In our society one can hear a lot of talk about investment plans. The topic becomes more important as we begin to focus on that someday of retirement. How shall we invest what we now have for the sake of the future? My granddaddy used to say, "Land. Buy land. Messing around with the stock market is like gambling in Las Vegas." But one of my respected mentors used to say, "Stocks. Buy stocks. Over the long haul, stocks is the way to go." And when I have talked to investment counselors, the options of how to invest for the future multiply in number and complexity.

How to invest the money we have now for the sake of our future is an important question. We want our investments to pay dividends; we do not want to waste our money or just fritter it away. We spend dollars for this and that and in the end have nothing to show for it except some relatively obsolete gadgets and photographs taken in forgotten places. There is no investment plan. There is only random spending, done to satisfy the last whim or craving.

All too often, this way of dealing with money is also the way we deal with time. We waste it. We just fritter away our days. All too seldom do we think about the investment options for our lives. Of course this does not mean we have somehow been able to save up our time like money in a savings account. There is no time saving plan that allows us accumulate extra hours or days for spending in the future. The twenty four hours we have in each day are spent by the end of each twenty four hours. The only question has to do with the use we made of that time. All too many of us, all too much of the time, invest our days in this and that without realizing the time we are spending.

One of the goals of this sermon is simply to call to our attention to the fact that we are spending our time. We are unable to put life on hold; it is impossible for us to put some minutes in a time bank for us to withdraw at a later date.

A second goal of this sermon is to motivate us to examine our living to discover what we are doing with our time. How are we spending our limited days? In what are we investing our lives? That is not merely another question among other questions. That is THE question. In what are we investing our lives?

There are investment options. Because the past is past, the question about how we invested ourselves in life yesterday are of very little importance. To be sure, we cannot escape the consequences of the choices we have made in the past. But we do not have to continue making those kinds of choices. We can make other choices about what we do with our limited time.

The really important questions are: How are we investing ourselves in life now, and how are we preparing ourselves for investing ourselves in life tomorrow? While we live in the midst of the consequences of our yesterdays, we are given choices about how we will spend the twenty four hours of today.

What are the investment choices we will make?

We who claim Jesus as Lord, claim Jesus as our leader, our role model. For us Jesus is the one to whom we look to discover not only what God is like, but also what it is to be truly human. What can we learn from him about the use of our limited time?

The passage we read today from chapter 10 is part of a larger story. For several chapters, Jesus has been the focus of religious anger. Some of the very religious people were upset by what Jesus was saying and doing. In chapter 9 there is the story of Jesus healing a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus healed him by spitting on some dirt, turning it into mud and putting the mud on the man's eyes. Then he told the man to go wash in the pool of Saloam. The man did and he was able to see.

What upset the religious people was that in their opinion Jesus has violated one of the ten commandments God had given Moses. Jesus had worked on the Sabbath. Surely he was not a man of God, much less the son of God, if he had so little regard for one of the commandments of God.

And so they verbally attacked him. They even tried to gain evidence from the man who had been healed and from his parents, trying to show Jesus was a charlatan or, that he was possessed by a demon. In an earlier confrontation Jesus had with these folks (see chapter 8) they had actually started picking up stones to kill him as a blasphemer.

This was the setting for the passage we read today. "I am the good shepherd," Jesus said. "The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand … runs away [in situations of danger because he does not care for the sheep]. … I lay down my life. … No one takes it from me, but I have the power to lay it down of my own accord, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father."

And to all this, the very religious people who were upset with Jesus said: "He has a demon and is out of his mind. Why listen to him?" But some others said: "These are not the words of one who has a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?"

What can we learn from all this about how we are to use our time? There is much that can be learned from these chapters in the Gospel of John, but for today, what I want to focus on is Jesus’ faith that led to both his obedience to God and his compassion to persons.

When we look at Jesus as our Lord, our leader, our role model, the authority regarding being human, what we discover is one who trusted God. Jesus lived trusting God to be his Father, trusting God to be at work in his life, trusting God to make use of his ministry—even when it looked as if his ministry was a failure. Jesus lived trusting God.

Jesus trusted God so completely Jesus lived in obedience to God. Obedience is not a popular word in our culture. We shy away from saying anyone must obey. Perhaps the military is the last institution in our society in which obedience is viewed as a virtue.

For the rest of us, the goal more often than not is "to do our own thing." "Self-fulfillment" is our goal. "I Did It My Way" is our theme song. Being independent and not allowing anyone to tell us what to do is our goal in life. Locked in some sort of perpetual adolescent rebellion against any shape or form of authority, words such as "obedience" and "obey" are worse than distasteful.

And yet, these words, these concepts are at the heart of the faithful life because until we trust God to the point of doing what God wants us to do we do not really trust God. If we do not trust that God loves us and that God will not abandon us we will never be able to obey—certainly not when what is called for is for us to follow Jesus’ example. "I am the good shepherd," Jesus said. "The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." There is no virtue in self-abuse. There is no worthy value in self-destruction. We are not called to waste our lives in some display of self-sought martyrdom. But we are called to obey God—to do what God wants us to do with our lives.

We have to have confidence in God to be willing to try to seek, earnestly seek, God's will for our living. That can be dangerous if we do not want to make any real changes in the way we are living. But if we have confidence in God, if we trust God, if we have faith in God, then seeking, earnestly seeking, what God wants us to do is the natural thing to do. And if we have confidence in God, if we trust God, if we place our faith in God then striving to do what we understand God wants us to do is no special deal. It is simply the way we live.

Jesus invested his life the way he did because he trusted God, he had confidence in God, he placed his faith in God. This led him to live in obedience to God.

And obedience to God was no heavy chore. It was not a painful burden to bear. In trusting God, Jesus placed his confidence in God's love. And confident in God's love, Jesus lived a life of love, a life of compassion. In this he was obedient; because he trusted God, he loved God with his heart, soul, mind and strength, and he put that love into action by giving of himself for the good of others. That is to say, he loved his neighbors as himself.

What shall we do with our time, the limited time we have? We are to place our faith in God so that we willing strive to obey God by having what we say and do in each moment be consistent with the command to love God with all that we are. This will lead us to follow the example of the good shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep—not as some burdensome duty or some self-inflicted martyrdom, but as an expression of loving others as God in Christ has loved us.

 

God, help us. May the way we invest ourselves in life each day be pleasing to you. Give us that faith that leads to joyful obedience and compassionate living. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer:

God, on this Pentecost Sunday, send your Holy Spirit among us so that we are aware of your presence. Empower our living so that we, like Simon Peter, leave our old ways behind and in our deeds and speech make known the amazing grace you have revealed in Christ.

All too often we live not only as if you are not present in our lives but as if you never could be. May your Spirit be so at work in us that we not only sense your presence in our living, but that we also become aware of what you want us to do. And God, empower us to do what you want done. Motivate us to take the steps you see we need to take. Turn our living in the direction you would have us go.

God, we pray that this Pentecost Sunday not be merely the remembrance of a story told in the Book of Acts. We pray that the truth of that story happens to us and among us. May your Holy Spirit move us to a new level of discipleship.

This we pray in the name of the one who in showing us the way, taught us to pray: "Our Father. …"