Jesus
said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with
all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is
the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second
is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On
these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
Love
God.
Love
Neighbor.
Love
Self.
In these
words we have three invitations to a God-soaked, Spirit-saturated,
Gospel-inspired, and Disciple daring life.
In many ways these three invitations in these three verses take our
entire life to explore, experience, and express. How are you loving God with your heart? This could be through prayer, listening for
God in music or being in silence, going out in Creation to hear the sermon of
the songbirds. How are you loving God
with your soul? Your soul longs to
express creatively the ways God forms and fashions you. Your soul is an unfolding, never finished art
project. I love God with my soul through
how I show up for my family, through worship, sermons, morning meditations, and
I pray opening spaces where people can realize like Jacob, ‘God is in this place
and I didn’t know it.’ How do I love God
with my mind? This calls me to pay
attention to what I am consuming in the media, but those voices will consume
me. What do I encounter online or in the
24-hour news cycle or what am I engaging that can stretch me out of this moment
to the wideness of God’s work over years and centuries (this is exactly why we
read the Gospels!!). Loving God is our
primarily calling. As we love God, God
loves us. God feeds and fuels our lives,
God shows up disguised as our lives, often not in the ways we planned or
predicted. You can go for that walk
outside and no birds may be singing, you may stub your toe and get splashed by
a car driving through a puddle. You may
come home, towel off and think, “That was the dumbest idea I ever read. Thanks a lot, Wes!” Then, God shows up in a sip of warm tea that
satisfies or in a friend as you share walking experience with and start
laughing uncontrollably. We don’t
control or confine God’s love, God’s love is expansive and evolving beyond our
comprehension.
We do
channel, in our very human-size ways, God’s love to others. Our neighbors, both those next door and down
the street and around the world. A
neighbor is anyone who responds with God’s love, remember this from the Good
Samaritan Luke 10. The question the
lawyer asked was, “Who is my neighbor?”
Who do I really have to be kind to, Jesus, because I would like to have
a sacred script that tells me step-by-step.
And Jesus tells an offensive parable, because the hero is a Samaritan,
who many of Jesus’ followers would ‘other’, push to the fringe and fray, not
see as fully human or God’s beloved. The
Samaritans exist in your life. They are
the people with that political sign, posting that misinformation,
pushing all the emotional buttons, and causing you to think, “That’s it, I am
outta here.” To channel God’s love to
the very people who are un-lovable is the scandal of the Gospel. Caesar’s gospel said might makes right and
power rules the day. Jesus’ gospel
preached and proclaimed a diverse, inclusive, equitable love that saw all as
beloved.
Jesus
also recognized that this wasn’t easy, because we don’t really love
ourselves. I mean seriously, if you
heard the endless chatters and color commentary of the play-by-play voices in
the booth of my brain – you would question everything I write and speak. What do you say to yourself when you make a
mistake? What names do you call yourself
when you put on an outfit that doesn’t quite look as good as you thought? How have you internalized the voices of
mentors who demeaned and demoted you rather than treated you as beloved? And why, for all that is holy, do we let
those voices of our worst critics live rent-free in your minds?
Love God
Love
Neighbor
Love
Self
This is
truly the calling of being a disciple, an apprentice and follower, of Jesus in
these days that takes a lifetime to explore.
Amen.
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