe that? Some of these relatives lived in the Carolinas and some lived in San Diego -- as far east and as far west as you can go. They all came and they were all here for this occasion. It was a good crowd in the service, and the celebration, I thought, went well. I am open for criticisms or for comments. Either way.

Our members did something that was very special and precious and for that I am so delighted. I don't know who of you did it. I just know it happened, and that is what makes it nice about you. I don't know who planned to have the refreshments. The refreshments turned out to be a full celebrative meal. There we were, talking with one another, and I am sure Ms. Bessie would have been pleased. A few regrets I have. One is that I didn't talk with Mrs. Huggins and others who had taught with her. Oh, I talked with one; I talked with Ms. Thompson. But there were others of you who had known her.

When I asked -- rare as I do on such occasions -- for a hand show of those who had been her students, it was amazing to see how many people in the congregation that day had been her students. Had I asked how many had taught with her -- which moves it to a different level of those who were educated by her and becoming educators themselves -- there would have been a goodly number of you in that group. She was one of those who was honored in a special way, and she is not the only one who has been honored that way in the last few years. You were doing good. Those of you who thought of doing those things, you were doing good.

So the title of the sermon today is not aimed at you who have done good in the past week or so. "Do you give up on the do-gooders?" I wouldn't classify you, in my book, as the do-gooders. Well, maybe I do want to do that, because doing good is what Jesus did. He went about all of Galilee doing good and his good was that he healed the sick, made the blind to see, helped the lame to walk, and preached the good news to everybody. So if that is doing good, that's not the kind of people I am talking about this morning in my sermon title.

It is the "do-gooders!" That is what I mean, those who do good so they will be known as doing good, and that seems to be their primary motivation. Jesus went about doing good, and he went about doing good because he knew what needed to be done. That is what I saw this week. You saw things that needed to be done. He knew how to get the job done. You have to know the need, you have to know how, and Jesus' motivation was that he was busy about his Father's business. He started at an early age, about Jennifer's age. He went about doing good. He said to his parents when they found him in the temple disputing with the leaders, "Didn't you know? I have to be about my Father's business?"

Jesus went about doing good, and that good is fine. On this particular day that we're reading about from the text, Jesus was about doing good. He was walking along by the sea. It was not unusual for Jesus to go walking by the sea. He loved the water and he often walked by the sea. People were all around him -- a great crowd followed him -- and everywhere he went, he was teaching as he went, giving out information that was helping them to understand themselves. And as he did that, he walked by a tax booth.

I don't know whether Levi was running it or not, but the implications from Mark and Matthew certainly are that Levi was a tax collector. Levi, we think, is the same as Matthew, and the first listed book of the gospels is that of Matthew. He was tending his business, and Jesus said to him, "Follow me." And Levi left his booth and followed Jesus.

You know, though, that when you change your life -- when you do a career change in mid-life -- you do some things out of courtesy and you do some things out of sincere gratitude for the change you are making. When Jesus called him, he followed. And when he followed, he invited Jesus to come to his house for dinner. That is no small thing and Mark didn't include that just to be giving you the reports of history.

It is very important to understand that in that area of the world -- and still is true today -- when you eat with someone, you are a friend. You do not accept an invitation to eat with your enemy, but when someone shares a meal with you, you become friends. You don't forget. Levi invited Jesus to his house for dinner. Jesus came. Jesus came and his disciples came and Levi invited his friends. His friends were tax collectors and sinners. Jesus was there eating with them and having a good time. No doubt he was having a good time. Jesus could understand the change in Levi. He knew what was happening to him. He could be excited about that; he could see someone who was on a better track.

Then, of course, there were those do-gooders: the scribes and the Pharisees, the legal aides to the Pharisees. They were the persons who were in charge of understanding and recording history and making people provide themselves a life that would be according to those rules. These were not people who were "bad." In their eyes they were holy people. They did the things that the rules say to do. They were law-abiding, they were rule-meticulously abiding, those rules were extremely important to them, and they were doing them. They could go into the temple anytime to pray and they knew that they could lift clean hands to God in the process.

You see, the Jews prayed with their hands up to God, showing the palms. That is not something that just developed in the charismatic movement with Pentecostals in this century or the last century. That is the position of prayer. Hands lifted to God. You may be on your knees, but you lift your hands to God to show that you have hands that are full of mercy and kindness and gentleness and not full of blood. So they went to pray. They were holy people; they lived by the rules. They gave themselves to those rules to make sure they were right. When they went to pray, they were good.

You remember the story that Jesus told about the Pharisee who went into the temple to pray? And he listed his hand to God standing and praying, "O Lord, I am grateful. I am thankful to You that I'm not like other men, not like this sinner back here. I'm standing here holding my hands holy to you because I pray regularly. I do alms to the poor. I attend all the services at the church. I do all these things. I've done all that you've said for me to do, and I'm holy." Do-gooders.

It is not bad to do all of those things. Rightfully they should have done all of those things and we should do them, too. We should do every one of them. But the point is that we need to be driven by the Spirit of God in kindness and in mercy and not condemning of others. You remember the rest of the story. Jesus said the Pharisee stood and held his hands high and he prayed, and the sinner and the tax collector in the back would not so much as lift his face to God. He was embarrassed with his sins, overloaded with them, and was on his knees praying, "Father, forgive me for sinning."

Jesus said, "I tell you. He went away forgiven and the other one didn't." But the other one standing holy in his own goodness did not have any reason in his mind to ask for forgiveness. So the scribes and the Pharisees were trying to be good. They were doing everything by the law and the rules and they said, "If Jesus is a good man, if he is righteous, why is he eating with tax collectors, traitors to our nation, those people who take money from us and goods from us and put us in prison, those people who take tax from us and send it to a foreign government? If he is a good man, why is he doing that? Why is he eating with tax collectors -- those plain, open sinners?"

Jesus said to him plainly and simply, "Those who are well have no need of a physician. You are well. You don't have any need for me. There's no room in your life for me. You're okay. I can't convince you that you're not okay. In your mind you are okay, and if you are okay in your mind, you don't need me." Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick do. Now I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners. The righteous don't repent. The righteous don't confess their sins. The righteous are self-righteous. That is not the group I came to deal with. I came to deal with the sinner bowed in contrition prayer. I came to deal with the sick that need to be touched and healed. That is who I came to deal with. So did Jesus give up on the do-gooders? The holier-than-thous? It seems like it, doesn't it?

Let's look at the next section. It says that John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. It could have been the same time, it could have been a different time; but they were fasting. And the people came to Jesus and said, "Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, and your disciples do not fast?" Jesus teaches another lesson. He says to them that the wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, and then Mark does an interesting thing. He adds, "Can they?" As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away and then they will fast on that day.

But Jesus didn't stop at that point. There is another paragraph there. This paragraph makes us fully understand what Jesus was saying when he talks about the righteous, when he talks about the sinners. Listen to this.

No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak. I remember as a boy -- and all of you men were boys at one time -- I remember that I liked to play. Oh, we could play with anything. Boys in the country in the '40s could play with anything. We played on our knees. We would wear holes in our overalls and when those holes came, Mother would patch them with different kind of cloth sometimes. I remember patches. So when Jesus said, "You don't take an unshrunk piece of cloth and patch a cloak," it struck a chord with me. All of you mothers who have patched or repaired clothing know what that is like. I remember when there were no Sanforized or pre-shrunk fabrics. You could put a new piece of this material on an old item of clothing and wash it or get it wet in the rain, and it would shrink.

But the story I didn't identify with was the taking newly made wine and putting it in goats' skins. We call them goat skins, but the primary source for that was the stomach of the animal. You put that new wine in that newly gathered stomach and it would expand and contract as it needed to during the fermenting process, the aging process of the wine, and it would be fine. Then you could pour it all out. And when you got through using it, you didn't put new wine into the old wineskin. If you did, the new fermentation process of the wine would expand it and it would burst open and you would lose the wine.

Jesus was saying something extrememly important in those follow-up verses to the ones we read. He is saying to those Pharisees and the scribes, "What I am bringing into the world is new." Do you remember Hosea saying, "I am going to have a new covenant? I'm bringing something new into the world and the old standards that you have been using -- the old way you've been doing them, the old rules following that you have been doing -- are not going to get it. You've got to do something different. Jesus says, "This new wine that I am bringing has to be put into new wineskins."

Jesus did a radical thing. He called people from all walks of life. He got them from various backgrounds, from various tribes, from various interests, from various skills, and he called them together to follow him. Oh, he saw their foibles. He saw the things that were wrong with them. He knew those things that were there. Look at Levi, the tax collector. Look at Judas. He saw those, but Jesus worked with the potential and he took this group of people who were not formally trained in the highest rabbinical schools of the day and he made them to be that mission team that would go out for him and take the good news of God into the world. The scribes and the Pharisees had everything figured out and could stand on their own. They kept the law. They lived holy lives. They criticized the unholy lives and habits of others. In all of those things, they missed the connection between holiness and caring for others.

It is that connection between holiness and caring for others that Jesus said had to be there. Steadfast love. Justice. Mercy. Those things have to be there. There is always a tension between living holy and being helpful to others, and sometimes we don't know where we stand when we make the actions.

Last night about ten o'clock our doorbell rang. It was raining outside and had been all night. I went to the door, and as I opened the door, there stood a man drenched to the skin. He had on a shirt, a pair of trousers, and a clear face. He looked at me as best he could and told me a story. He had come to visit his grandmother in the hospital and the fuel pump had gone out on his car. He took the money that he had and bought the fuel pump and put it on, and then he didn't have enough money to get home. Would I help him? What do you do? How do you handle that? What do you do with it?

Do we keep the holiness connected to mercy? Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I've come to call not the righteous, but sinners. The wedding guest cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them and then, they will fast on that day. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, otherwise the patch pulls away from it -- the new from the old -- and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the wine would burst the skins and the wine is lost -- and so are the skins.

But one puts new wine into fresh wineskins. Sounds like Jesus is saying that the old ways of holding the truth are no longer flexible enough; they have to have something new. If the do-gooders are like old cloaks and old wineskins, new foundations must be used and more flexibility is required. Let us not stop doing good, but let us be sure that we are flexible with the Spirit. Amen.