your heart, and you shall love the Lord with all of your might, and you shall love the Lord with

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1 November 4, 2018 Mark 12:28-34 No Greater Commandment Joy Douglas Strome Prayer for Illumination: God of wonder and hope and all that is sacred, help us to wonder at your word, bring hope to us again, help us to use this sacred time to draw near to you. We pray this, Amen. Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord. And you shall love the Lord with all of your heart, and you shall love the Lord with all of your might, and you shall love the Lord with all of your soul, and you shall love the Lord with all that you are. The Shema it is called, a primary confession of faith for Jews for centuries..found in Deuteronomy 6:5. It burrows deep into your bones with a really simple goal---are you in this or not.all in for one God.Yahweh.or not.your heart, your soul, your might, your everything. God alone. The text is clear..and goes on to remind the Israelites that this is what you get up every morning to teach your children, this is what you do every day to reflect faithfulness, this is it. All In. Full Body/Mind/Soul experience. While the Shema does not include the mind, Jesus slips it in. and we aren t really sure why, but it does complete the picture doesn t it? Feel it in your body, think about it in your mind, know it at your core, your soul..and remember it with all that you are.your God is one and your one job in life is to love this God. This is the first commandment that Jesus refers to---straight out of everyone s experience. There could be no argument with this. Known to them all. Then he adds the second commandment---love your neighbor as yourself..and again, we can see him work this crowd. Straight out of Leviticus, he quotes another commandment to go with the first: Hear the text in Leviticus 19: 18: You

2 shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I Am the Lord. Jesus pulls this little verse out of a string of You Shall nots--you shalls in a section of Leviticus called Ritual and Moral Holiness. It s an interesting list---i commend it for further reading. Some of its just weird, some of it is as relevant today as it ever was back then. I ll just read one more.how about this one in v. 33: When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God. This little passage seems to have slipped off the radar of those folks who are gearing up for a showdown at the border. This passage wasn t in the minds of those who thought it good to separate children and their parents at the border and for whom so many still have not been reunited. Ritual and Moral Holiness is a big deal to the Israelites and Jesus knows this. They, like us, might be bogged down in the scope of the requirement. IT is a lot. It requires constant monitoring of one s life. It never ends. It is for life. All of life. And so they come to Jesus asking him to give them guidance about what s the most important in the list. Love God. Love Neighbor. It s pithy and short. Fits on a t-shirt and the bulletin cover. Everyone thought it a good idea. Scribes couldn t really argue with him and the new Christians got on board too---especially since there were only two to remember.

3 It seems an important week to remember our ties to our Jewish ancestry. The law comes from them. The ethic was there long before Jesus. Jesus pulls it together with teaching tools that lock it into their hearts in a new way. Jesus pushes the limits of understanding and spends his ministry and life trying hard to show them what this looks like--- don t put this on a t-shirt, he says.put it into action..there is no greater commandment than these.and somewhere in that exchange.the argument ends. they will not question him again. It s hard to say what made this pairing so exceptional, these two out of so many already in the lexicon. Why was Jesus so controversial when he really spouted conventional wisdom. He makes the commandments more important than burnt offerings and sacrifices.if we think about that law alongside the others I think I can figure out the rub. While I m sure the temple needed money to make their operation financially solvent just the way we do at our church, Jesus puts the two kinds of actions in perspective. Could it be as simple as money? Or complicated as money? Aside from the money, what about the ask? Anyone can put an offering down. But is loving your neighbor that easy? Does loving God above all else really seem possible? These are the two most difficult asks on the list. As long as you have a long rambling list, it leaves plenty of cushion to conveniently ignore the weird ones. Can t I just follow the one about leaving grain along the edges of the field? I d like to do that one instead of love my neighbor. But one doesn t work without the others. If you love God, and you love neighbor the rest of the laws won t be hard to follow, because they will be implied. v. 13. You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not

4 keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind. you shall fear your God If you love God, and love your neighbor the rest of this list is just obvious. you can t love your neighbor and defraud them at the same time. you can t love God and put a stumbling block before the blind. Can t happen. Mutually exclusive actions. Jesus let s these two commandments rise to the top of the list because if they can get these? all the rest should follow. So we dare not think that the law of the Israelites is not our commandment. He lifts these two to the top of the list because they imply the rest of the list. All the law is all our law. Jesus just makes it easy for us to remember them. No greater commandment.but the Great Commandment has consequences aplenty! It seems like all of the rest of religious thought, tradition, and conflict hang on these consequences. What does it meant to love God with all that you are? What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself. Oh how we love to fuss over this. Let s write a doctrine to prove this is what they meant. Or let s send an overture to demand that it be understood this way. Let s write a treatise that will make it clear that we think it means this.or that. Or let s really make it stick.let s split apart and just the people who agree with us can be part of our group. Something meant to be so extraordinarily monumental is reduced to humans behaving badly---with no sense of being all in for their love of God or neighbor. I m not jumping on that topic today. I m still feeling too good about loving neighbor yesterday. I think the beauty of the two commandments is how they complement each

5 other. I don t know about you, but these last weeks have been brutal.loving God when I d really like God to reconsider free will and just come on down and put us back together again..loving God has been hard. So heading out to put our shaky faith into action yesterday with so many others, with our friends across the street, and visitors from churches in Michigan, and a wildly intergenerational effort..heading out on all that.restored some stuff for me. Maybe we have to spend some active time really loving our neighbor if we are going to understand how to love God.and then the complement of that is true too of course. Yesterday morning this sanctuary was full---of people who had given up their Saturday to go off and help people they didn t know with people they didn t know and in some cases in places they didn t know. that s a lot of unknowing. but it was a happy group that set off to take a break from the woes of the world and country and just love a neighbor for a few hours. My time with the women of our own church and the women from next door was so awesome. And then to meet the women at Sarah s circle and get a sense of a bigger picture not being told? not making it on the radar of the news cycle? well, the combination of work and good spirits and a lot of laughing was restorative. it never hurts to throw in lasagna. restorative. in many ways. I hope that happened for other groups too. It just made me think what opportunity we have in this city. We don t have to go far to find some work to do that will help our neighbor. Our neighbors, our next door neighbors..they need our love, and we need theirs start there..and build our way back to God----who has been there the whole time anyway, of course. It is love between neighbors that will set things to right.with God

6 undergirding the process as we go. What does this look like going forward? beyond the high of Service worship? It s obvious isn t it? This is an important week. Voting is not an option. We must do it. And we have to call up our parents and grandparents and make sure they do too. It is another tangible way we are loving our neighbors, near and far. Consequences are dire. Our neighbors at the border are counting on us to love them. our neighbors who have come to us from all parts of the world are counting on us to love them.our neighbors in uptown, our friends at the Night Ministry, scared families at House of the Good Shepherd, clients at Lake View pantry. It is the love between our neighbors, made tangible in a voting block that has backbone with an ethic that roots itself in love..that s an unstoppable force. After yesterday, I m feeling possibility? Dare I say hope? yes. I will. I dare you to say hope too and then live it. Amen.