Proper 26

28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” 29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31

The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” 32 “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

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“You are not far from the kingdom of God,” says Jesus

The only thing better to hear would be, “this is the kingdom in your midst”

Jesus is telling him, “You’re close. You’ve almost gotten to the heart of it. Almost.”

So let’s sit with this and talk about why this answer is a good one.

PROBABLY, there’s nothing too ground breaking in this text for you.

The formula is familiar to anyone who has read their bible

Love God with all you heart, soul, mind and strength, which is to say, you’re whole person

And then love your neighbor as yourself

Because everything in modern American gets reduced to a slogan we often see this as simply “love God love people”

But if we press deeper than the slogan and explore what that really means I think we’ll find it has more teeth to it than some general encouragement to be a nice churchgoer

To begin with, you’ll notice that it always STARTS with calling people to love God

That’s important for a few different reasons

To begin with, we would say that God’s love is the basis for all love.

Put another way, all love originates in God because “God is love” according to 1 John 4:8 , not

not God is loving. God IS LOVE

It’s his very nature

Is that how you see God?

God’s love is demonstrated in the perfect unity of the Trinity and in his actions toward humankind

God created humankind in love, for love, because he is love

And where God’s unity with humankind was disrupted he has sought to repair it

Not weighing blame and litigating grievances, simply pursuing and inviting and giving selflessly to restore the relationship

To bring humankind back into the loving unity of the triune life

So then, loving God isn’t just some grand idea philosophers came up with in a vacuum

It is a reconnection with what we were always meant to be and do and experience

AND it’s a reciprocal relationship in which we receive his love and offer it back to him

Thomas Merton puts it like this

Love comes out of God and gathers us to God in order to pour itself back into God through all of us and bring us all back to Him on the tide of His own infinite mercy. So we all become doors and windows through which God shines back into His own house.

1 John 4:7-12 puts it like this

7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

So then, step one HAS TO BE, getting connected to the source of love.

Let’s use the metaphor of the vine and branches that Jesus gives us

We attach to the vine that IS LOVE

The nature of that vine flows through us

And produces a type of fruit that reflects the nature of the vine

The love of God flows through, extending to everything around us that isn’t God

Namely, to other people

And just like God loves us without regard to our worth or how much we’ve earned it

The love of God that flows through us gets extended to others without consideration of whether they deserve it or not

And Jesus, along with the New Testament authors, tell us that when we discover this flow we’ve found the heart of it all

We’ve clicked into what we were always meant to be

And you can imagine a world where everyone is living out of this flow and it’s perfect

It’s the kingdom

The problem in our world then is that people are not connected to the love of God

And what I mean by that is that people do not live from a place of believing that the source of all things is love and that they, themselves, are actually loved

And that’s largely because the relationships we have with others typically reinforce that we are not just unloved, but unlovable, and that life is ultimately cold and devoid of love, safe for a few warm spots if you can find them

And so we have a world DISCONNECTED from the vine, caught in a cycle that keeps us from connecting to it

Which is why we live a world that doesn’t feel much like the kingdom

We live in a world that seems to be fueled by competition and hate between people who don’t accept that they are loved and end up taking it out on each other

Again, Merton

The man who is aware of his own unworthiness and the unworthiness of his brother is tempted with a subtler and more tormenting kind of hate: the general, searing, nauseating hate of everything and everyone, because everything is tainted with unworthiness, everything is unclean, everything is foul with sin. What this weak hate really is, is weak love. He who cannot love feels unworthy, and at the same time feels that somehow no one is worthy. Perhaps he cannot feel love because he thinks he is unworthy of love, and because of that he also thinks no one else is worthy.

The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian answer to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible. It is a prior commandment, to believe. The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy—or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth!

In other words, the command to love others doesn’t even make sense unless we can learn to accept that God is love and that we are truly, actually loved by him.

Not just we, I.

I am love by him.

He knows me and everything about me and nothing his hidden and yet he smiles upon me and invites me to come close and rest.

It is nearly impossible to extend genuine love to others if we don’t know that place of rest and don’t have security in knowing we are loved.

So, let’s reframe this teaching.

Perhaps you’ve heard it framed as essentially, “There is a big, demanding God who commands your allegiance and conformity. Part of that is to act charitably toward others to win them over so that they will also give their allegiance to this big, demanding God.”

There’s no life in that.

What we want to hear is this: “God loves you (full stop). Like actually loves you. And God knows better than all the people who failed to love you and who communicated you are unworthy of it. They are flawed and hurt themselves. But God is not. He is perfect and in his perfect knowledge he says you are worthy and wants you to accept that he loves you and wants you to find rest in him. And when you find that security he knows that his love will flow through you, back to himself and outward to the world, which will ultimately, in the end, be a full extension of his love.”

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Proper 26

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