October 23 - The 19th Sunday after Pentecost
Not So New Rules
A sermon by the Reverend Robert Bruce Edson in Emmanuel Episcopal Church, West Roxbury, Massachusetts, on October 23,
2011, the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
He said to them,”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all you mind.’
This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Matthew 22:36-40
By now we’ve all grown weary of the rhetoric of the ongoing political campaign even though we still have another year to
go before the general election. Candidates may ascend swiftly only to fall out of favor due to an ill chosen remark. In the 1920’s,
the taciturn President Calvin Coolidge, known as “silent Cal,” was a man of few words because he knew he couldn’t be criticized for what he didn’t say. There is the story of a woman seated next to him at a dinner who told him that she had made a bet
that she could get him to say at least three words, to which the he replied, “You lose.”
It is popular for politicians to be in favor of reducing the size of government; cutting taxes and deregulating restrictions
they feel threaten their freedoms. In Jesus’ time, there were as many as 613 laws and regulations that were part of the sacred
Torah, some of which contradicted themselves. When the experts of the law try to test Jesus by asking him which of the laws is
the greatest, he quotes from the book of Deuteronomy, (6:4) “You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and with
all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. He then quotes from the book of Leviticus,
(19:18) “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Whatever
we believe about following rules and regulations, it all comes down to loving God and loving our neighbor as we love and respect
ourselves. This gets right to the heart of a matter in a very simple but profound way. Abraham Lincoln, considered by historians as our greatest president, received little formal education, yet had an extensive knowledge of the Bible. This is because in his time children learned to read from the family Bible as one of the few books
available. His eloquence in writing and speaking far surpassed those with more formal education. Though he was baptized in
a river before his first inauguration, Lincoln never formally joined a church because he felt that so many church membership
requirements were far too complex. He once said that he would join a church whose sole requirement for membership was to
love God with all your heart, soul and mind and your neighbor as yourself.
The great commandment to love God must come through our own personal experience. It requires allowing God,
“from whom no secrets are hid,” to reach right to the very heart of our being. The second great commandment is to love or respect others as we would respect ourselves. We can’t love and respect anyone else until we learn to love and respect ourselves.
Loving and liking are not the same thing. We are not expected to like everyone. We can’t. That’s impossible. Nor can
we expect everyone to like us. But, we can learn to love and respect others with whom we share all the same human needs
and feelings. It is humbling to remember that God loves those whom we dislike just as much as God loves us. It makes you
think that the dumb things we do and say must be an unending source of humor for God. It was Mark Twain who said that
mankind was created because God was disappointed in the monkey!
To love and respect our neighbor requires knowing who our neighbor is. Our neighbor is that parent, sibling or child
with whom we sometimes find it difficult to have a civil word. Our neighbor is our spouse or partner with whom we haven’t
been out to dinner in six months. Our neighbor is the stranger on the street who doesn’t have anywhere to go at night who
would never choose to live that way. Our neighbors are misguided religious fanatics who think they are right and everyone else
is wrong. Our neighbors are to be neither avoided nor used, but respected in spite of what we may feel or think about them.
Because we all belong to the same human race and share the same basic human needs, our neighbor deserves the same basic
considerations we want for ourselves.
Some years ago, a well-known Hollywood actress was suffering from severe depression and wandered the streets for
months. When some homeless people took her into their makeshift shelter, wrapped in a blanket and living in a cardboard box,
she exclaimed that she didn’t belong there. Their response was, “Neither do we.”
You will never hear me talk about the Episcopal religion or even the Episcopal Faith. We are part of the Christian religion and faith of which the Episcopal Church is a part. Christianity is far more than a philosophy. Philosophy attempts to answer
the great questions of life. Christianity doesn’t have all the answers, but does know how to ask the right questions. That is how
we come to grips with life’s hard issues and maintain our sense of trust and hope when nothing else makes sense.
At the heart of our Christian faith is learning to live with what we don’t understand. In a time of ongoing economic uncertainty and international tensions, it is all the more important to ask the right questions in the hope of living into some of the
answers.
I have a silkscreen artwork by the onetime Boston artist and Roman Catholic nun, Sister Mary Corita Kent. She will
never be made a saint because she challenged church authority and eventually left the order. This is reflected in the word
“ornery” written backwards in ecclesiastical purple. In the background it reads, “Hip deep involvement.” At the heart of this is a
quote by the German poet Rainer Rilke that reads:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers
that cannot be given you. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day
into the answer.
(Letters to a Young Poet, 1903)