Sermon — October 25, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Well, this is it. The heart of the matter. The core of Jesus’ message, the central tenets of Christianity, the two commandments on which, Jesus says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:40)
They’re deceptively simple. For a preacher like me, they’re disappointingly simple. I’m a nerd, after all. I like history. I like to dig into the Biblical text to try to understand what was going on two or three thousand years ago, to parse out the theological differences between the Pharisees and the Sadducees and why it’s one group and not the other who’s testing Jesus with these questions; and then to do the sometimes-difficult work of connecting all that up to our lives today, and trying to understand how one of Jesus’ cryptic parables speaks to us across the millennia.
But Jesus’ message today isn’t a riddle. It’s not an obscure historical reference. It doesn’t need to be unwrapped, or clarified, or revealed. It’s simple: Love God with all you have. Love your neighbor as yourself.
But “simple,” I’m sorry to say, isn’t the same as “easy.”
People often quote the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton, who once wrote that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” In other words, Chesterton says, it’s not that people have tried Christianity out for two thousand years, and found that it doesn’t work. It’s that they’ve taken a good look at Christianity, found that it’s too hard, and decided not to try it at all. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself”? That’s a little much. We’ll stick with ordinary life; we’ll say in a vague way that we believe in God, we experience God in the world around us, and we try to help our neighbors in need when it’s not too inconvenient for us. Chesterton was pretty skeptical of your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Christian; he would probably say that most of us had found the Christian ideal hard, and left it untried.
I’m not sure, though, that this is exactly right. It’s not that we don’t try to love God and our neighbors; it’s just that we do it imperfectly. We do try to love God; but our minds are distracted, our souls are divided, our hearts are full of other, beautiful loves. We do try to love our neighbors. But to love our neighbors as ourselves? I have a hard enough time loving myself, and an even harder time loving my spouse as myself, and as much as I love the notion of extending that ideal of unconditional love to the entire world, I know that I will never actually place the good of others on the same level as my own good. Because that, after all, is what “love” means, for Jesus; not to feel warm-fuzzies about another person, but to act on their behalf, to work for their good, to lay down one’s own life for them.
So if the mission statement of the whole Church and of each individual Christian is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself,” then it’s a great mission—but undoubtedly, again and again, even when we admire it, even when we try so hard to live it out, we fail.
Lutherans often distinguish between Law and Gospel, between the hard and imposing commandments God lays down and the merciful love God extends when we fail to obey them. It’s not a distinction between the Old and New Testaments. There is Law in the Old Testament, and there is Gospel; there’s Law in the New Testament, and there’s Gospel. And it’s not a distinction between the bits we like and the bits we don’t of the Bible, between the cozy and kind and the harsh and violent. It’s a distinction, instead, between the standards God sets for us and the compassion God shows when we don’t live up to them.
So this passage from our Gospel reading is pure Law. There’s nothing more cozy and kind than saying that all the law and the prophets hang on these two Great Commandments of love. And yet there’s nothing that condemns us, as a human race and as individual human beings, more. It’s clear that this is a commandment we simply don’t live up to.
But paired, this morning, with this inspiring and imposing Law, I find a hint of relief in the story of the final moments of Moses.
Moses has walked a long road. God has called him away from his ordinary life to become the prophet of God and turned him into a leader. After the miraculous triumph of the Red Sea, Moses has been stuck with his grumbling people for forty years in the desert, condemned to wander because of their rebellions against God. And now, as the forty years draw to an end, they’ve finally reached the River Jordan, and they’re ready to cross over into the Promised Land. And Moses goes up onto a mountain, and he sees the whole land spread out before him, a land flowing with milk and honey, the final destination he’s been trying for decades to reach. And then he dies, his journey incomplete.
It’s the story that Dr. King, quoted with uncanny foresight in his final speech: “We’ve got some difficult days ahead,” he told the people of Memphis on April 3, 1968. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop… I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” And within a day, he was dead.
Maybe these last words of Moses and of Martin are an odd place to find good news. But I can’t help but find them comforting, these days. We try to love God with all our hearts, and all our souls, and all our minds; and our neighbors as ourselves. And we don’t do it right. We can’t. We try and try and try to grow in love, to keep walking in the Way that Jesus taught us, but we never quite arrive in the Promised Land, in a just world, in a state of spiritual perfection. And that’s okay. It’s not completely satisfying, I’ll admit. But if it’s good enough for Moses and for Martin Luther King, Jr., then it’s good enough for me.
In church life, in personal life, God knows in our national life, we walk a long road together. Sometimes it seems like we’re making progress toward a more perfect love; sometimes it feels like we’re just wandering in the wilderness. And I doubt that any of us will ever enter into that final Promised Land of perfection. That may sound depressing. But it can also be liberating. Because it means that no matter what—even if we never manage to love our neighbors as ourselves, even if we never manage to love God with our whole hearts—each step takes us closer to God’s love. So “walk in love,” as the familiar verse goes, “as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God.” Amen. (Ephesians 5:2)