All Saints by the Lake
October 29, 2023
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first and the great commandment. The second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.
This text is one of the affirmations of faith that we say in our daily morning and evening prayer services. The first part is known as the “Shema” in Hebrew, for the first word – “hear” – and comes from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy. The second part – “love your neighbour as yourself” – comes from Leviticus, the nineteenth chapter. It was these texts that Jesus was drawing on in his answer to the lawyer’s question in today’s gospel passage.
This was not a controversial statement; other rabbis around the same time are recorded as making similar statements, and Jesus’ audience would have nodded and agreed. And yet, humans pretty much always need to be reminded of the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – and the importance of centering our hearts, minds, souls, and strength on something bigger than ourselves – God – rather than exclusively on our own concerns.
Even if we’re not being selfish and self-centered on purpose, it can be so easy to lose sight of this focus. So often our lives feel like drinking from a firehose, with demands and responsibilities and stimuli coming at us from every direction. Jesus cuts through all that with one simple standard: love God, and love your neighbour.
I suppose that’s actually two standards, but in practice, they are so intertwined as to be inseparable. If we love God, we will search for God’s image in all of God’s creation, and most particularly in our fellow human beings, whom we are assured are stamped with God’s image (remember last week and Jesus showing the coin with Caesar’s face on it).
And if we love our fellow humans, I think most of us at some point will probably be led to seek some kind of larger meaning, to wonder about the Being who made us and loves us, and how that fits with our often difficult and painful human experience. Those who love and serve their neighbours, especially if those neighbours are in situations where more than the help of one other person is needed to address the problem, are often most in need of spiritual nourishment, lest they burn out and suffer from compassion fatigue.
As St. Paul puts it, “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” The gospel of God, and caring for our neighbours for their own selves’ sake, are inseparable.
One pitfall we can fall into in listening to this text and trying to put it into practice in our own lives, is to think that there’s only one way to love God and one way to love our neighbour. Perhaps we have a mental image of “loving God” as spending your life doing nothing but praying, and “loving your neighbour” as spending every waking hour at the soup kitchen or the drop-in centre.
But because each of us is created unique, with our own gifts and needs and calling, each of us loves God and neighbour in our own way. Perhaps your way of loving God is to make music, or spend the day in nature, or learn everything you can about a subject you’re passionate about. Perhaps you love your neighbour by being their doctor or their teacher or their Member of Parliament, or working to make their air and water cleaner, or by making art for them to enjoy or be inspired by. The possibilities are literally endless. Each of us is able to love God and our neighbour in ways that bring us joy, not ways that drain and exhaust us.
I think sometimes even in church, which is supposed to be the place where we come to learn and practice loving God and neighbour, we lose sight of this central goal amid the welter of other competing priorities. When we’re in the weeds with a budget or a meeting agenda or a building problem, it can be hard to remember the connection between these things and the greatest commandments.
As our sequence hymn said much more eloquently than I can, everything we do – here in church, and in our daily lives – must spring from and be centered around love of God and neighbour, or what’s the point?
And here, at All Saints’, we have additionally focused our priorities around the threefold motto, “Reconciling, Affirming, Rejoicing.” All these are specific ways to love our God and love our neighbour, ways that we feel particularly called to do. And when we live into those ways, when we love God and love our neighbour actively and visibly, it is a thing of joy and beauty.
Two weeks ago, our young friend Alora turned five. Her mother, Farai, brought an entire feast of sandwiches and wraps, and a birthday cake and balloons, to church. We sang “Happy Birthday” once upstairs with the organ, and again downstairs with the cake and candles. Alora, wearing a Mickey Mouse dress and a birthday hat, positively glowed as she danced around the church hall, and all the adults delighted in her delight. It was a lovely and unexpected moment of pure joy and celebration: an example of the church being what it is called to be, of loving our neighbour and celebrating God’s gifts to us in community.
Likewise, few days ago, I was chatting on the phone to a church member about some item of business and they mentioned that they had other concerns weighing on their heart. I responded that if their heart would be eased by talking about those griefs, my door was always open – that’s part of what I’m here for!
Loving God means seeing all our joys and sorrows in the context of God’s gifts to us, God’s calling in our lives, and how God can use all our experiences to help us grow in knowledge and love of God. And loving our neighbours means sharing our joys and sorrows with each other in community, remembering amidst the chaos of daily life and of trying to keep a church going, that we are here for a purpose: reconciling, affirming, and rejoicing. And that all we do is rooted in love of God and love of neighbour. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
Amen.
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