Scripture:
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees,
they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to
test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He
said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first
commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
(Matthew 22:34-40)
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do
not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have
prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have
all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If
I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may
boast,[a] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or
boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not
irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in
the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things.
8 Love never ends. (1 Corinthians 13:1-8a)
Over the past few years I’ve been asked what my calling in
life is and how might I live that out. That is a question that holds a lot of
weight for a person and its not the easiest question to answer. This past week
I was asked to articulate those two questions in a paper for one of my classes.
Our texts that we read this morning offered an insight to me this week and I
pray that they will offer insight for you too this morning. Today we are
given an opportunity to look to these ancient texts and discern what it is God
is calling us to do and what it is God is calling us to be. For me, I
understand my calling and God’s will for my life to revolve around love – love
of God and love of neighbor. For me, they are one in the same. So let me ask
you:
How are you expressing love in your life?
In this season, what might God be calling you to do? To be?
Let us pray.
Sermon:
When Kyle and Fernie asked if I would come share a word with
you this morning and I learned that I was to speak about love I must admit that
I was kind of intimidated. Speaking about love isn’t always the easiest thing
to speak about. As I was praying this week and discerning God’s voice and God’s
will for what it was I was to speak about I was really led in the direction of
Matthew’s Gospel. In our story Jesus is in the midst of a lot of stuff. The
people were out to get him. The Sadducees and the Pharisees had made it their
mission to catch Jesus breaking the law so that they could find him guilty. He
had been causing them problems for a long time – even calling them false
prophets and heretics. So when the Pharisees ask him the question,
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest,” they are essentially
setting him up. To their avail Jesus responds with the Shema Israel – “You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your mind.” The Shema prayer is one of the most important prayers or
phrases in the Jewish tradition. The Shema is the first thing Jews say when
they wake up and it is the last breath they breathe when they lay down at night.
For the Jews, the Shema is a way of life, a way of being – “You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
mind” – everything you are is God’s and with everything you are you will love
God, that's essentially what the prayer is saying. But Jesus doesn't stop
there. Jesus says, “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The
key word in the text for us, “and a second is like it.” For Jesus love of God
and love of neighbor are interconnected, they are one in the same. Then in
verse 40 Jesus says, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets,” meaning that all the laws are framed around love of God and love of
neighbor. Without following these two commandments, Jesus is saying that you
are breaking the law. That's why Jesus’ message was such a radical message for
the religious elite of his time. Jesus wasn't advocating for strict observance
of the law, Jesus was advocating for genuine love of God and genuine love of
neighbor. You could follow every law in the book but without love you are
nothing.
This essential claim from Jesus then led me to our text in
Corinthians. Paul says that we might get it all right. We might follow all the
laws, all the commandments, do all the right things in the sight of the
religious elite, but if we don't have love we are simply just noise. Paul was
preaching this radical love that Jesus taught. Paul was saying here that love
is in all things, love is everything - “Love is patient; love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on
its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in
wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all
things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends.” Love happened
in the beginning and love remains to the end. For God so loved the world that
he gave us his son …. Who came to preach love and show love here on earth so
that we might live a life that was modeled after his teachings. To follow Jesus
means that when we wake up our first breath would be “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” and when we lay down our last breath would be the
same. Paul’s message and Jesus’ message was the same. To live a life with
Christ would mean that our whole life, our entire being, would be modeled
around the love that God extends to us and the love we extend to our neighbor.
A few weeks ago Kyle gave a prophetic word about, “Who is
our neighbor.” In Kyle’s message Kyle challenged us to be engaged with everyone
around us, especially those who might look differently than you and I. It was a
wonderful testament to the love of God and a hopeful expression of the love we
might show our neighbor. Jonathan Sacks, author of The Dignity of Difference,
says “We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the
Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to
ethics. God creates difference; therefore it is in one-who-is-different that we
meet God.” What a powerful statement that I believe goes hand in hand with what
our Scriptures have to say to us today.
So in this season of your life, how are you encountering the
living God in the people that you meet?
In this season how are you going beyond yourself to meet
those people who are different than yourself?
NYC Photographer Richard Renaldi recently embarked upon one
of the most original photo projects I’ve ever heard of. In his project,
Renaldi wondered the streets of New York looking for just the right pair of
complete strangers to get them together and pose as if they had known each
other for years. As you can imagine some of the photographs show the explicit
awkwardness of two complete strangers posing together for a photo, but
strangely enough, some of the photos capture beautifully the raw emotion of
compassion, care and love. Most of the subjects in the photos said that after
the shoot, they felt a sense of compassion and love towards the stranger in the
photo with them even though they did not know them.
A few years ago, when talking about God’s love, someone gave
me the perfect illustration that I’d like to share with you. Think about the
image of the cross. God’s love is like the vertical piece of the cross,
representing our connection with God and the horizontal piece of the cross
represents our love with our neighbor. The cross only becomes one when we
combine the two. Love of God and love of neighbor is the greatest commandment
of them all and everything we are and everything we do is framed by that love.
Eugene Peterson’s, The Message Bible, puts it like this in
Romans 12:1-2:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your
everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and
walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God
does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don’t become so well
adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead,
fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily
recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it.
Daniel Wolpert, in his book, Leading a Life With God, says,
“Most of us know the phrase “actions speak louder than words.” This is a
statement about embodiment. If we as leaders believe that our faith is about
God being present in our world here and now then we must embody that gospel,
embody the good news. As we do this, we become living examples who can
encourage our communities to embrace an embodied gospel.”
Friends, God is calling us to be different. God is calling
us to love the stranger and have compassion for our neighbor. To connect our love
that we have from God to the love we show our neighbor. To connect our love
that we have from God to the love we show our neighbor beacuse how we love our
neighbor is essentially how we love God.
This advent season is a season set apart from all the rest.
Advent is a time where you and I are anxiously expecting the coming Christ. We
are making things ready for the arrival of the Messiah, for the arrival of the
One who shows us how to live and how to live abundantly. Advent is a time for
us to examine ourselves, examine our life and ask honest questions about our
faith as we prepare for the coming Christ. So, in this season set apart for
love, how are you going to live? Jesus invites us to live as if the love we
have from God is equal to the love we have for our neighbor. Are you willing to
take that radical responsibility and follow Jesus, not only in this advent
season, but each and every day of your life?
Colossians 3:12-14 (The Message)
”So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the
wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet
strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to
forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave
you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It's your basic,
all-purpose garment. Never be without it.”
The Good News for us today is that God is calling us to a
life of love. God wants us to show, in our everyday lives, the love God has for
us and to connect the cross and reach out to love our neighbor as ourselves. Because
friends, how you love others IS how you love God. That’s the way of Jesus, and
that's how we are called to live each and every day.
So this advent season, this season set apart for love, may
you be the embodied Gospel for your neighbor. May you be bearers to truth,
claiming Jesus' promises and teachings his truths. May you be witnesses to the
fact that you and I serve a living God who walks among us as our neighbor who
is full of grace, mercy, compassion and love. And may you always be people of
The Way - a people who have committed themselves to a life of abundance in
Christ - always claiming and naming God's call for us to "love The Lord
your God with all your heart and with your soul and with all your mind and may
you always love your neighbor as yourself." In this season set apart for
love may it be so for us.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
