Proper 25 year A RCL

October 26, 2008

Leviticus 19:1-2,15-18

…You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Matthew 22:34-46

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." …

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. In the name of the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. This is a pretty tall order. How do we know when we’ve gotten to this point? I’d say that this isn’t a quantifiable matter. I’d say that the real issue is whom do I put first in my life? Do I put myself first? Do I place myself at the center of my own very small universe and resent anyone or anything that tries to displace me from that self-absorption? Or do I recognize that there is something greater than me, that I am not more important than everyone else?

A guy once told me that babies only care about having their own needs meet. They aren’t aware that their actions might have an adverse effect on others and even if they did know, they wouldn’t care. This guy was trying to argue some point about sin, which doesn’t matter. But he did make a good point about how even the best, most gracious Christian ever was still completely self-absorbed at one time.

Some people get stuck in the small universe of an infant child. They have a tendency to leave a wake of destruction in their path until they begin to realize that there is a higher power of the vast universe and they ain’t it. If things work out, those people gradually surrender their life and their will over to the care of that higher power (who we commonly refer to as God).

I think that loving God is probably the easier of the two commandments that Jesus singled out as the top two. At least for me, loving a person that I don’t like, is much more difficult. But there is an element to this loving the neighbor thing that I found in the lessons for today that might be equally difficult.

Jack asked me at the end of Bible Study on Wednesday about that verse in the first lesson that says, “You shall reprove your neighbor.” We didn’t have enough time to figure out what ‘reprove’ means. Later, I looked up the verse in my fourth grader version of the Bible. It reads this way: “it's wrong not to correct someone who needs correcting.” Now that causes a dilemma for me because, if you remember, I made a promise not to be the morality police. Yet, here is a verse that could be used to say that I should have never made that promise.

This “reprove your neighbor” verse is important because it is an Old Testament passage that is in the context of love your neighbor as yourself. Sometimes I read Old Testament stuff and I don’t give it the authority over my life that it may deserve because I reason that Jesus came to free us from the constraints of the Law, which is a pretty easy argument to make. But I have to be careful not carry this to the extreme and negate all of the Old Testament.

That is especially true here because Jesus validated this passage when he was asked which law of all the 613 laws is the most important. Jesus answered, “Love God, love your neighbor.” He didn’t invent that on the spot. He was quoting Scripture. The love God part comes from Deuteronomy chapter 6 and the love your neighbor part comes from the first lesson. So this business about correcting our neighbor is just one verse before the verse that Jesus says is the second greatest commandment of all time from God to his people.

It isn’t quite the same thing, but I found out some information about my friend’s son this week. It was not good, but it also wasn’t my business. So I debated about whether I should tell the friend or not. I asked my crewman Matt what he thought. He summed it up for me, “If it was your son wouldn’t you want to know?” So I told the friend.

I think that Matt hit on the litmus test for correcting our neighbors. If I were making a mistake and didn’t know it, would I want someone to tell me? I think that fits with “love your neighbor as yourself”—give the loving reproof to the person in the way I would wish it for myself, should the tables be turned.

But this is still tough because I do not like to be corrected or reproved—ever. With this in mind, it makes it an extremely delicate issue to correct anyone. For me, correction has to be made in such a way that the person doesn’t realize that the hint has been made. Because, I’ll tell you what, otherwise I risk self-righteousness and I despise self-righteousness above all else.

So, what are we to do? Let us start by loving God and then loving our neighbor. I say we let love be our guide.

==Amen==