Loving God and neighbor

We’re hearing in these few weeks about a series of confrontations between Jesus and the leaders of the Jewish people – Jesus has told scathing parables on the Pharisees and Sadducees and others, pointing out their faults and failings, and they have responded with tests designed to trip him up and undermine his credibility with the people. One commentator called this section of Matthew’s gospel ‘Reality Show Jesus’ – persistent attempts to humiliate Jesus and his perfect answers back. You can hear the crowd going ooh! Burn! go Jesus! Today he silences his adversaries so well that no one dares ask him any more questions. But the worst is yet to come – now they will start to seek his death.

But what Jesus says today isn’t just a chance for us to be spectators at the tennis match. He offers a challenge to us as well: Love God and love your neighbor. It sounds so simple. And yet we fail at both so very often. 

Jesus is asked to name the one greatest commandment, and he seems to answer with two. Both are quotes from the Old Testament, one from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus. Love God with all your heart and mind and strength – and the second is like it – love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus isn’t fudging with his answer, though. He’s saying that these two commandments are really one commandment – you can’t love God without loving your neighbor, and you can’t love your neighbor without loving God. The first letter of John makes this same point later: ‘Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars.’ 

Well, if there’s anyone here who has never been uncharitable toward somebody else, then this sermon isn’t for you. For the rest us…right. Guess this incriminates all of us, doesn’t it?

Now to be clear, Jesus isn’t talking about our feelings, per se. His emphasis isn’t on what we think of other people or how warm our hearts are toward them. He’s talking about actions, about whether we care for others’ needs. And with the Old Testament passages he’s referencing, he’s talking about real needs. Whether we feed the hungry and take care of the poor; whether we build holy relationships and put the wellbeing of the other person as a priority. Whether we tell the truth about other people and insist that others do as well. If we do all those things, then we are loving our neighbor – and we are loving God as well. We don’t have to adore other people all the time – but we do have to look out for other people, always.

And we don’t have to gin up warm feelings about God all the time either, because that can be hard too. For some of us, God is more of a distant idea, not a close companion – maybe because of early teachings we took in as a child, or for lots of other reasons. Then there are times when we feel angry at God for some pain or disappointment – we might not admit feeling angry, but we do all the same. And other times, even if we are consistent with our prayer and spiritual practice, it can start to feel dry and lifeless, even boring. We can feel guilty about this, like we’re not loving God the way we should. Hearing that loving God is really about caring for and serving others, and staying faithful in our intentions and practice with God, can be something of a relief. But it does place an expectation on our behavior, even if not on our feelings: it means we must serve and care for and be faithful to others and God – something we’re not always so consistent about.

A few years ago after her death, Mother Teresa’s writings were published. Many of these were letters that Mother Teresa had no intention of making public, and they revealed a long, lonely period of spiritual darkness in her life. Even as she continued to serve the poor and the dying, an icon for people around the world, she was struggling with God’s silence and feeling abandoned by God. The warm connection to Jesus that had drawn her into her ministry had disappeared. And yet she persevered, not speaking publicly of this to others, offering what she could to those in need around her. The Vatican determined that none of this should keep her from being made a saint – after all, so many of the great mystics of the Christian tradition have written of just that same thing. What made her a saint was that despite her struggles, Mother Teresa lived out just what Jesus calls us to do – loving in tangible action. That itself is the path of sainthood. 

Hearing of her inner struggles and reading some of those letters made Mother Teresa much more real to me, more human. But it also meant that I’m not off the hook. If Mother Teresa could reach out to the people in need around her, even when it didn’t feel good to do so, then so can I. I don’t have a call like hers, but I do have a call to serve those right here in my life. And I’m not always so great about it. We as a community, here at St Francis, have a call to serve people in the community around us, and to love one another well. But we’re not always so great about it either. So what then?

Well, if it were all just up to us to love one another well, that’s right about where it would end. We would try and fail and try again, and more often than not just give up. It’s tiring to do this. It takes a lot of effort and work, going against our lesser nature. It would be easier to settle into our prejudices, ignore the people who annoy us, disparage the ones whom we can’t stand. We’d pick the people we liked and be nice to them, and no one could expect us to do differently with those we didn’t like. But loving our neighbor as ourselves isn’t just an effort of our will alone. It’s connected with the commandment to love God because only then can we really love others. Offering to God our whole heart and mind and strength – directing all our attention and intention to God first – is offering God all of us. And when God has all of us to work with, then God can use all of us to do what God would do in the world: namely, to love. ‘Increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity,’ we prayed in our opening prayer today: God, give us the ability to love. It’s the only way we really can – the only way to reach out beyond our own self-absorbed limitations and let God give Godself, through us, to others. That’s what made Mother Teresa a saint – that she could be a conduit for God’s giving to others. Even when she didn’t feel that warmth herself, she never seemed to tire of the work – she allowed God to use her to love. 

So how do we do all of this? It begins with discipline, of course – over and over again, bending our mind and will to choose in every decision to do what is good for others. And at the same time, being intentional about praying – talking to God, in formal and more often informal ways, allowing our minds to fall open to God, asking what God would have us do next. Loving is an act of will – it can’t help but require work on our part. But as we do this, as we grow in this process and progress in this path, it gets easier – it gets to be habit, it gets to be just how we are. And more and more as we do this, God is able to use us, to pour light through us, to love the world. 

We love God and each other by giving ourselves – not worrying over reciprocity or what we’ll get out of it, but simply giving. The same kind of giving that Jesus did for us with his life, that God did in giving us God’s self in Jesus. It is giving that makes more of us – enlarging us from the shrunken little place we’d pick for ourselves to live in, into something far greater, big enough to share God’s love and light with others. This is how we love: by letting God’s love be the source of our love.  Amen.