O Lord, grant us to know your abundant love for us that we might respond by loving you with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves ✠ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The English novelist E.M. Foster is oft-quoted for his line, “Only connect.” In one novel he writes, “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” In Ephesians, St. Paul writes that “Christ is the plan for the fullness of time, the means by which God will gather all things up” and in Colossians, he puts it this way, “Christ is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” All of these are different ways of speaking of integration, of saying that everything belongs, of pointing to the reality that all things are connected because we are the Body of Christ.
In
today’s Gospel text, we heard one of the most well-known passages in all of
Scripture, at least I hope that it’s one of the most well-known. It’s often
called the “Great Commandment.” A scribe has been watching Jesus’ interactions
with others and has come and seen his deep wisdom. So he asks, “Which
commandment is the first of all?”
If
someone asked you what is most essential to faith, what might you say? Jesus
does not turn to the Ten Commandments. Instead, he turns to a passage from Deuteronomy
known as the Shema and says “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord
is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” This was a central
commandment for all Jews, in fact, it still is today. Of this commandment, Deuteronomy
says “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite
them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are
away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand,
fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your
house and on your gates.” This commandment to love God functions as something
like a Creed in Judaism. And the Shema is about connecting. Connecting
our heart, soul, mind, and strength. In other words, it’s about loving God with
the totality of our being.
It’s
a great answer – loving God is central to faith. But Jesus doesn’t stop there.
He connects something else to loving God: loving our neighbor as ourselves. So
when Jesus is asked about what the most important commandment is, he responds by
connecting two things and making them one. And if we were to shorten Jesus’
answer about which commandment is greatest, we could say that the Greatest Commandment
is that we love. Through and through, our faith is rooted and grounded in love
and love is the fruit that blossoms through faith in Christ. It’s central to
our parish identity statement – come and see beloved community: a community
that is loved by God, that strives to love God in response, and seeks to foster
beloved community among our members and in our neighborhood.
In
fields like mathematics, physics, economics, and psychology, they all search
for the answer that explains everything else. Whether it’s an equation that
brings things like the speed of light, the weight of a neutron, and the force
of gravity all into alignment, or a formula that will predict economic fluctuations,
or a theory that explains human desires and actions, experts give their lives
to search for some sort of key that will explain everything. Well, here in the
Church we don’t have to search for that thing. Love is the key. Love is what
holds everything together. And I know that it can sound trite to say love,
love, love. But when we say “love” in the Church we don’t mean the way you feel
about a new gadget, or a pet, or even a spouse. In fact, love isn’t even a
feeling – love is a commitment, an orientation, a priority, an action.
If
it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then the picture that best
defines love is the image of Jesus, the Son of God, on the Cross. And this is
why sometimes people are dismissive of love. It’s not because love is too
sentimental, too sappy, too emotional, too impractical. No, not at all. Rather,
the sort of love meant by “For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal
life: is a transforming, vulnerable,
self-giving love. It’s the sort of love that demands all of us, and for that
reason, sometimes people dismiss love as being impractical, not because love
doesn’t work, but because love connects things that we’d rather keep divided.
In
the first part of Jesus’ response to the question, he tells us that we are to
love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. In an
excellent article on this passage, our own Dr. Dora Mbuwayesango writes that
what is elicited from us is a response of extravagant love. We love with our
heart, meaning our sense of conscience and morality. It’s point towards what
many call the “Golden Rule” – “do to others as you would have them do to you.” We
love God with our souls, meaning with the very essence of our lives. We love
God with our minds, with our thoughts, ideas, and plans. We love God with our
strength, meaning with our energy, vitality, and resources. With the entirety of
our being, we love God. At all times, in all places, with all resources, we are
to respond in love to the God who first loved us.
And
how exactly are we to love God? Well, as it’s put in First John, “Those who do
not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they
have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God
must love their brothers and sisters also.” Jesus connects loving God with
loving our neighbor. Martin Luther King pointed at the same truth when he said
that “We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together
as fools.”
Just
stop and think about how ridiculous we are. I mean it. Here we are, sitting on
a rock in cold and lifeless space, circling a flaming ball of gas. God has
blessed us with life and with a planet that produces enough for everyone to
have enough. If we are lucky, each of us gets about 90 years of life, which
doesn’t even register on the scale of human history. And yet we seem hellbent,
pun absolutely intended, on making life hard for one another. We lie, we cheat,
we steal, we hoard, we exclude, we divide. Just think about how silly we must
look from an outsider's perspective. We’ve been told that love is the key to
everything, and we’ve tried everything but actually using that key.
That
being said, I know that many of you strive to love. I am inspired by how you
all love one another and serve our community in love. I am not dismissing any
of that, nor am saying that if we all could just love more that the world would
be a better place. None of us are the savior of the world. We remain human.
Sometimes we think that we are doing the loving then but we end up just making
things worse. Jesus does not tell us to love God and love neighbor as a project
for us to do or a status to achieve, instead, he’s telling us how we
participate in God’s love for us.
No
matter who you are. No matter what you have done. No matter what you have not
done. Each and every single one of us and all of us together are loved by God.
We do not have to earn or deserve this love, which means that it can never be
lost or taken away. This is the message of grace – that God loves us and wants
us to do nothing more than to enjoy this love by participating in this love
with God and others. And the way this love happens is by connecting.
This
Great Commandment connects Deuteronomy where the love of God is mentioned with
Leviticus, where the love of neighbor is found. Jesus’ words connect the grace
of being loved by God to our calling to participate in and further this love.
That old faith versus works debate is obliterated by love – it’s not grace or
works, it’s both; they are two sides of the same coin of love. We are loved and
so we love. The Great Commandment connects faith with life – Christianity is
about certain truths such as God is the Creator of all things, God brought the
people out of slavery in Egypt, God was born in Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus was
crucified and rose again on the third day, the Holy Spirit was gifted to all people.
But these are not merely ideas to hold in our minds, they are truths to be expressed
in every moment of life through by pursuing love. The Great Commandment is
about the integration of religion and spirituality, of faith and practice, of
believing and living.
And
this commandment of love also connects the two sermon series that we’ve had
since August – sermons about “What is the Church” and “What is Stewardship.” Over
these many weeks, I’ve used a lot of words all of which have been about love.
The Church is the steward of God’s love because we are the Body of Christ. We
have been given the story of faith, the story of how God loved us so much to
come to us in Jesus and to live, die, and rise to show us the depths and the
grandeur of this love. In the Eucharist, which is a gift of love that God has
given to us, we see that story of love and receive those dear tokens of Christ’s
love for us in receiving his Body and Blood. And I the sermons about financial stewardship,
we’ve considered how we give of our treasure, that our hearts might follow in
being given to God’s beloved community in the Body of Christ. So one of the central
reasons that give is giving is a part of how we love, how we participate in God’s
love, with the fullness of our being. If we hold back and are not as generous
as we might be, we might think that we’re doing something for our own financial
security, but we’re really just holding ourselves back from giving ourselves
fully to the love God intends for us.
This
is the beautiful, mysterious, and glorious thing about faith: everything is
connected in the love of God. Tensions are resolved in love. Differences are
reconciled in love. Fears are overcome in love. Enemies are made friends in
love. Sins are atoned for in love. Death is resurrected in love. The Cross is shown
to be the grain of the universe in love.
As
James Joyce wrote, “Love loves to love love.” We are created in love, for love,
and by love in order to flourish in that love by loving God and others. The love
of Christ connects all things and brings all things to their perfection. It
really is the greatest truth, the greatest commandment, the greatest
connection, the greatest way: As the beloved of God, we are given the gift of
participating in this love that makes all things well by loving God with all our
heart, all our soul, all our mind, all our strength, and loving our neighbor as
ourselves. My prayer is that we grow into the fullness of this love in God’s beloved
community.
