Sermons
August 9, 2026 (Proper 14)
Gold Doesn’t Rust
Matthew 7:12
It became popular about thirty years ago, and still is in some circles, to wear bracelets and other doodads with the initials “W.W.J.D.” on them. The letters, as I’m sure you know, stand for “What would Jesus do?” We are encouraged to consider how Jesus might act in any situation, as we decide how we should act.
The modern iteration of this question dates back to an 1896 novel by Charles Sheldon, who was a Congregationalist pastor in Topeka. But the idea is quite Biblical; it is based on Galatians 2:20, which says, “…it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” In other words, my actions are to be Christ’s actions.
St. Augustine developed this into the doctrine of imitatio Christi, or “imitation of Christ,” and a thousand years later Thomas à Kempis expounded on it in a book by the same name. It was this book that informed Charles Spurgeon’s preaching a few years before Sheldon wrote In His Steps.[1] It seems like quite a simple and basic description of Christian life: Act like Jesus.
But there’s a problem with it in this age of Biblical illiteracy. In order to answer the question, “What would Jesus do?” we need to know the answer to the question, “What did Jesus do?” Otherwise, it’s awfully tempting to assume Jesus would do precisely the same thing that we want to do, whatever it may be.
We can say the same thing about the Golden Rule.
It’s about as close to universal law as we can get, especially in this postmodern age when almost everything is up for grabs. “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you…” Jesus says in Matthew 7:12. Other faiths express it more negatively: “Hurt not others with that which pains yourself,” in Buddhism, for instance; but it’s the same idea.
We run our youth groups by the Golden Rule, oftentimes: “You wouldn’t want someone to pull a chair out from under you when you’re sitting down, would you? Then don’t do it to them!”
(Any of us who work with children know there’s almost always a smart aleck who replies, “But I like it when someone pulls the chair out from under me!” No you don’t. Knock it off.)
It seems so obvious that we hardly need a sermon on it. But I think we do.
To obey the Golden Rule, we start, of course, by thinking about how we prefer to be treated. I appreciate kindness, I appreciate being thanked when I do something for someone else, and so on. So perhaps we can assume another person might similarly appreciate these things, and we act accordingly.
That’s fine as far as it goes. Jesus says here that the Golden Rule sums up the whole of the Law and Prophets. (Later in Matthew, of course, he makes the same claim about what he calls the two greatest commandments, “Love God with all you are and have” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He’s not contradicting himself; I think a case can be made that “Love your neighbor as yourself” pretty much is the Golden Rule.)
But is the whole of the Law and Prophets simply projecting our own preferences and wishes onto someone else and treating them accordingly? I don’t know. I think there might be something else we need to do in order to be truly faithful to the Golden Rule.
Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that there is an elder in the church who, when they go to the hospital for surgery or something, prefers not to have people coming in and seeing her like that. A simple, literal understanding of the Golden Rule would tell that elder that she shouldn’t visit a sick person in the hospital, because she would not prefer a visit in that state.
But is that true?
Others might like to have a visit, someone to talk to that can take their mind off their situation, even briefly. If she operates with a strict, literal understanding of the Golden Rule, our elder might miss that reality.
So I would argue that truly being guided by the Golden Rule requires us to take another step beyond simply treating others as we’d prefer to be treated, in an objective sense. Just like how we can’t effectively answer the question “What would Jesus do?” without knowing what Jesus did do, we can’t really follow the Golden Rule until we step outside ourselves for a moment.
This allows us to apply the Golden Rule to our interactions with people who are not exactly like ourselves.
Again we return to our elder who generally prefers not to be visited when she’s in the hospital, but who has a church member under her care who is hospitalized. She could just say, “Since I would prefer not to be visited, Mrs. X would also prefer not to be visited, so I won’t.” But what if Mrs. X is a very social person who really would prefer a visit from her shepherding elder?
If the elder truly wants to do right by Mrs. X, she shouldn’t simply ask, “How would I want to be treated?” and stop. She should take one more step, and put herself in Mrs. X’s shoes. So the question our elder should ask is, “How would I want to be treated in this situation if I were Mrs. X?”—assuming she knows Mrs. X well enough to know that she enjoys visiting and being visited, and is an extravert whose recovery would quite likely be enhanced by having people around.
Just like the answer to “What would Jesus do?” isn’t necessarily “Jesus would do the thing that I want to do right now,” the answer to “How can I treat another as I would like to be treated?” can’t be to impose our own preferences on them. Instead, we need to get to know others and spend some time walking in their shoes, understanding their experiences and their needs.
It’s then that we’re able to understand how we might wish to be treated if we were in their situation. It’s then that we are truly able to love our neighbors as ourselves, to treat others as we’d have them treat us.
When we do that, we’ll find that the commandments take care of themselves, as Jesus and his fellow rabbis taught. “What is the most loving way to treat this person, given who they are, where they’ve been, and what they’re going through right now?” This is the Law and the Prophets.