“Rule Number One” – Sermon from October 23, 2011
NOTE: Due to technical difficulties, an audio recording of this week's sermon will be unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience.
October 23, 2011
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Rule Number One”
By Rev. Dr. Larry Bethune
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
Deuteronomy 34:1-12
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” – Psalm 19:14
Mirror, mirror on the wall, “What is the greatest commandment of all?” The lawyer in today’s gospel story sounds like our generation. Boil the Bible down into a tweet, Jesus! 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation. 631 commandments are too many to remember. Just give us one. Maybe we can remember one. Maybe we can obey one.
Actually, it was the question of the day. Two famous rabbis of the time, Hillel and Shammai, were both asked the same thing. A disciple came to Shammai and asked him to summarize the whole law of God while standing on one foot – which means short, quick, and easy. Shammai, a known curmudgeon, whacked the disciple with a stick!
Hillel, a kindlier sort, answered with the passive version of the golden rule: “Whatever you wouldn’t have another do to you, don’t do to them.”
Jesus doesn’t use a stick or speak in the passive negative, but offers the perfect tweet in reply: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” – 98 characters! Actually, the rabbis had already reached the same answer, a direct quotation of Deuteronomy 6:5.
“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,” Jesus says. Rule number one! Do we need to elaborate on that? Or do the three “all’s” applied to all three aspects of human being say enough?
What does it mean to love God? Remember the movie Becket with Richard Burton in the lead role of Thomas Becket and Peter O’Toole as King Henry II? Becket is Henry’s chancellor, demanding the King’s revenues from landowners, including the church. Henry appoints Beckett Archbishop of Canterbury thinking he can control the church through his loyal friend. But Becket turns out a strong defender of the church so opposed to Henry’s designs the King’s knights eventually murder Beckett in the cathedral.
Earlier in the movie when the King confronts his old friend turned enemy, Henry asks Becket, “What happened, Thomas? Did you fall in love with God?” And Becket replies, “I fell in love with the idea of God.”
A lot of us are in love with the idea of God. That is, we have a mental image of who we want God to be, a God who may not always do what we want but who invariably makes us feel good. We love the idea of a God who loves us with all the Divine heart, soul and mind. We like to talk about God, maybe study God in Bible and theology. We love to talk to God in prayers that are always more about what we want God to do for us than what we can do for God. Loving God is easy.
But Jesus isn’t finished tweeting. He goes on to say “And a second commandment is like it.” That’s actually stronger in the Greek. The Greek word means "identical." It’s an equal sign. It means the second commandment is the same thing as the first. And again Jesus quotes scripture, Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
The same thing?! Jesus is saying the way we love God is by loving others. And he doesn’t mean loving all the children in China. We don’t have any trouble loving all humanity in our heads because we don’t really have to deal with them! But our neighbor? The people we live with and work with and church with? The people who know us as we are and whom we know as they are? Not so easy!
Here’s the thing. If we love God and love humanity in our heads, we have a disembodied, Gnostic gospel. We have a God who is easy to manipulate into serving us. But we have a mental image God, an idol which is not real. The early church labeled such faith that’s all in our heads heresy. But Christianity is not a religion of ideas. It is a religion of action. It is a religion of relationships. It is an embodied faith.
In A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story, Diana Butler Bass notes there have been two primary approaches in telling Christian history. She calls the dominant approach “Big-C Christianity,” or triumphal Christianity. It is the Christianity of power and coercion, Christianity that conquers and dominates. But Bass says there is another approach, what she calls “Generative Christianity.” This is the Christianity “that transforms the world through humble service to all.”
“Generative Christianity” is not about victory; it is about following Jesus in order to share his grace with the human community. This is the Christianity of humble people who serve Jesus in simple, quiet ways every day. Bass has another name for “Generative Christianity” - “Great Commandment Christianity.”
Jesus insists Rule Number One is loving God by loving your neighbor. Now get this! “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength=you shall love your neighbor as yourself” is exactly 140 characters! The perfect tweet! (I discovered that myself. Do you think Jesus was anticipating Twitter two thousand years beforehand?)
According to Walter Brueggemann it is as if Jesus invents a new word - "Godneighbor" – because you can’t love God without showing what that love looks like with your neighbor and you can’t love your neighbor without the love God gives you. Loving God and neighbor are the same thing. But that’s not popular in our self-focused day.
Scott Russell Sanders tells of a man who sued the town of Bloomington, Indiana, because they had an ordinance that everyone must shovel the snow from their sidewalks so that people could walk down the sidewalks in winter. The man filing the law suit said, “I don’t use the sidewalk and I don’t care about anyone else. For the city to tell me I must shovel my sidewalk is socialism.”
Whatever happened to the idea of serving the common good? When did compassion and public duty become socialism? They’ve been replaced by the notion that we’re all private individuals who do not answer to anyone else and do not care about anyone else. But is that any worse than reducing love to an idea or an emotion, an absence of hostility rather than a pattern of intentional positive action?
Elaine Pagels is a scholar in the history of religion. In Beyond Belief, she asks from the objective historian’s perspective how the early church retreated from our remarkable moral vision and vitality in the face of extraordinary adversity and persecution until we became an institution concerned with power and correct belief.
Part of her insight comes through her own story of returning to faith and to the church. Her son was diagnosed with an incurable illness and one winter Sunday morning in Manhattan she was out jogging trying to come to terms with it all and stepped into the vestibule of an Episcopal church to warm herself. She stood there listening to the hymns and prayers and thought to herself, “Here’s a community that knows how to deal with this.”
She made this connection with her own reading of history:
"From the beginning what attracted outsiders who walked into a gathering of Christians, as I did on that February morning, was the presence of a group joined by spiritual power into an extended family. Many must have come, as I did, in distress.
“They did remarkable, unprecedented things,” she says, "they contributed money to a common fund to pick up orphans abandoned to die on the streets of Rome and in the garbage dumps. They took food to prisons and stayed behind when the plagues struck to minister to the sick and dying because Jesus told them to love God by loving their neighbors."
Pagels probes deeper:
"It’s not that other religions didn’t ask people to do plenty of things. Jupiter and Diana, Isis and Mithras, required their worshipers to offer devotion, pouring out wine, making sacrifices, contributing money to the priests.... such gods were understood to act like humans, out of self-interest. But Jews and Christians believed that their God, who created humankind, actually loved the human race and evoked love in return."
Gordon Cosby, pastor of the phenomenal Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. says God sends to every church at least one person who is hard to love so the church can learn what it means to love our neighbor.
Now, before you start worrying to yourself, “Is it me?” let me say, “Of course it’s you!” Every one of us is hard to love at some time or in some way. But think about this: we naturally love the people who love us. So, as hard as it may be to do, maybe the way to get unlovable people to change their ways is by loving them first, the way Jesus did for us.
And Jesus isn’t talking about drive-by loving in short term relationships. The difficulty we have in loving people as they are over the long haul is part of the reason commitment is rare in any relationship these days – marriages and partnerships, families, social organizations, and churches.
That’s why the commandment to love "Godneighbor" is accompanied in the scripture by so many encouragements to be humble, longsuffering, forbearing, and forgiving. Instead of running away from difficult relationships – and all relationships are difficult at times – God calls us to stay engaged and learn what real love is.
I said this last week, but some of what I say bears repeating: forget what you think; consider what you do. How many real live, flesh and blood people in your own life would you have a hard time saying you actually love? How many of them would say you love them? At the real life level, how are you doing with Rule Number One? When you put it that way, I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve been hit with a stick. Amen. May we pray?
Lord, teach us to love one another as Christ loved us. Fill us with your grace. Give us humility, forbearance, forgiveness, and commitment. Help us to love our neighbors until they love us. Then maybe our words will ring true when we say we love you. Amen.