“God’s Gifts and How to Use Them, Part 4:” by the Rev. Dr. Don Wahlig, November 17, 2024, Year B / Pentecost 25 (Proper 27) - Deuteronomy 6:1-9 and Psalm 119:1-8 - Mark 12:28-34

THEME:  Love God and love ALL our neighbors, even those we do not understand and those with whom we disagree.

When you were growing up, did your parents ever say to you, “There are two things you should not talk about in polite company. Politics and religion.” Well, this morning, we are going to talk about both.  Karl Barth, the greatest Protestant theologian of the last century, was famous for many things that he wrote and said. One of the better-known quotes attributed to him was a piece of advice for pastors. He said that we pastors should “preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” What he meant was that everything that happens in the world is to be held up against the benchmark of God’s Word in order to be tested for faithfulness. That applies to both individual actions, and public events like our recent election. 

Like many of you, I have spent the last week and a half trying to better understand the implications of the election in light of our faith. Several of you have come to me with questions about how the results square with our beliefs as Christians. If you are one of those who has questions about that, by all means, please come see me. I will be happy to talk with you.  It is no secret that our country is divided along political lines.  It is not the first time this has happened, and it will not be the last. As a result, we have different reactions to the election. Some of us are elated. Others among us are distraught. Either way, as people who place our trust in Jesus Christ, the only faithful way to understand the result is in the light of our core beliefs. 

So, the question is this: In our public life, as in our private life, are we being faithful? As individuals and as a society, are we living and acting as Jesus would have us do? The benchmark, of course, is his Great Commandment. In Jesus Christ, you and I have been given new life. The Great Commandment is how he wants us to live out our new life in him. And so, this past week, I have done some digging to remind myself what it actually means for us to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

In order to understand what this means for us, we have to first understand what it meant to Jesus. This was not just some saying that he made up. Jesus was a Jew.  He formed the Great Commandment by drawing on the Jewish scriptures. That was his Bible. The command to love God with our whole being comes from Deuteronomy. It is the first paragraph of the central prayer of Judaism. That prayer is called the Shema. To this very day, faithful Jews recite it twice a day. It declares that Yahweh alone is God. Not only is there no other God before him, there is no other basis for life or for meaning. No other value system comes before God – no religion, no philosophy, no ideology – political or otherwise. 

It also means that God is the source of being itself. Every blessing that we experience in this life - goodness, beauty, love, joy, and holiness – is an aspect of God, and a gift from God. All things and all people have their existence in God, and in God alone. Because of that, we are to love God. Yes, we should hold God in awe. And, yes, there are times when God’s power can be a fearsome thing.  But fear and awe do not define our relationship with God. Love is the fundamental nature of God, and our relationship with him.

But loving God is not enough in Jesus’ eyes. So, for the second half of the Great Commandment, he draws on the ethical commands in Leviticus. If we are going to please God, he says, then we have to love our neighbor. Not just a little. And not just some of the time. But always, and to the same degree that we love ourselves. But what does that really mean? What does it look like in practice? For Jesus it meant that we do not hold grudges. We are honest and just in our dealings with others. We are reverent in our worship of God, and respectful of young and old alike, parents and children.

Further, loving our neighbor means special consideration for those whom Jesus called the least. Farmers are to leave the edges of their fields and vineyards unharvested in order to provide food for the poor and the alien. Aliens are to be considered citizens. We are to love them the same way we love everyone else – which is to say that we are to love them as we love ourselves. This is what Jesus meant by loving God with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves.

This is not what we see from either of the two political parties today, especially on their extremes. They each seem to have different ideas about who qualifies as our neighbor. Neither one meets the standard Jesus set in his Great Commandment. So, now is a good time for all of us to reconsider whether our definition of neighbor is as broad as Jesus intended. I could not help but notice, for example, that many folks who live in rural places across the country feel unheard, dismissed, and irrelevant, like their lives do not matter and their needs can simply be ignored. At the same time, it is clear that many of those who are vulnerable because of their race, ethnicity or place of origin, also feel like their needs are ignored, that they are dismissed, and their lives do not matter.

Jesus tells us that they do – all of these, no matter what they look like, where they come from, or where they live. They need to matter to those in power, and they need to matter to you and me, and everyone who wears the label of Christian. It is by no means easy to love all our neighbors, but that is what we strive to do here at SSPC.  We are working very hard toward a vision of being a Grace-filled family of faith sharing Christ’s love with all.  I am proud of the way that we try to put the Great Commandment into action in the way we love and praise God, love and nurture our faith family, and love and serve our neighbors, just as our Mission Statement says. Are we perfect? By no means! Is there room for us to do better and more? Absolutely.  And we are proposing to do just that in the coming year. By now, you have all seen the 2025 Financial Narrative. If you have not, it is available on our website under the Giving tab. 

Our Elders and their committees have faithfully discerned dozens of new and expanded initiatives to help us live out Christ’s Great Commandment more faithfully. A common theme for many of these is the increased focus on reaching out beyond our walls to touch the lives of our neighbors here in Mechanicsburg and beyond. In order for us to share Christ’s love more faithfully, we need everyone’s help.  Today is Commitment Sunday. This is the day when we each make our commitments to God’s work here in the Silver Spring family of faith. 

In just a moment we will all come forward to place our financial commitment forms in the pledge box at the front of the chancel. Even if you have already made your pledge online, or you have yet to make your pledge but intend to, we invite you to come forward and place your hand on the box as a sign of your commitment to doing and supporting God’s work here at SSPC.  As you do, consider this. Today, you and I are taking the next step in our faith journey.  As we do, we are one step closer to living into the Great Commandment that Jesus gave us – not just as individuals, but as a congregation.

May it be so.