Love Your Neighbor!
A Sermon by Matt Fitzgerald
St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, Chicago
October 13, 2013
Matthew 22:34-40
Years ago when Kelli and I were first trying to convince our children to sleep through the night we decided to adopt the Weisbluth method, otherwise known as the “let your infant cry herself to sleep while you slowly go insane in the other room” school of parenting. In the middle of one particularly loud week Kelli ran to Target on her lunch break to buy the baby a little cd player for the nursery. We figured that if some soothing music didn't calm our infant down, it might at least drown out the howls.
I took the player out of the box and plugged it in after tossing the instructions in the trash. It didn't work. I made sure it was plugged in. It still didn't work. Frustrated I told Kelli we were going to have to return it. She then suggested that I should probably fish the instructions out of the garbage can. Which I did. And upon reading them learned that, unlike every other cd player in the world, this particular model had you insert the disc upside down.
The problem with any instruction that one hears repeatedly is that a certain hardening of the ears sets in. Who needs to be told how to operate a cd player? And who needs to hear Jesus say that when boiled down to its essence religion is about “love?” We already know that in his struggle with the legalistic Judaism Jesus championed a warm religion of love over a cold rule based faith.
But what if he didn’t? What if centuries of misinterpretation have caused us to overemphasize Christ’s break with Judaism? What if Jesus really is giving us a commandment in this morning’s lesson? Insisting that we love our neighbors.
One of my closest friends is an ethical man who would like to understand God as something more than a distant mystery. But he won’t go to church. He sleeps in, plays soccer, reads the paper. I’ve tried to convince him that church is vastly preferable to all of this but he’s unconvinced. "I don't know what to say," he says. “I believes in God and I try to be kind, the rest just seems unnecessary." You’ve heard it before. You have this very same friend. We all do. And guess what? They’re right. Church is unnecessary if faith is nothing but love; an easy matter of being kind and having warm feelings about God.
But that’s not what faith is. At least it isn’t Christianity. In this morning’s lesson Jesus steps in and gives us two commandments. Commandment. That’s a word which refers to specific kinds of behavior that can be required or prohibited. It is a word concerned with actions, not feelings. That’s the meaning any first-century Jew would use when employing the word. It is certainly what Jesus meant. And here he commands us to love.
This suggests a form of love that upends our modern definitions. Most often when we say “love” we’re talking about sentiment more than active behavior. “I love the way this October feels like May. I love the orange glow of a fireplace. I love God.”
But warm and appreciative feelings are not what Jesus meant when he talked about our love for God. No. When Jesus commanded us to “love God” he meant that we ought to approach God with dogged, tenacious, unyielding, commitment.
So if I were feeling faithful I would say to my Sunday morning soccer playing friend, “There is no option here. It isn’t a matter of choice. You are commanded to love God. Not by thinking warm thoughts when you hear a Christmas carol, but by jumping off the couch and raising your voice in song. By giving your money away. By praying tenaciously even when God seems unreal. You are commanded to love God with worship, with scripture and by fighting injustice.” Or in other words, you are commanded to love God by coming to Church.
I can tell by the expression on some of your faces that you don’t want me talking this way with your friends. And you’re right. I don’t even do it with my friends. We can’t speak that bluntly to a culture that has let Pat Robertson pervert its understanding of Christ.
Moreover, many in our own tradition think any sort of religious insistence about God is too much religious insistence about God. As William Willimon observes, for generations, Liberal Protestantism has argued that by equating love of neighbor with love of God, Jesus implies that love of neighbor is love of God. This is why many churches like ours assume the most important task of church is to instill good ethics while pursuing social justice.
This might be wrong. I mean, certainly Jesus brought love of God and love of neighbor into an inseparable unity with his answer to the Pharisees, but I don’t think it’s a unity that finds its meaning in some great similarity between God and neighbor. We used to have neighbors in Minneapolis who pulled their garbage cans out of the alley and placed them on their front lawn, because this made it easier to throw their trash out the living room window. These people may have been our neighbors. But they were not God. And so it very was hard to love them.
So hard, that for me and Kelli at least, this family proved the fact that in his answer to the Pharisees Jesus mentioned love of God first for a reason. Before he talks about our neighbors, Jesus commands us to actively, tenaciously, commit ourselves to God. By coming to church week in and week out. When it is inspiring and when it is boring, when it is healing, and when it is disappointing, when it lifts your soul and it when makes you squirm, when you love the hymns and when we choose the ones you hate to sing, week in, week out, actively committed. Do this long enough, and you will learn that God loves you tenaciously, unrelentingly, actively. Depending upon what you got up to in the six days between this morning and last Sunday God may not have warm and appreciative feelings toward you, but God is unyieldingly committed to you nonetheless.
And to everyone else. For only the most outrageous spiritual narcissist is going to discover the love of Christ and think it is his or her’s alone. Which means that once I realize the depth of God’s commitment to me, I will realize that God is equally committed to my neighbors. Which is to say that while I may have struggled to love those garbage neighbors, God didn’t. She was committed to them. Which meant I couldn’t loathe them as easily as I wanted to. I couldn’t even ignore them. I didn’t stumble across this fact deep in the goodness of my heart, I learned it by going to church. For at the same time that Kelli and I lived next door to these difficult people, my seminary required that I worship every single week. Something I hadn’t done since I was a child.
Four months in, on a beautiful October morning sun bursting through the foliage, I stepped outside to walk our dogs. I could smell the bacon coming from our neighbor’s kitchen - their window was open. And I could smell the trash sitting on their front lawn. They hadn’t closed the lid of the garbage bin. Suddenly the family’s sixteen year old son leaned out the window with a full-to-bursting hefty bag in his hands. And I thought, “God loves this kid as much as God loves anyone.” And suddenly this strange neighbor looked kind of wonderful.
By actively practicing our love for God, we not only discover God's love for us, we are inspired to imitate
God’s love for others. So I said “good morning” and he smiled and waved while he dropped the bag into the garbage can.
God doesn’t just want us to love everyone, he wants us to love anyone. It is one thing to love humankind; it is another thing to love the people that you work with, or go to church with, or live next to.
So at work this means small favors bestowed when it seems you have nothing left to give and your co-workers haven't earned your kindness; given because you are commanded to love your neighbor. With your children this means kind words spoken when your mood is short; spoken because you're trying to love them. Or with your spouse or partner large sacrifices made in spite of your own desires, not necessarily because your heart is full of warm feelings, but because love commits you to your partner's needs. At church this means a generous pledge, not just because of what it does for you, and not because Saint Pauls promises a good ROI, but because your gift will help your neighbors in the pew. And so you give regularly, generously, because God both gives and commands such stubborn commitment.
And here is the miraculous thing about Christ’s kind of love. Practice it long enough, and you'll find that warm feelings and affection abound.
The same can be said of our relationship with God. If you worship frequently enough. If you practice unyielding commitment long enough, you will find the Divine transformed from some abstract notion to the object of your awestruck affection. And you will love God with all your heart and mind and being, changed, re-made, transformed, re-claimed, as you are laid so low and lifted oh so high by the goodness of our God. Amen.
Matthew 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 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.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’