Loving God… and Neighbor?

Scriptures:     Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17, Matthew 22:34-40

For those of us who have been Christians for any length of time at all – and I’m pretty sure that includes most everyone in this room – this text from Matthew 22 is just second nature to us. We could recite it in our sleep.  Which commandment is the greatest?  Why, of course, love God with heart and soul and mind – and there’s a second just like it:  love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus here is putting together two key passages from Hebrew scriptures, which the Pharisee asking the question would recognize:  Deuteronomy 6:5 (which, by the way, uses “might” or “strength” rather than “mind” – and the difference between those words could be a sermon in itself) and Leviticus 19:18 (where “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” is found in the midst of a whole series of laws defining ritual and moral holiness).  In citing these passages, Jesus is demonstrating for the Pharisees that he is a loyal Jew and knows his scripture.

We’ve gone far beyond Moses and the Ten Commandments here.  By the time Jesus lived there were 616 laws which faithful Jews were supposed to know and follow.  And of course the Pharisees were trying to trip him up by getting him to say that one of these was more important than another.  He’s just side-stepped a similar attempt by the Sadducees who were trying to get him to say to which brother a widow who had married seven of them would belong in heaven, and also by another group of Pharisees who tried to get him to mis-speak when they asked him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”  So now they’re bringing in the big guns – a lawyer – to test him:  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

Did you watch the Republican candidates’ debate here in Las Vegas last Tuesday?  I was reminded of this passage from Matthew while I was watching it – not that I would identify any ofthose candidates with Jesus, but because the goal, it so often seemed, was to trip somebody up, to get them to mis-state a fact or stumble through an answer in order to show themselves up. Rick Perry, it seems, was especially a target, since he had not fared well in previous debates, and he fought back by getting testy and tearing into most everyone else, but especially Mitt Romney. Back in the 1976 presidential debate, you may recall, Gerald Ford mis-stated a datum about Poland, and there are those to this day who think that may have caused him the election.

“Gotcha!”, for some reason, seems so much more satisfying than seeking a truly reasoned response to the serious problems that our society is facing.  And that’s what this Pharisee was seeking, as well – how could he catch Jesus in a mis-step, a mis-calculation, when the other two groups couldn’t?  This question about the greatest commandment was designed to do just that.

But as in the other two instances, Jesus wouldn’t take the bait.  He wasn’t trying to be oh-so-careful, like our political candidates are in a debate situation, nor to be politically correct and say what he thought they wanted to hear.  In Matthew’s gospel these exchanges occur after Jesus has came back to Jerusalem (that Holy City, as we heard Dain play a paean to so beautifully earlier); it’s after Palm Sunday, that glorious entry into the city, but Golgotha is just around the corner.  So, he has limited time, and above all he wants to make sure he leaves them with an understanding of the reality of God’s love.

“…love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  Sounds straight-forward and pretty obvious, doesn’t it?  But then comes the kicker:  “And a second is like it…..”  The same as – comparable to – on a par with – loving God:  “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Then he really sticks it to this lawyer-Pharisee:  “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

OK.  We’ve got our marching orders.  Simple enough, right?

But what if your neighbor is serial killer Ted Bundy?  What if your neighbor is Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh?  What if you are an ardent liberal and your neighbor is an equally ardent tea partier?  What if your neighbor’s dog does his business all over your lawn?  In a word, what if you simply cannot stand your neighbor?

Loving someone else, you see, doesn’t have to do with liking them.  Moreover, loving someone else in Jesus’ terms has nothing to do with any sort of feeling you have toward them.  It has to do with commitment.  That’s why this second commandment is like the first.  God makes demands on us.  We do not always like what God is calling us to do. Loving God does not have to do with our liking what God asks of us or any sort of a fuzzy feeling we may have about God.  And the same is true of “your neighbor”.  No matter what your feelings, you have made a commitment to act on the basis of love.  It is the action, not the feeling, that matters.

Minister Rosemary A. Rocha tells a story that bears on the meaning of this commitment.  She recounts:

“Larry was 85 years old and a member of the first church I served.  He was a curmudgeon, as they say.  He challenged everything I tried to do and consistently made things difficult for me. One day a rumor began circulating that he was going to leave the church.  The church moderator asked me to talk with him.  I did not want to.  I told her of all the ways that he had been mean to me and had made my life miserable. She listened and when I was done speaking she spoke, ‘You know, you don’t have to like him, but you do have to love him.’

“I hate it when church folk get you at your own game!  I thought about it, called Larry, and while I never really liked him, I tried to be loving to him.  He stayed at the church and I have always been grateful to that moderator who pushed me to be faithful to the story behind the words of love.”

Douglas Hare has said, ”In an age when the word ‘love’ is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary component of biblical love is not affection but commitment.  Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that [this commandment] demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment.”

And Kate Huey, who so often has such insight into passages like this, adds:

“We might begin our closer look at these two commandments by asking how humans can indeed be ‘commanded’ to love.  Some might ask, ‘how authentic is a love that’s forced?’  And then we might look more closely at how we define love mostly as a feeling that then causes us to behave in a certain way.  When we don’t feel love, it influences and even justifies our behavior, or our lack of right behavior.  We claim that no one can force us to love someone else.  And commitment can certainly be seen as a setting of the heart, something we choose to do, a way we freely choose to live our lives. Commitment is that mysterious mingling of feeling and action, a beautiful dance between the two.”

Kate goes on to recount this story, which is a good example of the impact of the Great Commandment on us as we anticipate Stewardship Sunday next week:  “several years ago, inspired by the witness of two older women, longtime and faithful members of the church who told me their stories of tithing, I decided to take the step of increasing my own giving to the church I loved. Increasing to a tithe was a challenge, but it surprised me that my feelings followed after the action, or after the commitment, if you will.  I found that I loved my church more when I gave more to it, much as we love our children more after giving of ourselves to them over many years. So it seems that when we decide to set our hearts in a direction, toward something or someone, and when we do the things that fulfill that commitment, our feelings often follow afterward.  The laws of giving and Sabbath and loving, I believe, are God’s way of getting us to do what we need to do, what’s good for us; these laws give us the direction for setting our hearts. Again, it’s a thing of mystery.”

Perhaps part of our problem with understanding how these expressions of Jesus lead us to commitment is thinking of them as commandments.  Biblical scholar Marcus Borg speaks of these as the two “great relationships”.  God calls us to be in relationship with one another, even as God offers Godself in relatedness to us.  The Psalmist implores God:  “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”  And we know that God has responded.  God’s love is steadfast.  Therefore, we are called to love one another, not just the people we feel love for, but all of God’s children, which is where justice comes in.

“Doing justice”, as Amos and Micah and a host of prophets have taught us, is the social form of love.  It’s what Jesus gets at in a couple more chapters in Matthew with his “as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”  “The least of these” refers to, among others, those who are unlovable, those we don’t really like, those we would prefer to avoid.  To commit ourselves to loving them – even as we love ourselves – which, you have to admit, for most of us is a powerful lot – is to find ourselves in the midst of doing justice in the world.

Jesus embodied love in his own life in a more radical way than the simple love of neighbor might suggest.  You may remember about a month ago when we were talking about Jesus’ statement that the last shall be first and the first last how his focus was on prostitutes and tax collectors and lepers – the very people who defined the word “sinner” in that society.  In fact he told the “religious” people of his day, “‘Truly I tell you the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you!’”  Indeed, he treated the shamed with honor and declared the unclean clean.  He loved the unlovable.  He loved his enemies.  To love God is to be devoted to a basic and fundamental reality that runs through all of life and creation.

Ever since college I have been particularly fond of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran; even though some criticize it as being overly-sentimentalized, it still speaks to me in many passages.  In his chapter “On Love” Gibran writes, “When you love you should not say, ‘God is in my heart’ but rather, ‘I am in the heart of God.’”  Rosemary Rocha comments on this passage:  “To love God above everything else and to love my neighbor as I love myself is to exist within the heart of God.  I think this is precisely what Jesus wanted for us – not to win a debate on religious practices, not to become the leader of a religious movement, but to touch people with the love of God.  That, my friends, is why we’re here.”

Loving God.  Loving neighbor.  Loving self.  The holy triumvirate of what it means to be here, to be alive, to be doing justice, to acting on behalf of the Christ in this world. Yes, we do have our marching orders.  No, it is not simple – but these are the most powerful, pleasurable, freeing, and fundamental actions we take as we worship our Savior:  “…love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind…and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
October 23, 2011