What sort of King is Christ?

I first had the opportunity to preach on Christ the King Sunday during my seminary internship at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in Littleton, Colorado, in 2012. It is the Sunday that precedes the season of Advent and is an important commemoration in the life of the Church. In the time since, I have had very few opportunities to preach on this feast, because The Belfry did not have our midweek service the week of Thanksgiving, which is when we often would have observed it.

When I first sat down in 2012 to write that sermon, I was angsty. I didn’t really know what this day meant, and I presumed that it meant that we should see Jesus as a king in the way that we have had kings here on earth for millennia—as power-hungry, imperialist, colonizing, grossly wealthy, disconnected from the reality of the people they tower over. This doesn’t sound like who we know Jesus to be. So I typed out a bunch of stuff about how this was the opposite of the case and that Jesus was unlike any king ever before seen or seen since!

And then I did a few googles about Christ the King Sunday and wouldn’t you know, that is actually the premise.

The feast of Christ the King is officially known as the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. It came about in 1925 during the rise of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator in Italy. Pope Pius XI insisted that supremacy over the universe belonged to Christ alone, not to any earthly leader.

Contrary to popular belief in 1925 and in this year of our Lord 2021, no earthly power deserves our unwavering allegiance—no political leader, no church leader, no celebrity, no king, no idol.

The idea of Christ the King is to subvert the idea of kings. No king wields as much power as the God who created the universe. Powerful people should take a look at themselves, have some perspective. It can be all too easy for us, these days, with our incredible technological advancement and our global communications, to think that we are truly the masters of this planet and its inhabitants.

To be clear—our actions on this earth can have ramifications on a global scale. But we are not all-powerful. We are not gods. We are not even kings.

Rather than ascribe Christ-like-ness to kings and rulers and dictators and autocrats and despots, the feast of Christ the King reminds us what true leadership looks like. In response to the sin that so easily entangles us in our earthly kingdoms, on this day the Church proclaims that the only, true way to wield power is to wield it like Jesus. To preach good news to the poor, to free the captive, to liberate the oppressed.

The Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe did not come about because Pope Pius XI thought the Sunday before Advent begins needed a little zhuzhing. This feast was declared in response to the real threat of fascism in the governments of Europe and in the hearts of each of us. A threat that has not diminished.

Some of you have not known me for very long, but those of you who do are perhaps not surprised that I was delighted to be the preacher on this anti-fascist feast.

But the sermon I began to prepare earlier this week is not the sermon I finished writing yesterday.

On Friday morning, a jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty of the reckless homicide of Joseph Rosenbaum, the intentional homicide of Anthony Huber, nor the reckless endangerment or attempted intentional homicide of three others. [1] I wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted several sentences about this.

Simultaneously, Travis and Gregory McMichael are on trial in Georgia for the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was out for a run in their neighborhood. There was an altercation, they followed him, and they killed him.

A similar conversation will be had in that jury deliberation, about whether this homicide was justifiable. I wrote and deleted and wrote and deleted several sentences about this.

In slightly better news, Julius Jones’ death sentence was commuted by the governor of Oklahoma at the eleventh hour, after several appeals based on the likelihood of Mr. Jones’ innocence in a 1999 murder, for which he has been imprisoned for half his life.

There is plenty to read and watch about these incidents and these trials, and we shan’t re-litigate them this morning. I wrote and deleted several sentences about these events yesterday because I was processing my own grief. My own weary, unsurprised devastation that, time after time, justice is not truly served.

And there are plenty of sermons and adult forums in me about the abolition of the prison-industrial complex and the idolatry of whiteness and of guns, and we’ll get to those, but it turns out that today is not that day.

Today is a day to remember that when it is injustice that rolls down like water, when we cannot bring ourselves to mourn and rage and grieve and cry again this week, this month, this year about the same thing...our God joins in our weeping. Our God who lived and died among us in a callous world, understands what it is to suffer, and to bear witness to the suffering of others.

On this day when we commemorate the ultimate power of Jesus the Christ, we do the counterintuitive Christian thing of acknowledging the insufficiency of our own power. On another Sunday, I will remind you of all that you have the power to change in the world around you and implore you to take bold action in the name of Christ. But at some point, we do have to grieve.

Feminist author bell hooks wrote that “to be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.” [2] Our interaction with the world, as people who strive to love God and love our neighbors, will lead us to grief and to sorrow. It will lead us to joy as well, we are assured, but the more we are open to love, the more we are open to grief.

We cannot continue to absorb all of this terror and pretend it is having no effect on us. We have to engage with the world around us in a way that preserves our energy for responding, when we’re able. I am not recommending a head-in-the-sand willful ignorance; neither am I recommending a non-stop doom-scroll through your news apps and social media. Tuning it out does not actually make it go away.

An artist that I love, Nicole Manganelli, says that grief is tidal. [3] It ebbs and it flows and it sometimes feels that we are far from being swept away by it but then suddenly our sandcastle is overwhelmed and everything is soaked and we’re trying to laugh it off but it’s going to be pretty uncomfortable for a while.

We have to notice in our minds and feel in our bodies when we are grieving. That may seem obvious to you, because you’re thinking about mourning and grieving an isolated event, like the death of a loved one. But what about when the grief is not singular, but unending? Over and over and over, it crashes on our shores.

Under normal circumstances, we might share our grief with a friend or a therapist or a clergy person. But what about when they, too, are experiencing grief? What about when everyone is grieving, everything all at once? And it doesn’t stop?

How do we respond to a tidal wave of grief?

You may have heard of the Talmud, which is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, outside the Torah itself, and predates Jesus by a few centuries. It expounds on the Hebrew Bible and is a source of great, great wisdom. There is a passage in it that I learned in seminary and it comforts me greatly, and I want to share that with you. It’s in reference to famous verses from the prophet Micah. It lacks concrete attribution, but a wise Rabbi once said:

"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."

I am going to read it again just in case you missed part of it because I want you to really feel it.

"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."

It is not the responsibility of this morning's sermon to wrap up the enormity of the world’s grief with a bow and tell you that it is all going to be okay. I am not in the business of toxic optimism, and neither is the Torah or the Talmud or the Gospel. This week, dear ones, I am daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Many weeks, over the last uh, several years, I have been daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

The daily grief of living and loving—job loss, death, breakups, diagnoses, struggles, fears—those continue apace in the midst of our national and global crises. We have tried to go about our regular human business while also trying to navigate the dueling traumas of rising sea levels and white supremacy and mass gun violence and political unrest and wildfires and wars and and and…

It is not imperatives to pick up the pace of your personal anti-fascist practice that you require from the pulpit this morning. It is rest. And it is not me who grants you that rest, of course, but it is Jesus the Christ, King of the Universe. In the Gospel According to Matthew, not remotely this morning’s assigned text, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

This offer is personal and this offer is collective. Unshoulder your burdens in prayer to your God, unshoulder your burdens in community, work together to unshoulder the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do not expect the powers and principalities of this earth to easily give up their grip. But do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly, in your small corner of the enormous world, knowing that it is Jesus the Christ, King of the Universe, to whom you pledge true allegiance.

I hope that in the midst of all this that you feel the freedom of it. You are free, as a child of God, from the compulsion to capitulate to earthly powers. You know the truth, and the truth has set you free. You know that true power and true glory is not of this world. You know that Christ is King. Any person who tries to convince you that they bear the real truth, that they wield the real power, that they have the real control, is wrong. You do not need to be seduced by empty earthly promises. You know that no leader can solve all the problems, no matter how they boast. No matter how many people shout their support for that person in an arena. No matter how many vigilantes rise up in their name.

As we transition into the Advent season next week, we’ll remember that a light shines in the darkness, and that the darkness has not overcome it. There is no promise that there will not be grief, but that God will show up in the midst of it. We’ll anticipate the birth of the Christ child and the return of Christ as King. Our world will get whipped into a capitalist frenzy in the coming weeks, and we will have the opportunity to speak into that void. Just like Christ the King is not about what the world might think it is about, Christmas, too, is a subversion of power.

The season of Advent is a time for peace and quiet, for hopeful expectation, for joyful recognition of a changing world. Jesus the Christ, King of the Universe, will come into the world as a tiny and vulnerable baby. The child of refugees, fleeing one oppressive regime for another. From the absolute humblest of beginnings, God will enter into our world to show us once again what true power and true glory look like. Stay tuned.

A Little Apocalypse

I preached this sermon to the good people of Davis Lutheran Church while their pastor was on vacation.

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Good morning! If you are just tuning in on the livestream, or watching this back at a later time and are surprised to see me instead of Pastor Jeff, hello! I am Pastor Casey Kloehn Dunsworth, and I am currently serving as the Interim Assistant Rector at the Episcopal Church of St. Martin here in Davis. I am filling in for Jeff this week, as he is away being celebrated for his birthday.

We clergy types often joke that you bring in a guest preacher on the really tricky weeks of the lectionary, so that they can wrestle with them and you don’t have to. Or, conversely, that it’s a risk to have a guest preacher on one of those weeks, because they can say something controversial to your congregation and leave you to deal with the repercussions. Stay tuned to find out which of those this turns out to be!

Our stories this week are apocalyptic, which puts us on the onramp to the season of Advent, a time when the past, present, and future overlap in the coming of the Christ child. This week, we have a story from Daniel, which is the “most apocalyptic book in the Hebrew Bible” and, weirdly enough, we only hear from Daniel three times in our whole three-year-lectionary cycle! This week, next week, and next All Saints Day. Since apocalyptic literature is so much a part of early Christianity, it is really odd that Daniel is so left out. But I guess that’s a story for another day.

We have verses from the Gospel According to Mark that are part of what is known as “The Little Apocalypse”, because they do not reflect the storied end of the literal world, but they reflect an unveiling, a revelation, a seismic shift.

My favorite college professor offered a class called “Revelation and Apocalypse”, and it was just about as epic as that title sounds. But the best thing I learned from it—sorry, Dr. Fogg, if you’re reading this—is that those words mean the same thing. Revelation and apocalypse are synonyms! Revelation comes from Latin, which I have never studied. But it comes from revelare, which means “lay bare” to revelatio, which means “reveal”. Those cognates make sense to our English-speaker ears.

Apocalypse comes from the Greek, which I studied in college and in seminary! Apo- which means “un” and kaluptein, which means “cover”. So, together, apokaluptein, uncover. When Greek merged with Latin into French and later English, we got apokalupsis, and eventually apocalypse. Uncover. Reveal.

When we hear the prophets talk about the apocalypse, we are much more likely to think of end-of-the-world disaster movies, and earthquakes and wars and zombies and stuff. But for Jesus’ first-century Jewish audience, and the eventual hearers and readers of the Gospel According to Mark, that was not what they would have in mind.

Prophecy, in the Hebrew Bible and in the words of Jesus alike, is not fortune-telling. It is not a prediction of future unknowns, discerned from the stars or from tea leaves or from any mystical source. Prophets do not hypothesize about what may come, they tell the truth about the present. They “lay bare” the harsh realities of human brokenness, and “reveal” what is probable and possible as a result.

The Gospel According to Mark was written in approximately 70 CE, either right before or right after the destruction of the temple. The one that, in this story, the disciples are marveling at. We don’t know if this exchange between Jesus and the disciples reflects the downfall of Herod’s empire as it happened, or the prophetic knowledge of its likelihood.

Either way, the disciples enter the scene, so impressed by the temple’s majesty. It is the pet project of Herod the Great, who presided over a sort of Gilded Age. As this massive structure is towering over the people of Jerusalem, they are suffering immensely. The wealthy are showing off while the rest are without work, without food, without the power to change their circumstances. There is a massive Jewish revolt against Rome during this time. This juxtaposition of power and poverty is not unique to this story or to our time.

But as is typical of the disciples in Mark’s telling of the story, they are 100% not on the same page. They are gaping at this epic building, so impressed by how cool it is. I hear them, like kids on a field trip, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” (13:1) Jesus replies, with, I presume, an eye-roll, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” (13:2)

Later, and sort of abashedly, Peter, James, John, and Andrew follow up on this apocalyptic pronouncement. They’re a little dim, but they’re not completely unaware of the tension in the city. They see the Roman occupation with their own eyes. They see the public executions, the shows of military force, the fear mongering. They worry, then, about what Jesus means by his claim that the Temple will fall. What act of war could bring down such a structure? What else would fall with it?

They are being overly literal, here. Jesus is trying to explain to them the difference between the power of God and the power of Rome. This empire, this institution, this human construction, this will not last. The reign of God will outlast any earthly kingdom. And true power does not oppress. True power liberates.

We have to be careful here about slipping into an antisemitic understanding of these verses. Jesus is not saying that Judaism is wrong or that Jews have misplaced values and practices. He is, like all the prophets before him, critiquing his own house from squarely inside it and critiquing the false and ultimately impotent power of empires.

It is not appropriate for us as 21st-century Christians to extrapolate this story of the temple’s impending destruction to be a stand-in for our institutional church’s decline. These are not analogous. The trauma that the Jewish people continue to suffer because of the destruction of the temple and its continued absence from their collective practice is not the same as our wish for a return to the glory days of American Christanity. Maybe that didn’t even cross your mind, but it’s going to be what some sermons are going to be about today, and that’s inappropriate, and I just wanted you to know why that’s not what we’re going to do.

What we are going to do is critique the false and ultimately impotent power of empires.

As 21st-century American Christians, most of us live a completely unrecognizable life compared to Jesus and his contemporaries. Our religious tradition, though it is one among many in our culture, enjoys a hegemonic ubiquity that is truly opposite of their experience. We are free to practice as we please; our holy days are honored on the national calendar; some version of our general tenets is inscribed in the governance of this nation and much of the world, for that matter.

But when we look around, at the systems and structures of our so-called Christian nation, what do we see? When we lift the veil from our eyes and truly see?

We see so much done—sometimes even done in the name of Christ—that makes an absolute mockery of God.

We see white supremacist insurrection at our nation’s capitol.

We see erasure of Indigenous peoples, languages, and cultures.

We see extrajudicial killing of predominantly Black Americans at the hands of the police.

We see climate refugees from one once-in-a-lifetime disaster after another.

We see housing costs and evictions skyrocket in the midst of an unemployment crisis.

We see a mishandled pandemic claim the lives of nearly 800,000 of our fellow Americans.

We see degradation and marginalization based on perceived gender and sexuality.

We see glorification of wealth for the few, made possible only by the exploitation of the many.

We see death.

We see death.

And I know I said that we were gearing up for Advent and so I’m leaping across the church calendar but we are Easter people. We are resurrection people. We are not the people of death. We are the people of a God who lived and who died and who lived again! So what do we, people of life, death, and life again do when the world around us crumbles?

We hold fast to hope.

We do not cling to a hollow and weaponized optimism!

We do not cling to false promises from false prophets!

We are not fooled by those who would lead us astray, who claim to come in the name of Christ, and say, “I am he!” but promise death, and only death.

In our world of death, in our continued suffering, it can be quite easy to wonder, what is the good news?

The good news, my friends, is that the reign of God will come. Jesus will return. The dead will be raised. And the only way out is through.

“The good news of Jesus [can seem false] in the midst of crisis and disaster, and this place is precisely where [we] can imagine a different way forward for humanity. Whenever we hear reports of disaster, [the Gospel, and more precisely, this Little Apocalypse] reminds us to not be led astray by messianic claimants that can not save us; [instead], we [must] look for Jesus.” [1]

It is Jesus the Christ whose reign on earth and in heaven we will commemorate next week, on Christ the King Sunday. It is Jesus the Christ whom we will spend the season of Advent anticipating coming among us as a baby and again at the last day. It is Jesus the Christ whose life, death, and resurrection we tell and retell every week, every season, every year.

There is no other. We cannot be persuaded by American Exceptionalism, by a prosperity gospel, by any shiny version of do-it-yourself pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps salvation. It is the grace of God our Creator, poured out for us in Christ Jesus our liberator, that carries us through.

Jesus knew that this risk would befall us, as it would befall his own friends and disciples. Throughout human history there have been so many who have called themselves saviors, leaders, kings, messiahs, prophets, and gods among men. All of their empires have fallen. In our present and in our future there are more and there will be more. Jesus knew this and we know this.

But we know that there is no God but God, no salvation other than the grace in which we stand firm. And that, dear ones, is the best news there is. Amen.

A Sermon for Episcopalians on Reformation Sunday

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.