This is, as you know, the final chapel service of the year and the final meditation in our series on love. I am grateful for all the contributions that have been made this term - Kurt nelson, Adam Holt, Nathan Empsall, Eric Schildge, Eileen Brody, Pam Misener, Guy Collins, Carla Bailey, and Dierre Upshaw. They have discussed perspectives on love - from romantic love to family love to social service to mandated love to self love. Today, I want to talk briefly about Love for God, love for neighbors, and love for enemies.
We are commanded to love God. Indeed, we are told that this is the greatest commandment. Strangely, perhaps, we have not heard a great deal about loving God in this series. I wonder why? Perhaps it is because we do not know how to do it. What do we do to love God? In many religious traditions, love for God has been equated with keeping commandments, which has meant keeping and performing certain rituals, performing a certain kind of worship. These structures, while perhaps supporting our love for God, are not the essence of it.
We are also commanded, in both Old Testament and new, to love our neighbors as ourselves. Without getting into the issue that Dierre discussed last week (the proper role of self-love), we can conclude that loving our neighbors is more difficult than it seems. As Carla pointed out, it is sometimes easier to forgive major misdeeds by people we do not know than to forgive annoying or hurtful acts from people we do know. Yet, as we learn from the epistle of John, loving God and loving our neighbor are practically the same thing. We love God, he asserts, by loving our neighbor. For how can we love God, whom we have not seen, if we do not love our neighbors, whom we have seen?
This does not make it easier for us. Seeing them is the problem. As I have told you, I view riding the bus as a spiritual practice. And a very difficult one. It is not that the bus is sometimes slow or inconvenient that makes it most difficult. Rather, it is having to listen to some of my neighbors on the bus. Every day I am subjected to certain people who talk nonsense - who speak inanities, who repeat and perpetuate misinformation as if it were established truth. My usual posture is simply to bury myself in TIME magazine or gaze off into the middle distance as I hear yet again stupid stuff said at loud volume.
So I acknowledge, I fail. I fail to love my neighbors, I fail to love God - all the time. But I do know that my love for God, when I practice it, when I experience it, when I am aware of it, has to do with genuine gratitude for life and for my fellow creatures.
But then, there is the third topic: Love for enemies. I have it on good authority - a professor of Biblical studies at Princeton --- who told me that the only teaching of Jesus that was new, the only thing he said that was really new, was his commandment to love our enemies. I find loving my neighbors on the bus - who mean me no harm at all - difficult enough. How am I ever to love enemies - people who do mean me harm? Yet this commandment, to love our enemies, is, in my mind, the most distinctive contribution of Christianity to the world - and also the most neglected. Most people write it off as foolishness. Even most Christians rationalize ways to qualify it and ignore it. Thank God for a few people - the Quakers, the Amish, the Mennonites - who will not ignore it, and who remind the rest of us that it is not optional for Christian discipleship.
I used to have a bumper sticker on my door. A friend gave it to me. It confounded many people who read it. It said: "When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he meant don't kill them." The friend of mine who gave it to me had it on his car. He was accosted in the grocery store by a person who was offended by the bumper sticker, and who wanted to start a fight over it.
I do not hold myself up as model of a person who loves God, loves my neighbor, or loves my enemies. Yet I do proclaim that these three commandments are linked as one, and that they are the truth. To genuinely love God is to love our neighbors, and to love our neighbors is to love our enemies. I know this to be true. In my best moments, I can even feel it to be true.
I want now to address at topic that must be addressed - because two speakers this term have mentioned it: gay marriage. As you know, the New Hampshire legislature has passed, and the governor yesterday signed, a law that extends marriage as a civil right to homosexual as well as heterosexual couples. This issue has aroused great controversy and deep feelings. Now the legal argument has been decided. Our view of marriage is both civil and religious. Some religious groups have deeply opposed gay marriage; others have supported it. They may even consider each other enemies. But I think we must consider this issue as we do divorce. Many religious traditions oppose divorce; some do not recognize it. In years past, some states did not allow divorce. Yet all of us, whether we accept divorce as morally right, now do accept it as a civil right.
Jesus said that a person's enemies are sometimes those of one's own household. Deep divisions certainly create enmity, even among families. This is why it's all tied together: Love for God means love for neighbors means love for enemies. It's one truth.
Amen.
