This sermon was my first to the good people of the Episcopal Church of St. Martin as their Interim Assistant Rector.
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Grace and peace from God our Creator, hope in our Redeemer, Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you always.
Today is a very special day. October 31st! A crowd favorite. I am sure that all of you have been anticipating this day for weeks now, preparing to celebrate and eat and drink and reminisce. Every year, the excitement builds until finally we get to gather together and say those words particular to this day: Ecclesia Semper Reformanda Est!
No? You don’t know that one? “The Church must always be reformed”? Huh. Okay, well, duly noted.
In the Lutheran tradition, October 31 is Reformation Day. Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther’s launch of the Protestant Reformation by nailing his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.
Good old Marty chose this date, also known as All Hallow’s Eve, because the following day, All Saints Day, was one of the busiest days of the church year, and everyone in town would of course stop to read his very thorough list of grievances with the papacy on their way to the pews.
Most of Marty’s neighbors actually could not read, and so it is probably apocryphal that he actually hammered a piece of parchment to the door. But it is a very good legend and we are deeply committed to it, as Lutherans. In our campus ministry several years ago two of the LEVNeers insisted that I allow them to paint a giant replica of the Wittenberg church doors, onto which we could invite students to play “pin the theses on the door” while wearing a Martin Luther mask. Kids these days!
But since I did, in fact, get the memo that this is the Episcopal Church of St. Martin—different Martin, it turns out—I will turn our attention toward the day you came here to celebrate. Sunday, the day of the resurrection of our Lord, and All Hallow’s Eve, el dia de los Muertos.
Today and tomorrow and next Sunday we will dedicate particular attention to life and death. As mortal humans, and as followers of Jesus—who lived and died and lived again—we are not unfamiliar with the premise. Both life and death are themes that run throughout our scripture and traditions. Yet somehow, many of us are still fairly uncomfortable with the realities of bodies and birth and life and death.
We who are gathered this morning, and on every Sunday, commemorate the resurrection of the Christ and his victory over sin and death. Every Sunday is a little Easter.
It’s likely, though, that the other six days of the week—and especially over the last 19 months—have felt like some other days of Holy Week. There is death all around us.
We have spent countless hours learning more than we ever wanted to about immunology, and epidemiology, hoping to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from this deadly virus. We have grieved our loved ones lost to COVID, and lost during this era of COVID, when our rituals for dying and grieving could not be enacted.
A byproduct of this crisis has been a reexamination of what it means to live in community, to be a society. We have, perhaps, reorganized our priorities around what it means to love our neighbor. Fortunately for us, Jesus has something to say about that.
Our text this week is from the Gospel according to Mark. The quickest gospel! It’s the shortest, word-count-wise, and everything in it happens rapidly. Mark does not wax poetic, or editorialize, or even, sometimes, contextualize! There’s just a story, and that’s that.
This is one of those weeks. This conversation that Jesus is having with a scribe makes a bit more sense if we trek back a few verses to the conversations he had with the Pharisees and the Herodians and the Sadducees immediately beforehand. The first one, with the Pharisees and the Herodians, is a trap. Mark says so, straight up, but also the question they ask is “should Jews pay taxes to Rome?” It’s the definition of a “gotcha” question, wherein any answer Jesus gives gets him in trouble with somebody.
The second conversation, with the Sadducees, is about resurrection. This one’s tricky, as well, because a major difference between Pharisees and Sadducees hinges on their beliefs about resurrection. Again, any answer will back him into a corner. So when this third question rolls around—Teacher, which is the greatest commandment?—the reader might assume that this, too, is a trap, and that Jesus’ answer will stoke controversy.
Jesus doesn’t pause to consider the options, or what the scribe thinks is the answer, but immediately—remember, it’s Mark, we’re hustling—responds that the greatest commandment is the first: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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.” And he takes it a step further and adds that the second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” joins the first to become the greatest commandment.
What is the scribe going to say? “How dare you omit the other eight commandments!”? “What, you don’t think it matters that we abstain from lying and murder and adultery? What a heathen!”? Instead, the scribe agrees with him. Plot twist!
Jesus and these other religious leaders have been sparring—in this particular instance and throughout Jesus’ ministry—so it is not altogether surprising that we expect more of the same. But if the thing these three questions have in common is not that they are intended to trap Jesus, what is the link between them?
Each is a fundamental question regarding who Jesus is, what he is about, and what that will mean for the community. [1] Whose side is he on? The scribe, though, does not play into the “us versus them” setup provided by the previous two discussions. The scribe’s question provides Jesus the opportunity to express the fundamental relationship between God, us, and each other. It is not “us versus them” but “God and all of us”.
This is a fundamental tenet of our faith, but it is not always easy to stick to the fundamentals. We are often caught up in our differences and our nuances, making sure that we set ourselves apart as Lutheran or Episcopalian, that we neglect the groundwork set for us centuries ago.
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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.”
About this commandment, theologian Elizabeth J.A. Siwo-Okundi has written that “The ways in which we love God must be personal, generational, public, and consistent. The more we engage with the commandment, the more we become accountable for acting upon it.
This commandment must be so ingrained within us that our circumstances will not alter its significance nor deter us from loving God always, everywhere, and with everyone.” [2]
But Jesus didn’t even stop there! He added another commandment to the first: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus has taken these two commandments and combined them into one, because they cannot be separated. “The love of God cannot fully exist without the love of neighbor and self....It is this combined love commandment that we must now...make personal, generational, public, and consistent.’ [2]
How is it that we do this? What are the actual actions of neighbor-love?
They are personal—this is the one that we are perhaps best at. Caring for those we love with our words, actions, time, and energy. Our families, friends, and other close relationships are most likely to come to mind when we think of our “loved ones”.
One way that we can be faithful to God is by expanding this network to reach further into our communities. Thinking of more of our literal neighbors as part of the family of God.
his continues as we think about our neighbor-love being generational. How are we receiving wisdom from our elders and passing that wisdom on to our newcomers? In our families, our networks of friendship, our workplaces, our neighborhoods, there are ways of showing love that we had to learn, and part of our responsibility is to ensure that that learning is shared. Raising our children in the faith, yes, and adapting to the new ways of being that they teach us. Love of neighbor being generational can and must be a mutual exchange between the generations.
Love of God and love of neighbor must also be public. This can mean a lot of things, but most critically, it means that as a whole community, we belong to each other.
Dr. Cornel West, a contemporary public theologian, is famously quoted as saying that justice is what love looks like in public. Justice is what love looks like in public.
As we discern how to act in love for our neighbors, we must consider justice in our neighborhood as a whole.
Who lives here?
Who is being educated here?
Who works here?
Who worships here?
Who plays here?
Who thrives here?
Who is unable to live, be educated, work, worship, play, or thrive here?
The systems and structures of our society are direct reflections of our commitment to the greatest commandment. Are we, individually, collectively, systemically, and structurally, loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves?
Are we individually, collectively, systemically, and structurally, loving God when we allow 25% of children under 5 to live in poverty in the state of California? [3]
Are we, individually, collectively, systemically, and structurally, loving God when we allow hate crimes to surge to their highest rate in 12 years? [4]
Are we loving God when we allow thousands of indigenous children to die in residential schools? [5]
Are we loving God when the rate of suicidality among our military veterans is 4 times as high as combat deaths? [6]
Are we loving God when 1.8 million women have left the US workforce since the pandemic began? [7]
Are we loving God when healthcare decision-making is dictated not by patients and doctors but by legislators and insurance companies?
Are we loving God when 898 people have been shot and killed by police in the last year? [8]
Are we loving God when we are putting 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic into our oceans? [9]
Are we loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves when we decide that these realities are not our problems to solve?
The four components of our love of God and love of neighbor are that it needs to be personal, generational, public, and consistent. Consistency is key. We have to give our whole selves to this, not just check it off a to-do list occasionally. Our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength! That is not a one-off occasion. Love of God and love of neighbor should be the fundamental lens through which we design our lives.
Some of us may feel like these questions are “politics” and that they “do not belong at church”. But politics is the way that people in a community living together make decisions. If we do not bring our love of God and our love of neighbor into our most pressing decision-making as a society, we are not following the commandments. These commandments were given to us by God, interpreted by our ancestors in the faith, and reiterated to us by Jesus himself. There is little more fundamental to our Christian life than that.
Dear siblings in Christ, I pray that you will love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. I pray that you will love your neighbor as yourself. Please pray that the same will be true for me. We will come near the kingdom of God, together. Amen.
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[2] Elizabeth J.A. Siwo-Okundi, “Proper 26 [31]” in Preaching God’s Transforming Justice: Year A, p 479-484.
