Love Your Neighbor

October 23, 2011

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen

I. Introduction

Two weeks in a row - don’t get to do this very often. Now I know how Scott feels, standing up here each week. Hope you’ll bear with me.

Last week I spoke about coming together, combining our lives in the world with our lives of faith. About how Jesus’ teaching on rendering unto Caesar and unto God points the way to abundant lives of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or.’ Or that’s what I was trying to say anyway. This week, we another well-known teaching to consider. One much talked about, but with ever deepening layers of meaning attached. And one with particular power for our own parish community.

II. Love God and Your Neighbor

Love your neighbor as yourself. We hear it every Sunday in our Eucharist and Communion services. A commandment like unto the first and great commandment to love God. We are invited to understand that our love for God extends to embrace love for all of God’s creation – and so we are called to steward the environment in which we live, not just our backyards mind you, but our neighborhoods, our cities, our continents, our world. Loving God with all we’ve got, heart, mind, soul, strength, now that is a tall order. But through the practices of prayer we can come to appreciate how central to our lives is the Holy One of Israel who is in our midst. And so our lives may include prayerful worship as well as righteous action, expressing our love for God and for all in God’s creation.

So when we think about loving our neighbor, this is not something that is in addition to loving God – but is like unto it, as Jesus tells us. Loving our neighbors follows directly from our call to love the Lord our God, from whom all creation proceeds and on whom we and all creation are dependent. Our love for our neighbors is an expression of our love of God. Not another item on the list, but rather an intensification, a focusing of that first and great commandment, to love God. Just as loving our God inspires us to love our neighbors, loving our neighbors is a inseparable consequence of loving our God.

And so we ask the perennial question – who are our neighbors? This is the great part. We all want to love God. We all want to express that love. And our neighbors offer us the opportunity. Our neighbors, each one of them – whether within our church or without, whether living next door or in the park, whether friendly with us or grumpy, whether old or young, prosperous or needy, likeable or not – each of our neighbors and all of them together, offer us an opportunity to express our love of God. And for that I for one am deeply grateful.

And loving each other is surely what will get us through the challenges ahead. Frankly, and I have been wrestling with this a lot lately, I see our world and our community heading for very trying times ahead. The economic situation looks very troubling, not to mention ongoing difficulties with international conflict, global access to food and water, environmental challenges and all the rest. But at the end of the day, we are all in this together. We are all together in this world. But sometimes it seems hard to see. I have been so very troubled recently by the sense of aggressive triumphancy around “victories” in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Libya – around the notion that we celebrate vengeance, that we celebrate in the streets when people are killed - even people who have done terrible things. I wonder, where is our love then? Are we condemned to view life as consisting of allies and enemies? And even if we are, are we to ignore Jesus’ commandment that we love our enemies? Let us try to rediscover that love in our troubled world today.

In our own communities, we see divisions – consider the “occupy” movement, or criminal justice policy, or responses to hockey violence (on and off the ice), or issues around labor relations, and all the rest. Can we not perhaps consider that love for our neighbors invites us to appreciate other folks’ preferences and positions? We are all in this together. We are all together in this community. Whatever may be the differences of perspective and priority that characterize everyday life, might we return again to Jesus’ teaching? Might we rediscover the command to love our neighbors? To love our neighbors, such that we don’t forget our basic common identity in the midst of temporal disagreements over policy priorities, politics, or whatever.

A wise person said recently that we live in a time when a gaffe is defined as telling the truth. At the risk of committing such a faux pas, allow me to speak truth for a moment. Our parish has differences – differences of age, differences of time in the church, differences in finances and economic standing, differences of family situation, differences of priorities and perspective. Yet our love for each other is what binds us together and strengthens us all, so that differences do not become divisions. And our connections within our parish, our coming together, this is what enables us to minister more effectively in the world. Together we gain the spiritual strength to shout it from the mountain, to celebrate and re-affirm our love for God through expressions of love for our neighbors. To express and celebrate our love for our neighbors, not just in the Church, but in the community and the world.

III. Love Ourselves First

So, you may be thinking, OK we get the love part Potter, but what else have you got? Well, it’s this. When we Christians get all wrapped up in loving God and our neighbors, I wonder if we are not leaving ourselves out. I worry that perhaps we are too ready for self-reproach, too ready to sink into despondency over our own sinful nature, too ready to de-cry ourselves when we encounter our needy neighbors. Now self-denial is often useful in spiritual disciplines such as prayer and fasting – remember Jesus inviting us to deny ourselves and take up the cross. But devaluing ourselves in response to the needs of others is something different altogether. Such thoughts can tempt us toward unhealthy feelings of guilt (guilty giving, for example) or to the defense mechanism of condescension (helping those less fortunate, etc.). Remember, we are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. Not instead of ourselves.Not above or beneath ourselves. But as ourselves.

And I wonder if this doesn’t mean that we have to be able to love ourselves first. Sort of like the oxygen bags on airplanes – I know I’ve used this metaphor before, but it seems to work – when the airbag comes down, you put your own on first, then help others. And so we need to be OK with the notion of loving ourselves. We may be unworthy to stand before God, but we are not worthless – far from it. In the sight of God, we are good. This is not about egoism, but simply a reflection that we are part of God’s creation too. Along with our neighbors, we too are good. We are part of God’s glorious creation and what’s more, we know that Jesus came into the world to ensure we don’t forget it – that we don’t forget that we are in relationship with God. It’s OK. We can love ourselves as creatures of God, dependent on God’s grace and love.

And so we are called to love other in the same way that we love ourselves. To love others with such same-ness as we love ourselves that all the worldly differences between us fade away. People are no longer divided into “us and them,” and all the other categories into which we place our neighbors in this world. Of course, objective, material differences may still exist (age, gender, socio-economics, whatever), but they do not become divisions because of love. The differences among us do not become divisions between us, because of love, the great equalizer. Love that allows us to be at one with everyone else.

Love for ourselves as children of God, then becomes the standard for our relations with others. Relations with others, on our streets and in our offices, in our communities and across the globe, other whom we love as part of God’s creation just as we love ourselves for the same reason. Just as when our child hurts, we hurt as well, so too when our neighbor hurts, so do we. When we see another human being who is cold, hungry, lonely, we too suffer. And just as, when our child succeeds, we celebrate, so too when we see another human being achieve sucess, we celebrate. Because we love our neighbors as ourselves.

And perhaps it is through that empathy, that capacity to walk in the shoes of another, in the shoes of all the others whom we know, or see, or hear about, perhaps that empathy is what enables us in the end to come together. To come together as a parish, as a community, as a world. And therein lies the victory, therein lies the Kingdom of God. So let us begin, again with prayer.

Holy One, we thank you for your gift of grace that invites us to love you as you have loved us. Give us the vision, we pray , to find you everywhere in creation, and the strength to serve you by serving our neighbors. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen