Matthew
22:34-46
I
recently came across a story of a man reminiscing about his first encounter
with love. Jim was in the second grade
and back then everyone called him Jimmy.
Sheila was the first girl who ever caught Jimmy’s eye. Up until this point all Jimmy wanted to do
when he saw a girl was throw rocks at her, but Sheila was different. He didn’t want to throw rocks at her. She was the cutest thing young Jimmy had ever
seen.
Sheila
noticed Jimmy too because one day she passed him a note during class. It read, “Do you love me?” Uh oh, Jimmy thought, he had no idea that
things were this serious. Now Jimmy
didn’t know much about girls, but he did know that girls like to hear you say
that you love them. So he checked the
box that said “Yes” and passed it back.
At recess that day Sheila came up to him with a big smile on her
face. “Say it,” she said. “What?” Jimmy responded, confused. “Say that you love me,” explained
Sheila. Completely embarrassed, Jimmy
choked out, “I love you.” Thankfully
after hearing that she left him alone until the next day when Sheila came up to
Jimmy again and asked, “Do you really love me?”
“Yes,” said Jimmy. “Do you really
mean it?” Sheila pressed, “because a lot of boys tell me they love me, but some
of them don’t mean it.” Even at the
tender age of seven Jimmy knew the right answer to this question, “Of course I
mean it.” That seemed to satisfy Sheila
for a few days, but then she came back.
“If you love me and mean it,” she said, “why don’t you show it?” Good grief, Jimmy thought, I let her have my
special GI Joe eraser, I stopped pulling her hair, I even made my friends stop
calling her names. What more did she
want? “You’re supposed to hold my hand,”
she said with a stern look on her face, “and play with me at recess, sit next
to me during free time…you’re supposed to show that you love me.” With this Jimmy realized that he was way over
his head. So over the next few weeks
Jimmy did his best to gently fade into the background of all the other second
grade boys knowing that Sheila eventually look to someone else.
I
wonder if we sometimes have a Jimmy/Sheila dynamic going on with God? “Do you love me?” God asks us. Quickly we check off the appropriate box,
“Yes, God, we love you.” “Then say it,”
God says. “We love you Lord,” we reply
with a convincing Sunday smile. “Do you mean it?” God continues, “because a lot
of people say that they love me, but some of them don’t really mean it.” “Well, of course we mean it,” is our reply. “Then show it,” God says, “Love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind...and
love your neighbor as yourself.”
Ok
at this point, if we are completely honest some of us may confess that we
completely identify with young Jimmy here because it may feel that we too are
way over our heads. Love God with all
that we are - our hearts, our souls, our minds?
And love others, every other person, as we love ourselves? We know that this love that Jesus speaks of
in our gospel reading today goes way beyond warm, sentimental feelings. This love is the type that lead Jesus to die
on a cross. This is the type of love
that always seeks the good of the other, is unconditional, faithful, self-sacrificing
and enduring regardless of circumstances.
Good grief! Are we up to it?
Now
we talk a lot about love around here.
It’s not a new topic. However as
familiar as we are with the subject, living into the truth of it is always a
challenge and even has a bit of a mystery to it. I mean how exactly do you love a God who you can’t
see or touch or hear? And what is the
best way to love our neighbor - a family member who has deeply hurt us or a
co-worker who clearly has the wrong type of politics or someone who we are
afraid might hurt us in one way or another?
How to love such people is not always obvious.
And
let me throw in one more thing to consider as we seek to love God and our
neighbor as ourselves. It’s something
that researcher Dr. Brene Brown, after 10 years of studying human
relationships, concluded. She writes, We can only love others as much as we love
ourselves. Self-love, Dr. Brown
claims, is actually a requirement for loving others. But this self-love is not about self-absorption
rather it’s about extending the same degree of kindness and acceptance to ourselves
as we do to anyone else. But from what I
know, most of us are very hard on ourselves. We are full of
self-criticism. The things we say to
ourselves we would never say to anyone else because we know that that would be
cruel. And research suggests that as
much as we’d like to think that our lack of love for ourselves does not affect
anyone else, it does - kind of like secondhand smoke. We don’t realize that the things that we
don’t like about ourselves can cause us to act in unloving ways towards others,
especially those who are closest to us.
But whether or not you buy this theory that you can’t love others more
than you love yourself, what is beyond dispute is that God deems each one of us
worthy of loving and being loved - no exceptions.
Yet
we all love, no matter how hard we try, so imperfectly - we lose our patience,
we say things we don’t mean, we turn a blind eye, even our good deeds are full
of mixed motives. Recognizing this, a
young man went to his rabbi and said, “Rabbi, I know that we are commanded to
love God with all of our heart and soul and mind, but I also know that my heart
and soul and mind have bad parts in them.
So how can I love as God commanded?”
Thinking about this for a moment the rabbi replied, “It seems then you
will just have to love God with the bad parts too.” That’s what God wants from all of us - that
we might love with all of who we are, our imperfect selves, holding nothing
back. For God well knows that we are
not perfect. I mean we confess every
week how far short we fall. How we have
left undone those things which we ought to have done and have done those things
which we ought not to have done. We’ll
confess it today, we’ll confess it next Sunday, and hopefully we will confess
it to God throughout the week as we recognize the ways in which we’ve been
unable or unwilling to love. We’ll fall
short of the great commandment to love all of our lives, guaranteed. But the bigger and more important guarantee
is that no matter what God will keep extending love to us - forgiving us,
encouraging us and sending us back out into the world to try again to love God
with all that we are and to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Does
this feel like a big ask? So big that
some of us may be tempted to fade into the background hoping God will look to
someone else? It may feel like a big
ask, but actually it’s a big invitation.
An invitation to both recognize our limits and to experience the limitless
nature of God’s love. A love that is so
big, so generous, so patient, so forgiving - a love that never waivers, never
fails. A love that we do nothing to earn
or deserve but that is poured into our lives nonetheless. This is where we are to start. Know that love. Let it flow through your heart and soul and
mind so that the world may know God’s great love as we seek to love our
neighbor as ourselves.
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