If available, this post will be updated later tomorrow with the Worship Service taped at St. Matthews Church in Welland.

Bulletin: Worship Guide

Gospel and commentary (PDF)

Prayer of the Day

Almighty God, gracious Lord, we thank you that your Holy Spirit renews the

church in every age. Pour out your Holy Spirit on your faithful people. Keep them

steadfast in your word, protect and comfort them in times of trial, defend them

against all enemies of the gospel, and bestow on the church your saving peace,

through Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the

Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Gospel: Matthew 22:34-46

34 When the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered

together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him.

36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him,

” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and

with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a

second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ 40 On these two

commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this

question: 42 “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to

him, “The son of David.” 43 He said to them, “How is it then that David by the

Spirit calls him Lord, saying,

44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord,

“Sit at my right hand,

until I put your enemies under your feet” ’?

45 “If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” 46 No one was able to

give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more

questions.

Commentary—“toward a sermon”

The plan was to draw a line between Jesus’ reply about loving neighbour as oneself

and the riddle Jesus poses about the relationship between the Messiah and the

venerated King David. The value of reading other commentaries is to keep

preachers honest…and to keep us hearers honest too.

Love God and love neighbour is so easy to say. It’s tougher to do. Maybe we know

that love can be understood as what we do for the benefit of others. Can we always

be sure we know what that good is?

The challenge might be to help others when we can while paying close attention

that we interact as equals. A couple of commentators suggest that humility is the

thing that enables us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves.

If we skim from the top of the riddle we see something suggesting humility shown

by King David. The riddle isn’t meant as a change of subject we don’t

think….more like amplifying what it means to love one neighbours as one self.

We won’t totally unpack the riddle today. Instead we’ll consider what it really

takes to obey the commandment everybody agrees is “the biggie”.

Maybe the repeated attempts to publicly embarrass Jesus betray a lack of love.

Maybe the thing sociologists call the honour and shame code gets in the way of

loving one’s neighbour. Public challenge riposte events were designed to define

the social pecking order. Very much a win/lose sort of proposition. Tough to love

ones neighbour as yourself when everybody is jockeying for position.

Ironically even when we try to be humble, we’re kind of proud of our virtue. You

might recall the TV series Poirot starring Sir David Suchet. In one episode Poirot

decides humility would be to his advantage and he announces that in his quest to

cultivate some, “there will be nobody as humble as Poirot”.

When Jesus confers blessing on the humble, he uses a literal term…we could

translate it “down to earth”. Maybe other word nerds enjoy the connection

between the words “hummus”, “humility”, and “human”. The connection

illustrates that we are creatures and we’re part of creation. We are entrusted with

care of other parts of creation, because we’re related to it all. Kinship may well be

at the heart of humility.

The writer and preacher Frederick Buechner says truly loving others requires a

high level of self awareness. He says to love your neighbour as yourself requires

you to love yourself as you love your neighbour. Our task, Buechner says, is that

we share the self we love instead of keeping it in a “perpetual safe deposit box”

(Buechner, Wishful Thinking a Theological ABC, page 87-88).

The riddle about the Messiah being Son of David and yet Lord over David presents

a paradox. The early Christians heightened that paradox with a hymn that finds its

way into the letter to the Philippians…In prose form…Jesus doesn’t regard

equality with God to be exploited. Instead he becomes human…he takes on the

form of a servant and even becomes obedient to the point of death on the cross

(Philippians 2:5-11). From this place of moral authority Jesus calls on us as thechurch to love our neighbour. He embodies that love. He empowers us to love as

we’ve been loved. Living these paradoxes and riddles might be what we mean

about a church in constant re-forming as we learn and grow and start new every

day.