Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
[please click on one of the items above for more information]
============================================================
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were told that
you had to make friends with a certain person?
I can remember one Sunday morning when I was about five years old,
Mom telling me,
now, there’s going to be a new girl in your Sunday school class this morning,
so be sure and make friends with her.
I remember that I was puzzled by that.
I knew I could be nice to her,
and not pick on her, and all that,
but how could I promise already to make her my friend
when I hadn’t even met her yet?
My kindergarten gave me the same kind of trouble.
One of the refrains we constantly heard from our teachers was,
“In this school, we’re all friends.”
Well now, that’s a noble sentiment,
but I didn’t see how I could be friends with Debbie,
who was always running around punching people on the arm.
Or with those boys, whose names I have mercifully forgotten,
who knocked you down on the playground
and skinned up your knees,
or scooped up the army worms crawling around
and chased you with them.
How could I be friends with people like that?
They certainly weren’t acting friendly.
I suspect that this is something that career-military wives
traditionally have had to grit their teeth and learn to live with …
pastors’ spouses, too, for that matter …
“You will be friends with the colonel’s wife, won’t you?”
But how effective is that, really?
Can you really become friends with someone
because you’ve been ordered to do so,
whether by yourself or by somebody else?
No.
You can decide that you’re going to behave in a friendly way,
and act warm, and nice, and all that good stuff.
But you can’t manufacture that feeling of friendship.
It either comes, or it doesn’t.
Same way with that “falling-in-love” kind of love.
You can’t make yourself fall in love with someone,
no matter how hard you try.
You can’t make someone fall in love with you,
as much as you might want to.
The feeling comes, or it doesn’t,
sometimes of its own free will, it seems!
Sometimes, even if it is going to make your life miserable!
And you can choose how you will respond to the feeling,
but not whether you are going to have it.
So perhaps it sounds strange, and maybe even unfair,
for Jesus to remind us that we are commanded to love.
“Jesus,” we want to argue back, “it’s not that easy.
Have you seen some of the people that I have to live with?”
Yet, his words come back just as clearly:
Are you listening?
Get with the program.
Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
And remember, of course, that for Jesus,
the notion of “neighbor” includes
everybody who isn’t God and isn’t you,
especially anyone in need.
So, we as Christian people are under orders to love,
even if that sounds a little odd.
It isn’t always easy for us even to love God.
We respect God …
We worship God.
We stand in awe of God.
Many of us are a little bit afraid of God.
We’re curious about God.
Maybe sometimes we get angry with God.
We depend on God.
But, to love God?
Love implies a kind of closeness
that for many of us seems inappropriate to assume
in relation to God.
Distance, fear, trembling, maybe even terror if we’ve been really bad …
seem somehow more appropriate.
But how can we love someone, anyone,
who is far away
and who scares us half to death?
We can’t;
at least, not in any human sense of the word love.
So in a sense, the command that we love God,
is also a command that we come to know better who God is,
and to know, to understand, that God is love-able.
We don’t throw out those notions of respect,
and awe, and worship …
God is, after all, greater than we are.
But God’s greatness is God’s love,
not some kind of power to terrify us
or frighten us into submission.
When Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God”
he is not implying, “or else.”
But if loving God is sometimes challenging,
how much more so is loving our neighbor.
Particularly since, as we said a moment ago,
the term “neighbor” in the New Testament has been expanded
to include pretty much everybody.
How do we do it?
How can we possibly do it?
The way we begin is by understanding
what “love” does and doesn’t mean.
Now, I would not wish the study of the Greek language
on my worst enemy!
But it does have a few advantages over English.
One is that Greek has different words
to refer to the different kinds of human love.
English only has the one “L” word.
They have a word for the friendship-kind of love.
A different word for the romantic,
falling-in-love kind of love.
And yet a third word for the
love-your-neighbor-as-yourself kind of love.
So that when we read that commandment
to love our neighbors,
we need to be clear that it doesn’t mean
that we’re going to have be good friends with everyone we meet,
much less does it mean we have to fall in love with them, thank you very much!
(Wouldn’t that be miserable!)
With the love-your-neighbor kind of love,
it is possible to love people that you don’t much like.
In fact, it’s even possible to love people
that you dislike pretty thoroughly.
Because love for our neighbor is not an emotional attachment.
It’s a choice we make.
It’s not so much a matter of the heart
as a matter of the will.
To love our neighbors as ourselves
means to want what is best for them.
It means that we take their needs into consideration
when we have a decision to make that might affect them.
It means that questions of justice, and poverty,
and peacemaking, become important to us,
because people we love are hurting.
To love our neighbor as ourselves means that
the hunger of a child in Iraq is just as important
as the hunger of a child in Oak Cliff,
which is just as important as the hunger of our own child.
And we don’t naturally think that way, do we?
We have to learn it.
Which I suppose is why
God made it into a commandment.
It wouldn’t naturally occur to us to do it,
so we have to be told.
Incidentally, that’s an interesting thing about Christianity,
if you look at it historically:
It was really the first major religion
that was more than tribal.
It insisted that Christian people had relationships and responsibilities
to non-Christian people, to outsiders,
just like those to Christian people, to insiders.
That was new.
And it was hard then,
and, unfortunately, it still is.
Anyone who is in need is our neighbor.
Of course, I cannot possibly help every one of them.
But the commandment to love them means
that I must do as much as I can.
That’s an important reminder for us all,
especially as we celebrate All Saints’ Day,
and think about who are saints,
and what does it mean to be one of God’s saints.
Our saint-liness is not measured by
whether we have performed any miracles.
It’s not measured by whether anyone ever named a church building after us.
It’s measured by whether we have loved our neighbors.
Even those neighbors who speak funny-sounding languages.
Even the neighbors who don’t share our faith.
Even the neighbor who is in a refugee camp on the other side of the globe.
Even the neighbors who are quite clear
that they don’t love us.
They are all our neighbors.
And we are under orders to love them.
One more thing to note, just in passing,
because I find it kind of encouraging.
Towards the end of the passage we heard from Mark,
Jesus says to the scribe who is questioning him,
“You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
That’s about the only nice thing we have Jesus recorded
as saying to a scribe anywhere!
“You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
Which seems to me to say that
having the proper understanding about loving God and our neighbors
is very, very important.
Doing something about it of course matters also,
but Jesus seems almost to suggest
that the “doing” will follow naturally if he can just get us to understand.
And I suppose the reason that I find it encouraging
is precisely that there are so many neighbors
that I can’t begin to help.
And if I measure my progress towards the kingdom
in terms of how many I can help versus how many I can’t help,
I’m sunk, and probably all of us are.
But Jesus seems to be saying that
the number we help isn’t nearly as important
as the love we have in doing it.
Today, as we remember specially those we have loved,
who are now saints in another realm …
let us also recommit ourselves
to being God’s saints in this place and this time:
To love God,
to love one another,
to love our neighbors,
whoever they are, whatever they need.
Amen.