Community UMC, Quincy
“Pressing On: On These Two Commandments”
Rev. Andrew Davis
October 25, 2020
Matthew 22: 34-46
It’s always nice to get a little reprieve from preaching every so often, as we celebrated Laity Sunday last weekend. Our laity (the people who aren’t clergy) have many gifts to offer and are the people who keep the church running smoothly and effectively. I was very inspired by the stories that Susie, Marty, and Charlotte shared last week about how God’s presence and call works within them as they press on in faith. I am grateful to have them among the leadership of our church. Not only did they demonstrate their faith in action, but demonstrated how they love God and neighbor, these two commandments that Jesus talks about in our Gospel lesson that Jim read for us as we conclude our series, “Pressing On.”
In this morning’s gospel lesson from Matthew chapter 22, Jesus is finding himself in a battle of wits between the Sadducees and Pharisees. In fact, it feels like a little bit of theological smackdown, as the Sadducees and Pharisees are two groups in the Jewish faith in Jesus’ time who did not see eye to eye on certain theological matters such as resurrection and Roman law, with Jesus outwitting the Sadducees and silencing them, leading to some challenging questions by the Pharisees.[i] Taking place after Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, Jesus has cleared the temple, cursed a fig tree, and now faces questions about his authority from the Pharisees, who were among some of the religious leaders of Jesus’s time. A lawyer from the Pharisees tries to trap Jesus with his own words, although when asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy 6:5, a prayer from the Jewish tradition known as the Shema when he says “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul” then adds Leviticus 19: 18 with “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” tying these two commandments together. It’s on these two commandments that are at the core of our faith as we press on together.
On these two commandments which Jesus claims the law and prophets hang on are meant to be a challenge for all of us from his time up to today, especially when it comes to loving our neighbor as ourselves. The fact is that “one cannot claim to love God unless one does everything in one’s capacity to love one’s neighbors,” as our neighbors are made in the image of God just as we are whether we like our neighbors or not.[ii]
We do everything we can to love God, giving God our praise and worship, our prayers, our songs, not using God’s name in vain (like remembering that God’s last name is not darn-it). In one commentary, there were some early writers such as St. John of the Cross’s “On a Dark Night” who equated love of God using erotic terms, which I won’t go into detail here.[iii] Yet Jesus is saying that the first commandment is to love God while also loving our neighbor as ourselves. So, what does loving our neighbor look like? Think about those who come to us in the church for help, those we help in our community through CAN, our support of PCIRC, Rotary, Dress-a-Girl/Dress-a-Dude, the way we take care of each other by keeping in touch with each other, or in the age of COVID, wearing our masks, washing our hands religiously, and practicing social distancing.
While loving God is pretty easy, loving our neighbor presents a challenge because we are human and that there are cultural and social factors, especially when it comes to our core beliefs and moral lenses. Several things have stood out this week when I think about these two commands from Jesus. First was a meme on Facebook over the weekend that says “you cannot treat someone like garbage and worship God at the same time.” Another was Monday’s Hidden Brain podcast episode from NPR called “Moral Combat” that featured psychologist Linda Skitka who talked about how sometimes our moral lenses can prevent us from fully loving our neighbor or seeing the bigger picture, especially in the divided climate we live in right now.[iv] Sometimes, we think that we are conflating loving God with giving us a sense of entitlement and superiority over others, which some of us might think gives us license to treat like garbage those we don’t like.
It’s something I have to think about right now, as I have my moral lens of “do no harm, do good, and stay in love with God,” along with loving God and loving neighbor, yet I too fall short a lot and am in need of God’s grace like everyone else. I get very easily disheartened when I read comments on Facebook or our local news website when I see people who claim to love God spew out some of the nastiest, most viral stuff (although as I said a couple weeks ago, it’s easier to hide behind the keyboard). Loving our neighbor extends into how we represent ourselves on social media just like it does in the community. I know in high school, even in my early 20’s, there were people I would treat like garbage at times and even came short of calling some bad names to their faces, behavior that I’m ashamed of today. I still loved God although realized that if God hated the same people I hated, then I created God in my own image. Thanks to God’s grace (with perhaps a nudge or a kick from God) and the Holy Spirit, it took me until my late-20’s-early 30’s to really start making the effort of loving God and loving neighbor, as both go hand in hand. It’s a journey towards moral and spiritual maturity that all of us take and mature in different steps along the way. As New Testament scholar Raj Nadella puts it,
Loving God should be at the core of [our] faith but incomplete by itself. If one’s love for God does not translate into love for neighbors – near or far – or, even worse, prevents one from loving neighbors, it is a façade designed to cover up indifference and hostility towards one’s neighbor.[v]
I don’t want us feel crummy here as I don’t like feeling crummy when I get called on the carpet, but this is a time for us to look in the mirror and think about our actions or words through the lens of these two commandments, as we need to be able to see that like each of us, our neighbors are beloved children of God and made in God’s image, even if they don’t look like us, vote like us, worship like us, believe the same things we do, etc..
When we consider these two commandments and celebrate Reformation Sunday today in solidarity with our friends in the ELCA, we are in a way getting back to the basics of our faith , the Bible, and loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves as we press on.[vi] While the UMC is part of the Anglo-Catholic tradition (as the Reformation happened some 200+ years before John Wesley’s time), acknowledging Reformation Sunday is an example of how we love our neighbors in the Reform tradition. As the UMC and ELCA have been in full-communion with each other since 2008, I am grateful for the work that our church and Our Savior Lutheran Church does together in our community and our world, as we all take part in “God’s Work, our Hands.” Perhaps even today, “it’s time for [our own] congregation to claim a reformation, to set aside things that get in the way of being the church as Jesus describes it, the community that loves God and loves neighbor with commitment and passion” as “this is the way that we as disciples and a congregation, will press on.”[vii]
That’s the good news in all of this, as it’s never too late to love our neighbors or ourselves in the same way we love God. That’s one of the ways we press on, as we can turn around how we see our neighbors, and that we all can accept God’s grace, both the grace that is there before we come believe (prevenient grace), the grace we receive when we accept the forgiveness of our sins and experience a new beginning (justifying grace), followed by “a life of loving like Christ loves, of loving God with all our heart and soul and mind, and loving our neighbor as ourselves” which leads us to sanctifying grace, which is striving to have the same mind of Christ.[viii] These next couple weeks are going to be intense, especially with the election coming November 3 along with hopefully returning to in-person worship, although the date for that has been bumped back due to a spike in COVID-19 cases last week. Despite all that tests our love of neighbor and our fatigue many of us feel right now, my prayer is that we can all see each other as beloved children of God and love our neighbors as we love God and ourselves, and as we continue wearing our masks, washing our hands, and practicing social distancing which are a means of grace. Let us press on by getting back to the basics of our faith on these two commandments. Offered to you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, let the Church say, Amen.
[i] Raj Madella, “Commentary on Matthew 22: 24-35” in Working Preacher. Accessed 20 October 2020,
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Allen Hlton, “Homiletical Perspective on Matthew 22: 24-35” in Feasting on the Word, ed. David L. Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 215.
[iv] Hidden Brain Podcast, October 19, 2020
[v] Raj Madella, “Commentary on Matthe 22: 24-35”
[vi] Derek Weber, “On These Two Commandments” in Pressing On Worship Series (Nashville: Discipleship Ministries of The United Methodist Church), 26.
[vii] Ibid., 27.
[viii] Ibid., 28-29.
No comments:
Post a Comment