I have a question specifically, for the children here today, though I’m sure the adults will be interested in the answer: Here’s the question:  “What rule of your mom and dad’s is most important?”  

            Keep your room clean? Do your homework? Hard to answer, isn’t it? When I was little my parents had a lot of rules that I was expected to follow. In fact, it seemed I had more rules than my sister did. When I confronted my mom and dad about this grave injustice they answered, “Well, your sister never puts gum in your hair or loosens the front wheel of your bicycle either.”  

            Picky.  Picky.

            I remember asking Josh which of our rules he thought was most important. He said, “do what you hafta before you do what you wanna,” probably because it was the one he failed at most often.

            A similar question was asked of Jesus.

            In the gospel lessons of the last few weeks Jesus’ adversaries keep firing questions at him. Then, wouldn’t you know, it’s a lawyer who decides to put him to the test. “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment?” Cut to the chase, he’s saying. Give us your bottom line. What do you really think is the essence of life?

            And Jesus answers him without hesitating.  “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

            The greatest commandment is the command to love, Jesus says. Love is the key to everything. And God commands us to love.

            Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? After all, you hear the word “love” just about everywhere these days. Occasionally I see a car with a Virginia license plate, often with a bumper sticker that reads “Virginia is for lovers.” I never could quite figure out what that meant.

            My next door neighbor, Bob and Ann Barnes’ daughter, Robinanne, has a new car.  Well, an old, new car.  It’s got a bumper sticker in the rear window with the four letters L-O-V-E on them. It reminds me of all the songs about love I used to listen to when I was very young. The radios of that era were filled with love songs, or what I would call today wonderful co-dependent love songs. They were all about how life will end if we can’t have a certain person in our lives to make our lives complete. “I can’t live, if living is without you,” one said. “All you need is love,” we were told.  “Love me tender, love me true.” One after another, these songs declare that the meaning of the universe hangs on the attention of a beautiful young man or woman.

            Of course things began to get a little rawer later, when songs came along like “Gimme Some Loving” and “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” But I’ll always remember that good, practical love song, the one that we were still singing in college in the mid-1980’s:   “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

            Love in our time is all about feelings. We speak of people “falling in love.” It’s something that happens that we have no control over. Either we “feel” love toward someone, or we don’t. We’re the passive recipients, even the victims, of our feelings. That’s why the classic expression of love through the ages has been Cupid with his arrow, shooting people so that they hopelessly lose control of their feelings.

            A few years ago, James Welch, a much admired CEO of one of America’s biggest corporations sat for an interview with a reporter, and soon he and the reporter had “fallen in love.” And then, victim of Cupid’s arrow that he was, he walked away from his wife and family to follow this new love.

            Seventeen years of performing weddings and working with engaged couples has convinced me that most couples head into marriage because they “fell” in love. They hardly realize that falling in love is just the beginning of a long journey in learning how to love. The commitment they often think they are making is not “for better for worse, for richer for poorer,” but something more like “we will stay together as long as our love shall last.” As long as it feels right.

            The ones that survive, of course, are the ones that grow beyond this stage.  Divorce statistics in America show that many couples never do.

            Feelings are a bad master.  They are notoriously unreliable. They can change at the drop of a hat. Lives get pulled and stretched, and people change. A relationship based primarily on feelings is built on sand.

            Jesus does not seem to have any interest in feelings of love. “You shall love the Lord your God,” says God; “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” says Jesus. It would appear that love is something that Jesus believed could be commanded. We are told to love God with our hearts and minds and souls and our neighbor as ourselves. This love isn’t something that we need to feel.

            The command to love in our Christian tradition is a practice, a skill, a demanding discipline. It entails an arduous journey out of our self-absorption into caring for the well-being of another. As secular psychiatrist Erich Fromm wrote in his book The Art of Loving, loving is an art, the apex of what it means to be human, and it takes the kind of practice required to be an accomplished pianist, or dancer, or scientist. If we want to become full human beings, we must slowly, carefully learn the art of loving.

             Here in today’s gospel, Jesus laid down the heart of it all for his followers. When the lawyer challenged him to name the greatest commandment, he wanted Jesus to cut through the 613 separate commandments in Jewish law, all the rules, all the guidelines covering every area of life.

            And Jesus responded with the Israelis’ own core command, the Shema, which Jews had been reciting and wearing around their foreheads and nailing to their doorposts for centuries. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

            Then Jesus shocked them. They thought he was finished. But without missing a beat he said, “There’s a second commandment that’s like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

            Wait a minute; where did that come from? Sure, it’s a line out of the Book of Leviticus, but since when has that second command been pasted in with the first? As Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann puts it, Jesus is saying you can’t say “God” without saying “neighbor”; it’s almost hyphenated—“God-Neighbor.” To love God means to love your neighbor. To love your neighbor is the active form of loving God. (From Brueggemann, The Covenanted Self).

            For Jesus, your neighbor is the one who needs you, whether that person is across the dinner table, or next door, or across the city or the world. Since returning from Guatemala almost two years ago, I think fondly of people I consider neighbors a continent away.  I consider them my neighbor.

            Many of us feel as if the hurricane victims in the Gulf Coast are our neighbors, and some of us will be responding to that neighbor need in just a few weeks by going down to New Orleans.  Not because loving our neighbor is about swelling music and warm feelings, but unsentimental, concrete acts.

            It’s that cool, clear, unsentimental love that you find in people whose lives are given to loving. My bet is that you can see that God-neighbor love in people who work at the soup kitchen in New London. I wager that it’s what you would see in the prison ministries that exist in this area and is on display by many at the Habitat for Humanity workdays.

            Loving our God-neighbor can mean babysitting in a pinch, or doing the dishes after church.  It means speaking to someone who has hurt us, and honestly confronting the issues between us. Loving God-neighbor means prayerfully, yet gently telling a friend she’s drinking too much.  

            Loving our God-neighbor is mentoring kids and making sure that something other than the bottom line alone drives our business decisions—things like the welfare of employees or the good of the community.

            Years ago Campus Crusade was trying to get going on Stanford University's campus. And it was slow going. So many rich, bright spoiled kids--they just didn't need God. And most of Crusade's ministry was words, persevering and prayer. That's when a bad flu epidemic swept the campus. And half the student body was down with it.

Most collegiates were selfish, avoided the sick, went to class, took care of Number One. The Christians ministered to the sick by serving chicken soup, administering medicine, bringing class notes, laying on the warm blankets, praying. And the campus noticed. And soon the Crusade meetings began to grow. Today Campus Crusade thrives on campus!

            The ultimate issue for all of us is whether we ever learn to love our God-neighbor. Worshiping God is where we begin. We come to places such as this to open our minds and spirits to the One who made us and loves us. But that alone is only a start. It shows us the things that count—compassion, forgiveness, active love. And it opens us to receive Christ’s Spirit and love that make those things possible. Church is meant to be a School for Love, a place where we can learn and practice the skills and art of loving. Part of our mission is to experience the most profound worship of God possible, and then be propelled out in service to our God-neighbor.

            There’s a short story by John L’Heureux called “The Expert on God.” The story is about a young priest whose faith has been riddled with doubts for years. One day he happens on a terrible car accident and finds a young man trapped under an overturned car and dying. After a lot of struggle the priest is able to get the young man out from under the car and holds him in his arms as he begins desperately praying that the young man will survive. The priest anoints him and prays more, but it’s clear to him the prayers are useless. Still he prays on, but seems to be hearing only his own empty words being hurled up toward heaven.

            Then the story closes in this way:

            “The dying boy turned—some dying reflex—and his head tilted in the priest’s arms, trusting, like a lover. And at once the priest, faithless, unrepentant, gave up his prayers and bent to him and whispered, fierce and burning, ‘I love you,’ and continued until there was no breath, ‘I love you, I love you.’”

            At long last this priest became “an expert on God.” As he embraced this dying man, he moved away from all of his preoccupation with himself and gave himself away in an act of pure love of his God and neighbor. “I love you,” he said as he held him, “I love you.”

            “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these..”

            And on these two commandments hang our life’s meaning, and our world’s hope.  If you attempt to live by them, this I assure you:  You are not far from the kingdom of God.

            Will you pray with me now?

(Grateful thanks to The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, Dean of the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. for help with this sermon)