Matthew 22:34-46
“Love More”
October 25, 2020
Right about now, with tension and fear filling the air, we could use some guidance on how to make it through the coming weeks. What would make a difference beside wearing a mask, keeping our distance and voting? What is within our power to change? Change – both within ourselves and our little corner of the world.
What if we loved our neighbors and God the way that theologian, writer and Rupert resident Frederick Buechner explains this lesson of Jesus’ when he said: By loving God and your neighbors, Jesus doesn’t mean loving as primarily a feeling. Instead, he seems to mean that whether or not any feeling is involved, loving God means honoring and obeying and staying in constant touch with God, and loving your neighbors means acting in their best interests no matter what, even if personally you can’t stand them.” (Screen share Linus image) Linus here may be onto something…
That all sounded perfectly lovely until that final thought, “even if personally you can’t stand them.” Now there’s an idea for these divided times. To love those we don’t like, those who trouble us, those we feel threatened by, those we would never willingly spend time with. God is easy to love when God’s big and broad and out there because, let’s face it, most of us have an image of God that we’ve created using all of the best information we have but God is still how we each individually perceive God. It’s really easy to forget that in proclaiming the first great commandment to the Pharisees, Jesus is saying we are to throw our whole selves into our love of God. Is that possible?
When we get down to what that is going to look like, we have to get past the feeling of love which is not what Jesus and instead focus on the doing of love. I can think and feel anything deep and dark but what I do, how I treat the person who gets under my skin, makes my blood boil, or holds opinions I find abhorrent is how I love God. My love for God is to be expressed by how I treat other people.
What would express our love of neighbor, even those we don’t know or those whose troubles are very different from our own? If we live into our mission as the Federated Church – welcoming all, following Jesus Christ together, and living God’s Word with compassionate service – this is where our love of God and neighbor would be the means by which we love neighbors without judgment and without determining if they are worthy of our care and attention.
In these COVID times we have the potential to respond. A conversation with Battenkill Valley Health Center has been happening and there’s the potential that we could partner to have love take the form of bags or boxes of items that could support our older neighbors and our neighbors with disabilities during what could be a very dark and challenging winter.
Another idea that’s been floated, especially after we saw the response to the fresh produce outside of Bailey Hall this summer, is to create a Little Free Food Pantry which is modeled after the Little Free Libraries where a cabinet is placed outside and food items folks want to share are placed there for anyone to take. And it is replenished with donations and the love, with no strings attached, is spread to our hungry or struggling neighbors.
What ideas might you have? The Pharisees, in their continuing effort to try to catch Jesus up, ask a question which they already have the answer. Remember, these are folks well-versed in scripture. Jesus is condensing it all into two guiding principles that are found in the first 5 books of the Old Testament known as the Torah. All Jesus has done is take those 613 commandments – 248 Thou Shalts and 365 Thou Shalt Nots and whittled it down to love. We, too, know the answer to that which divides us and pits us against each other.
The Great Commandment many of us learned first as the Golden Rule as children. I remember they gave us wooden rulers in school with that message to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. It is a way to love God and love neighbor that has been at the heart of our faith and the beliefs of a huge swath of the world’s religions and cultures. Perhaps those rulers we received as kids were meant to be a way to remember, with every measurement, the guiding principle for how we are to live and love.
These words have carried our ancestors through other pandemics and political crises and violence and wars. All that is being asked of us – in times of light and times of darkness – is to love God and love our neighbor. Simple to remember but oh so hard to do sometimes.
This Great Commandment is our source of hope, this day and for all time. Let us raise then this prayer from Unfolding Light:
Loving One,
may all that I do today be love.
May my faith be this simple,
this urgent,
beyond all doctrine,
beneath all righteousness.
Every act, seen and unseen
an act of love.
Every thought and judgment
considered through the lens of love.
All my doubt and anger
held in the hands of love.
All my fears and desires
held in the hands of love.
Loving One,
enact your love through me.
Held in the hands of your love,
may I love in all I do. Amen.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net