Proper 25                                                  October 2011

Trinity 18

I thought that I could get off easy this week when I first saw the Gospel lesson.  What could be easier than to talk about loving God and our neighbor?  We recite these two precepts frequently and we acknowledge our failure to live up to them in every confession of sin.  If there are two phrases that we know almost as well as we know our own names, these are the two.  Yet, when you start to think about them, it is not clear that we know what we are talking about.  Consider the word “love” in English.  It is terribly ambiguous.  C. S. Lewis once gave a famous series of lectures on the Four Loves, noting that in Greek there are four words for love: one that indicates affection; one that indicates friendship; another referring to romance; and the last which speaks of self-sacrificial giving.  But in English, if we want to talk about our pet or our favorite chair or the wine we like most or a comfortable old shirt; if we want to speak about a dear friend or a close family member; if we want to refer to a passionate sexual relationship; or if we are thinking of the God we worship or the neighbor for whom we care—all we have is this word “love.” 

In addition, none of these four senses of the word work very well when we think of our relationship with God.  I know that some people talk about Jesus as their friend in such a way that all the companionship meanings of the word love come into play—Jesus as my pal, Jesus as my buddy and best friend.  I cannot get that to work well for me.  I also know that some of the great mystics used the range of meanings surrounding sexual passion and romance for their sense of unity with God.  I have never been there, either, but I cannot think this is within the normal range of what we mean by the love of God. 

In the Old Testament, very often the idea of the love of God is referred to by the phrase “the fear of God.”  It doesn’t mean that one is afraid of God; it indicates rather a deep respect for God and his laws.  This is the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom and its crown and glory.  So I think an idea comes into focus for us here.  The love of God refers to the place God has in our lives.  If I ask you if you love God, the seriousness of your answer has to do with the degree to which you consider God’s will in all areas of your life.  For some people it comes as a surprise to learn that God particularly cares about the various parts of our lives.  In other words, people sometimes make a separation between their religious duties and the rest of their lives.  “To God belong worship on Sunday (at least occasionally) and donations to the Church (when I have the money), but the rest of my life belongs to me.” 

In the Old Testament the duties involved making sacrifices and paying tithes.  But the prophets chimed in:  “[God says] I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”  [Hosea 6:6]  Jesus repeated the phrase to some of his listeners: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” [Matthew 9:13]  In other words, there was more to the love of God than performing religious duties.  Perhaps the most famous Old Testament comment is that of Micah [6:8]: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  Another version says: “Do what is right, love loyalty, and walk humbly with your God.”  [NJB]

What does this tell us about the love of God?  It is expressed in justice towards others (and we shall consider that in a moment) but consists chiefly in a humble and loyal walk with God.  This means that the love of God is a way of living continually in His presence while seeking to know His will for us in any given moment.  It is the love of God that leads us to meditate on Scripture and engage in regular prayer: we are learning to be the kind of people who can practice God’s presence in our lives by doing the kinds of things that please Him and bring honor to Him, just as we see exemplified in our Lord Jesus.  God wants us to know Him so deeply through a life of loyalty to Him, that our lives manifest his own heart—towards the world and towards our neighbors.  By walking humbly with our God, we learn to imitate his own loving heart and show that love towards our neighbor.  It is also obvious why we need the continual confession of our failure to love God with all our hearts: we are still learning how to do it.  There is so much in our lives that is not based on openness to God, so much that blocks God’s love from flowing through us to others, that we need to repent of it frequently.  

It is when we understand that the love of God is a way of describing how we worship and pray and walk with God so that his love comes to fill us, that we can go on to understand what the love of our neighbor might mean.  In short, we are to manifest to everyone around us the heart of God towards them.  In our interactions with those around us, they ought to discover from us what God thinks of them and hopes for them.  That is what we mean by loving our neighbor as ourselves.  We have learned what God desires for us, now we share that with our neighbors. 

Of course, that is not how some have taken this commandment.  I have heard some folks say that the first thing we need to do is to learn to love ourselves well so that we can then love our neighbor likewise.  That sounds sensible, I suppose—but it is likely that we will never quite get it right and so never get on to part two.  In fact, loving ourselves is not really our problem.  I know that there are folks out there who hate themselves—but this is a psychological illness and not the way we normally are.  Many people are also said to have low self-esteem, faulty self-images—and I believe it.  But that is not what the commandment is about.  Normally, people love themselves by taking sufficient care to make sure they have enough to eat, clothes to wear, shelter to live in, and a job that can provide for these things.  Very few people have such low self-regard that they do not care to eat or dress or live under a roof.  Of course, our lists are a lot longer than that—which indicates that our problem is likely to be a self-love that is rather more than can be justified, instead of one that is too feeble. 

Now God wants us to be alive and fully human—that, I daresay, is why he created us.  He didn’t want us to be miserable and starving and homeless and naked.  One of the ways we know the love of God towards ourselves then is that we accept that our human needs are right and legitimate—by creation and redemption.  But as we come to know God and ourselves, we also come to see that we don’t live alone in this world—there are neighbors all around us.  God loves them too—just as he loves you and me.  If, in fact, we are to love our neighbors with the same love with which we love ourselves, then we are to be just as concerned that our neighbors have what they need to live fully human and fulfilling lives as that we have what we need to do so. And that is usually where our problems surface.

It is easier to be concerned for my own needs than those of my neighbor.  Mine seem so personal!  Theirs seem so external to my own.  Of course, it is fairly easy to bring within my circle of personal concern those who are closest to me—my spouse and children, perhaps my extended family, or a particularly close friend.  As I get farther away from this circle, my sense of personal concern can easily diminish until, towards people on the other side of town, the other side of the tracks, the other side of the world, it hardly exists at all.  In short, my love doesn’t extend very far.  And in some ways it is not hard to see why it should be so. I am only one person.  My resources—economic, social, psychological, emotional—just don’t go all that far.  Caring for those close to me takes all my reserves of energy and ability; those farther out will just have to fend for themselves.  That sounds sensible, and yet, there is something missing from such an approach.  If we really share the heart of God towards his world and towards all his creatures, we cannot just give up on everything except what is closest to us.  It may be true that we cannot do much, but are we really so powerless as we think? 

Let us remember Micah: “what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”  We don’t have an easy time talking about justice in our world.  It has become a bad word in some circles.  But as someone said recently: “justice is what love looks like in public.”  I know there are theories of justice and very important and learned people have written very long and difficult books on the subject.  Still, I think it is easy to get a grasp as Christians on what justice means in our normal daily lives.  If we believe that God’s love towards us demonstrates his desire that we live lives that are rich and fulfilling, based upon having the things we need to live well, then his love working through us requires us to care that others have the same rich and fulfilling lives as we desire for ourselves. 

This caring will be expressed in the way we treat those who are close to us and the way we treat those whom we encounter casually, the way we talk with others about the needs of the world, the way we engage in the political process, and the way we pray.  As we manifest the heart of God towards others in our world, we are striving for social justice at the same time—because we cannot separate our desire for a good life for ourselves from the same desire for others.  What we can do in a practical way varies, of course, with our own means and importance in the world.  A rich and powerful person can do much directly and have others listen to his voice.  A person of modest means has no such voice or resources.  But we can all find ways to express our concern for justice—that is, in the way we love our neighbor as ourselves.  Some of that might have to do with the way we spend money on ourselves: do we buy inordinate amounts of goods for ourselves when we could donate more to charities that help the poor?  Do we support public policies in our conversations with friends that assist the needy?  Do we take time to inform ourselves of the real needs of the world or seek to become involved with neighbors whom we might never have heard of?  If we really know the love of God then we will come to share in his own heart for the whole world we live in—we shall find it very hard indeed to draw our circles of concern too small and make our interests too narrow.  And we shall need the regular confession of sin in this regard too—we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves—but we are working at it.