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“We Love Our Neighbor”
September 15, 2024 Cobleskill United Methodist Church, Pastor Anna Blinn Cole
Psalm 133; Matthew 22:34-40
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 133
The Blessedness of Unity
A Song of Ascents.1 How very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!2 It is like the precious oil on the head, running down upon the beard,on the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robes.3 It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion.For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life for evermore.
Matthew 22:34-40
The Greatest Commandment
34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ 37He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
A couple weeks ago on Labor Day my mom gave me a belated birthday present by taking me to see at concert at SPAC. It was my first time there and we were seeing James Taylor, a family favorite. A James Taylor CD was often playing in our house during the 1990s and as we walked into the concert, I asked my mom if that was his big era, you know, the 1990s. She laughed. Apparently, he had been around long before I first heard him and he’s still going today at the age of 78. What a guy!
The best part of the concert was the way he talked and told stories in between the songs. It was kind of like sitting in a living room with him. At one point he had just finished singing a song he was really famous called, “How Sweet It Is to be Loved by You.” And as he was setting his guitar down, someone from the crowd calls out “I love you.” And James Taylor without missing a beat responded, “I love you, too!” And then he added: “Although it helps that we don’t know each other.”
A room full of James Taylor fans, neighbors, you could call us, all laughed. We all laughed because we all understood. Loving our neighbors and being loved by neighbors sounds sweet, but in reality, it’s often something that works better in theory than in reality. We like the idea of loving each other like it says in the Bible, but when we actually start to see our neighbors up close, we find it easier to pick out our differences than to see the love.
Maybe this has been you, or maybe you’ve seen it happen. A new neighbor moves onto the street. Everything starts out well and good but the families are at different stages in their life. One is young with children running around. The other likes their peace and quiet. One likes to raise chickens. The other prefers a neat and clean yard. And then eventually maybe opposing political signs go into the yard. The story plays out in lots of different scenarios. But usually ends the same. Some kind of fence goes up. I have nothing against fences. Privacy is a wonderful thing. But sometimes I wonder if we use fences, the literal ones we construct and also the metaphorical ones we put up in our minds, to avoid interacting with and being in relationship with that which is different from us.
Those of you here two weeks ago over Labor Day weekend heard my mom preach on this. Who is our neighbor? Jesus goes on after the verses of scripture we heard today to explain who our neighbor is by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. A person of a different nationality and different religion helping a hurting, bullied stranger who had been left in the ditch. A neighbor has nothing, actually, to do with who lives next to who. But it has everything to do with finding the fences and walls that have been put up, literally or metaphorically, and getting across them somehow.
When Jesus said to love our neighbor, he has come a long way from the man we saw last week. When Jesus said to love our neighbor, he meant our neighbors that won’t look like us, have the same birth country as us, love in the same way as us, speak like us, worship like us, act like us…vote like us. That’s kind of the whole point. Loving our neighbor takes not only getting close enough to see what makes us different, but finding a way to love each other anyway, despite our differences.
You’re probably thinking: this sounds great in a sermon. But in reality, it’s impossible.
You’d have to be living under a rock right now to not know we’re living through pretty contentious times. This week I feel like I’ve been up to my eyeballs in memes about cats and dogs, and not in a good way. When Sunday rolls around after weeks like we just had, I spend a lot of time praying about what our role is here as a faith community in these times.
And this is where I ultimately land: here in church we’re not going to avoid talking about the contentious election season in which we find ourselves, but we’re not going to talk about it in the way you might expect. We’re not here to choose sides. We’re not here to tell each other how to vote. We’re here to follow Jesus. And ultimately our goal is not being right, it’s letting Jesus’ footsteps show us a way through the divide that our polarization has created. Being right and sure of ourselves on one side or the other does nothing to help us be a better nation. No matter what happens on November 5th, we still have to wake up the next morning and live together.
So here’s what I suggest. We have Jesus and we have Jesus’ teachings. And in today’s passage he is literally asked: what is the most important thing about our faith? Now mind you, this was a trap. The Pharisees were trying to bait Jesus into saying something that would get him in deep trouble with his religion. They were trying to get him to break the law so that they could get rid of him. And Jesus without hesitation walks right into it. He has no problem telling them what is most important among the laws and it astounds them. Love, Jesus says. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.
His words are a distillation of everything else in our religion. They are like a colander to put all the mess into. If it’s not about love, if love doesn’t come out at the end of the process, our religion is worthless. Everything hangs on love. It must!
And so Jesus has given us something like a pair of glasses to wear through which to examine everything around us, in our religion, in our politics, in the way we treat one another. Does love come out of it? We can disagree, sure, nothing wrong with that, but at the end of the day, can we disagree without building a fence between us? And if you receive nothing but hate, can you stand up for love in a way that does perpetuate the cycle?
These are questions we must ask ourselves in the coming weeks. And so I have three pieces of homework for you this week. Don’t worry, they aren’t graded, at least not by me. They are three things you can do this week if you’re serious about bringing Jesus into this polarized reality in which we are living.
The first is this:
Pluralize your civility. We’ve fallen into this trap of thinking that the nation’s health and well-being is directly tied to our own health and well-being. How much better off are you now than you were 4 years ago? This is a popular question. But for Christians, it’s the wrong question. Because if we really take Jesus at his word here in the scripture, we see our own health and wellbeing intrinsically connected to the health and wellbeing of our neighbor. They cannot be separated. The love we have for ourselves is reflected in the love we have for our neighbor. And all of it is a signal for how much we love God. As we think about policies and issues, let’s consider not just the personal effects it has on us individually, but how those policies and issues affect the least among us.
Stop judging people when you know only a little about them. I watched a video this week of Andy Stanley, famous evangelical preacher from Georgia, addressing the Georgia State Legislature. And it was not what I expected. He was telling them to stop making enemies out of each other. Fundamental Attribution Error, he called it. When I define you by some bad behavior you do, even though when I do that same bad behavior I rationalize it. Getting cut off while driving and jumping to the conclusion that the driver is just a rude person. Meanwhile if you were in a hurry because the school called and your kid is sick, you might cut someone else off and rationalize it as being okay because of your circumstances.
Look inward. The tension right now is really high. There are a lot of important issues at stake. But how are we personally adding to the tension? If our main goal, as Christians, is to help bring about the beloved community where everyone sees everyone else as a neighbor, how can we talk about the issues that are most critical in ways that people on the other side will actually hear?
A few weeks ago, I contacted Braver Angels, an organization that brings people together from opposite ends of the spectrum in order to build relationships back up. I spoke to a man named Bruce France and a woman named Sara Silver from the Capital District Chapter of Braver Angels. I asked them if our church could help in some way. Could we host a workshop where we could bring our community together to start bridge those divides. And without hesitation, their idea for us is more basic. If our church wants to help bridge the divide in our community, we should begin by looking inward. Can we first relearn how to recognize the image of God in our conversation partner? They encouraged us to have a workshop called Depolarizing Ourselves first, so that we can address how we may be inadvertently complicit in, or possibly even encouraging, the very polarization we seek to heal.
Loving our neighbor doesn’t work so well if we think we’re so right that we can’t even hear what the other side is saying. We are all children of God. The people on this side and the people on this side. And if we hope to follow Jesus into the middle where conversations can happen, we must acknowledge the fences we’ve put up around ourselves.
So, in summary:
1. Pluralize your civility. How are we doing? Not just some, but all.
2. Stop judging people when you know actually only a very small bit about them.
3. Look inward first before you criticize someone else for doing what you might be complicit in doing, too.
November 5th is just a day. Elections are just seasons. Living together as a community of people with differences and still creating the beloved community is a life-long project. Let’s not build walls between ourselves that we someday regret. ~ Grace and peace, Pastor Anna
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