The Measure You Give, the Measure You Get 

Luke 6:27-38 

June 26, 2016 

Mark S. Bollwinkel  

            On a police chaplain “ride along” I watched as the officer pulled over a 17-year-old driver.   She was traveling 50 MPH in a 25 MPH school zone with kids on both sides of the street.

            She was in tears as he issued her first moving violation citation.   The license plate frame of her red sports car read, “Fast Cars, Hot Men, Cold Champagne.”

            It reminded me of Jesus’ words, “The measure you give will be the measure you get” from his Sermon on the Plain.

            Many of the same teachings in our scripture for this morning from the gospel of Luke, we hear in Matthew’s version known as the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5-7).  In Luke’s version, Jesus chooses his twelve disciples on a mountaintop and then comes down to a level plain to deliver the sermon.  

All who will listen are equally in need of Jesus’ words not just those on top.

He talks about loving others, loving enemies, of not judging but forgiving.  He ends with an illustration about a measure; “the measure you give will be the measure you get.”

A measure was an instrument of market economics in first century Palestine and is still used in many countries today.   Dry goods such as grains, sugar, spices, and flour are sold by volume not weight in market places around the world.   It can be a 1-kilogram metal cylinder or can.   It can be a cup measure or quart of glass.   

An honest merchant will maintain the shape and quality of the measures.  A dishonest salesman will purposely bang up and dent his measure, or even place a false bottom in them so to cheat the customer.    The prophet Micah says that such false measures are an “abomination to God” (6:10-11).

Our Lord defines “a good measure”.  The merchant offers an abundant 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.”  It’s a similar phrase to “you shall reap what you sow” (Galatians 6:7) or the Beetle’s famous lyric, “And in the end, the love you take will be equal to the love you make.”

We know that to be true in so many parts of our lives.

You get as much out of your work as you put into it, or your marriage, or your health, or your church.

We will get as much out of our church as we put into it.  That is so true that we remind ourselves of our own commitment to the church and the meaning of our own baptism each and every time we repeat the sacrament.   We are asked to respond during the liturgy as we re-affirm our own commitments.

In the United Methodist Church we rarely baptize people privately, only in special circumstances.  Rather we do so publicly in the community of faith.

Who, all by ourselves, can live up to such standards as Jesus; “Love your enemies, pray for those who abuse you turn the other cheek”?   Nobody!   We need each other to learn how to live out such values, to create such a lifestyle.  We need each other to stay on Christ’s path when it is so easy to stumble.

Jesus suggests to us that reciprocity and humility is how we should form and regulate human interaction in business, within families, even with adversaries.   That is how we are supposed to treat each other in the church.

The measure you give is the measure you will get.  

In Mary Owen’s short story, Winning Isn’t Everything (Chicken Soup for the Baseball Fan’s Soul, Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Park, Florida, 2001, pp.136-138), she describes an event at her son’s Little League T-ball game in Davis, California that illustrates the point:

“A small boy stepped up to bat.  The crowd watched like hawks…waiting for the sought-after home run that most likely wasn’t to be.  After all, these kids were five and six years old, much too little to stroke a ball past the pitcher, if at all.

The little guy’s determination showed in his stance: gritted teeth, slightly bulging eyes, hat-clad head bobbing slightly, feet apart, hands with a death grip on the bat.  In front of him was a small softball, sitting perched like a parrot on a lone tree, awaiting the six swings that the batter was allowed.

Strike one.

“Come on, you can do it!” came a solitary voice out of the bleachers.

Strike two.

“Go for it, Son!” the proud father yelled encouragingly.

Strike three.

‘Go, go, go…’ the crowd joined in.

Strike four.

“You can do it!” just the father and a couple of viewers crooned, others losing interest and turning to bleacher conversations.

And suddenly bat hit ball, amazing the crowd and the little boy, who stood rock still, watching it travel slowly past the pitcher on its way to second base.

“Run!”  The stands rumbled with stomping feet.  “Run, run!”

The little boy’s head jerked ever so slightly and he took off towards third base.

“No,” the crowd yelled, “The other way!”

With a slight cast of his head towards the bleacher, he turned back toward home.

“No!”…the umpire waved him toward first base.

The kids on both teams pointed the way.  The crowd continued to cheer him on.  Confused, he ran back to third.  Then following the third baseman’s frantic directions, he finally ran toward first base but stopped triumphantly on the pitcher’s mound.  The pitcher moved back, not sure what to do next.  The crowd stood…all arms waved toward first base.  And with no thought for his position, the first baseman dropped his glove and ran toward the pitcher.

“Come on,” he yelled, grabbing the hand of the errant batter and tugged him toward first base while the crowd screamed its approval.  The ball lay forgotten as the triumphant twosome hugged each other on the piece of square plastic that marked the spot where lives are forever shaped.  

Two little boys, running hand in hand, toward a goal that only one should have reached.  Both came out winners.

No one will ever remember the score of that summer afternoon encounter.  Competition…lost to sportsmanship, an innate formula for winning.”

How often do our relationships at work, at church, in our families, even in our marriages degrade into power struggles?   Feelings get hurt, needs go unmet, emotions simmer and pretty soon somebody’s got to win and somebody’s got to lose.

While preaching on the plain Jesus uses the word “agape” in the original for our English word “love”.    It’s a love that has the welfare of another as its goal.   It’s a love in which everyone is a winner and nobody has to lose.

To the church in Rome Paul writes, “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor” (12:9-10).

Imagine what our homes and church and marriages would look like defined by a good measure of such love.

But that is not how God deals with us.  In fact, God may often do just the opposite; “…for God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked”.  God does not give us equal measure for measure.  We don’t reap exactly what we sow with God.   As much as Jesus’ message of equality in love should prevail in human life and society there is no such equality between God and us.  Rather God gives us love, mercy and grace we don’t deserve, forgiveness we cannot earn.

A while back, I received an email from an old friend, Rev. Jonathan Jelanding.   While I was principal of the Methodist Theological School in Sibu, Sarawak, East Malaysia thirty-seven years ago, Rev. Jelanding was my best faculty member.   Bonnie and I spent our three years as United Methodist missionaries in Northern Borneo trying to convince everyone involved in the Iban church, and in the missionary headquarters in New York City, that we shouldn’t be there.   In our first assignment out of seminary, we worked very hard to get ourselves out of a job.

It was long past time to train Iban pastors at the graduate level of theological education so they could lead their seminary and train their pastors without the confusing influence of North American culture and expectations.   As long as they continued to send missionaries, the Iban church would never move past its legacy of dependency and grow its own leadership in theological education.     

It was personal stress and our infant son’s illness with typhoid fever that finally forced us to return home.  

When we came back to California, while waiting assignment to St. Paul’s UMC in Reno, Nevada, I saw a pastoral counselor to help me through the guilt, shame and anger I was experiencing because of what I perceived as a terrible failure as a missionary. 

At the time I didn’t know that the church “powers that be” would use our return to America as the occasion to shut down the school in Sibu as a missionary assignment, as we had been requesting, and fund a scholarship for Rev. Jelanding to study for a Masters of Divinity degree in our United Methodist seminary in Ohio.

Since then, two other Iban pastors have also earned advanced degrees and they make up the core of the faculty now at Sibu. 

I’ll never forget the words of the wonderful Presbyterian minister and licensed therapist who helped me work through my crisis of failure as a missionary when he said to me, “Can’t you see that God has used your brokenness for something good.  Doesn’t that grace and forgiveness you preach to others also count for you?!”

I wept reading Rev. Jonathan Jelanding’s email.  He emailed me just to let me know had just been elected President of the Iban Conference of the Methodist Church of Malaysia [like our Bishop].

This God gives us love we don’t deserve, forgiveness we cannot earn.  Somewhere in varying degrees each one of us comes to a church looking for that very same word of grace.

Isn’t that really why we are here, why we join a small part of the body of Christ, because in a sermon, or a song, in discovering a new friend or the desire to renew old vows, somewhere in this particular place and with these people, we have heard the God who loves us, in spite of us, call our name?

That God calls us to love each other with good measure because the measure we give is the measure we get.   We can do so because that God loves each one of us even more than that.

Amen.