A sermon for the Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, October 29, 2023. The scripture readings are Leviticus 19:1-2,15-18, Psalm 1, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, and Matthew 22:34-46.
I had a parishioner in a previous church who could be extremely funny and deeply theological, at the same time. More than once, when someone inside the church or outside the church was being difficult, she would say, “I know I’m supposed to love my neighbor…. But sometimes I’ve just got to do it from across the street.”
We just heard some impossible-sounding scriptures: “Be holy, for God is holy,” and then Jesus’s repetition of the other Leviticus scripture, “Love God with heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” When we hear those kinds of words, they might sound hopelessly out of reach. Maybe one day I can do that, when I’m more accomplished at prayer. Maybe when irritating people don’t come at me when I’m tired. Or maybe I can “love my neighbor as myself” when I’m older and more faithful, and there’s less of the day-to-day to worry about.
But Jesus wasn’t talking to the advanced religious of his day or ours: and I think my parishioner had it more right than she might have imagined. Jesus is saying Love God and love your neighbor as yourself, but “across the street” works just fine, and sometimes works even better.
Some of you know that the Greek New Testament uses at least four different words for what we call in English, simply, “Love.” There is the unabashed eros of lovers, the storge love of family members, the sympathetic philia of friends, and agape giving itself away freely in ways that are sometimes harder to translate—into English or into action. (the King James version translates agape love as charity).
The writer and theologian Frederick Buechner clarifies Jesus’s use of the word, “love.” He writes,
In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact, liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.
Frederick Buechner, – Originally published in Wishful Thinking
When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn’t say, “There, there. Everything’s going to be all right.” He said, “You brood of vipers! how can you speak good when you are evil!” (Matthew 12:34). And he said that to them because he loved them.
Jesus is saying here in shorthand what Leviticus is spelling out. We’re not called to be holy off in some quiet, perfect place, meditating somewhere in a temple. Holiness looks like very practical, mundane things.
Judging rightly and fairly
Don’t show favoritism to people with money or importance
Don’t slander others, spreading gossip
Don’t profit by the blood of others
Don’t hate in your heart anyone of your kin or community
Don’t take vengeance or bear a grudge,
But Do reprove a neighbor and love your neighbor as yourself.
A few years ago, we read a little book on Sunday mornings called Friedman’s Fables, by Rabbi Edwin Friedman. Friedman is known as someone who took the family systems psychological theory of Dr. Murray Bowen and applied it to congregations. Throughout these fables and the theory of family systems is the important of what psychology calls “differentiation of self,” the idea that a person needs to spend some time understanding where he or she begins and ends, in relation to other people. In other words, if I don’t have a good sense of who “John” is, I might get all caught up in trying to be who you want me to be, or who I think I ought to be, or borrowing too much of your “self,” thus creating all kinds of problems for relationships.
When Jesus talks about loving neighbor as self, or when other scriptures refer to denying self, they assume what Friedman is getting at– that we HAVE a self. Jesus knows that as each of us is created by a loving God, we are worthy of love and respect and life.
Love of neighbor without love of self can result in a kind of mission-driven frenzy that forgets people for the sake of success. Love of self without love of neighbor ends up with a preoccupation with what’s good for me and my family, while the rest of you have to fend for yourself.
Jesus calls us to love neighbor as self, but notice the emphasis is on the neighbor. He assumes we are operating out of a love of self.
When I think about the practicalities of trying to love my neighbor as myself, in the context of Christian teaching and practice, I think it involves two aspects of love.
The first part of loving neighbor as self involves accepting that my neighbor HAS a self– her own self, his own self. They are not me.
The second part of loving my neighbor as myself involves wanting the very best for my neighbor– the best in terms of material goods and the best in terms of spiritual goods. Materially, loving my neighbor affects how I spend my money. How I contribute to helping others. How I vote, as my vote affects policy, which affects other people. And how I pray, as I pray for the very best thing to come for those other people.
We can practice this kind of love (acknowledging that the person has a self, created by God, and wishing the very best of God’s blessings on that person with people who live in our house or building, with people at work, with people demonstrating for a point of view different from our own, even for people we read about in the news.
Outside the church walls, this weekend has begun Halloween and people are dressing up, often dressing as the very thing that scares them, to get power over the scary thing. Other times, children and adults dress up as someone they admire or wish they were more like. That second idea might be a good take-away for us today. As we think about Jesus’s encouragement to love your neighbor as yourself, who would you like to emulate in doing that? Is it a saint or someone in the Bible or religious history? Is it a relative– maybe someone living, maybe someone who has died? Or is it a neighbor, a coworker, or fellow church-member? As we think towards the celebration of All Saint’s Day this week, how might we begin to live towards being that person who balances love of neighbor and love of self? How might we live more deeply into that cross shaped faith connecting us to God and to others?
May all the saints, living and dead, show us the way.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.