Sermon for Sunday, October 29, 2023 || Proper 25A || Matthew 22:34-46
Today’s sermon is about love, and I’m going to throw in a few movie quotes to spice it up, okay? In this morning’s Gospel reading, a group of Pharisees gathers together and comes up with what they think is a doozy of a question to test Jesus. One of them (and here Matthew makes sure we know the questioner is a lawyer) asks Jesus, “Teacher, what commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus doesn’t hesitate. He borrows from the book of Deuteronomy when he says, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’” Then Jesus takes this commandment to its logical conclusion: “This is the greatest and first commandment,” he says. “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
For those of us who have grown up with English as our first language, these commandments might seem rather difficult to obey. We might bristle at Jesus’ words and say, “You can’t command me to love someone.” But here we have to pause and spend some time on what we mean when we say “love” in English, because our common understanding of “love” and Jesus’ usage of the word are pretty different. I’m reminded of Inigo Montoya’s great line in the 1987 cult classic The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
In English, we tend to use the word “love” as a more intense version of liking. So I might say, I love mashed potatoes. I love building LEGO sets. I love playing soccer. In the late-90s Shakespeare adaptation 10 Things I Hate About You, a pair of high school girls are walking to class and talking about fashion. One says, “I like my Skechers, but I LOVE my Prada backpack.” The other says, “But I LOVE my Skechers.” And the first responds, “That’s because you don’t have a Prada backpack.” You can see how in English, this usage of the word “love” as “intense liking” is super common. Does that track for you?
When we mistake “love” for “liking a lot” we remove nearly all of the weight of the word, as Jesus uses it in today’s Gospel. But when we move past this high school version of love, we find the deeper territory that love calls us to explore. Far from simply being an emotion, love opens the door to the whole universe of connection. In the highly underrated film Dan in Real Life, Steve Carrell’s character is just starting to open up to the idea of a new relationship following the death of his wife. And he hears some wisdom from an unexpected source – the teenage boy who wants to date his daughter. The boy says, “Love is not a feeling, Mr. Burns. It’s an ability.”
The First Letter of John reminds us, “We love because God first loved us” (4:19). Because God loves each of us, we each have the ability to love in turn. Shutting the door to love means shutting the door to the entire emotional realm and replacing it with indifference and isolation. But God does not desire this for us. God desires us to open the door, the same door God opened when God sent the only begotten Son to this broken world that God loves so much.
When we love, we invest ourselves. We become vulnerable. We may be hurt. Or we may be filled with joy. The ability to love is the ability to look past yourself, to see the heart of God burning in the chest of another, reflecting the burning in your own heart. And to have that burning move you to trust, to connect, to sacrifice. This burning may or may not kindle affection within you – that is, the emotion of “liking a lot” – but you will be “loving” just the same.
So the love that Jesus commands us to show for God and neighbor begins, not with the emotion of “liking,” but with a posture of openness, selflessness, and vulnerability. Our love of God and neighbor propels us to seek connection on a personal level and justice on a societal level. As Dr. Cornel West has often said: “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
The kind of love Jesus commands us to live out is the very love that brought him to Golgotha. He could have sunk under the waves of uncertainty in the garden. He could have shrunk back into obscurity after causing a stir in Jerusalem. He could have slunk home, only to have his followers drift off in search of new messiahs. But love would not let him take that path. Out of love, he stood in solidarity with all the suffering people of the world. Out of love, he chose the path of selflessness and sacrifice. Out of love, he spread his arms wide on the cross. Hanging there, naked, bleeding, breathless, the openness and vulnerability of love was exposed. But only with his arms spread wide could he reach out and touch everyone with his loving embrace.
This love is not strictly an emotion, but an ability, an attitude, a state of being. This love is the word we use for the voluntary conviction that propels us to step outside of our selfish selves and to discover the riches of building up one another, of finding mutuality, of respecting difference, of speaking out against intolerance and hate. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says this in his book Love is the Way: “To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. But maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement. And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.”
When we love God and our neighbor and ourselves, we weave together a new community of belovedness. We let go of old hurts. We forgive. We expand our circles of care. We move forward together.
Season 6, Episode 4
“Disney Remakes”
The Podcast for Nerdy Christians, where faith meets fandom. In the 4th episode of Season 6, we’re talking about three of the recent Disney remakes of Renaissance animated films.
Where the Wind... 