Mar 11, 2024
The story is told of a man who was on a business trip and stayed
in a hotel that had a bug problem. There were bugs all over his
room. He complained about this to the management and later wrote a
letter of complaint to the main office of the hotel
chain.
Sometime later he received a letter signed by the President of the
company. It said:
“We are humiliated that a man of your integrity, a man of your reputation, a man of your importance in the community should have had this experience in one of our hotels. We are deeply sorry.”
This made the man feel somewhat better about the situation until,
as he was folding the letter to put it away, he noticed a little
piece of paper at the bottom of the envelope, obviously not
supposed to have been included. It was in the President’s
handwriting and it read: “Send this guy the ‘bug
letter.’”
Unfortunately, this is the way we sometimes treat other people.
We send them the ”bug letter,” the form letter. We give them
the tired, old cliches: We ask them:
“How are you?” when we don’t really care.
We say “have a nice day," or "I'm so sorry,” when
really we couldn’t care less.
When Jesus was asked which of the commandments was the most
important he replied with two.
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second
is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment
greater than these." ~ Mark 12:30-31
According to Jesus the only way to truly love God requires us to
love people as we love ourselves. Now, there is a lot going on in
this text but the bottom line is simple: a disciple of Jesus loves
God by loving people.
That's easy enough to remember and say, yet actually loving someone
is much harder to do. True love requires something of us...it
requires us to truly care about others, even if they are our
enemy.
Each day we come into contact with people who will have one thing
in common: they're struggling with something. They will
tell us about loved ones who are sick, loved ones who have died,
loved ones who have problems. They will share with us their
sufferings, their heartaches, their fears.
Perhaps Mark Twain was right when he said, “You should never
tell people your problems because 80 percent of them won’t care,
and the other 20 percent will think you deserve
them!”
Let us not send them the “bug letter.” Let us listen
carefully and mean it when we say we care. Jesus never sent anyone
a “bug letter.” We shouldn’t either. To better understand
what this would look like in your life, check out part nine of our
sermon series through the Gospel of Mark.