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It Lectionary: Deuteronomy 6:1-9 Prayer of the Day: Psalm 32:8-11 “[Y]ou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these." (Mk. 12:30-31) Loving God and loving neighbor can be the same thing. Love is not limited. But my deeper understanding of how that happens has only come recently and required a step by step progression. Loving God and neighbor can be the same thing, but the process leading to such commitment of the heart doesn’t begin by trying to do both with equal focus. For love to reach its potential, our primary focus must be on loving God with all we are and all we have — on “lov[ing] the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength'” (Mk. 12:30). To know love as God wants us to will open flood gates of love for neighbors. We can’t imagine the scope of what can come out of those gates and won’t experience it unless we focus on surrendering to God in love as the way to become empowered to help others. To love God as God loves us is to be complete. If completeness in relationship exists, we need not worry about how to love others. We need not plan and evaluate. Our calculations and judgments can disappear. Too often these are burnt offerings (Mk. 12:33). When love is free from analysis it just happens - in ways we can’t explain or control. It happens in simple, beautiful, and amazing ways because our surrender to God in love frees us to see, hear, and touch in new ways. Then we love God and neighbor as a single expression of gratitude. Love without fear. Loving God to this extent requires honesty, humility, and trust. That’s the vision. That’s what I’m working toward. Easier said than done. But saying it and trying to live it a little more each day are important steps. I perceive, and also experience, a parallel between my relationship with God and my relationship with my therapist (or spiritual director). Both can help me love my neighbors. Both provide the opportunity to yell, cry, rejoice, converse, and experience ah-ha moments. But it takes real courage and investment to receive these benefits. It requires me to decide I want to know God ’s love. If I can catch a glimpse, and understand a bit about what that means, then I realize I can choose to what degree I love God with all my being. That takes risk. It demands sacrifice. There can be pain. So I must visit that place often with the belief that God loves me more than I do myself, and that God knows better than I do what will make me happy. That speaks to what I believe constitutes a healthy spirituality: gratitude, relationship, surrender, and availability. In my relationship with God I can explore and test. I can pause and be patient. As can God. I can express my darkest parts — my shadow — in my language. Or I can sense something that needs attention for which I have an incomplete understanding. Either way I meet God on turf new to me but which God knows well. I can be held, I can squirm, I can dodge, I can become angry, I can experience grace. So it is in the counselor/client relationship. I have thought for a while that life is all about affirmation and identity. Now I realize how love drives those needs. Love of God, self, and others. Love of self is not named in today ’s passage, but I think it’s implied. I am held together — or not — by love. My relationship with God allows me to feel love, practice returning love, and then, hopefully, share love with others in deeper ways. Hopefully that can be an affirming way of being that can help others with fear. Loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength can empower me to love my neighbors in radical ways. But I’m not there yet. I can’t see everything as clearly as I would like to know everything that requires. Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe self sacrificial love is just too scary. So I’m taking one step at a time. Not to take steps is to question God’s love, restrict my ability to grow in love, and prevent me from loving neighbors to the fullest extent possible. To love all of my neighbors as myself demands that I learn to love my whole self – even the parts I am ashamed of. If I can’t progress in doing so with God, who already knows it all, I’m in trouble. If I can’t let God help me love myself, then how in the world can I really love and forgive others who I also judge? “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In a recent homily, Dunstan argued there cannot be justice without love. When I was working in the justice world, I was driven too much by judgment of others — neighbors seeing things differently than me — and not enough by love for neighbors I was trying to help. Surrendering to God more and more has allowed me to understand that. Judgments in the name of love about others are powerful and can harm both us and them. That’s often easier than loving them by attempting to understand who they are and what drives them, both good and bad. Judgments are most powerful when turned harshly on myself, instead of me confessing to God, seeking God’s forgiveness and protection, and opening myself to love and affirmation. That’s why I find Psalm 32 so comforting. It’s my honest confession (32:3), receipt of God’s love (7), and desire to be taught a better way (8). At the beginning of the service, when I asked you to express your love to God on an index card, mine was simple. I wrote: “I Love You.” That’s what God wants to hear from me. It says it all. It brings me closer to the mystery of love that makes distinctions and nuances fall away. My whole being says that when the love of God is our focus, and when we offer ourselves to that power, life becomes simpler. Love flows more freely. It becomes redefined in our way of being. We are freed. We step outside the fears of our linear, either/or way of living. Questions about the relationship of God and neighbor become irrelevant. Loving both becomes one act – but not in a way we can totally grasp. And we are able to keep all the decrees and commandments, as Deuteronomy urges (6:2), without having to list, order, and recite. Psalm 32 is my prayer when I can’t identify or am not ready to speak the Its. It unites all that I am, all that I need, and all that I hope to be. It helps me bring it all before God, who knows the specifics even if I don’t. It is a surrender that leads to comfort. “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Therefore let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters shall not reach them” (32:5-6) Jesus said to the scribe: “You are not far from the kingdom of God" (Mk. 12:34). I think we come closer to the kingdom when we focus on loving God with our whole broken self and trusting the ripple effects of doing so. I think we bring neighbors closer to the kingdom because of that. And they bring theirs closer. And they bring theirs closer. And… Yes, I understand that every life must end, uh-huh
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