October 25, 2020 | Worship

Love, Love, Love, Love
Christians—this is your call
Love your neighbor as yourself
For God loves all.

Today’s readings in Matthew and Leviticus always bring me back to this song—one I must have learned at camp because I can’t seem to find it any of the 27 hymnals on the bottom shelf in my office. I’ve never forgotten it, though. We would sing it in a round, which I can’t replicate for you today since I’m all by myself, but I invite you to picture a bunch of dirty, stinky, booger-nosed kids circled around the campfire up at Tamarack, arm in arm. It’s dusk, and the trees are silhouettes against a sky that is fading from the pink of dusk into the grays and the eventual deep, velvety purple-black of nighttime, the stars beginning to shine their brilliant display on us as we transitioned from the more raucous “YOU CANT RIDE IN MY RED WAGON, THE WHEELS ARE BROKEN AND THE AXEL’S SAGGIN” of the early evening, to the slower songs signaling that we would be headed to our tents soon. And this song would begin, and swaying, everyone would sing in their best camp voice (which is less worried about how it sounds than say, our church voices, but more restrained than singing in the shower) and this somber tune of love would go one for five or six rounds, sometimes more if the group is really feeling it.

And it’s that sad quality, the mysterious shifts into sharps and flats that stick with me. It’s a hauntingly beautiful, simple song. And it’s about love, which has some dissonance when I stop to think about what love really is, what this song is saying. Is love somber? Is the kind of love we exhibit as Christians haltingly, hauntingly beautiful?

I’m prepared to say that yes, yes it is.

Love is a loaded gun. Love is a topic with potential to break open old wounds. Love is ambivalent. Love, like so many other things, does not exist in a binary of only one possible expression, and a binary where the opposite of love is hate. Love has a spectrum. It has as many healthy ways of manifesting itself as it has unhealthy.

When we hear “Love your neighbor as yourself” we project onto it a healthy kind of love. I mean, duh. We’re not reading this text and picturing a narcissistic or a co-dependent love.

But, just like the song, there’s something that tugs at me a bit when I read “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There’s more to it, more to explore. Something hidden in the shadows, and not necessarily in the shadows of the text itself, but in the way we, as adherents of Biblical wisdom, live out “love” in the world.

There is a chapter in the book The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed titled “In the Name of Love” that explores the ambivalence of love, the mutability of the word when it is applied as a way of protecting something. The chapter begins with an excerpt from the “wake up or die love watch” website, a website that is dedicated to listing white nationalist organizations. This comes on the heels of a Hatewatch website which also lists the same white supremacist, nationalist organizations, however, lovewatch took the concept and spun it around. Using the language of love, it is explained that this site is born out of a steadfast devotion to their—and I get a lump of barf in my throat as I say it—White Racial Family and their nation. It is an act of love, as this website would have us believe, to uphold a white supremacist, aryan nationalist way of life, and on the contrary, Hatewatch is the one who is being divisive and terrible. As Ahmed says, “these groups come to be defined as positive in the sense of fighting for others, and in the name of others.” (pg. 123).

We can see that love isn’t always helping people cross the street and rescuing kittens from trees. Acting to protect something can be seen an act of love, misguided and harmful as it may be. It is with this lens that I turn to our readings today. In Matthew, which—a few weeks ago I misspoke when I said Matthew was written a hundred years after Jesus—I rounded up a bit too much. In around 70 CE is when it is generally agreed on that Matthew was written.

In our reading, the pharasees have heard that Jesus completely shut down the sadducees, just utterly silenced them. Matthew lays out that they sent one of their folks—a lawyer—to test him.

I know. I know. It’s like, the lawyer trope was already in existence back then. This could be the set up to a joke. But it isn’t, this is a battle of wits. It’s like in the movie the Princess Bride when the man in black bests Inigo the swordsman, beats Fezzik the strongman, and so he comes to Vizzini, the Sicilian who challenges him to a battle of the wits. It’s like, an ancient rap battle. It’s like…well, I could go on with what it’s like. But basically, they are trying to outsmart him, to catch Jesus stumbling, slipping up. They’ve been doing this over the last several weeks of readings, but in reality, all of this is taking place during Holy Week, during the week preceding jesus’s death.

So this lawyer asks Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the Greatest?” to which jesus responds, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and wth all your soul and with all your mind.” And then he follows up with “ and the second is “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

This is a no-brainer. In the reading from Leviticus 19, we hear this same thing. This is something that anyone with any understanding of the law would know. It is essential. I think as Christians we tend to assume Jesus made the “love your neighbor as yourself” bit up on the fly, but there is a deep tradition preceeding this interaction.

The pharisees and priests and sadducees are portrayed as kind of awful in Matthew, they get a little more grace in the other gospels, but they are really grilling jesus for answers in Matthew. Are they actually terrible? They are protecting something they love—a tradition that is threatened by Jesus’ existence. Is it as bad as, say, lovewatch? Probably not, which makes things even more murky when it comes to the notion of love. It cannot be viewed as all one way or another. It lands in different middle spaces.

So when we are instructed, then to love our neighbor as ourselves—and let’s not even get started on the dilemma of “what if we don’t love ourselves enough or if we love ourselves too much”—that’s a whole other sermon!—how do we know that our love is the kind that is life-giving, that magnifies, amplifies God’s booming, loving voice? How are we certain that the love we are giving our neighbor, that we are giving God, isn’t a one-sided, divisive kind of love?

I think a good yardstick for measurement can be found in our Leviticus reading—You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor.

This grounds our love a bit. It keeps us from going overzealously in one direction or the other. Yes, we must care for the poor—Jesus modeled this all the time!!—but we also must consider the “great” those wealthy and powerful as people as well. As our neighbors. Equally, we mustn’t put all our eggs in the “powerful and charismatic” basket, deferring to those who have money or whatever it may be that we think gives a person more standing than the average joe, while ignoring the cries of the poor. This little preface a few verses ahead of “you shall love your neighbor as yourself, I am the Lord” in Leviticus tempers our tendency to go all in, choosing one over the other.

This message of love is powerful now, as we enter the weeks before our presidential election. Loving our neighbor isn’t going to be easy, because we must fight for justice, but we must still look at the “other” whether that other is the poor, the wealthy, the republicans, the democrats, the people who like pepsi, the coke drinkers, whoever they might be to us, we must look at them not only as other HUMANS, but as our neighbors, whom we are commanded to love just as much as we love ourselves. That’s how God’s light is shone in the world.

This week, Christians, as we hear our call to love, love, love, love, I pray that God will help us to be sure that our love is not oppressive. That our love isn’t merely a manifestation of our fears, that it loves both the poor and the rich and judges both with fairness. That we have a love that mirrors the kind of love we are given by God, For God loves all. Amen.