Home is the place where we are first loved, although sadly for some people this is not the case. Home is the place where I received love and learnt how to love.
When asked by a religious authority which was the most important commandment, Jesus replies: ‘…you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ Mark then has Jesus quote some words from Leviticus 19 for his second commandment: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
LOVE is the Way. LOVE. It sounds simple. But LOVE is anything but simple. LOVE God, LOVE your neighbour as you LOVE yourself. Jesus sifts centuries of religious seeking, religious teaching, and religious practice and reveals what is most important: LOVE.
LOVE is such a simple word. And yet, anyone who has ever loved knows that LOVE is also a word that can be one of the most complicated, challenging, misunderstood, difficult, intimate, spectacular, passionate, gratifying, mysterious words we have. LOVE God. LOVE our neighbours as we LOVE our selves. Both these sayings are not unique to Jesus, if he indeed did say them. For ‘followers of Jesus’, what is important is that Jesus is the one who did not simply teach the double commandment, but actually embodied it.
In many ways we have domesticated the world LOVE. All too often we trivialize the word. But as anyone who has ever tended a rose-bush will tell you, roses have thorns and thorns can be painful.
Who is our ‘neighbour’? I am sure we all remember that our tradition says Jesus once had a conversation about this very question, and in response, shared what we now call the parable of the so-called ‘Good Samaritan’.
Reflecting on that story, New Testament scholar Robert Funk raised the stakes a bit. From ‘who is my neighbour?’ to ‘whom will I allow to be my neighbour?’ And that puts a whole new light on the Samaritan story!
Australian Biblical scholar Greg Jenks, writes: ‘It provides a way for Christians in Israel and Palestine to reflect on their experiences of dispossession and occupation, and to draw strength from the biblical and theological traditions which they share with their Jewish neighbours and, to a different extent, with their Muslim compatriots.’ ‘Jesus always focuses our attention on God and on others.’. (GJenks. FaithFutures web site 2006).
LOVE takes on many forms. And one of the forms I personally feel is needed today is Justice. One of LOVE’s most demanding forms is justice. Justice is what LOVE looks like in public and justice can be such a demanding taskmaster. Justice demands our best efforts, our sharpest minds, our wisest instincts coupled with steadfast dedication and selfless service. Learning to meet the challenges of LOVE cannot happen in isolation. Just as our first lessons about LOVE happened at home with our families as our teachers, learning how to LOVE our neighbours, ourselves, the Earth, and God, learning to be LOVE in the world requires community.
In his book The Great Spiritual Migration, Brian McLaren writes: ‘You can’t learn to love people without being around actual people—including people who infuriate, exasperate, annoy, offend, frustrate, encroach upon, resist, reject, and hurt you, thus tempting you not to love them. You can’t learn the patience that love requires without experiencing delay and disappointment. You can’t learn the kindness that love requires without rendering yourself vulnerable to unkindness. You can’t learn the generosity that love requires outside the presence of heartbreaking and unquenchable need. You can’t learn the peacableness that love requires without being enmeshed in seemingly unresolvable conflict. You can’t learn the humility that love requires without moments of acute humiliation. You can’t learn the determination that love requires without opposition and frustration. You can’t learn the endurance that love requires without experiencing unrelenting seduction to give up. The way of love is the way of annoyance, frustration, disappointment, unkindness, need, conflict, humiliation, opposition, and exhaustion. No one would choose it if love weren’t, in the end, its own reward. This difficult way, this way of love and suffering, this way of Christ is unavoidably the way of the cross.’
So, on this Sunday, let me welcome you home to Aldersgate with these beautiful roses. For here in this place we make a home for one another, a home where together we experience communion with the one who is our lover, beloved, and LOVE itself. Here in this home we learn from one another how to be LOVE in the world. Welcome home to Aldergate where together we learn how to LOVE our neighbours as we LOVE our selves. Welcome home to Aldersgate where together we learn how to love the Earth. Welcome home to Aldersgate where we learn from one another that in LOVING our neighbour, in LOVING ourselves, and in LOVING the Earth we experience the one who is LOVE. For the LOVE that is God does not live in some mythical heaven. The LOVE that is God lives and breathes in, with, through, and beyond us and when we LOVE our neighbours, ourselves, and the Earth we are LOVING God. Creating and being home for one another is what it means to be church; a home where we can learn to be LOVE in the world; a home where we are nurtured, nourished, grounded, and sustained for the work of being LOVE in the world. The kind of home where we learn from one another how to be about the work of creating justice, which is what LOVE looks like out there in the world.
Welcome home. Welcome home to the beauty that we find at home, and welcome too to the reality of the thorns. Creating and maintaining this home where LOVE is our Way might be painful, demanding work, but there will be morning tea, prepared and served by loving hands. There will be LOVE.
Welcome home. Together, let us be LOVE in the world.
‘Jesus’ love was a forgiving love, full of mercy and compassion. It was a justice-seeking love transcending class, status, wealth. And I think that kind of love calls us to do two things even amidst our fears and anger. First, a Jesus-kind-of-love calls us to resist giving up on ourselves and our world… And the second thing that a Jesus-kind-of-love leads to amidst fear and anger is the ability to hold on to hope… even in situations of anxiety and rage…’ (Jerry Stinson).
Not giving up on ourselves and our world, and holding on to hope, is vitally important in our day. Because what we believe about life makes a huge difference to us.
References
Jesus and his Kingdom of Equals. An International Curriculum on the Life and Teaching of Jesus by CG Binkley & JM McKeel. Polebridge Press, 2001.
The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, by RW Funk, RW Hoover and the Jesus Seminar. HarperOne, 1996
The Great Spiritual Migration: How the world’s largest religion is seeking a better way to be Christian by Brian McLaren. Convergent Books, 2016