Homily, July 13, 2025
From The Pastor
The world view a person holds will determine their perception of life from that point of view. To turn a phrase, a point of view is a view from a point. For most people, the determining point is me. What I see, perceive, experience, learn, and come to believe creates my view of the world. How a person sees and interacts with the world will determine their values and the degree of importance various people or things will hold in their life.
The interaction between Jesus and the scholar of Law (a lawyer) is a good example of this. The point of view of the lawyer is the law; how it should be kept and by whom. His role is one of authority over others in the name of God. His motive and energy are to be on the right side of the law. The Law he teaches is that of God and religion. His world view is that God is a Law maker who expects laws to be obeyed. Those who keep the Law as God intends will be one with God. His personal justification depends on keeping the Law.
The world view of Jesus is the Father; to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. To love God is to love one’s neighbor. Jesus respects the Law, but lives from the heart in the Spirit and love of the Father. Knowing the fullness of the Father’s love, the world view of Jesus is one of compassion and mercy. Mercy and compassion are the nature and identity of God.
The lawyer affirms Jesus in the correctness of his answer. In the world view of the law, the scholar wants to limit his liability of failure by limiting who is considered a neighbor. This leads Jesus to the story of the Good Samaritan. It is an effective story because the meaning is obvious; obvious but difficult and too often resisted as unrealistic.
The world view of a Christian is Christ. The practice of Christianity is to imitate the life lived by Jesus. This is a life-long journey given the impact of sin and the world views of wealth, power, and control over the weak, the poor, and those considered less desirable. This is an uphill climb. It is not by accident that Jesus exposes the priest and Levite as keepers of the Law, who for the sake of religious purity ignore the plight of the robber’s victim.
In the world view of Christianity, what does it look like to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength? God is One. God is first. God is the Source and Origin of all that is. I do not fit God into my world view as I see things and want them to be. I seek to mature and grow into God’s universal view as seen and lived by the Lord Jesus.
How do I do this? It begins with faith and trust in God as supremely loving, humbling himself to become incarnate in the Lord Jesus as Savior and Christ. To know God is to love God, and to love God is to know God. To believe in the love of God experienced in the Lord Jesus is to learn to trust God in all things, however wretchedly difficult they may be.
To know yourself in Christ is to believe you are holy and beloved, willingly, and freely created by God for a meaningful purpose. To know and love yourself is to be honest with yourself, accepting yourself as a creature and a sinner redeemed in the Lord Jesus. To know yourself fully is to know yourself in God. You are not a separate self. You belong to God as God has been given to you in Christ through the Spirit.
Living in God who lives in you, you seek and desire to make God the central identity of who you are as his holy creation. More than keeping laws to avoid punishment, you feel your heart drawn by God as God seeks a mature relationship with you. To feel drawn to God with the desire to love God is not your doing; it is God’s gift. Well beyond the rule of law, your nature is to love God for God’s sake out of gratitude for the gift of life that is yours.
This is not fear-based faith. It is the nature and call of the Christian life that leads to happiness on this earthly journey as well as the gift of eternal life. This is not a gotta do, or else. It is a journey, an invitation, a call to share the life of God here and now as well as in eternity.
By nature, to love God leads us to love our neighbor. As you are an image of God, so is your neighbor whom we are called to love. Every human being, however unappealing, hated, rejected, or disordered they may be deserves the dignity of their human nature. Christ died for all, especially the poor, the hated, and the rejected.
As a Christian, check your world view and do all you can to put God first and at the center of who you are as a beloved son or daughter of God. In Christ you cannot fail.
Father John Esper
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