GETTING OUR VALUES STRAIGHT

By James W. Crawford

October 24, 1999

Matthew 22: 34-40

I ran across a little book the other day entitled, The New Millennium Spiritual Journey.  The book promises to "change your life  and develop your spiritual priorities with help from today's most inspiring spiritual teachers."   Among other things it offers a test of your "spiritual wellness;" it gives recipes for  spiritual practice to help you on your way;  it provides  vital reflections from the great religions of the world to stimulate your thinking, your praying, your acting. The book closes with an opportunity to write a "Spiritual Will." You can enclose your Spiritual Will  in a time capsule so in twenty years or so, perhaps after you are gone, someone who opens it can discover what you decide to be most important in life and who you are trying  to become. The work book calls this, "establishing your Spiritual Priorities."

It's this very exercise of establishing spiritual priorities Jesus faces in the lesson Scott McInturff read for us this morning. Some religious types  confront him with a "test of his spiritual wellness."

A few minutes before this particular encounter Jesus  confounds theological sophisticates with answers to religious riddles they throw at him. Their purpose:   to confuse and humiliate him.  But they fail. So, in round two, a second set of learned academics seek to entrap him in the minutiae of a doctrinal  examination: "Teacher which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

Now, we need remember their question emerges from the religious life of an Orthodox Jew. Proper moral behavior could be found in following a battery of imperatives, practices, rules and regulations demonstrating loyalty to God.  Over the centuries Judaism developed by Jesus' time 613 of these particular spiritual exercises. They included eating regulations, sexual practices, work rules, a dress code. So, those academics  confronting Jesus, eager to plunge him into an argument over the relative merits of a particular practice, ask  him to pick from this catalog of 613 what might be most important: ". . . which commandment in the law is the greatest?" They expect an answer something like, "Well, of the 613, number 383 is the most important." Such an answer enables our Lord's antagonists to respond: "Why, yes of course, number 383 is important, but what if there is a conflict with number 527? Which might be more important then? How do we choose? Which rule takes priority? How do we get our religious values straight?"

Do you recall our Lord's answer? He bypasses their anticipated entanglement. He will not prioritize their 613 signs of religious authenticity. He reaches back to his rich  heritage and answers, " 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 the first commandment. And the second is like it" - meaning the second is no less grave, important, intense, weighty - "You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

I

What does it mean to love God with all we've got? And our neighbors as ourselves? Where can we look for a clue? Who shows us the full scope of  a spiritual life where these two dimensions, love of God and love of neighbor coincide?

We don't have to look far. We look first of all to Jesus. Through his life we see that loving God and loving neighbor join in one person. Through Jesus we witness the exposure of true spiritual priorities.

This Cross we place here at the heart of our worship shows us many things, as we've illustrated before, but as much as anything else it shows us the life of one who gives self wholly to God and one who gives self wholly to neighbor. The two cannot be separated. Loving God in heart soul and mind is not to engage in a new asceticism; not to eat right, dress right, exercise right, pray right and to attend church with regularity. It is, for God's sake, to surrender our lives - and perhaps even our deaths - for the sustaining and healing of human life.

Isn't this what Jesus means when he says, "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."? The ten commandments, begins with the one to recognize and serve loyally the God who led the Jews from tyranny, slavery, physical abuse, injustice - the rest of the commandments deal with how we shall treat one another - loyalty in marriage, the integrity of human life, the sanctity of telling the truth to and about one another, the true value of another's possessions and person. That's the law. And the prophets tell us again and again that  religious fasting and worship apart from the justice  love originates is simply a blasphemy,  that what the Lord requires of us is to let justice run down like waters and righteousness like an ever rolling stream." I've never understood the fury of what we might call conservative evangelicals  about "humanists" and "humanism."  If one looks at the life and death of Jesus what else do we see but what Hans Kung, as he reflects on being a Christian calls  "God's cause being our human cause. Our human cause being God's cause."

  To love God, you see, with heart soul mind and strength is first of all to love  - to love not an abstract essence, a universal blob, a distant, cold, arbitrary, silent, irrelevant, formless enigma. Hardly. But rather to love a Presence, a capital "P" Person whom we discover through Jesus Christ loves us first of all, with heart, soul mind and strength.

II

Heaven knows our stumbling and sometimes pathetic efforts to bind love of God and neighbor. And  we clergy types are no different, and probably a lot less capable of doing that, than most of you. Every time I walk in here and contemplate this beautiful room, or sing a great Wesley text, or hear a Bach fugue or absorb a Brahms motet, I find myself tempted to divide what Jesus forges together: the love of God and neighbor. The risk facing those of us in the clergy lies in  divorcing the worship of God from service to humanity. We can separate aesthetics from ethics;  sever  "spiritual experience" from pursuing justice and peace. We divide Brahms and bread, hymns and housing, prayers and peace when each of these are inextricably united  in the great way of Jesus Christ.

And of course, some of us fail to join love of God and neighbor because we are busy, conflicted, torn to pieces among ourselves and a million other things. Someone was saying not too long ago, "Sometimes I help and sometimes I don't. I open the door for someone behind me; or I rush through preoccupied in thought,. I vote - but not always. When solicitations comes through the mail, some catch my heart and I send at least something. Others, I basket as junk mail. A friend experiences a hard time. I think I should phone to see how she is, but I jut don't' feel like it tonight . . . Whom should I help, anyway? Senior citizens, battered children, human rights victims - whales? If we don't defuse the nuclear threat there'll be no tomorrow. If we don't support education and the arts, what kind of tomorrow will there be? . . ." This joining of Divine worship and love of neighbor challenges us all.

Our Lord knows it. It's more difficult I think than following the 613 rules of orthodoxy, whatever they might be. Jesus laid out some vivid illustrations of neighbor love. Remember? We no longer get angry. We  see the log in our own eye before we see the splinter in our sibling's eye. He describes for us a human family where hypocrisy dissolves, our good deeds are hidden, our money enhances human welfare. He tells us worrying about tomorrow takes most of the joy and humor out of today; he insists   meaningless repetition in our religious ritual bounces off the ceiling.

But more, and this is where love of neighbor really becomes sticky. Don't just love your friends and neighbors; love your  enemy. It's easy to pray for those in our family circle, or among our friends and even some of our acquaintances. Try praying for those who give us a hard time; who don't like us; who hold some grudge we can't understand; who try to do us in. Jesus says, "Forget the revenge, get the hate out of your heart":  that is loving God.

Robert Coles  in his book, "The Call to Service" calls attention to a reflective talk he heard Martin Luther King give some years ago to a small group of men and women during the Civil Rights struggle of the sixties. These were midday sermons to what King called 'brothers and sisters of the movement." And in one of the speeches Robert Coles taped he describes Dr. King as "worried about the consequences of the struggle for those waging it, and the constant temptation to get worn down, to become bitter , and worst of all," as King says, "to turn on our opponents the same spirit that informed their hostility toward us and our fellow activists. A big danger to us," says Dr. King, "is the temptation to follow the (example of the) people we are opposing. They call us names, so we call them names. Our names may be 'redneck,' or 'cracker': they may be names that have a sociological or psychological veneer to them, a gloss; but they are names, nonetheless - 'ignorant,' or 'brainwashed,' or duped,' or 'hysterical,' or 'poor-white' - or 'consumed by hate.' I know you will all give me plenty of support of those categories. But I urge you to think of others as that - as categories;  and I remind you that  in many people called segregationists, there are other things in their lives: this person, or that person, standing here or there may also be other things - kind to neighbors and family, helpful and good spirited at work.

You all know, I think, what I'm trying to say - that we must not end up with stereotypes of those we oppose, even as they slip us all into their stereotypes. And who are we? Let us not do to ourselves ( as our opponents) do to us: try to put ourselves into one all-inclusive category - the virtuous ones as against the evil ones, or the decent ones as against the malicious, prejudiced ones, or the well-educated as against the ignorant. You can see that I can go on and on - and there is the danger: the 'us' or 'them' mentality takes hold, and we, actually, begin to run the risk of joining ranks with the very people we are opposing. I worry about this a lot these days."

Dr. King, you're not alone. I invite you to take a look for a moment, if you please at the small citation on the back of our bulletin. See it? "A Note on the Inclusive Dimensions of God's Grace." Among a number of very import affirmations it says, ". . .we affirm each individual as a child of God, and recognize that we are called to be like one reconciled body with many members, seeking with others of every race, ethnicity, creed, age, gender, physical or mental ability, and sexual identity to journey together toward the promised realm of God. . ."   Do you know why that's there? Sad! Sad! It is because some churches and denominations in the name of scripture, or Christ, or God say thanks but no thanks to some people they believe to be enemies of the Gospel.  It's because in loving God some Christians find it difficult to love their neighbors . . . some of them of different race or nation, and in these latter days, many of different sexual orientation. I don't mind telling you I look forward to the day no church finds it appropriate to include a notice like this. I anticipate the day when people see Christian churches they assume everyone fits into the dimensions of Divine love, everyone enjoys the status of neighbor.

You see, neighbor love is radical.  When Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan he  defines the Samaritan as  neighbor -  neighbor! - to the Jew who found himself beaten, robbed, thrown into a ditch.  To save that mugged Jew  Jesus chose an enemy. He drew an image of an ethnically detested, socially inferior, religiously blasphemous character from beyond the margins of decent humanity - and said, shockingly, to those very citizens whom even reference to a Samaritan made sick to their stomachs:  that is your neighbor. Palestinian and Israeli: neighbors! Belfast Catholic and Belfast Protestant: neighbors! Hutu and Tutsi: neighbors! South Boston and Roxbury: neighbors.  Patrick Buchanan  and Barney Frank: neighbors. Hillary Clinton and Helen Schafley, neighbors. Old South Church and Holy Cross Cathedral: neighbors!

Oh my friends, our  hearing of the lesson today offers an opportunity to sort out our spiritual priorities, to  put first things first. It gives us a criteria to test our "spiritual wellness." "The new millennium spiritual journey"  is the same as the First Millennium Spiritual journey and will be identical for millennia to come.  Whether it's 613 religious admonitions or the "thousand and one things I've got to do today" we face the difficult and tortuous task of getting our values straight. How do we decide? I'll give you a clue. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself." That  throws what used to be tough choices into a new perspective. It may help  with a career choice, a financial decision,  a key to managing  time differently.  It may provide a route through a family issue or a personnel problem on the job. It can  turn our lives  around. It will cost something. . .something like the Cross: that crystalline point where love of God and love of neighbor coincide.