Gospel within the Gospel

 

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.