"And a second is like it."

Homily for Sunday, October 29, 2017.    Good Shepherd and Graves Chapel

The lessons:

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18

Psalm 1

1 Thessalonians 2: 1-8

Matthew 22: 34-46

            Laws, rules, commandments…if we try to be law-abiding citizens and faithful Christians, we may begin with the underlying sense that we just have to follow the rules, and then all shall be well. After all, there are only Ten Commandments, and they appear to cover every way humans tend to break the law. Sometimes it seems simple to tell ourselves we are good people because we do not steal or lie or covet our neighbor’s donkey. In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus tells us there is more to it than following the rules if we wish to be faithful Christians.

            In this episode, a Pharisee, a lawyer, asks Jesus this question, “to test him” we are told. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus’s answer includes the two connected commandments that he says cover all other laws and rules. When we follow these two, we need not worry about breaking any other rule or commandment given us by God: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest 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.”

            In teaching us that we should love the Lord our God, Jesus directly asks us to love him, the incarnate God. Only by being fully present to God—in heart, soul, and mind, as the commandment says--can we truly demonstrate our love for the Lord. The prophet Isaiah explains how we may be able to meet this challenge: “Thus says the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy, ‘I dwell in the high and holy place and also with the one who has a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite.’”

            Jesus tells us that in his person the kingdom of heaven has come near; in other words, the human notion of heaven as the faraway place where God dwells was upended when God appeared on earth and lived among humans. Jesus also repeatedly told his disciples, including those of us who wish to follow him in the 21^st Century, that He is in us, as He is in God, and we are invited to dwell with him there. Is that not what the prophet Isaiah meant when he quoted God as saying, “I dwell in the high and holy place and also with the one who has a contrite and humble spirit”?

            As God promised, when our heart is in the right place, we make room for the Lord to dwell within us. Contrition and humility have to come from our hearts, and those things that rise from our hearts cannot be feigned. Our friends and acquaintances know when we are insincere with either apologies or modesty, so we should assume God will not be fooled. Maybe this is why Jesus’s expression of the Great Commandment includes the instruction to love God with, “all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” The heart, the home of love and the place within us where we are most honest with ourselves, comes first in this hierarchy of importance. Thus, we join the Lord in God’s kingdom whenever our heart is in the right place.

            And when our heart is in the right place, when we love our Lord with all the humility we can muster, then following the second great commandment should be less difficult: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The other lessons for today offer beautiful illustrations of what it requires of us to love our neighbors. In Leviticus, the first of the Old Testament books of law that God, through Moses, established for his people, we are told,

 “You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor.”

Loving our neighbors as ourselves will inspire us to seek justice and fairness for all; we certainly know from the parable of the Good Samaritan that we cannot choose to love only those who believe like us or behave like us. Our neighbors in need of our love are all of our fellow humans, especially those who are poor or sick or unjustly treated.

In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul describes neighborly love in this way: “We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.”  In the aftermath of the recent hurricanes, we saw evidence of many neighbors reaching out in self-sacrificing ways to assist other victims of the storms, even those who were strangers to them, like nurses tenderly caring for their own children. We humans indeed have been blessed with a great capacity to love one another. God plants within each of us the “contrite and humble spirit” required so that we can know God dwells within us and empowers us to love our neighbors as ourselves. When we accept and share the gift of God’s merciful love, our heart is in the right place.

In Matthew 25, Jesus very clearly illustrates in a parable some of the things we must do to fulfill the second great commandment: “…for I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” In this story, when the righteous ones ask the Lord how and when they did these generous and loving things for him, he answers, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.”

           

            So, we return our meditation on love to the first of the great commandments. Jesus answered the Pharisee’s question by stating the two great commandments, the first one being “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  As God incarnate, Jesus simply asked us to love him. With dedication, humility, and contrition, we can tune our hearts fully to the Lord who dwells within us and loves us in return. 

            “And a second is like unto it.”  Jesus leaves it to the Pharisee and to us to discover the connection between that first great commandment and the second one: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” With a contrite and humble heart, we are assured that God is present within us. When we fully believe that our love for God, our connection with God, empowers us to carry God’s love to those who need it, we will fulfill the second great commandment. The two great commandments do not involve either/or thinking. Instead, they call for both at once! In caring unselfishly for “the least of these,” we have recognized God’s presence in “the other,” and have shown our love for God by loving our neighbor.  We love God best when we love our neighbor.

Today’s collect reminds us of the beautiful words St. Paul wrote in his first letter to the church at Corinth, describing the proper nature of our love for God and our neighbor: “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends…And now faith hope and love abide, these three: and the greatest of these is love.”

We love God best when we love each other well.

AMEN.

            

Trusting in God's Abundant Mercy

Homily for Sunday, September 24, 2017     Good Shepherd and Graves Chapel

Jonah is a lovable biblical character, isn’t he? He reminds me of familiar TV characters, Fred Flintstone or Barney Fife or maybe Archie Bunker.  How comforting it is that in Jonah we can recognize many of our own human flaws and find, through Jonah’s interactions with God, that God’s mercy will absolve us of all of them.

In fact, it is the abundantly generous mercy of God that causes Jonah to sit down and pout in today’s lesson. By the time this part of the story takes place, Jonah has already resisted God’s call and found himself in the belly of the whale. After being vomited up, he then dutifully carries God’s message of total destruction to the disobedient and sinful people of Ninevah. But when the people call out for God’s mercy and God relents, granting them the forgiveness they request, Jonah becomes indignant. How dare God make him, Jonah, look bad by not following through on the apocalypse Jonah had predicted for Ninevah? His pride is so wounded that Jonah says to God, “Please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” Can’t you hear the whining tone in Jonah’s voice and see the pout that forms around his mouth? In his little fit, he plops down on the ground.

Then, God makes use of a weed and a worm to teach Jonah a lesson. So that Jonah will be shaded from the heat of the sun, God causes a bush to grow near Jonah. We are told, “Jonah was very happy about the bush.”  Ah, therein lies the rub, as Hamlet said. As Jonah plops down in his pouty anger, he wants God to believe he is ready to die for the sake of his wounded pride. If so, why would the shade of a bush matter to him? He is ready to die, right? After God sends a worm to cause the bush to wither, even though he is fainting from the heat, Jonah still persists in saying, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

So, is it prideful self-righteousness or envy that can keep us, like Jonah, from fully rejoicing in the good fortune of others? Or is it some combination of those two character flaws?  Remember, Jonah begins his pout by saying to God, “Oh, Lord, is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? For I knew you that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”  Think about how self-centered Jonah’s words are; imagine speaking to any authority figure in such a way, much less God, and not being punished. Jonah clearly expects God’s mercy for himself even when he wishes to deny it to others. In today’s lesson from Matthew, Jesus offers a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven as a place where God’s abundant mercy is always the prevailing law. In this parable, the human tendencies toward self-righteousness and prideful indignation are fully on display.

At the end of the day, when the landowner prepares to pay each of the workers he has employed over the course of the day, those who have worked all day are in for a big surprise. Although they are paid the agreed-upon amount, a fair wage for a day’s work, they are quite indignant to discover the landowner paying all the workers, even those who worked only a part of the day, the same amount. It isn’t fair, they say. The landowner is perplexed; he has done the day-long workers no harm and has paid them the contracted amount. Jesus, through the landowner, asks this question: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

“Are you envious because I am generous?”  When we consider ourselves to be “good people,” church-goers, well-behaved for the most part and forgiven of our sins, we are filled with gratitude for God’s mercy. Right? Out of that gratitude, we share from our abundance with others. Don’t we expect the Lord to continue to forgive us, to be merciful to us throughout our lives? It isn’t as if we are never going to sin again. Sins of one kind or another are easy to come by on a daily basis—petty anger or foolish pride or simple unkindness seem to be some of the run of the mill everyday. Even so, I expect that God will always show me mercy—just as the workers expected the landowner to pay them the amount they had contracted for. Why is it that we resent it when others who are also in need of God’s mercy are, in fact, shown that mercy? Why are we envious because God is generous, Jesus asks us.

For those of us here who are very blessed and live lives of comfort that would astound the very poor, this is indeed a tough question. Are we always as generous as we could be? I don’t know about you, but I have certainly heard well-off Americans complaining about the  money and support given to poor people through programs such as welfare or Medicaid. Even though suspected fraud is very rare and the dire poverty of people around us can be quite obvious, if we would but see, we fall into resentment over what the poor receive. How many Americans have storage sheds (or attics or garages) full of things we don’t need or use, but we still persist in buying and keeping such things? (I confess: I am guilty of hoarding.) The very fact that the storage industry has become such a major feature of the American landscape is truly astonishing—and revealing of American values. In his daily meditation for this past Tuesday, Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote, “I have yet to hear a sermon or confession concerning the 10^th Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not covet.’ It’s almost impossible for Americans to see capitalism or consumerism as problematic. Our culture is built upon the idea that there’s not enough, that we must always seek more—at others’ expense.” Why are we envious because God is generous, Jesus asks us. Is it because we covet what others’ have, even when we already have more than enough?

Or, have we simply forgotten God’s infinite, generous mercy—and our calling, as Christians, to reflect that mercy and generosity in all that we do? When Jonah sits and pouts, angry over the loss of the bush and its shade, God says to him, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons?” God asks Jonah, to paraphrase, “So, your pride and your personal creature comforts are worth more to you than the well-being of thousands of your fellow human beings?”  God asks that question of us as well.

 All of God’s creation and all of God’s creatures are subject to the generous mercy of God. For that, we should simply be grateful. Thank you, our gracious God, for we know that you are merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.  AMEN.

-->