Today is the third Sunday of this Stewardship season and if last week we talked about money this week we hear about love, which I guess is much more exciting for all of us! The lesson of the Gospel we have just read bring to an end a long passage where Jesus, after he has arrived in Jerusalem, starts teaching in the Temple and the Pharisees as well as the Sadducees are not happy with him, mainly because Jesus criticizes their way of practicing religion. They challenge his authority (21:23) and asks him trick questions, hoping he’s going to contradict himself and discredit himself in front of everyone. Their first question was the one we’ve heard last week: “Is it lawful to pay taxes?”, then they questioned Jesus’s teaching on Resurrection, and today they ask Jesus what is the greatest commandment. This may not seem like a big deal from our point of view, but we know that the Law was most important to the Pharisees. Not only they respected the written Law to the letter, but they had also added to their daily life all the religious rituals prescribed for the priests in the Temple, the famous “purity laws” often debated in the Gospels. They had a reputation for holiness because they were so scrupulous about everything, and my guess is that, by asking Jesus what matters most, they were trying to get Jesus to say some matters of the Law are not that important compared to others, and if he’d say that they would have had a good reason to condemn him. Once again though, Jesus escaped from their trap, and there are a few things here we need to notice.
First Jesus quotes the “Shema Israel” (Listen, Israel) which is the most important prayer for all the Jews, a prayer said at least twice daily (It’s like our “Our Father”, if you will) and it goes like this: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:4–9). Nobody would have had any issue with that. And then Jesus quotes another part of the Scriptures, Leviticus 19:18: Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. This was also a very well known passage. It’s actually interesting to realize that Jesus’s teaching, contrarily to what we might think, is not so different that what the Rabbis of his time taught. There is this famous story where Rabbi Hillel (if you remember, he was Paul’s teacher) once met a Gentile and the man said to the famous teacher: I am ready to be converted, if you can explain to me all the Torah while standing on one leg. It was well known that learning the Torah was a long and arduous task, so it was a bit like the man was making fun of the Rabbi and also challenged him, but Hillel replied, standing on one leg: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole entire Torah; the rest is its explanation. Go and learn.” which silenced the man – and so this very close to what Jesus says today and “From that day, no one dare to ask him any more questions.”
So what is it that is so special about what Jesus says? Well, I think it’s not so much about the commandments themselves, rather it’s about the connection he makes between the two commandments: And the second is like it. Jesus is not saying that the love of God comes first and then we are to love others, nor does he say that if we love people then it does not matter if we love God or not. Jesus claims that the two are equally important. It was of course a blow for all the holier than thou people who used purity laws to separate themselves from others, but this saying is also very powerful for us today when on one side, we have some among conservative Christians who will put the love of God above anything else, following the letter of the law by reading the Bible very literally, even if it means judging people who don’t have the same beliefs and excluding them, and then, on the other side, we have some among progressive Christians who think that the most important is to love people and think that as you do that you’re okay with God even if you only pray occasionally and don’t develop a deeper knowledge of God or repent from your sins. For some among Christians, it’s like one side of the equation cancel the other: Either you emphasize the love of God, or the love of neighbor, but you cannot really hold them together, and yet this is exactly what Jesus is teaching: The two go side by side and are as important as the other. On this, he says “Hang all the Law (= the teaching of the Torah) and the Prophets (= the teaching of the Books of the Prophets)”.
And this part is even more important because if you pay attention, you’ll notice that when Jesus says that he does not really answer the question the Pharisees asked him, he does not say that there is a commandment that is greater than the others, rather he says that there are two commandments that encompass them all. And that’s where it is indeed very smart, because Jesus does not downplay any commandment, and if you read closely Matthew’s Gospel Jesus never says there are commandments in the Law that shouldn’t be taken seriously (contrarily to what we might think) but Jesus connects the commandments to the source, the motivation, the intention of the Law and that, he says, is always the Love of God and the Love of neighbor. And it’s really important we have that in mind because it happens so often that when we practice religion we do things without knowing why we do them anymore. I remember I used to work in a church where during Easter Season we would say the Athanasian Creed, instead of the Nicean Creed. And the Rector told me that it was their tradition, even if “nobody understood this Creed” (check it out BCP p.864–865). When I asked why they were doing it, he said that there was a lady who used to love it and have them recite it. And the he added that the lady had passed a long time ago, yet everybody was still saying the Athanasian Creed. And so my point is, maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to condemn the Pharisees with all their rites, because we often do the same things in our church: We forget why we do what we do, but Jesus reminds us we’re here to love, not to be the keepers of the museum or the defenders of the tradition. And I don’t think we understand stewardship if we don’t understand that first, that we’re not here to just make sure the cycle repeats itself, would it be the liturgical cycle, we’re here to honor God, to serve people and to prepare the future.
The passage we have just read from Deuteronomy is very poignant. We see how, once Moses has led the people as far as he could, he has a glimpse of the promised land but he is not going to enter it. Everything he has done was leading to this moment, but now another generation is going to take over and starts a new adventure with God. They’re going to do it without Moses and yet they wouldn’t have been able to do it without Moses. I think a lot of us come to church because we love our traditions, we have some good friends and we’re attached to the way we worship God, and I would say, there is nothing wrong with that. But we also need to understand that we are called to evolve and, as our Stewardship theme goes: “Make Plenty Good Room” for those who would want to join us, even if it makes us feel a bit uncomfortable. We constantly have to go back to the heart of why we do the things we do: For the love of God and for the love of others, both our own people as well as the outsiders and the next generation And it’s something that is easy to lose sight of as well. We’re often so busy on Sundays making sure everything happens as it should that we may forget to take a few minutes to close our eyes and really worship God in our hearts, offering ourselves, asking God to fill our hearts. And then again, we may be so busy that we forget to take a few minutes to talk to people, not just our friends but those we don’t know that well, newcomers or people who are going through difficult times. We have currently several people who are not able to attend church and if it’s important to notice not only those who are here, but also those who are absent, get in touch with them to check in and visit if they are lonely, or offering a ride if they cannot get to church by themselves. It may be humble work, maybe less exciting then bigger projects, but it is the work of love Jesus has commended us.
Now why am I saying all of this during Stewardship season?
Well, because Stewardship is certainly not just about money, it’s also going back to the reason of why we do the things we do. When you’ve received your pledging card, you will have noticed that it’s flippable: On one side you can make your financial contribution and then on the other side you can offer some of your time. This year, I would like to have more people involved in welcoming and following up the newcomers, as well as a pastoral care team, to visit the sick and if possible have one or two lay persons able to bring communion. We are also all aware that every week, we ask for new people to volunteer for coffee hour. You know it’s not about the coffee. It is that when we have coffee, it’s an opportunity to connect together, to enjoy some fellowship in a world where there is so much loneliness. I bet that in every church there are some people coming in for whom it’s their only opportunity of the week to speak to someone. So please do sign up for this humble work of love too! We talk a lot about generosity at this time of the year, we can be generous with our money but we can also be generous with our time, and the hope is that as we have been generous to people while we could, they will be generous to us when we need their generosity. But again, it’s all about going back to Jesus’s teaching and the center of why we are doing the things we do: To love God and to love neighbors, both those we know and those we do not know yet. I am aware that there is a lot to do to keep a church running, and actually that’s why it’s so important to often to recenter on the reason why we’re here, to practice loving God and loving neighbors. And we do what we can. It does not have to be big, but it has to come from the heart. I am part of the small group of clergy people who meet every week, and one of us told this story recently about a church who had “adopted” their neighbor, a single older lady who lived on her own next to the church property. They were a small congregation, but they all agreed to take turns visiting her, bringing her food, helping her with errands and medications. It may not seem like a lot, to have a “one people outreach project”, there are certainly more fancy things to do, and yet haven’t they touched exactly on what it means to be a church and to obey Jesus’s commandments? I think it is worth a thousand words.