The Immediate Word

For February 23, 2025:

• The Golden Rule by Dean Feldmeyer. The Golden Rule — more than a nice idea.
• Second Thoughts: The Joy of Rebellion by Katy Stenta based on Genesis 45:3-11, 15.
• Sermon illustrations by Mary Austin.
• Worship resources by George Reed.
• Children’s sermon: The Golden Rule by Tom Willadsen.

Note: This installment is still being edited and assembled. For purposes of immediacy we are posting this for your use now with the understanding that any errors or omissions will be corrected between now and Tuesday afternoon.



The Golden Rule
by Dean Feldmeyer
Luke 6:27-38

Once again, some Kentucky lawmakers are renewing efforts to require the display of the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom in the state, a move similar to one in the 1970s that was struck down by the courts.

State Rep. Josh Calloway, a Republican from Irvington, is spearheading the initiative, and he is apparently willing to schlep his plan through the courts with all the time, resources, and money it will take to do so.

His argument is that the Decalogue isn’t really a religious document so much as a legal one that is “integral to the nation’s history” and upon which American jurisprudence is founded. That argument has not floated before, but who knows what the current Trump Supreme Court will decide.

Here’s an alternative idea that may not bring with it the legal baggage that accompanies the current plan: Instead of hanging the Ten Commandments on classroom walls, hang the Golden Rule there instead.

In the Scripture
“Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (v. 31)

The Golden Rule, or some version thereof, appears in the literature and/or traditions of virtually every religious faith and humanist philosophy. Judaism, Christianity, Bahá’í, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Ancient Egyptian, Hinduism, and Jainism all have some version of it.

For Christians, however, it does not stand alone. It comes to us in the middle of the Sermon on the Plain (Luke) and the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew), couched within a whole bunch of other ethical admonitions that aren’t as easy to shrug off as what some might think of as a self-evident “old saying.”

In today’s version from Luke, the Golden Rule is preceded by a general moral imperative and three examples of what it looks like when put into action.

First, a general imperative: Love your enemies. That is, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. Then he offers three specific examples of what the kind of behavior he’s talking about looks like when one puts it into action: 1.) If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also. 2.) If anyone takes your coat, offer them your shirt as well. 3.) If anyone takes away what is yours, do not ask for it back.

Then, he wraps it all up into a simple directive, what we have come to call the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”

Luke concludes this pericope with three parallelisms that speak to the outcome we can expect if we can bring ourselves to live by this seemingly simple rule. We will be different; we will stand out from the culture around us because:

1. If we love only those who love us, we’re no different than everyone else in the world.
   
2. If we do good only to those who do good to us, same thing.
   
3. If we lend money only to those from whom we expect repayment, again, the same thing. We are no different than anyone else.
   

In other words, if we want to benefit from doing good, being kind, being generous, and loving, we have to offer these to people who don’t deserve them. That, after all, is what God does, and we are called to be like God as God comes to us in Jesus Christ. At the very least, we should be able to be kind and generous to people whom we don’t know, whether they deserve it or not.

He concludes by applying the Golden Rule to our proclivity for judging others and warns us that God judges us by the standard we use to judge others. If we are mean and harsh in our judgment of others, that’s the standard by which God will judge us. If we are kind, merciful, and loving in our judgment of others…well, you get the point.

In the News / Culture
Ask your AI companion about common themes in fiction and film, and revenge/retribution will appear in the top ten every time. Revenge is not just a thing of movies and novels. It burns bright and hot in our own government.

To the degree that our president, Donald Trump, had a platform upon which he ran for office, certainly one of the planks in that platform, at the personal level, was revenge.

He vowed to go after all persons in and out of the government who went against him, disagreed with him, or, and this one is especially true, who investigated him, indicted him, prosecuted him, convicted him, and sentenced him for anything he had done. And he has made a pretty aggressive start in his quest for revenge.

To date, he has fired or had one of his disciples fire more than a dozen members of the Justice Department, almost all of them prosecutors who investigated and indicted him in one or more criminal cases. The top five administrators of the FBI have been dismissed, and he has demanded the names of more than 1,500 agents who had any part in investigating the January 6th uprising.

He has also fired 17 Inspectors General who serve as independent watchdogs within federal agencies, tasked with investigating allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse. Their roles are to maintain transparency and accountability within government operations. These officials are appointed to serve across different administrations and are protected under federal law, which requires the president to provide a 30-day notice to Congress before any dismissal, a law that the president has ignored, and at which Congress has shrugged.

His promise to leave no stone unturned in his search for undocumented migrant people has focused almost exclusively on Democratic states and cities.

In the Middle East, the Levitical code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has been not just ignored, but trampled by Israeli troops in a shocking lust for revenge. Since the October 10th terrorist attack in which 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children were murdered and 250 were reportedly taken hostage, Israel has undertaken a campaign of saturation bombing and military occupation that has caused the deaths of 45,000-60,000 Palestinians, 18,000 of them children.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the purpose of the violence is to destroy Hamas, but does he really believe that this overwhelming violence, this massive and brutal death and destruction, will somehow end terrorism?

Of course not. But the purpose of retributive justice — revenge — is not to influence the behavior of the one who has caused the offense, nor is it to assuage the loss, grief, and pain of the victim. The one and only purpose of retribution is to punish the offender for offending. That’s all.

The impact of the punishment upon the offender’s family, friends, and country is not a consideration. So, naturally, the result is that the offender now becomes the offended, and the cycle of violence and retribution is energized and extended.

As Christians, however, we know that there is a way to interrupt the cycle or to keep it from even getting started, and that is forgiveness as it is expressed in the Golden Rule. Treat others not as they treated you but as you would have them treat you.

In the Sermon
Sometime around 1754 BCE, the king of the Babylonian empire realized that as the empire expanded, it would need a uniform and consistent set of laws around which it would be ordered and organized. To that end, he created a list of 282 rules and laws and the punishments that would be handed out for any violation of them. He had them inscribed in cuneiform script on both sides of a stele, a seven-foot-tall slab of durable stone called diorite.

The king’s name was Hammurabi. He was the sixth Amorite king of the Old Babylonian Kingdom, and the legal code that he created is known as “The Code of Hammurabi.” The stele upon which the code is written was taken as plunder and lost in one of the many Babylonian wars. But in 1901 it was rediscovered by French Orientalist Jean-Vincent Scheil at the ancient site of Susa, in present-day Iran.

It is believed by many scholars that the Code of Hammurabi became the foundation upon which legal jurisprudence was built throughout the Middle East and the Western world up to the present time. It gave birth to the legal concept of “lex talionis,” or what we moderns refer to in more nuanced terms as “exact reciprocity” or “retributive justice.” In less nuanced terms, it is simply “proportional revenge” — an eye for an eye.

Retributive justice, or revenge, is the basis for English Common Law, European and Latin American Civil Law, Islamic Sharia Law, Mosaic Law, and the American Legal System. In some systems, the focus and emphasis is on the wrong done to the individual victim and the revenge to which they are entitled as the aggrieved person. In others, such as the United States, the belief is that a wrong done to one is done to all, and it is, therefore, the people in general who are aggrieved, and it is they who, as they are represented by the prosecutor, exact revenge for wrongs done to and against society.

Retributive justice requires that the wrongdoer be punished, and that the punishment must fit the crime. The problem comes in deciding exactly what punishment precisely fits the crime. If it is too lenient, the aggrieved party is wronged. If it is too harsh, the wrongdoer is wronged. So, the punishment must be determined not by the aggrieved party, who would be influenced by their grief and pain, but by a detached and objective judge, in a perfect system, the law itself.

The concept of rehabilitation as an alternative to recrimination in criminal sentencing didn’t enter the picture until the early 19th century. In the 20th century, rehabilitation became a central feature of the correctional system, especially in the first half. Programs aimed at mental health, substance abuse, and education were introduced to help offenders reintegrate into society. However, the popularity of rehabilitative programs declined in the 1970s and 1980s due to the “nothing works” doctrine, which questioned the effectiveness of rehabilitation, and retributive punishment has again become the driving force behind criminal sentencing.

The only problem with that is that lex talionis doesn’t work.

There are extenuating circumstances on both sides — the victim’s and the perpetrator’s — and the law is incapable of taking all of them into account. There are subtleties and nuances, contexts and circumstances, that need to be considered.

Of course, it is in human nature that people are not, generally, satisfied with the outcome of sentencing. Those who are punished rarely believe the punishment they received is just. Those who are aggrieved rarely believe that they have been fairly compensated for the totality of their pain and suffering.

Revenge is only good at creating a never-ending cycle of revenge and counter-revenge.

If we hope to live in peace with one another, we have to figure out a way out of the revenge cycle, and it is Jesus who has given us just that — the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule is more than just a good idea that we teach Sunday school children to recite from memory. The act of forgiveness, forgiving as we would want to be forgiven, interrupts and ends the cycle of retribution. Loving heals the wounds of the victims and, sometimes, the wounds that led the perpetrator to commit the crime in the first place.

It makes us more like the one we follow and claim as our Lord, the one who said, as he was dying upon the cross, “Lord, forgive them.”

Addendum
Revenge, often spoken of as justice, is one of the top ten themes that drive stories in film and fiction. Few realize that the original title of The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most famous such stories, was Une Histoire de Vengeance (a story of revenge).

In theater, Hamlet; in literature, Moby Dick; and in television, Breaking Bad all have revenge at the center of their plots.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn involves themes of revenge in a dark, twisted story of a wife’s mysterious disappearance and the ensuing investigation.

Stephen King’s premier novel, Carrie, is about a teenage girl who exacts revenge on her tormentors using her telekinetic powers.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker, seeks revenge against those who have wronged her.

In the novelization of the screenplay Kill Bill: Volume 1 by Quentin Tarantino, the Bride undertakes a quest for vengeance against those who wronged her.

And who can ever forget the most famous line from The Princess Bride by William Goldman: “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

In movie westerns, we can reach all the way back to 1958 to the Gregory Peck film, The Bravados, for a revenge theme. In 1966, Steve McQueen hit the screen in the western revenge drama Nevada Smith. More recently, there have been western films like Django Unchained, The Outlaw Josey Wales, True Grit, The Quick and the Dead, Hannie Caulder, and High Plains Drifter.


SECOND THOUGHTS
The Joy of Rebellion
by Katy Stenta
Genesis 45:3-11, 15

Joseph well understands the politics of subversion. He is not only a former slave but was outcast from his brothers, wrongfully accused of rape, and was possibly from the LGBTQIA community, as his famous rainbow coat could also be translated as a “lady’s coat.” As such, when he said, “It was not you who sent me here, but God,” he did not do so lightly. Joseph was very familiar with how God can subvert evil purposes and use them for good, not because God wants people to do evil, but because joy is an act of rebellion, as Womanist Too Derricotte first expressed.

We can see how the purpose of things can be subverted, refashioned, and revolutionized in art. Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show is one place that rethinks how America is for the one on top versus Black Americans, thus putting into sharp perspective the joy and exuberance that all of America is reaching for at the same time. A Substack article by Kasvare talks about the precarious position Kendrick Lamar was in to put on entertainment worthy of the Super Bowl while still communicating a complex message. As a multi-Grammy winner and Pulitzer Prize artist, Lamar’s performances will continue to have papers, essays, and college courses written about his work. For a basic understanding of the symbolism of what Uncle Sam, the game players, and the divided flag meant, one such interpretation is given in Rolling Stone. The radical hope presented in the Super Bowl show is for a United States where people are not players in a game, and behavior is not about polite repression, but about people being able to be true to themselves. The Black joy on display was jarring, and the absence of white performers was upsetting for some. In an era of DEI rollbacks, some joked online that if MAGA people are upset, they could ask for DEI in the performers.

The idea that abuse and suffering can be transcended to a place of hope and giving is the story of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors. Too often, we in the United States are afraid to share power with the marginalized because we are afraid that if we share power with them, they will treat us the same as we have treated them. The brothers were afraid of retribution because of all they had done to Joseph in the past. However, because of God’s plans for good, his brothers’ acts had the opposite of their intended effect.

Can we count on God and humanity’s capacity for good and the fact that joy itself is so often rebellion? Can we make good the ultimate goal and work toward that outcome until the end of this tumultuous time?




ILLUSTRATIONS


From team member Mary Austin:


Luke 6:27-38
Being a Giver
Jesus counsels us to live with generosity, saying, “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

Entrepreneur Chris Anderson, founder of the TEDx Talks, says generosity should be the way we measure our lives. He states, “The simplest, most powerful moral question people can ask of their own lives is this: Am I a net giver or a net taker? The answer to that question will come from taking stock of our lives: the people we’ve hurt versus the people we’ve helped, the resources we’ve consumed versus those we’ve protected, the ugliness we’ve been part of versus the beauty we’ve created, and so on. It’s an intensely personal question — and it has consequences for all of us. Whether our collective future is a good one or not depends largely on whether the majority of people give more to the world than they take from it.” (from Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading)

As we examine our lives, does the balance favor giving or taking?

* * *

Luke 6:27-38
Love Your Enemies
Eeeew. “Do we have to?” we think, as Jesus instructs us to love our enemies.

Author Melissa Florer-Bixler says that Jesus is playing the long game here. He has more in mind for our enemies than we can yet imagine. She writes, “It is the work of liberation to create the conditions of a world where enemies are freed from enacting harm and victims are freed from receiving it. It is easier to reduce Jesus’ teaching on enemy love to an ethical injunction, a set of rules we can parcel out to shift our behavior. Instead, Jesus calls us to publicly imagined possibilities of transformation that break open a renewed order. Only then can we love our enemy as we proclaim that their terror no longer has power over us.”

Once the power is gone, the enemy is gone. Florer-Bixler adds, “Jesus frees the community on the plain from entrapment to this negotiation of power. The power of the garrison is real, and it is also futile. It is destructive and ultimately doomed. For the rest of his life, Jesus will call enemies out of their enmity, into a social order that eradicates the destruction into which they are embedded.”

God’s good news for us will be good news for our enemies, too.

* * *

Luke 6:27-38
Strengthening the Patience Muscle
Talking to the crowd listening to him, Jesus says, “Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great.” The “expecting nothing” part is an invitation to patience as we wait for God’s realm to unfold.

M.J. Ryan says we can improve our spiritual skills here. She writes, “We can learn to harness the power of patience in our lives. It’s a combination of motivation (wanting to), awareness (paying attention to our inner landscape), and cultivation (practicing). We can do it because patience is a human quality that can be strengthened. We have what we need. We’re patient already — how else did we get through school, learn to love, find a job? We’re just not always aware of what helps us to be patient, what triggers our impatience, or what to do when our patience wears thin.”

The key, she says, “is that patience is something you do, not something you have or don’t have. It’s like a muscle. We all have muscles, but some people are stronger than others because they work out. The same is true with patience. Some of us may be better at it right now, but each of us can develop more with patience.”

Working on patience draws us closer to the God who is always at work.

* * *

Luke 6:27-38, Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
How to Treat An Enemy
“But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return,” Jesus instructs the people listening to him. He has already assured them of God’s reversals in the section before this. Similarly, the psalmist urges, “Be still before the Lord,” and do not fret about the evildoers.

Melissa Florer-Bixler reminds us that Jesus has a God-given way of detaching himself from his enemies, noting, “Jesus doesn’t want us broken apart and martyred for people who refuse the good news of our lives. We are given permission to leave. Holding on to power, ignoring the words of prophets, refusing to hear those who have news of liberation — these are their own judgments. We have no need to give ours. In the end, ordering life by the rules of coercive power opens the door to destruction and death. This good news will not come from the wealthy or the politically and socially connected. It will not come from those obsessed with their own righteousness through piety or religious practice. It will not come from those who lay heavy burdens on people’s backs or who ignore the cries of the poor, the orphan, and the widow. To follow Jesus into the life of the beatified community requires discernment between difference and enmity." (from How to Have An Enemy)

God’s judgments are already in process; we are called to discernment and not to be consumed by rage.

* * *

Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
God Asks for Patience
The psalmist promises that God is at work, even when we can’t see it, writing, “Yet a little while, and the wicked will be no more.” We’re invited into a practice of patience, hard as it is to wait.

Henri Nouwen observed that “Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a conflict. Patience is not a waiting passivity until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Let’s be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.” (from Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith)

Even while we wait for the wicked to be no more, we rest in sacred patience.

* * *

Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40
Be Still
Be still before the Lord, the psalmist tells us. Patrick Bringley, who was once a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says an art museum is an ideal place to cultivate stillness.

He shares that this is his best advice after ten years as a guard: “First, just get lost in the vastness of it all. Leave your meaner thoughts on the doorstep and try to feel, pleasantly, like a tiny insignificant speck afloat in a storehouse of beautiful things. Come in the morning if you can, when the museum is quietest, and at first say nothing to anyone, not even a guard. Look at artworks with wide, patient, receptive eyes, and give yourself time to discover their details as well as their overall presence, their wholeness. You may not have words to describe your sensations, but try to notice them anyway. Hopefully, in the silence and the stillness, you’ll experience something uncommon or unexpected." (from All the Beauty in the World)

Once we learn to do this in the museum, we can do it anywhere and rest in the presence of God.




* * * * * *

WORSHIP
by George Reed

Call to Worship
One: Take delight in God who gives you the delight of your heart.
All: We will commit our ways to God and trust in the Lord.
One: Be still before God and wait with patience.
All: We will refrain from anger which leads only to evil.
One: The salvation of the righteous is from our God.
All: God is our refuge in times of trouble.

OR

One: God comes to teach us how to live as God intends.
All: We need God’s instructions so we can find peace.
One: The Christ who dwelt among us continues to teach us.
All: We will open our hearts and minds to what he says.
One: The Spirit that dwells within us calls us to forgive.
All: By the power of the Spirit we will forgive all.

Hymns and Songs
How Great Thou Art
UMH: 77
PH: 467
GTG: 625
AAHH: 148
NNBH: 43
NCH: 35
CH: 33
LBW: 532
ELW: 856
W&P: 51
AMEC: 68
Renew: 250

Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee
UMH: 89
H82: 376
PH: 464
GTG: 611
AAHH: 120
NNBH: 40
NCH: 4
CH: 2
LBW: 551
ELW: 836
W&P: 59
AMEC: 75
STLT: 29

To God Be the Glory
UMH: 98
PH: 485
GTG: 634
AAHH: 157
NNBH: 17
CH: 39
W&P: 66
AMEC: 21
Renew: 258

From All That Dwell Below the Skies
UMH: 101
H82: 380
PH: 229
GTG: 327
NCH: 27
CH: 49
LBW: 550
AMEC: 69
STLT: 381

There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy
UMH: 121
H82: 469/470
PH: 298
GTG: 435
NCH: 23
CH: 73
LBW: 290
ELW: 587/588
W&P: 61
AMEC: 76
STLT: 213

Help Us Accept Each Other
UMH: 560
PH: 358
GTG: 754
NCH: 388
CH: 487
W&P: 596
AMEC: 558

Forgive Our Sins as We Forgive
UMH: 390
H82: 674
PH: 347
GTG: 444
LBW: 307
ELW: 605
W&P: 382
Renew: 184

Lord, I Want to Be a Christian
UMH: 402
PH: 372
GTG: 729
AAHH: 463
NNBH: 156
NCH: 454
CH: 589
W&P: 457
AMEC: 282
Renew: 145

The Gift of Love
UMH: 408
GTG: 693
AAHH: 522
CH: 526
W&P: 397
Renew: 155

Let There Be Peace on Earth
UMH: 431
CH: 677
W&P: 614

Go Now in Peace
CCB: 96
Renew: 293

May You Run and Not Be Weary
CCB: 99

Music Resources Key
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
GTG: Glory to God, The Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELW: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
W&P: Worship & Praise
AMEC: African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal
STLT: Singing the Living Tradition
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship

Prayer for the Day/Collect
O God who sends rain on the just and the unjust:
Grant us the wisdom to be like you
treating all people with kindness and love;
through Jesus Christ our Savior.  Amen.

OR

We praise you, O God, because you send your rain on the just and the unjust alike. You love all of your creation. Help us to be more like you so that we can treat others with kindness and love even when they do not treat us that way. Amen.

Prayer of Confession
One: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially when we seek revenge.

All: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. You have told us how to live in community with one another and yet we fail to follow your instructions. You have sent Jesus to us to teach us by word and deed how to love one another even if the other looks like our enemy. We want love and grace for ourselves but we desire harsh law for others, especially if they seem different from us. Forgive us and renew your Spirit within our hearts so that we may readily forgive even as you forgive us. Amen.  

One: God is forgiving and gracious. Receive God’s love and share it with all you know, even your enemies.

Prayers of the People
Praise and glory be to you, O God of all peoples and all creation. With your breath you created all that is and your Spirit fills all. 

(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)

We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. You have told us how to live in community with one another and yet we fail to follow your instructions. You have sent Jesus to us to teach us by word and deed how to love one another even if the other looks like our enemy. We want love and grace for ourselves but we desire harsh law for others, especially if they seem different from us. Forgive us and renew your Spirit within our hearts so that we may readily forgive even as you forgive us.

We give you thanks for your forgiveness and grace. We thank you for your loving presence that we see in all you have created. You have blessed us with people who love us and care for us and who teach us how to love as you love. We thank you for Jesus who forgave those who tortured and killed him. 

(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)

We lift up to you those who are on our hearts today. Some of those in need are our family and friends while some we have only heard or read about. We know there are many more who are in need that we know nothing about. But all are your children and we lift up their needs, as well. We pray for those who find it hard to forgive and for those from whom forgiveness is withheld. We pray for your peace to come to all.

(Other intercessions may be offered.)

Hear us as we pray for others: (Time for silent or spoken prayer.)

All these things we ask in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ who taught us to pray saying:

Our Father....Amen.

(Or if the Our Father is not used at this point in the service.)

All this we ask in the name of the blessed and holy Trinity. Amen.


* * * * * *

CHILDREN’S SERMON
The Golden Rule
by Tom Willadsen
Luke 6:27-38

When I was little, I had a big brother, and we used to fight. He would hit me; I would hit him back. Mom would observe, “That’s how wars are started.” And she was right; these skirmishes always escalated into wars with lots of crying.

Jesus said:

Do to others as you would have them do to you. [NRSV] or

Treat people in the same way that you want them to treat you. [Common English Bible] or

Do for others what you want them to do for you. [Easy-to-Read Version] or

Treat men exactly as you would like them to treat you. [J.B. Phillips New Testament] or

Ask yourself what you want people to do for you; then grab the initiative and do it for them! [The Message]

My brother and I got Jesus’ words wrong. We thought that we got to do to each other what they had done to us! What Jesus meant was treat others the way you want to be treated, not the way you have already been treated!

And Jesus wasn’t alone. A lot of different religions believe in the same thing. (You might want to have this or something like it to hand to the kids.)



Remember that what you do affects other people, just like what they do affects you. Try to care for them the same way you care for yourself.


* * * * * * * * * * * * *


The Immediate Word, February 23, 2025 issue.

Copyright 2025 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.

All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.