The Right Rev. V. Gene Robinson: Just These Two

Lord, take my lips and speak through them. Take our minds and think with them. Take our hearts and set them on fire with love for you. Amen. Please be seated.

Well, you can just give me a difficult scripture any day of the week, and I’m all over it. You can give me Abraham needing to sacrifice Isaac. You can give me Jesus saying, “I will set son against father and daughter against mother”, and I can do a pretty good job of explaining it. But when you pick up a scripture like this one, “love God, love your neighbor as yourself”, Who’s gonna argue with that? But Jesus is caught up, in this passage from Matthew with the Sadducees and Pharisees. Now, he makes them sound really awful because after all, he’s a Jew writing for Jews, trying to convince them that this Jesus is the Messiah they’ve been looking for. So we have to make the hometown team look pretty bad. But like today’s Christians, or at least many of us, the Pharisees and Sadducees were quite serious about their religion. But they had a way of talking more about religion and rules, than about God and God’s love for us. They were sort of like God’s police.

Now, in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, we have the Jewish version of WWJD. What would Yahweh do? And in order to, well, explain what God wanted, over time, over actually many hundreds of years, over 600 laws were developed and preached. And they went one step further, even. They did what is known as building a fence around the law. That is to say, if you were told to do this, you better do a little more than this, to make sure you do this. And we see all kinds of examples of it around the Sabbath, around kosher eating, around the Temple Mount. And to this day, Jews won’t go on the Temple Mount to pray. They will do so at the Western Wall of the Mount because it was not right for one to go in the place of the Holy of Holies. And because they didn’t know exactly where that was on the Temple Mount, best just to stay off the whole mount. Building a fence around the laws to make sure that you’re obeying the laws. The last time I was in Jerusalem, the King David Hotel was still, on the Sabbath, making the elevators stop at every floor. It was okay, it was not a violation of the Sabbath to ride the elevator, but it was work to push the button. And that did violate that law.

But here’s the danger in all that. For Jews and Christians, for Muslims, for anyone who wants to be that cranky about God’s demands. Sometimes rules can become the focus more than that which is being honored by the rules. Today we might see that in appealing to an inerrancy of scripture, it sometimes seems that we begin to worship scripture rather than the God it points to. And Jesus is somewhat at fault here. He’s kind of upsetting the apple cart. After all, he’s eating with sinners, cavorting with those that would be deemed improper to be with. And he had some awfully strange ideas about the Sabbath and how the needs of humankind ought to override those rules about the Sabbath. The apostles, especially in the Book of Acts, are having the same trouble. What they thought was unclean food, it turns out to be it’s not what you put into yourself that makes you whole or makes you, evil or in sin, but what comes out of one’s mouth. What are we gonna do with Gentiles? Must they be circumcised? Must they become Jews before they become Christians? All these rules.

Of course, things are not so different today or certainly in my lifetime. In the Episcopal church in my lifetime, was arguing over when should we have first communion? Should it be before confirmation or after? Is confirmation a ticket into the Eucharist? Or are we offered the Eucharist simply because we are God’s children? In my lifetime, if you got divorced, you were not welcome at Communion. Astounding isn’t it, for the Church to contemplate taking away the bread and wine of Holy Communion at the time someone needs it the most. And Ordination. Who’s fit for Ordination? Certainly not women. Certainly not LGBTQ people. At least that’s what we used to think. But we decided that we had gotten that wrong. It seems that God is always pushing us to open up and to include more, to become ever more expansive and ever more loving.

Now, the Pharisees and Sadducees played lots of games. I mean, we play games. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Remember that? Well, they were arguing about which commandment is greater. Now, they may have been doing that just to catch Jesus in some kind of faux pas so as to be critical of him. But it, it might just be that they wondered which was the most important commandment. But the answer Jesus gave, I think probably made their brains explode. Jesus offered an almost insane answer to what was in some ways a religiously legal question. He offered just two commandments, and neither one of them had to do with rules that cannot be broken to be worthy in God’s sight.

Now, we like rules. We like rules because rules help us to know where we stand. We either follow the rules and we’re good or we don’t follow the rules and we’re bad. I know where I stand. But even better, I know where you stand. Because I can judge whether you have followed the rules or whether you have not, whether you are good or bad. It is a judgmental person’s dream come true. Isn’t it interesting, our love of the 10 Commandments? There are people in our society who want the 10 commandments posted in public schools and in courtrooms, carved in stone and put everywhere, to be reminded of these 10 commandments of God. Because if I keep these 10 commandments, then I’m good with God.

But here’s the problem with that. I can keep all 10 of the commandments and still be a selfish jerk. It’s a pretty low bar, those big 10 things doing nothing for anyone else. So doing no harm is setting the bar quite low and Jesus is demanding more. Jesus is raising that bar. It’s not about adherence to rules. Loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves raises the question of what kind of life am I gonna lead in light of God’s love for me? God’s unimaginable love for me. How will it change my behavior to know and believe in the depths of my heart, that there is nothing I can do that will separate me from God’s love? It’s not about obedience to rules. It’s about being faithful to a relationship with God. I think you can make the case that the same was true in the Hebrew scriptures. After all, God said, “You will be my people and I will be your God”. That’s a relationship. And all the rules that came out of that tried to enlighten that relationship. But it was the relationship, not the rules that mattered. And thank goodness for that, because if it’s about rules, you and I, all of us, are doomed. Because we are always going to fall short. But if it’s a relationship we’re talking about, then there is always hope. There is always hope.

Have you ever noticed that the creed begins, “I believe in God”? It doesn’t begin with, “I believe that God”, followed by a bunch of intellectual assertions about God. It says, “I believe in God”. Not unlike in a marriage, when I say I believe in my spouse and he or she believes in me, and we believe in us together. That’s way better than making intellectual assertions about what we believe about this other human being who happens to live in the same house as we do. The marriage, we pledge whatever comes our way, we will meet that together. And a relationship is like that. Even with God. I believe in God, not I believe that God does or is so and so. I believe in God and God’s commitment to me, and that’s kind of all I need to know.

But for most of us, that’s way too messy and way too hard and rules are way easier. In a marriage, in my opinion, sexual fidelity is the least of our worries. There are countless ways of being unfaithful to one’s spouse. And in marriage we pledge to honor one another. There are no rules in the marriage ceremony. It’s that pledge to honor one another no matter what, to be faithful in all kinds of ways. And we can’t just figure it all out ahead of time and make a rule that works in every situation. So, in a relationship, lots of confession, lots of forgiveness, lots of taking risks about being honest. And a whole lot of humility and precious little judgmentalism, whether with a spouse or with God.

So what we’ve got are two commandments. To love God with our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. That’s it. No easy rules to follow, no rules by which to judge others by. This is tough stuff. This is advanced placement religion, and it requires a certain maturity for you and me. It’s not neat and tidy. It’s not black and white. There’s a whole lot of nuance, and you’re never absolutely sure you’re doing the right thing. But that’s what we have, just these two commandments and God’s love for us. The good news of this and every Sunday is that, indeed, such a relationship opens us up to be more and more God-like every day. It opens us up to see one another as the children of God we are. And to strive every day to treat them like the children of God they are. Jesus was raising the bar and doing us all a favor.

Let me end with a story that comes out of the Second World War. There were four army buddies. They became quite close. They hadn’t known each other before the war, but they became quite close, spending all the time they could with one another. And when they were in France, one of them was killed. And the other three took the remains to a local church in hopes of being buried in the pretty little cemetery right next to the church. But the priest there asked the question, “Was he baptized?” Well, the three of them looked at one another and thought, well, we never talked about that. And said, “Well, we don’t know that he was baptized”. And the priest says, “Well then, I’m sorry but you can’t be buried in our cemetery. But you can bury him just outside the cemetery, just beyond the fence there”. Well, it seemed a bit second class to his three friends, but they needed to get back to their unit. And so that’s where they buried their friend and they put a rough stone there just to mark his grave. And when the war was over, they wanted to pay their respects before they came back home. And they went to that village and to that church and to that graveyard and, try though they might, they could not find his grave. They could not find that rough stone they left there. And they went to the priest and said, “What have you done with our friend? We buried him before we left and we can’t find him”. And the priest said, “I worried and worried. I stayed awake nights after you left, thinking what I had done, and how I had let my heart be hardened. And so I moved the fence”.

What fence needs moving in your life? How does God’s love for you, God’s unfailing love for you, make you want to open up for others? Make you a fuller reflection of God’s love for all of us. Rules won’t do it, but a relationship with the living God will. It’ll move all kinds of fences. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. On just these two commandments and our relationship with God, hang all the law and the prophets. Amen.