Land Acknowledgement
At Fifty, we acknowledge we are on land that for time immemorial was home to a number of First Nations People, including the Attiwonderonk and the Haudonosaunee. They lived on it and took care of it together, under the guidance of a covenant called the Dish With One Spoon agreement. When settlers arrived from Europe, they established an agreement of peaceful and separate co-existence called the Two Row Wampum Agreement.
All that changed, however, when this land was included in the Between the Lakes Treaty agreed upon in 1792 between the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the British Crown – a treaty that effectively gave control of the land to the British Crown. As heirs of the beneficiaries of that treaty, we commit ourselves to finding ways of truth-telling about our relations with them, and of reconciliation towards a good future together.
And why do we do this? To be nice? To be politically correct, and tp fir in with the times? Will it make people like us? Will it make God like us?
Or…because it’s fundamentally part of who we are, and what we are about about? Because it’s part of what it means to be a community of Christ in Canada in 2023, and children and people of God in the world today? Because it’s part of how we to love God with all we have and are, and love our neighbour as ourselves?
When Jesus was in Jerusalem, just before he was arrested and put to death, he was under constant challenge from the religious and civil leaders of the city. They peppered him with questions about hypothetical situations, asking him what he thought about different things, trying to get him to say something they could use against him.
They also asked him point-blank the big questions about God, what God wants of us, and what it means to be obedient and faithful to God.
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
….
No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.
Reflection
If the Pharisees – or anyone else, were to ask you what is the greatest commandment, what would you say? If you didn’t already know the story, and the answer that Jesus gives?
I’m not sure I would have said it’s to love God with all that I am, and love other people as the way for my own life to be good and worthwhile.
At one time – and maybe still, my answer would have been, obey your parents. Honour your father and mother – those above you, do what you are told to do, and don’t bring dishonour on them. In other words, be a good boy. Which became be a good student. Be a good person. A good minister. Don’t cause trouble, do what’s expected, and God will love you.
That commandment, with its implied necessity of proving myself worthy of God’s love, was planted in my heart early on in my life. Obeying it was as natural and irresistible as breathing. And I wish I could say it’s served me well. It has, in some ways. And in other ways, it has not.
The exercise of naming the commandment that actually guides you in life is not a bad exercise, and is actually a traditional spiritual practice. It was common among the Israelites – and especially their teachers, writers and prophets, to reduce the Law to a few simple commandments. The Law was huge and unwieldy with all its varied directions and ordinances about everything under the sun, and it was helpful to have a few simply stated and easily understood commandments that would stand you in good stead, and steer you right in all situations.
And, it was common for different teachers and prophets to debate and argue about what the greatest commandment is, and for different schools and traditions of thought to develop – each of them thinking they are more right than the others. So, it’s not out of keeping with the give-and-take battle for supremacy in the minds of the people that the Pharisees ask, what do you say, Jesus, is the greatest commandment?
To which Jesus says, to love God with all you are and all you have; and to love your neighbour as yourself – to find your own well-being in serving the well-being of your neighbour.
At which point the Pharisees realize they cannot argue with him. They cannot poke holes or find fault in his answer. From then on, they ask him no further question. And I can see three reasons for their decision.
First, Jesus’s answer is thoroughly and concisely scriptural in a way they cannot argue with. His answer is a quotation of two key verses from the Hebrew Scriptures. The first is Deuteronomy 6:5 – a passage known to Jews as The Shema, which observant Jews recite every day as the most basic fact and reality of their life – kind of their absolute bedrock statement of faith. “Hear, O Israel [and that’s what the word “Shema” means; it’s Hebrew for “Hear”] … Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. These words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart at all times.”
And Jesus adds to it Leviticus 19:18, one little verse in a whole box given to an exposition of the Law, which was accepted by the Hebrews as an inspired little summary of it’s all about – at least what the last six – maybe even the last seven, of the Ten Commandments are about – namely, the divine command in all situations and all encounters with other people of any kind, to “love your neighbour as yourself.”
Second – the second thing that scares the Pharisees from asking Jesus any more questions, is that Jesus not only gives them such a good summary of the Law – of truly human living, he also lives it so well. Even they see that – that in his living, there is no difference between what he says and what he does.
In his healing and his acts of compassion, he reaches out to help anyone who comes to him, no matter if they are a respected synagogue leader, an unclean Samaritan woman, or a pagan Roman centurion. It makes no difference to him. When he sits down to eat with people, he is just as likely to be at the table of a traitorous tax-collector or in the home of an unclean leper, as in the house of a righteous Pharisee. Who they are doesn’t matter. And when he gathers around himself a kingdom-of-God community, he welcomes with open arms and equal love all manner of men and women who in their “normal” lives in the world have no reason to ever want to associate with each other, or want to work together for good. He loves and welcomes any and all members of God’s family in the world.
And, third – the third reason the Pharisees back away from challenging him anymore, is that in living this way, Jesus actually redeems and heals the world and the people in it in ways that the Pharisees and the priests and the lawyers cannot with all the other laws, commandments and judgments they spend their life trying to enforce. His law of simply loving God and loving the other as the key to your own life being good, actually changes the world and the people in it in ways that nothing else can.
But – the big question for us, and for anyone really – what does it mean in practice, in real life and real time, to love God and love neighbour as Jesus does? It’s one thing to read the story of Jesus and the way he loved God and neighbour in his world and time of Jews, Samaritans and Romans, of Pharisees, priests, tax-collectors, lepers and prostitutes, of pious and impious Galileans all thrown together for good. And it’s another thing to know what it means to live out his way of loving God and neighbour in the realities and mosaics and melting-pots of our own time and place in history.
I wonder if the image of the cross – a central image of Christ and of our faith in Jesus, may be of some help here.
Image the cross in your mind. See … and maybe even touch and feel in your imagination the two intersecting parts of it – the upright piece and the cross-piece.
Think of the upright piece. See how it points to the sky, to the heavens. That’s the first direction we are called to know and to nurture in our living – an openness to heaven, loving openness to God, the One God of all that is.
And in this love, it’s helpful to pay attention to the preposition of the command. Prepositions are precise in the definition of what the relationship is between two things. And what is said – what is commanded about our relationship with God is that we are to love God with all out heart, soul, mind and strength – love God with all that we are and all that we have.
Note that our love of God is not to be for all that we have and all that we are. Love of God is not a means of getting God to bless us.
Nor is it because of all we are and all we have by God’s good will. Love for God is not just gratitude and good feelings for how we have been blessed. As good and healthy as it is to be thankful, that is not yet the real life-transforming heart of the matter.
Rather, love of God is with all that we have and all that we are. It’s an act of commitment, over and over, all the time, to use and to give all we have and all we are, to serve God’s purposes in and for the good of the world.
The language of “with” reminds me of the old marriage vow, that “with all that I am and all that I have, I thee wed.” It’s a commitment of radical identification and total union with an other as the meaning of your life in the world from this point on. It’s a yes to the invitation and the promise to be a partner in loving union with God – of becoming one with God and God’s good will in the way we live in the world.
Which leads to the second direction – the direction we are given in the cross-piece of the cross. The piece that reaches out to both sides. And how important is that? First, to remember that love always is a matter of reaching out? And that love in the way of Jesus means reaching out to both sides?
As one Bible dictionary says, “one cannot say in advance who the neighbour is, but … the course of life will make this plain enough”. The word used for “neighbour” has the same linguistic root as the word for “encounter,” suggesting the neighbour we are to love as ourselves – the neighbour whose well-being and our own are inextricably linked, is literally anyone and everyone we encounter in the world, especially in need, whose well-being we can help.
And then, the third direction. Yes, there is a third direction to the cross.
Focus on the bottom of the cross. The way the upright piece is rooted, planted and firmly fixed in the ground. In a particular moment of history. In a particular place in the world. In a particular web or network of relationships and possibilities.
When we read of Jesus, we read of Pharisees, Sadducees and priests, of tax-collectors, lepers and prostitutes, of Jews, Samaritans and Romans, of holy and unholy Galileans. Those were the people, the web of relationships, and the parties at play in his time – in the time and place where he was planted and rooted to live out love.
Who are the people of our time and place? What are the networks of relationships, the parties at play, and the challenges and opportunities to love at work in our time? Where we are rooted and planted. At our moment and place in history?
A quick scan – literally a 30-second scan of the landscape we live in, yields a list that includes First Nations people and issues; the people of Gaza, Israel and their neighbouring countries; people right around us and across the country who are poor, hungry, and either homeless already or soon to be so; people in our community who are deeply spiritual and intentionally non-religious; the LGBTQ+ community; the Freedom Convoy; and people seeking affirmation of gender and gender identity in ways more true to their own identity and experience. And that’s only a 30-second scan.
Imagine what would come of a more careful, faithful, and dialogical look at the world in which we live, and the place in history where we are planted. Imagine where it would lead us. What it would lead us to see and do about loving God and loving neighbour in our time.
It’s more than I or we can explore as much as we need to in this one sermon. In the little time we have right now. But maybe enough that worship – worship of the one God of all, open us to the task.
And maybe this prayer will help us find a way into
it. The prayer is an adaptation of a
video meditation by Elsa Anders Cook, titled “Let Us Love.”
A Responsive Prayer (adapted from “Let Us Love” by Elsa Anders Cook)
One: Let us love – comes the invitation.
All: Let us be a community following Jesus so long
that we come to define our whole being by it.
One: Little children, let us love.
All: Let us encourage each other,
as if this is something that is yet unknown and needs to be practiced,
like a baby carefully watching the footsteps of others
until she discovers her own feet can move in this way –
wobbly and imperfect, but still walking, still following in the way.
One: Let us love, little children, not in word or in speech,
but as if our whole bodies are learning this new grace.
All: Let us be bold in learning this new movement
for we will falter and it won’t be perfect, just as we are not perfect.
One: It will feel new and awkward; and it should.
All: It should feel strange to twist and turn our bodies into love’s possibility,
to learn how to love in the way of Christ
who is still trying to encourage us to love one another.
One: Let this be what defines us now in this moment
not so that “they will know we are Christians’
but so that we know where God’s love abides.
All: God’s love abides in me. God’s love abides in you. God’s love abides in others.
I am in you and you are in me, and we and others are one in God.
One: And this changes everything.
All: That is our prayer right now –
that we will come to believe enough in God’s abiding love,
that all our being and all other beings are changed.
One: O Christ, may it be so.
All: May it be so.
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