Proper 25, Year A                                                                   Exodus 22:21-27
October 23, 2005                                                                    Psalm 1
St. Margaret of Scotland Episcopal Church                           1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
The Rev. Linda McCloud                                                       Matthew 22:34-46 

Jesus would have used his turn signal    

            Do you love bumper stickers?  I have had some really funny ones over the years.  I did not put them on my car, but I have had some good ones – such as the one that said something like, “Read the Bible.  It’ll scare the daylights out of you.”  One of my seminary professors had no hesitation about putting bumper stickers all over the back of her car.  As I was graduating, one of her latest ones was, “I bet Jesus would have used his turn signal.”  In other words, she was reminding us that Jesus would have loved his neighbor as much as he loved himself.  She was reminding us that to be more like Jesus, we would need to treat others as we would have liked to have them treat us.   

Our reading from Matthew’s Gospel for today boils down the entire Old Testament into two basic principles:  Love God.  Love your neighbor.  Stick with Jesus, and he will simplify your life.  Love God with all your heart.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Everything else falls into place.  Pretty simple, huh?  But as we all know, living a simple life is not as easy as it might appear on the surface.   

Let’s take a close look at what Jesus actually says.  It’s pretty intense when we analyze it.  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind .[emphasis added] . . and . . . you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”   Jesus could not have made it any clearer.  In the thinking of Jesus’ day, “heart” was where thought, will, and emotion resided.  The “soul” was thought of as the vital part of each person.  They understood that when they were born, they became a “living soul.”  “Mind” was the source of reason and deliberation.  So, God wants no less than our whole being.  In fact, our very bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit that is within us.   

Loving God in this way carries with it all our intentions.  From the time we rise in the morning to the time that we fall asleep at night, we as Christians are to be thinking about how our lives intertwine with the very life of God – how that God is the very source of our lives.  When we do this, we will be much more apt to catch a glimpse of God.  As we catch a glimpse of God, we discover that God is love.  God loves us so much that God invites us by way of command to fall in love with him over and over again each day.  Fortunately, Jesus gives us specific instructions and very good advice about how to do this. 

If you have ever been in love, you know that being in love and staying in love requires effort on the part of both parties.  It takes communication and lots of it.  Some of the communication is verbal, but most of it is non-verbal.  This is one case where actions speak much louder than words.  God’s love for us is more than verbal.  God says over and over again in the Holy Scriptures, “I love you.  I am looking for you.  Please talk to me and respond to me.”  But beyond that, God’s action speaks volumes more.  God sent his only Son into the world because God loved the world so much.  Jesus died on the cross and rose again because he loves us.  God’s actions speak so much louder than words.  Is it too much for God to ask the same of us, his followers?  

Loving God with all our hearts and all our souls seems like the natural thing for us as Christians to do.  But loving God with all our minds – wait – hold on.  Some might think that at this point Jesus has quit preaching and gone to meddling.  Are we not free thinkers?  Do we not have minds of our own?  Yet Jesus says we are to love God with all our minds.  Don’t we have an education to get and a job to hold down?  We’re not monks and nuns.  We don’t pray twenty-four hours a day.  How can we love God with all our minds?  This is where intention comes in.   

We can be intentional about finding ways to take time to pray.  We can use the Forward Day By Day devotional books provided by St. Margaret’s.  The new ones are on the table in the narthex.  We can practice the presence of God in our daily work routine.  We can be intentional about finding ways to take time for spiritual reading.  Where can we get some help in loving God with all our minds?  We can find some classic Christian authors such as Thomas a Kempis, who died in the late Fifteenth century.  His book, Imitation of Christ, includes such great quotes as “Whoever loves recognizes this voice:  ‘My God! My Love!  You are all mine and I am all yours!’  It is the cry of an ardent soul deeply in love with God.”  (p. 90) 

There are other wonderful spiritual writers out there – such as John Donne, the Anglican priest and poet, who wrote those famous lines:  “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main . . .”  Or try reading another Anglican priest, George Herbert, who was Donne’s contemporary.  Look at Hymn numbered 487 in our hymnal for an example of his writing.   

More recently, we have Henri J.M. Nouwen, Thomas Merton, and Marjorie J. Thompson, whose book Soul Feast, An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life, offers different points of view on private prayer. I commend it to your reading. 

But the most important way in which we love God is to worship God.  We worship God together.  You know, of course, that I as a priest am not allowed to celebrate Holy Eucharist by myself.  I am required to have at least one other person in the room with me at the time.  Holy Eucharist must be celebrated in community.  Worshiping God together is a way of loving God and loving our neighbors. 

And then there’s that other commandment – “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Since our world has shrunk to be a global village, and since about six million of us in the world can now communicate by internet access, we have more neighbors than ever before.  Sometimes our neighbor-love gets stretched thin.  This is where we need to start looking for the good in others.  This is an instance in which we need to expand our hearts to appreciate the situation of everyone whom we meet or hear about.  We need to experience the love of God more deeply so that we can love these other people whether we know them or not, or whether we agree with them or not.  After all, we share the planet with them.  The love of God does not recognize geographical boundaries.  We are all on this fragile island home that we call earth.   

It would be good for our spiritual growth for us to be open to communicating with these other people.  If we do not expand our hearts to love and feel compassion for others, we are in danger of contracting our hearts – pinching them in and drawing them in so that we cannot appreciate the situations of our local neighbors or our global neighbors.  In this instance I am speaking not only of having compassion on people affected by hurricanes, earthquakes or wars, but of loving other people because they exist.  They share time and space with us.   

If we love God with all our heart, soul and mind, we will begin to see God in those around us.  Loving our neighbors as ourselves won’t be a stretch.  When we get the first commandment down pat, the second one falls right into place – love our neighbors as ourselves.  That’s because we will be so saturated with the love of God that we won’t be able to help ourselves. 

There’s one other hitch to loving our neighbors as ourselves.  We have to love ourselves first.  Sometimes this isn’t easy.  Sometimes we see in others the things that annoy us about ourselves.  So, we wind up having to forgive ourselves and love ourselves before we can possibly love our neighbors.   

Yes, this most important teaching of Jesus sounds so simple at first, but given the nature of human beings, it turns out to be one of the “hard sayings” of Jesus.  But Jesus’ example of life was that he did treat others with love and compassion.  Just think of all the people that Jesus healed, taught and fed over the course of his short earthly life.  There were times when he barely had time to eat or to rest.  He had to get up long before his disciples to find time for private prayer, because his days were spent in spending himself.   

And yes, if there had been cars in the Palestine of Jesus’ day, I bet Jesus would have used his turn signal.