Help us, O Lord, to love you in all things and
beyond all things. Amen.
Does anyone think that love is a bad plan? Maybe I’m out of touch with the world, but I just don’t think many people hear Jesus’ summary of the Torah, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” and then think “Yea, that’s not right, there’s got to be a better answer.”
The
issue is that we’ve all heard that we’re supposed to love God and love our
neighbors, what, a thousand times, ten thousand times? We hear it in Scripture,
we hear it music, that “love is all you need,” we hear it in movies, and we
hear it from preachers – that we just need to love God and one another. Our
problem is not ignorance – we know that love is supposed at the center of everything.
Rather, our issue is that we’re not clear about what love is, we’re not always
willing or able to take the risk of love, and even when we are, we don’t always
know how to love. And we see all three of these dynamics at play in the encounter
that Jesus has with the Pharisees in the Temple.
What
is love? A translation of Scripture that I’ve mentioned before is the First
Nations Version. Published about a year ago, it’s a translation from the
perspective of the indigenous peoples of this land and I find it to be an enlightening
way of encountering the Bible through fresh eyes. That version translates the
Great Commandment as “You must love the Great Spirit form deep within, with the
strength of your arms, the thoughts of your mind, and courage of your heart.”
Or going back about 800 years, St. Thomas Aquinas said that love is about willing
the good of the other. The founder of the Order of the Holy Cross, an Episcopal
monastic group, said “love must act as fire must burn.” And many theologians
have said that love is the raw substance out of which God created all things,
love is what was born from Mary’s womb, love is what was crucified on a Roman
cross, and love is what raised Jesus from the dead.
Given
all of that, what is love? Well, we can say that love is not about our emotions
or feelings. In none of those understandings of love do we hear anything resembling
feelings of affinity, or liking someone, or having warm fuzzies. Nor is love
intellectual; love is not something that we arrive at through reason, logic, or
debate. Instead, love is a commitment, an orientation, a resolve. Love is another
way of saying that we are in harmony with God. The metaphor that I like to us
is the beginning of a symphony. Once the conductor comes out, she usually points
at the oboist, who plays a note, and then everyone is to tune towards that
note. Now, if you get to the symphony early, you’ll notice that all of the
musicians are warming up and tuning their instruments. And, presumably, they
all think that they are in tune as they are preparing for the concert. But what
makes the beauty and the harmony of the music work isn’t that everyone thinks
that they are in tune with one another, but rather that they listen to that
first note and then adjust towards it. That commitment to being in tune, to
listening for that unifying note, and then adjusting towards harmony is a good
way of understanding what love is all about. Again, love isn’t about how we
feel about someone, or God, love is about seeking harmony, or, we might say,
love is about seeking communion.
And, as Jesus defines it,
we cannot love God without loving our neighbor. In the letter of First John, we
read “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are
liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen,
cannot love God whom they have not seen.” It is through loving our neighbor
that we love God. In defining love in this way, Jesus is synthesizing a passage
from Leviticus about loving our neighbors and a verse from Deuteronomy about
loving God with the fullness of our being. The conflation of these two directions
of love, towards God and our neighbor, tells us at least two things.
One, love requires us to
be rooted in a tradition of love. When asked which is the greatest commandment,
Jesus doesn’t have to struggle to come up with a response. He is rooted in a
tradition and is able to respond out of that tradition that has formed and
shaped him. This is why worship and practices of prayer and Scripture reading
matter so much. None of us knows when we will be tested. We can’t plan our
accidents. Chaos is not something we schedule. We read Scripture and come to
church not to appease God, not because it is a duty or obligation, but because through
prayer we become attuned to the sound of love. In beloved community, we are
reminded who we are: the beloved of God; we receive Sacraments which nourish us
in love; we have opportunities to practice forgiveness, generosity, and unity without
uniformity. When I worry about the decline of Church participation and affiliation,
I don’t worry about the future of this institution, I worry about the future of
a society that doesn’t have a note of love to tune towards.
The other thing that
Jesus shows us in his summary of the Torah is that we have to be able to see
the forest, not just the trees. Jewish scholars tell us that there are 613
commandments in the Old Testament. The Pharisees tested Jesus to see which single
one he’d pick. They were asking him to exclude 612 commandments in favor of
one. But when Jesus was asked to choose one, he landed on two. Jesus shows us
that we don’t have to be limited by the situations we encounter. He was asked
for one answer and he gave two. Jesus didn’t let their question dictate the
scope of his response. We are often tempted to narrow, reduce, and exclude. But
Jesus shows us a response that includes and expands. Love is not about making
things smaller, but rather bigger.
In answering by including
all of the Torah instead of just picking one part of it, Jesus demonstrates that
true wisdom isn’t just about knowing things, wisdom is about knowing what they
mean. In other words, it’s one thing to know that orchestra is tuning towards
an A, or that an A note is 440 hertz. It’s something else entirely to know what
an A sounds like, what it feels like.
The point is that, by the
gift of the Holy Spirit, most of us know what the loving response is in most
situations. And, yet, we try to solve too many issues through resolutions or
legislation. Love really isn’t that complicated, but by trying to turn love
into a policy we end up with solutions that often fall far short of love.
And the reason for this is
that love is risk. Again, just consider the cross of Jesus as the ultimate picture
of love and we’ll understand why it is a risk. Love is not about self-preservation.
Love orients us towards others, and others are not perfect. And so sometimes
our love will be rejected and taken advantage of. It is as CS Lewis put it, “To
love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and
possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it
to no one. Lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that
casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken;
it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be
vulnerable.”
Many of us prefer safety
to vulnerability. We prefer comforts to challenges. We’d rather worry about our
problems than theirs. If love is about tuning towards that note of grace that
we have heard, we’d rather choose our own notes. In our self-centered and
individualistic world, we’ve been conditioned to believe that we have to find
our own note and then play it loud and play it proud. And while there is always
room for individual expression, just as there is room in a symphony for
violins, trumpets, cellos, and flute, there is only one note of love to tune
towards. That’s not to say that the other notes are necessarily bad or wrong.
In fact, any good symphony will probably play all of those other notes at some
point. What makes the music work though is that everyone starts by tuning towards
that note held in common.
But we’ve lost the
ability to listen to one another. We often reject the suggestion that we are
out of tune and need to make any changes. Sometimes we even dismiss the idea
that we are a part of a symphony and insist that we’re just a one-person band.
Maybe we’ve been hurt and excluded too many times and don’t want to be a part
of a symphony anymore, finding it easier to just go at it alone or in a smaller
ensemble. For these, and other, reasons, we don’t take that risk of love.
The result is that we’ve
lost our ears for love. We don’t recognize those notes of love when we hear
them. Or we’ve forgotten how to get into the right position to play those
notes. This is why I so often repeat this note of grace and love in preaching.
Until we know how to recognize that note of love over the cacophony of social
media, advertisers, politicians, and our inner-critic it will remain a
challenge to play that note of love. We can hear every Sunday that we are loved
not because of what we do or accomplish, but the Church only gets about an hour
of our week. Media and technology companies get a lot more time than that. St.
Luke’s has a budget of about $500,000 a year. That’s petty cash compared to
what society has at its disposal. As long as those other notes get more volume
and airtime in our souls, love will remain something that sounds nice, but remains
beyond our reach. It’s why gathering in beloved community and hearing the
message of grace and love in community is so vital.
In First Corinthians, St.
Paul writes that love is patient, kind, it is not envious, boastful, or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way; nor does it tolerate wrongdoing, rather it
rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all
things, and endures all things. But these are not virtues that are generally
valued or pursued. Sure, we say that we want to be patient, kind, and deferential.
But our society does not lift up those models. You can tell a lot about a
society by who it gives attention to and what sort of behavior is rewarded. And
before we just blame the media, we should realize that the media is just trying
to make money. They are giving us what they know we will buy. The media is
simply a reflection of who we are, and we are not a society that invests in
love.
Which means that even if
we have a fuller understanding of love informed by Jesus, even if have the courage
and will to pursue love, we haven’t been given good models for what love in
society looks like and might not know how to truly love. This is why later this
week we will celebrate witnesses to love when we celebrate All Saints. We will
consider people like Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Oscar Romero, Hilda, Francis,
and Julian. And, again, this is why being a part of a Church community is so
important. The Church is a place to practice this sort of love – it’s a place
where we are free to make mistakes because the Church is nothing else if not an
institution built on forgiveness and second chances. This is a place where we
can be in communion with people who are in different socio-economic groups, generations,
or political parties. The Church is a place where we cultivate these virtues of
love and we practice vulnerability by taking the risks of love. And we do this
because of the strength of the Communion that unites us is the very Body and
Blood of Christ.
In beloved community, we listen
for the note of love, and by the gift of the Spirit, seek harmony with God and
our neighbor. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God
abides in them. Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God.”
