Sermon: “Counting Our Blessings: 
God’s Law of Love”

Like the story of Caesar’s coin that Jen preached about last Sunday, today’s lesson about Jesus again has the religious blowhards and scheming politicians of his day playing “gotcha” with tough questions, asked in public.  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” was a lot like one of those debate questions asked of Obama and McCain the other day, “What will be your TOP priority if you are elected president?”  The economy?  National security?  Taxes?  Education?  Health care?  Energy?  It’s no wonder both candidates did their share of dodging the question, because anything you answer makes it look like you maybe don’t care enough about the OTHER top priorities.

Well, it was like that for Jesus, with 613 mizvot, or laws, of Torah to choose from, he had to pick his words carefully when the Pharisees took up the attack where the Saduccees had left off.  He’d been accused of healing on the Sabbath, of being disloyal to his own people, of breaking laws about cleanliness and eating with unwashed hands and for touching women and lepers, for consorting with unsavory types like sinners and Zealots and foreigners and tax collectors, for eating and drinking too much and for fasting and praying too much, for claiming too much authority and claiming not enough authority.  He’d been accused of speaking too bluntly and for speaking in parables no one understood.  The poor guy just couldn’t win.

The Pharisees, like our Pilgrim ancestors and many fundamentalists today, were trying to hold people to a very high standard of morality.  As we celebrate Reformation Sunday today, we should remember our own Congregational history of encouraging great personal piety.  Early churches of the Protestant Reformation took very seriously the words of Leviticus 19:2, “You shall be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy," and they tried very hard to live out their faith in daily life.  But even though John Knox, the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, once credited Jean Calvin as helping to transform Geneva into "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on the earth since the days of the Apostles”[1] – even so, he and other reformers (as well as most European Catholics) also believed in the death penalty for witchcraft, and in Geneva in the year 1545 alone 23 women were burned at the stake and 11 more drawn and quartered for using sorcery to spread plague.  Even the church itself doesn’t always hold the best record of remembering God’s law of love.[2]

What usually seems to go wrong is when religious people take commandments SO seriously we forget to love God and our neighbor.  That’s why Luke’s version of “The Great Commandment” is followed immediately by the Parable of the Good Samaritan, with (you remember) the priest and the Levite who pass by the poor guy who is beaten and robbed, because it was more important to them to remain clean for worship.  Jesus valued the practice of love for the common good of the community FAR above the pursuit of individual piety.  He devoted HIS life and ministry to working with the sick and the poor on the streets of his community, welcoming the alien and the outcast, and he called the rich to share their bounty and the powerful to work for justice and peace.

But caught there in the spotlight of his rapidly increasing popularity with the people, cornered by sneering leaders whose power would have made a lesser man tremble, in the midst of all that, Jesus took the high road.  He chose love.  He answered, “’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.”  Now you didn’t need to come to church to hear this, I suspect.  You probably knew the Great Commandment when you got here.  And you also may’ve recognized “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” from that reading from Leviticus chapter 19, verse 18.  We all know we’re supposed to love God and each other.  The question is, how can we ever remember to do that in our real lives, and do it consistently? 

There’s some good “how to” help for us here in the FIRST part of The Great Commandment, what Jesus’s people knew as Deuteronomy 6.4-9 as the “shema,” which means “to hear,” because it begins, "Hear O Israel:  The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” That sounds a lot like the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”  The message is clear: there is only one God, and his law of love comes first.  But the shema continues AFTER the part we know as The Great Commandment to say, “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.  Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.  Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."

I love this very concrete solution posed here.  If you’ve seen orthodox Jews with their phylacteries, and their fringes hanging down from beneath their clothing, those are their reminders, as we might tie a string around a finger.  Many Jewish homes have a beautiful mezuzah in the doorway, which holds the words of the shema – and each time they go in or out, they touch the commandment that Jesus said was “the greatest of them all.”  And “recite them to your children,” it says.  Well, that’s a good suggestion too.  We’re doing that here, as our kids are doing a Sunday School rotation about the 10 commandments this fall and they are posted all over the doors and windows and walls.  They are being memorized.  But I wonder how many of us can remember our 10 commandments?

One time, as a confirmation class assignment, I sent the kids out to Fellowship Hour to poll the adults on the 10 commandments.  And when we got back together to compare results, it was very interesting that of all the people in that church, there was only one person who could remember ALL the commandments.  And it wasn’t one of the two seminary professors there, or any of the retired or active clergy in the congregation who won.  It wasn’t even one of the dozen or so veteran Sunday School teachers.  It was just an ordinary grandmother who had paid careful attention 60 years before when she had been in Sunday School, growing up in a missionary family in the Middle East.

The great thing about teaching children morality is that sometimes those lessons do stick.  And not only that, kids sometimes expect us to actually follow the rules we teach them.  When we old people forget, they are there to remind us. 

One time, at a church summer camp where I was the chaplain, I had the kids make and decorate their own mezuzahs and write the shema on little scrolls to place inside.  Lela proudly mounted it on the doorway of her bedroom, and every time she went in or out the door, she’d quietly touched it.  I thought it was sweet, and I’d do the same thing when I went in and out of her room to tuck her in at night. But then one day, as it happens in families, we had some disagreement about something or other, at bedtime.  She snapped at me, and I said something sharp back at her.  The next thing I knew she was stomping off toward her bedroom, but as she went inside, she slammed her hand – WHACK! – right on that mezuzah.  I followed her but when I passed the mezuzah, I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch it.  I was too ashamed.  I was reminded again of how much MORE important our love for each other was than whatever it was that had caused us to use such harsh words.  And that night, our bedtime prayers were about REAL love and forgiveness and God’s grace was thick in the room.

What a blessing God’s law is in our lives.  Just think about it: Wouldn’t the world be a beautiful place if we could just remember to follow these laws of love?  The first sermon I ever preached on this text, back when I was in seminary, was called “Love One Another: It’s Not Just a Good Idea, It’s the Law” after the old highway "Drive 55" campaign. And I thought, since we just learned about “going green” at the Yankee Fair, I would close this sermon by “recycling” one paragraph that my dad always said was his favorite.  In fact, he was so inspired he later mailed me a picture of his front lawn, with 6-foot tall letters cut into the hillside with the lawnmower that spelled out “L-O-V-E.”

Here’s what God seems to be trying to tell us, in ALL the law and the prophets: “Get it through your thick heads,” God seems to say.  “Love me more than anything else.”  Tie a string around your finger.  Put a Post-it note on your forehead.  Write “love” all over the palms of your hands and use them as cheat notes all up and down your arms.  Write “love” in red crayon on your walls, and nail signs in your doorways.  Spray paint “love” across your driveway or garage door; spell out “love” in shingles on your roof; cut the word “love” on your front lawn with the lawnmower.  (Sometimes people do as they are told!) Teach love, talk love, live love, eat, breathe, and sleep love.  And most importantly, make love your constant prayer.  For as we first were loved, so must we love our neighbor.  With the power of God to help us, some days we might actually remember. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.