Here is my sermon for Sunday, 26 October 2008.  It is based on the following Scriptures:  Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Leviticus 19:1-2, Leviticus 19:15-18, and Matthew 22:34-46.  It is also for the following days in the liturgical year:  Proper 25A, Ordinary 30A, and Pentecost 24A.

———-

She loves me . . .
She loves me not . . .
Or for you ladies out there:
He loves me . . .
He loves me not . . .

Do you remember ever doing this?
Do you remember finding a flower and then plucking off its petals one by one to see if the object of your affection felt the same way about you as you did about her or him?
We would gladly sacrifice the life of a flower for the love of a girl or boy.
And oh the joy when the last petal said “she loves me.”
But then there was also the possibility of discomfort and pain when the last petal said “she loves me not.”

When that happened I would often run and get another flower and start all over again, hoping for a better result.
And when I got older I would sometimes resort to cheating.
I would look for the flower that would tell me what I wanted to hear.
I would count all the petals and find just the right flower,
with just the right number of petals.

Now why did we engage in such silly behavior?
Why did we dare hope that a flower, of all things, had the power to tell us what another person felt toward us?
You know why, as do I.
We all want to be loved and accepted and besides,
none of us want to end up like the young man who proposed marriage to a young woman by saying to her,
"I may not have a beautiful house and a fancy yacht and a promising career in
international banking like Jerome Green,
but I love you more than anything in the world. 
Will you marry me?"

The young woman was silent for a moment. 
"I love you too,” she said, “but tell me more about this Jerome Green."

We all want to be loved,
and so when we felt the first stirring of love for another person,
we would seek to confirm those feelings through the power of flower petals.
Besides, if the answer we received was “she loves me,”
then we felt we had some protection against rejection and hurt and pain.
And this was important.
After all, no one I know wants to be rejected.
No one I know loves to be hurt.

The desire, the need to be loved runs so deep in all of our hearts, doesn’t it?
It’s said that before she committed suicide Marilyn Monroe had a conversation with her maid, a woman named Lena.
Marilyn said, “Nobody’s ever gonna love me now, Lena.
What good am I?
I can’t have kids.  I can’t cook.
I’ve been divorced three times.
Who would ever want me?
“Millions of men,” Lena replied.
“Yeah,” said Marilyn, “but who would love me?”

To know that someone loves us,
that someone cares for us and wants the best for us . . .
I know of no deeper desire.
Maybe that’s why so much of the Bible is about love.
So much is said and written about love because love is so very important.
And that is exactly the point Jesus makes in today’s gospel reading when he is confronted once again by the Pharisees, the religious leaders of his day,

Now understand that the Pharisees were not only religious leaders but they were also religious professionals,
and in today’s reading they expect Jesus to join them in a game of sorts.
You see, there were 613 different rules and regulations in Jewish law,
and it was considered very religious to know all of them and to debate which of them were most important.
And this is what the Pharisees hoped Jesus would do when they posed their question about which commandment was the greatest.
They hoped Jesus would pick one of the 613,
so then they could argue with him about it,
and maybe even score a point or two in the debate and make Jesus look bad in the eyes of the people.
But Jesus was in no mood to play their little game.
He wasn’t concerned with religious debates and point-scoring.
Instead, he goes right to the heart of the matter and the answer he gives is not debatable in the least.

Now before going any further, it’s important to understand that Jesus’ answer was not something new, something he invented.
In fact, his reply is straight from the Jewish books of law.
The first part is from Deuteronomy 6:5, which Jews call the Shema,
and which served and serves as a basic creed of Judaism.
These words are the essence of the Jewish faith.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
These words were recited every morning and evening.
They opened every worship service.
They were taught to children and were the first verses committed to memory,
and, if possible, they were the last words spoken before death.
That’s how important they were.

Jesus then ties the Shema to another selection straight from the Pharisees’ own tradition.
“And a second commandment is like the first,” he says.
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
And with this quote from Leviticus,
Jesus drives home his point like a stake to the heart,
“On these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets as well.”

We’re told that the Pharisees didn’t even bother to argue.
There just wasn’t any point.  Jesus had them.
There was and is no commandment greater than the commandment to love God with every part of our being.
And no law about how human beings are to treat each other could go any deeper than the commandment to love one’s neighbor as one’s self.
The religious leaders are stunned into silence by the brilliance of Jesus’ reply,
so they meekly nod their agreement and shuffle away.

Of course, as followers of Christ, we cannot afford to respond as they did.
Now I realize that a legalistic “law-abiding” religion like the Pharisees’ faith can be very appealing.
All you have to do when confronted with a moral or ethical dilemma is to look it up in the book,
find the appropriate chapter and verse and act accordingly.
Jesus, however, says that all we have to do is love,
and while on the face of it this sounds easier in theory,
it is much harder in practice.
Most of us here, for instance, can affirm that we love God.
After all, we are here this morning worshipping God when we could have stayed in bed and gotten some extra sleep.
But in the same vein, most of us here would admit that loving others is infinitely more difficult.

I am reminded of the faithful pacifist Quaker farmer who was out milking one of his cows one morning and was about half finished when the cow kicked over the bucket of milk. 
The Quaker farmer quietly shook his head,
picked up the bucket and started again. 
He had just finished when the cow picked up a foot and this time deliberately planted it in the full pail of fresh milk. 
The Quaker went around in front of the cow, took her gently, but firmly, by the horns, and said,
"Thou knowest I cannot hit thee, nor kick thee, nor curse thee,
nor loose my temper with thee. 
But there is one thing that thou does not know. 
Tomorrow I am going to give thee to my brother-in-law,

who is a Methodist,
and he will beat the tar out of thee."

It is hard to love, isn’t it?
Especially when the world is filled with people who are as bad or even worse than that stubborn and willful cow the Quaker man had to deal with.
“Yes, we love God,” we exclaim, “the hard part is loving my neighbors.
I mean, have you seen some of my neighbors?”
There’s that one guy who is constantly getting on my nerves.
There’s that woman whose mouth is constantly running, but who never says a darn thing of interest or value.
And what about so and so who lied to me,
and the one who put me down,
and the person who hates me for no reason?
I can love God just fine,
it’s my neighbor I have trouble with.
He or she is a different story altogether.”

But it really isn’t so different according the Bible.
Listen to the Apostle Paul who wrote:
“How can you love God whom you have not seen,
if you do not love your brother or sister whom you have seen?”
John goes on to add:
“You cannot love God unless you love your brothers and sisters.”
So there you have it.
There is no separating the two, and I would add that the only way we prove our love of God is by loving others.
And that’s where most of us have a problem.
We just can’t imagine having loving feelings for some people. Right?

Frederick Buechner has helped me to move beyond this problem,
and perhaps he can help you too.
Buechner writes, “In the Christian sense, love is not primary an emotion (That is, it is not a feeling), rather love is an act of will.
When Jesus tells us to love our neighbor,
he’s not telling us to love them with warm fuzzy feelings.
After all, you just can’t up and produce a warm fuzzy feeling.
Jesus is not talking about love as a feeling.
Feelings have nothing to with it.
No, loving God means honoring and obeying and staying in constant touch with God,
and loving my neighbor means acting in their best interest no matter what,
even if I have a hard time even liking them,
and even if that means sacrificing my own well-being in the process.

But preacher, you might be saying by now,
I’m glad that I don’t have to get all gushy to love people,
but if love is about working for someone’s best interest even if it conflicts with what is in my best interest,
well, that’s like hopping from the frying pan into the fryer.
I don’t know if I can do that either.

And I understand this.
And in now way do I want to minimize how difficult real love is.
The Episcopal priest Judith Schneck puts it this way:
“The two great commandments are simple, but they have teeth:
they are tough and costly.
Basically, we don’t comply and perhaps we can’t.
[But] that is one of the beauties of God’s call;
it always stretches us, pulls us from wherever we are to be more.
It is like the horizon, always beckoning, never reachable.
The secret is to want to live out the commandments,
no matter how poorly we actually do it.
The secret is in our heart’s desiring.
Do we really desire to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and souls and minds and to love our neighbor as ourselves?
Truth be known, many say no.
We don’t mind loving God or our neighbor, but forget that little word “all.”
If we, in our own lives, want to make a choice, a decision, to love God and our neighbor as God asks us, what changes would that require of us?”

“The answer may lie the word ‘hang.’
‘On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
This word usually gets overlooked in the text.
‘Hang’ can mean the way we put up our clothes in the closet,
or it can mean what we do with the birdfeeder or the peg we put our hat upon. But in this text, the word ‘hang’ is the same one used for “Jesus, whom you slew and hanged upon the cross.”
That shifts the entire meaning of the Great Commandment, doesn’t it?
To love the Lord with all our hearts and souls and minds,
and to love our neighbor as ourselves is a crucifixion.
It means to die to ourselves.
No wonder there are so few volunteers.”

But there are a few.
There are almost always a few who volunteer.
The great Norwegian writer, Johan Bojer, makes that point powerfully in his story, The Great Hunger.
It happened that an anti-social newcomer moved into the village and put a fence around his property with a sign saying, “Keep Out.”
He also put a vicious dog inside the fence to keep anyone from climbing it.
One day, a neighbor’s little girl reached inside the fence to pet the dog and the dog grabbed her by the arm and savagely bit and killed her.

The townspeople were enraged and refused to speak to the recluse.
They wouldn’t sell him groceries at the store,
and when it came time for planting, they wouldn’t sell him seed.
The man became destitute and didn’t know what to do.
One day he saw another man sowing seed on his field.
He ran out and discovered it was the father of the little girl.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked.”
The father replied, “I am doing this to keep God alive in me.”

Imagine how difficult love would be in such a circumstance.
But this is the love to which we are all called.
As Schneck said, “To love the Lord with all our hearts and souls and minds,
and to love our neighbor as ourselves is a crucifixion.
It means to die to ourselves.
No wonder there are so few volunteers.”
Will you be one of them?