Labor of Love
We so often approach the commandment to love God and love your neighbor as labor, leading to exhaustion or despair. But it becomes easier when we remember the crucial insight of the Reformation and mystics: that it’s actually about God’s love for us!
Vicar Lauren Mildahl
Reformation Sunday, Lect. 30 A
Texts: Leviticus 19:1-2, Psalm 1, Matthew 22:34-46
God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We hear this morning “the greatest commandment” – the very center of Jesus’ teaching.
And it’s pretty simple. Love God and love your neighbor. That’s it.
This wasn’t some secret that Jesus revealed. The two parts of this commandment are both pulled straight from the Torah, God’s gift to the children of Israel, which we often call the law. It’s what God had been saying all along. “Love me and love each other.”
And I really do believe that it is a gift. And that if I could just do that, just really get good at loving God and loving my neighbor, my life would be better. I could be so happy, like it says in Psalm 1. I could be like a tree planted by streams of water, bearing the most beautiful fruit in due season.
And I feel like I should be able to do it.
I feel like I should be able to love the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my mind and to love my neighbor as myself. But then, I start to think about actually doing it and all of a sudden, my anxiety ratchets up, because that’s a lot! My brain immediately goes into problem solving mode and I think maybe if I break it up, try just one of the pieces at first. Maybe if I just focus on the easier one to start with, that might help! Okay, Well. Which one is easier?
Is it easier to love God who sometimes feels so far away? Or is it easier to love my neighbor, who, you know, a lot of the time feels way too close?
Either way, it’s not so easy.
Either way, it feels pretty hard. A labor of love with an emphasis on the labor. It feels like work.
It’s hard work to love a God whose sheer vastness I can’t hope to comprehend! Hard work to love my neighbors who are so small and petty (and so am I).
And I start to wonder, how can I possibly love God with my entire self, my heart, my emotions, my center… With my soul, my being, my identity… With my mind, my intellect, my understanding? And how can I do it when I’m afraid that if I really did love with all of that, with all of me, there wouldn’t be any left of anything else?
And how can I hope to love my neighbor as myself, when I have such a hard time loving, or even liking, myself?
It’s exhausting! And so easy to despair. And that’s the bad news.
Not the commandment itself, that is a gift, but the way I tend to approach it as a checklist. How I experience it as a burden, as labor. The way I obsess over all the ways I think it’s too hard, impossible even. The way I let the tree from the psalm be withered, instead of watered.
But here’s where the good news comes in.
It’s hiding in plain sight, in the very verse from Leviticus that Jesus quotes, although he stops before he gets there. But in the Torah, it says: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” I am the Lord.
So often, we don’t say the last few words of this verse, focusing so much on the imperative (you shall love), that we miss the declarative: “I am the Lord.” But these words ought to resound, like a bell, calling us back to the Great I Am, the source of all life and all love.
It’s about God! This is the good news! It’s not about how hard we work, how much we labor to love. It’s not about all the shoulds and should nots or our insecurities over whether we are loving enough or the right way. This little refrain (“I am the LORD”) is our reminder that it’s actually and always about what God did and does. How God has loved and will love and always loves.
The same good news that the writer of I John captured so eloquently and succinctly: “this is love: not that we loved God, but that God loved us.”
And it’s the same thing Martin Luther was trying to tell everyone.
The reformers of 16th Century Germany that we celebrate today recognized how easy it is to get caught up in the fear and the anxiety of doing the labor of love. And how toxic and depleting that approach is and how often it leads to despair. Their remedy was to insist that it isn’t about us doing work, isn’t about us doing anything – it’s all about God. Because God saves, we are saved. Because God is faithful, we can have faith. Because God loves, we can love.
The crucial realization, or maybe we should say recentering, of the Lutheran Reformation wasn’t earth-shattering because it was a new insight. It was earth-shattering because God’s love is earth-shattering.
After all, many people throughout time, the medieval mystics in particular, have experienced the earth-shattering love God has for us. Often in evocative and sometimes frankly erotic terms, they have written about how God loves us with God’s whole heart, soul, and mind.
I want to stay on that image for a moment.
To take a cue from the mystic imagination, and play with the idea of how intensely and passionately God loves you. Let’s imagine God’s heart –whatever that might be – that it aches. I imagine God’s heart aches for you, composing love letters and poetry for you, sending you messages of every kind, hoping someday you’ll respond.
I imagine God’s soul – God’s very being – warming at the thought of you, itching to embrace you, leaning with longing toward you.
I imagine God’s mind – and God is head over heels in love, utterly fascinated and mesmerized by you, hanging on to every word you say.
That’s the kind of love that kindles reformation. On the scale of Christendom – and also deep in each person, deep in me, and deep in you.
Because when you accept God’s outrageous love for you, it changes the way you hear this commandment.
It’s not an order to try harder, piling up greater and greater labors of love. It’s an invitation to relax, relax into God’s love, like sinking into a warm bath. Not just around you but inside you too. The love of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit dwells in you and wells up in you, warming you from the inside and spilling over to others.
God’s love around us and within us frees us and transforms us. That’s what allows us to love as God loves, in a way that is abundant and abiding, and a tiny bit absurd. Because when we are snuggled in the warm, fuzzy blanket of God’s love, we experience the commandment like Luther did, who said that “the heart draws joy from the commandment and warms itself in God’s love to the point of melting.”1
Melted in the furnace of God’s love, suddenly it isn’t labor any more.
Suddenly it is an exquisite joy to love God back, heart for heart and soul for soul and mind for mind, a perfect dance of desire and longing. Suddenly it’s easier to love ourselves, to turn down the volume of our anxieties and fears and self-consciousness because we are too busy blushing at God’s tenderness toward us. Suddenly it’s a delight to love our neighbors – because we know God is absolutely crazy about them as well.
This is reformation. And it’s on-going and it’s happening in you. Every time you remember how utterly and completely God loves you. Every time you are reminded that this commandment isn’t a to-do list, it’s a love letter. Then your heart, and soul, and mind are re-formed, made new, every day by God’s love.
So, relax. And be loved into love.
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
1. Martin Luther, “The Third Commandment,” Treatise on Good Works, 1520.
Worship, October 29, 2023
Reformation Sunday, Lect. 30 A
Love God with all you have and love your neighbor as yourself: God’s plan of re-forming the Church and re-forming each of us in our worship and in our lives.
Download worship folder for Sunday, October 29, 2023.
Presiding: Pastor Joseph Crippen
Preaching: Vicar Lauren Mildahl
Readings and prayers: Carolyn Heider, lector; Consuelo Crosby, assisting minister
Organist: Cantor David Cherwien
Download next Sunday’s readings for this Tuesday’s noon Bible study.
The Olive Branch, 10/25/23
Alive and Illimitable
God is alive and beyond our control: but the Good News is God is working for the healing of all things and needs you and me.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Lect. 29 A
Texts: Isaiah 45:1-7; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Is God doing anything in this world? How would you know if you saw it?
Israelites in Babylonian exile saw God’s hand in a foreign general, Cyrus of Persia, who destroyed Babylon’s power and made an edict that they could return home, to Judah, and rebuild. Isaiah says God-Who-Is, the one, true God, anointed Cyrus Messiah to save Israel. Israel trusted God enough to have the imagination to see God working in ways beyond their comprehension.
The Pharisees seem to lack the imagination of their ancestors. They defended God’s law, and were good at it. And this rabbi from Nazareth played a little too fast and loose with it. He challenged their authority, questioned their interpretation, didn’t clear things with them before saying them. In these last days of his life, they tested him again and again. Even though, as we’ll see next week, the center of his teaching, summing of all God’s law into love of God and love of neighbor, was taken straight from the Torah itself.
The question behind this is, do you get to decide where and how God is working?
Maybe some ancient Israelites had doubts about calling a foreign emperor Messiah. But they saw what happened and concluded God was behind it. The Pharisees can’t see Jesus as from God because he’s outside their control.
That’s the real issue. It’s not about choosing Caesar or God, Cyrus or Jesus. The question is do you get to control God? But surely a God whom you can control is no god at all.
Today Paul praises the Thessalonians’ trust in a living God, not in idols.
“In every place,” Paul says, “your trust in God has become known, how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God.” We can control idols because we make them. In ancient times, idols were made in human images, animal images; today they’re reflections of our wants, our desires. Reflections of us.
But we can’t make a true God. It is the very truth that we do not control God that tells us we’re connected to the true God. If we create our gods, there’s nothing we don’t know about them, nothing we can’t explain or control. And there’s nothing real about them.
The true God creates us, comes to us from the outside, and we can’t always know what God is doing. And we can never control what God is doing.
But that makes life in a painful world challenging.
There’s no shortage of people who know for sure what God is doing in international affairs and politics, sure their view of God’s law and ways should be forced on everyone, sure they know who’s with God and who isn’t. People of most faiths can often act as if they’re in charge of God. And need to control things to make sure their view of God prevails. So they feel comfortable.
But when we live with the humble certainty that we’re not in charge, and we look at the wars in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Sudan, at the oppression and violence that shape our world, at the paranoid politics that infect the spirit of our nation, at the violent rhetoric that just keeps on a crescendo, and we know we don’t have all the answers, we do wonder: what are you going to do, God? Do you care? Is there a plan?
And in the imagination of the ancient Israelites, we find an path. They trusted God was working in the world, and had promised restoration. And they trusted God worked through people to do that restoration. Even unexpected people. Even through God’s people themselves.
What if we follow their lead?
Theologian Tom Wright has said, “Because of the cross, being a Christian, or being a church, does not mean claiming that we’ve got it all together. It means claiming that God’s got it all together; and that we are merely, as Paul says, those who are overwhelmed by [God’s] love.” [1]
If we trust God’s got it all together, and we don’t, we can trust God’s promise, that God is working to bring hope and life to this world. Even to the most devastating of places and scenarios. That every act of grace and kindness, every step away from the usual human violence and hatred and retaliation and revenge, is inspired by and led by God. That can be our hope and prayer.
And if God can use a Persian emperor to bring about restoration, God also can use you. That’s central to Jesus’ hope. He called people to follow, to become like him, to be shaped by love of God and neighbor, because God needs as many hands as possible to bring about the healing that is needed.
And yes, we feel we aren’t up to the task. We feel helpless here, in our place. We don’t elect every leader in Congress, we don’t have the ability to shape foreign crises personally. We can’t even fix our own city. We despair that it seems we lack the ability to help in anything that really matters.
But Jesus seems to think you’re critical to all this. That you, with a changed, new heart, filled with God’s Spirit, will make a difference that will tip the scales. That your love of neighbor, your careful voting, your engagement with your neighborhood, your prayer and supplication, your ability to hold in tension seemingly contrasting truths and find hope, all this makes a difference. You make a difference, Jesus thinks. Even if you can’t see it.
Like Paul’s Thessalonians.
Their trust in a living God whom they can’t limit or control, instead of whatever idols they’ve had, made them into people of grace and hope and healing that became known all over the region. They had no ability to control the Roman emperor, or probably even affect much beyond their own towns and villages. And yet Paul says the word got out: these people are living as Christ in the world and making a difference.
And since you are loved by God in Christ, since you are made in the image of God – that’s the image printed on you, not Caesar’s – when you give to God what is God’s, you give yourself, and you, too, will change the world. And even if you can’t see it, God can.
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
[1] N. T. Wright, For All God’s Worth, p. 20; Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, MI; © 2007.
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