Proper 25 A

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. A simple, easy to remember sound bite. An easy commandment until you start thinking about what it means to love and how can one be commanded to love.

Proper 25 A

Transcribed from a sermon given

On October 23, 2011

By The Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, with all your whatever. It’s said in different ways, but we have heard it so many times.

Love your neighbor as yourself. The essence. It’s simple. It’s easy to remember. It’s a wonderful little sound bite. It’s really hard to remember the hundreds or even thousands of rules that the Pharisees tried to follow. Even ten commandments can get intimidating. Remember all ten? But love God and love your neighbor that you can remember. That’s simple. It’s clear. It’s not confusing.

Until you start thinking about what it means to love. How do you love someone? What does it look like when you love God? What does love look like in everyday life?

 How in the world can you be commanded to love? You can be invited to love. But no one can command you to love. We know of the dictators in the world who demand their people love them. Well you can be forced to say I love you, but no one can force you to actually love. In fact, commanding someone to love you is the best way to get someone not to love you. So how can it be a commandment to love God?

Another question that comes up as you read this passage is why the writer of Matthew put Jesus asking about this obscure thing from scripture about David saying the Lord put my lord at my right hand? Why is it right there? After the great commandment? So lots of questions. Something that looks so simple ends up looking a little more complicated.

This particular question that Jesus asks the Pharisees is mirroring the way the Pharisees thought. They went through scripture and took quotes from scripture to try and explain things. One of the issues was what was the Messiah to be like? Now the Jews did not expect the Messiah to be divine. The Jews expected, and still expect, the Messiah to be a great human being. Like Moses who was a friend to God who could do marvelous and amazing things. But fully human.

Yet Jesus was talking in ways that didn’t quite fit with that, which disturbed the Pharisees. So he told them to look back at their own scriptures. One of the places that is seen as predicting the coming of the Messiah is this particular passage from the Psalms. The understand then was that the Psalms were written by David. Scholars now are pretty sure that David did not write most of the Psalms. Maybe he wrote a few, but most of them he didn’t. But in Jesus’ time there was no disagreement about who wrote them. Everyone agreed that David wrote them. So how could David be referring to the Messiah as his Lord, if the Messiah was to be his son?

 Remember the prediction was that the Messiah would be a descendant from David. So Jesus is bringing up this issue, this question, to leave it open that maybe the Messiah is more than they imagined. Maybe the Messiah is more than they ever dreamed. Not what they thought.

For us that is a very important issue. Let’s think about how we come to love? If you have ever met someone who had no love as a child, you realize that as an adult that person is a very damaged human being. We learn how to love by being loved. We respond to love with love.

It has been said that you don’t teach love, you don’t command love, you catch love. Its almost like a virus. You get around it, you catch it, it grows in you, and then you give it to others. But it is a good kind of virus. So if love is something that we catch from being loved, how are we to love God? By knowing that God loves us. That’s the power of the incarnation and the sacrifice of Christ.

Some of us have a difficult time feeling a love relationship with an abstract deity within which we live and move and have our being. For some of us it is easier the feel loved, and to love in return, when it has a human face, human flesh. So in order for us to obey the command to love God, we need to know that we are loved by God. It is God’s love that empowers us and strengthens us to be able to love in return and to be able to love others. To open to that love.

But what does it look like? What is everyday life like when you love someone? Most of us here, probably all of us here, have at some point felt deep love for someone — whether it was a spouse or a child or a friend. When we were feeling that deepest kind of love, when we go to the grocery store the beloved is in your presence, even if not physically, because as we walk up and down the aisles we might think, “Oh, she would love that.” Or,  “He loves doughnuts. I’m going to get the chocolate ones with the sprinkles which is what he likes the most.” Or for your children you may think, “Well there is the kind of cereal he loves the most, but that’s not good for him, but I’m going to get the healthy one that he loves the most.” Love is not always doing what the person wants, but what is best for them.

When you are feeling love, when you are loving, when you are in love, you naturally want to do things for the other person. I had an interesting conversation with a friend who had gone through a difficult patch in her marriage. There was a short period of separation and then they got back together and now the marriage is better than it ever was. She told me that before the separation, when it came time for a birthday or Christmas she couldn’t figure out what to get her husband. But now that they are back together, when it was Christmas time, she wants to buy him six or seven different things. She just spontaneously wants to do things for him.

You know the difference when you go Christmas shopping and you have to buy things because you ought to. like for aunt so-in-so when you struggle to figure out what to get her this year, versus when it is not even any special day, but you think that this person would love that and you pick it up and give it to them. When we are feeling in that love relationship we just want to give. It becomes natural to give. It becomes what our hearts and minds and souls want to do.

So when we are in a relationship of love with God, when we know God’s love for us and we open to that, we just want to give to God. The only way we can really give to God is by giving to other people. We spontaneously want to give; we want to express our love. The more we do that, the more we feel God’s love. The more we feel God’s love the more people around us feel the love that we have for them. It magnifies it.

So we have this wonderful, succinct summary of all the law and the prophets. All that a Christian really needs to know. Is to love God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your spirit, with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself.