7th
Sunday after the Epiphany; Yr. A, February 23, 2014
Leviticus
19:1-2. 9-18;
Psalm 119:3-40; 1
Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23; Matthew
5:38-48
Sermon
preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church
When
Hannah was about three, she used to sit with Nancy during the church
service. You’d think a kid that young
doesn’t really pay attention to what’s going on, especially if she’s sitting in
your lap snuggling, but they do. Nancy thought
Hannah was sleeping, when suddenly she popped up and asked, “what is love?” What do you say to a three-year-old who
wants to know what love is? Maybe you
tell them love is caring for other people, or treating people with kindness? Love, when you get down to it, isn’t so easy
to define in simple terms.
When
I hear the redactor in Leviticus say, you
shall love your neighbor as yourself, I start to squirm because love’s just
not simple.
I know that “love means
never having to say you’re sorry” is totally off the mark. In my experience, love is more like a cartoon
I saw recently on a friend’s refrigerator.
It was a picture of two older folk sitting on a park bench, at opposite
ends of the bench. It’s raining and
they’re sitting looking away from each other.
The man is holding an umbrella in an outstretched arm, so that it
shields the woman from the rain – even as she’s sitting at the other end. He’s getting wet. The caption says, “love means caring for
someone even when you’re angry.” That’s
my experience of love … you have to be tough and hang in there together,
because you’re going to have to say you’re sorry sooner or later … and more
than once. My tag line on love is more
like “you always hurt the ones you love”.
You shall love your neighbor as
yourself. Yeah, it makes me squirm. Love is a messy business. Caring about someone makes me feel a sense of
responsibility for him. It makes me feel
a bit vulnerable. If I admit to caring
about someone, even if I only admit it to myself, I put myself “out there”. I risk getting hurt by false promises, by
broken engagements, by missed opportunities, by thoughtless remarks, by bad
habits, by rejection, by high hopes, by dozens of things I can’t possibly
predict before I actually take the leap and realize I even care enough to be hurt. If I open myself to love, there will be pain. I can guarantee it. I’ll get hurt because I actually care about more than the person. I also care about the relationship we share,
about that “thing” that exists in the space between us, about the way we are
with each other. All that might be worth
it, if I actually got to choose who I am going to love, but that’s not exactly
how it works.
Soren
Kierkegaard wrote a book called Works of
Love. Now, I’m not a real fan of his
… probably even less of a fan since I read these first few chapters because
what he says is hard stuff. First he
claims, you shall love your neighbor. You shal,
not you should or you might or you can if you want to, but you shall.
It’s a commandment. It’s a
duty. Loving our neighbor is something
God requires of us as Christians. We are
a holy people, set apart for loving.
Don’t think twice about it. Just
do it. Kierkegaard says, “only when it
is a duty to love, only then is love made eternally free in blessed
independence”[1]. We can love someone and they can say, “I do
not love you” in return. If we answered
them by saying something like, “Then I will no longer love you”, our love isn’t
free, and neither are we. My love would
be contingent on someone else’s love.
Instead, someone can choose not to love me, and I can choose to love them anyway. What a radical idea! Love is a free gift, given because we have
received the free gift of love from God first.
We don’t have to worry about whether we will be loved in return. That’s
not the point. The point is that God’s
love will suffice. We will always be God’s beloved, and loving others is a
reflection of our love for God. It’s our
duty. It’s risk free! A guaranteed return bought and paid for by
God for all humankind. What could be
better, right? Maybe, but I’m still squirming.
So,
who’s my neighbor? Kierkegaard has an
answer for that too. He says the word
neighbor comes from the word neahgebur which means “near-dweller”.[2] Who is my neighbor? Anyone who is near me. Anyone. The guy who trips on the sidewalk and
falls. The woman who lives on disability
in the corner house. The kids who run up
and down the street and throw the tomatoes that grow in the garden beds. The woman who takes care of all the cats down
the block. The people who come to Sunday
supper. The good landlords and the
crummy ones. The rain falls on the
righteous and the unrighteous, and they are all my neighbors, your neighbors,
our neighbors. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. We may have chosen the neighborhood, but we
haven’t chosen our neighbors. We have a
duty to love them all! Kierkegaard says, “Choosing a lover, finding a friend,
yes, that is a long, hard job, but one’s neighbor is easy to recognize, easy to
find – if one himself will only recognize his duty.”[3] Any of you squirming with me yet?
Because here’s the real crux of the issue,
the cross, if you will. Who is supposed
to do this loving? You and you and you and you, and me too! Not the other guy. Not the person sitting next to you. Not the one with more money or more time or
fewer responsibilities. Not the one with
more connections or more creativity or more patience. Not them.
YOU and ME! Now do you get it,
why I squirm? This Christianity thing is
work. I can see why it scares people
away. I can see why God gave us the
Church. We need each other, not only to
help us be loving, but to help us grow in love and to forgive in love.
Leviticus
paints us a pretty good picture of what it looks like to live in love. It says, don’t keep everything for
ourselves. Leave enough for the poor and
for the ones who aren’t from around here.
Everyone deserves food on the table.
So why did we cut food stamps last November? And why did we pass a farm bill that reduced funds
to support SNAP again a few weeks
ago? Is that love? It says don’t take what’s not yours; don’t
cheat one another; don’t profit from the blood of a neighbor. Tell me again why we don’t fight harder for a
living wage? And what about sweatshops
and child labor? There’s blood spilt
there. Love is hard work, but still, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. It’s tough love in the truest sense.
It
helps to start with the simple fact that we’re loveable in the first
place. All of us. Beautifully, wonderfully made in the image of
God. We have to believe that God loves each
and every one of us; we have to believe that we’re worth it … me included. Maybe it would help to imagine ourselves as a
three-year-old safely snuggled in the lap of God. Because if we know how lovingly God looks
down on us, then just maybe, we could look with those same eyes on all those
around us. Maybe we could even look
that way on ourselves. There’d be
nothing to prove. No one to
impress. We’d be perfect, complete in
every moment … just as God is. Always
growing more deeply into the love God means for us, and becoming more fully
human with each passing day. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Just as yourself. We are a holy people, set apart for love and
for the world. Let yourself fall in love
with God, and spread that love wherever you go.
Amen.
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