Our worship bulletin indicates that we are observing "All Saints' Day" today. The history of All Saints goes back to the third century when several congregations remembered martyrs, or Christians who had been killed for being faithful to Christ as Lord. Eventually the observance broadened to include all people of faith who have died, and it is in that sense that most Christians mark All Saints' Day now.
Our celebration of All Saints is shaped by our understanding of the word saint as used in the New Testament. It is used to designate all who seek to follow Jesus Christ, all who are part of the Christian Church, living as well as dead. And so in the life of the Presbyterian Church, on All Saints' Day we remember those who have preceded us on the journey of faith, and we reflect on what it means for us, the living, to be the people of God, Easter people rooted in the reality of Jesus' death and resurrection.
As people who take the name Christian, you and I take seriously the work of connecting what we read in the Bible to our life in the world of 2006. In this church we reject the option of taking the words of the Bible literally and contorting ourselves to apply them to our lives rigidly. Instead, we take the Bible seriously, and we work to understand the world of the many authors who wrote what we call Scripture. Believing that those authors were in tune with what we call the living spirit of God, we read their words as significant for our journey of faith two or three thousand years after the time of their writing.
This morning's Gospel reading gives us Jesus' answer to a question about which one of the many religious laws of the time was primary. The rabbis who were contemporaries of Jesus calculated that there were six hundred thirteen laws to be known and obeyed by conscientious Jews. Of those six hundred thirteen laws, two hundred forty-eight were positive commands—Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, or Honor your father and your mother, for example. Three hundred sixty-five were negative prohibitions (one for each day of the year)—You shall not kill, or You shall not steal, to quote two obvious examples. And then there were multiple interpretations of many of the laws, so that the matter of obeying or keeping "the law" was complex, to say the least.
Most students of the Bible agree that Jesus' summary of the law was revolutionary. Before his time no-one had reduced the six hundred thirteen laws to two. In Marks' Gospel, Jesus responded to an honest question from a seeker after goodness: "Which is the first or greatest commandment?" Jesus' answer is well-known and, I would argue, significant. He said, in effect, "Two commandments are primary: Love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself."
The sincere questioner repeats Jesus' summary of the law with enthusiastic approval. Jesus then tells him he is not far from the reign of God, or the rule of God. In other words, "He gets it."
What are you and I to make of this in 2006? Let me suggest my take on it, and you can decide whether you agree or not. First, for me this reading means that Christianity in 2006 or any other time is not about lists of laws or rules, whether they come from Leviticus, Romans, or I Timothy. Clearly Jesus and his later interpreter Paul gave some very specific directions about practical aspects of Christian living, and we all have our favorites and our un-favorites among them. But both Jesus and Paul summarized the law, Jesus with two commandments and Paul with one—the second of Jesus' two.
Jesus' summary of the law lifts up this thing called love, and makes it the lens through which Christians are called to see themselves and their lives. Love God; and love neighbor as self. Jesus gives priority to neither of the two laws he quotes. They are a unity. You can't have one without the other. I don't think the Apostle Paul would disagree with that. He just states it differently.
For many Christians in 2006 the first of the two commandments cited by Jesus is harder to understand. What does it mean to love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength? The second commandment, the one about loving neighbor as self, is not easy to obey, but its meaning is rather clear—especially when we read it in Luke's Gospel. There it is followed by the question "Who is my neighbor?" And we have the parable of the Good Samaritan to focus our thinking. To love neighbor is to care for woundedness wherever we find it and to reach beyond the narrow boundaries of the familiar and comfortable. Doing that is anything but easy, but understanding it is not all that difficult.
There is one area that may invite clarification about loving one's neighbor. It is the degree to which some people give themselves away in the act of caring and end up feeling used or manipulated. I was on four different flights this past week, going to and returning from a Presbyterian polity conference in Tucson, Arizona. Four times I heard the reminder to put on my own oxygen mask before helping someone else with theirs. That important principle applies to loving one's neighbor as oneself. Healthy self-care is necessary for the practice of care for neighbor. My own understanding of self-care includes the importance of practicing tough love as a way to help people in situations of critical need. Without being self-absorbed, I set the boundaries for helping other people. I decide when to say yes or no.
There are some expert manipulators in the world. In that category are a great many addicts, as well as chronic procrastinators and people who suffer from depression. People in the "helping professions" soon learn not to be taken in by the accusation "You're not being very Christian" when it is made by someone who has gotten a negative answer to his or her unreasonable request for help. I've learned to say to such people, "I don't remember giving you the power to define what is Christian for me." Too many people, church people often, thinking they were practicing Jesus' second commandment, have become weary, burned out, and resentful after forgetting the importance of self-care—what Jesus referred to in that phrase "loving neighbor AS YOURSELF." The kind of servant-hood Jesus calls us to grows out of a healthy sense of self, out of being grounded in knowledge of God's unconditional love for us.
Back to the first of the two commandments. What does it mean to love God? The same Greek verb is used for loving God and loving neighbor. That same Greek word is used for Balaam's "love for the wages of doing wrong" (I Peter 2:15) and for "people who do evil's loving the darkness." (John 3:19) The Greek word used for "love" in the great commandments doesn't help us understand what it means to love God. Various commentators say what they think it means, and they often use words like "devotion" and "loyalty," both good but also problematic, at least for me.
The word "devotion" when used in relation to God can move in the direction of withdrawal from the world in order to spend large amounts of time in prayer, reflection, and self-examination—all of which have positive value when they are a part of a rhythmic withdrawal and engagement. The word "loyalty" is also a good word, but for me it needs the same clarification as "loving" God. What does it mean to be loyal to God?
I want to tell you where I am in my current thinking about the commandment to Love God. At this stage of my life I see loving God as doing what we can to be fully human. In one of the books I try to read from every day there is a sentence that says, "As I become more fully myself, I am better able to treat others with love and respect." For me, being fully human begins with accepting myself as I am and accepting other people as they are. That means accepting all that is good about me and all that is good about you, and coming to terms with my brokenness and the brokenness that is part of everyone else and everything else. It goes on to mean demanding the right to be fully myself and giving you the right to be fully yourself, so long as we do nothing to hurt one another or to harm creation. In that context to love God fully means to honor what God has created. In the book of Genesis God called creation good, and we love God when we see the goodness in people and the rest of the world.
One implication of seeing love for God that way is that it places less emphasis on the church as an institution, less importance on spending time inside the church and more emphasis on living life in the world as grateful, appreciative participants in the lively human enterprise. It also moves me personally toward being counter-cultural in New York City in the sense that I enjoy eye contact and smiling when I walk down Broadway from my apartment to the church each morning of the week. The result is interesting, as you can imagine. I actually get some positive responses from time to time. I'm thinking, "Yes, it's good to be alive even in a badly flawed society, even in a world where there is pain and loss. It's good to find connections, to experience community, to see goodness in the eyes of another person. Thank you, God, for the gift of being alive."
Jesus' refusal to separate love for God from love for neighbor calls the church, the community of people who have covenanted to follow him, to keep hearing the good news about God's unconditional love for the world—and everyone and everything in it. We need to hear it so clearly and so deeply that we can let go of our need for recognition and approval from other people, let go of our need to gossip and criticize other people in order to feel good about ourselves. Hearing and believing the good news of God's love frees us for self-acceptance, which is different from self-absorption. It sets us free for the joyful work of loving God and loving other people in the same way we learn to love ourselves.
That's what it means to be saints.