CLOSE ENCOUNTERS John M. Buchanan
Matthew 22:34-40 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
October 8, 19758 Columbus, Ohio

Phe lawyer wanted to test Him, to see if He knew the correct answers, but also,
We have to assume, to trip Him up, to trap Him in sume embarassing misinterpretation
of oxthodox doctrine. "Which is the great commandment in the Law?'' he asked, There
was really very little Jesus could say except, "You shall Love the Lord your God with
all your heart, soul and mind.“ Everyone knew that, Jesus passed the first and
most elementary test of orthodoxy, But then He pulled an obscure verse out of the
book of Leviticus: "A second is Like it," He said, "You shall love your neighbor as
yourself,'' These two are the essence of our religion,

Notice that here, as elsewhere, Jesus insists on moving from t the abstract to
the specific, It is difficult to prescribe or to measure the love an individual has
for God, The rituals of religion provide a framework: people prayed, fasted and
obeyed the law, But ultimately, the love a person has for God is a matter of heart,
soul and mind - those internal, private spaces, accessable to no one else. Love for
God sometimes proceeds no farther than an intellectual abstraction, And so, beside
that great admonition Jesus laid another one, of equal weight: love your neighbor -
the physical personage of another - : love him - not abstractly, theoretically, but

as you love yourself,

Notice, also, that here, as elsewhere, Jesus insists that you can 's do one
apart from the ‘Other: that in the final sense the only way you and I. have of “loving
God is the neighbor who needs us, The author of the Epistles of John put it nega~
tively: "Tf a aman says hé loves God and hates his brother, he is a liar,"

And notice the subtlety of the metaphor which has been repeated so often: “your
nejghbor as yourself. " The first century Jews were far less abstract than we: all
theix verbs were active: they knew what it meant to love, ‘The question His metaphor
provoked for them was: "Who is my neighbor?" He responded elsewhere with the parable

of the Good Samaritan, We, on the other hand, are inclined to focus on the whole
matter of loving the self, What in the world does that mean? A dangerous idea,
indeed! Put ethically in the Golden Rule it can mean, as cynics point out, "You
share your heroin with me and £'11 share mine with you,'' Or, put existentiaily, as
it is with monotonous regularity, "You do your own thing and I'il do mine", a
rationale for unbridled egocentricity,

Like fire, love of self can either warm or destroy, Christian theology bas
always been very wary of it, In fact, our favorite definition of human sin is pride,
self-centeredness, exclusive love of self. OQur favorite diagnosis of the human con-
dition is that each of us is like the football players of all aces who, when their
team does somethine well, run off the field, index fingers extended, shouting,
"We're number one!" Each of us, Christian theology maintains, wants to be the
focal point of a little universe: we can't love God or anyone else very well, for
that matter, bwause we are too busy fawning over ourselves, Love of self is that
‘from which we need to be delivered, not encouraged cto expand. And so the human self
has received skeptical and sometiues very rough handling at the hands of Christian
theology, At its extremes it has been reduced to a complex of suilt feelings, with
an emphasis on sinfulness so colorful and thorough that Christian people have often
felt that the only thing they could say to God is "I'm sorry'',

I can't believe that Jesus wanted that, He was too happy, too at one with His
own humanity, to have wanted to be responsible for reducing His followers into guilt
ridden neurotics. He said, "Love your neighbor as yourself", but He didn't mean

~ Fu

self-indulgent, self-centered love, In fact, He tacked that statement onto an ad-
monition to love God with heart, mind and soul, It isn’t mushy sentiment at all:
if it's God-defined love it's strong and demanding and acceptins and forgiving and
life giving.

The difficulty we have here is with the subtlety, Jegus meant—to_evoke an
image of a big and awesome love, But as J,B, Phillips reminded us, our God is often
too small, and so is our love, W,H,Auden, in For the Time Being, has Herod pray,
"0 God, put away justice and truth for we cannot understand them and do net want
them, Eternity would bore us dreadfully. Leave thy heavens and come down to our
earth of water clocks and hedges, Become our uncle,,, Look after Baby, amuse Grand-
father, escort Madam to the opera, help Willy with his homework, intreduce Muriel
to a handsome naval officer, Be interesting and weak like us, and we will Love
you as we love oursieves,"

If, as Jesus proposed, love of neighbor has to do with love of self: and if
love of self has anything to do with love of God, the God about whom we are talking
had better be worth loving or the whole structure collapses, Thus the initial and
fundamental difficulty, A God wa can discuss and love is often fashioned in our
image, too small, too familiar, almost trivial, In an article on the Episcopal
Church in this month's Harpers under the title, 'Trendier Than Thou", Paul Seabury
writes, "So the deity could be tailored to the current fashion: 4 nice, cool,
relaxed God could be procured, 4s presented in the theological best seller of 1965,
"Are You Running With Me. Jesus?' Now he would situationaily jog, God would be a
friend, and Christianity a celebration of life," (p,46).

At the heart of our Lord’s position is a God who is God, transcendent, sover-
eign, majestic, awesome, into whose presence people properly come in fear and tremb-
ling: a God whe is friend and father but also creator and judge: a God who is always
ready to forgive, but who Loves us so wuch He wants us to be all that we are capable
of being. To love that God is something other than an emotional tickle, And to talk
about love ef salf in the same breath, as Jesus did, is to mean something more than
petty self-indulsence, The danger in loving one’s neighbor ag one's self, I would
submit, is in not loving one's self enough,

Jesus had not read I'm OK, You're OK, but there is a sense in which He antici-
pated Transactional Analysis by twenty centuries, We know now that people with Low
self-esteem are in trouble; that the absence of self-regard is a debilitating, dis-
abling emotional condition: that "I'm OK, You're just so-so" really means "I'm not
very sure about myself", We know now that a major psychological dynamic for many,
if not most of us, is a sense that we are not OK; that we bear that burden all our
lives and engage in an endless series of games designed to prove to others and our-
selves the unprovavle, namely that "I am OK",

Reue]l Howe wrotc, "Anyone who works with people knows how common it is for
men and women to have predominantly disparazing feelings toward themselves, They
cannot believe in themselves or that other men, or even God accept them..,1It is
difficult to find a self-rejecting person who does much in the way of accepting
others,’ (Man's Need and God's Action, p,104).

ae

"Love your neighbor as yourself?" This, then, is elementary, We can't even -
use the vocabulary unless we have some kind of esteem for ourselves. Love for another
person isn't Love at all if it doesn't grow out of love of self, In marriage, or
sex, Lf the relationship is structured to bolster a weak self, or prove masculinity,
or femininity, or massage a self~-doubting ego, someone is using and someone else is

-~ 3.

being used and love isn't happening at all. The Simple fact is that Love for others
isn't possible until we come to terms with ourselves, and begin to appreciate who

we are, and to value our own special gifts, We can't give a thins unless we believe
we have somethins to give,

& line out of Hamlet commends itself:

"This above ail: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man," (Act I, Scene 3),

The relevance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it addresses, in our time,
our deepest pain and most urgent need. The literature of the day describes it as
alienation, isolation, separation; the whole kaleidescope of human relations from
Parent to Child, to Masters and Johnson, dominates the book shelves,

A feature article in New York Masauine earlier this year, laid it all out in
the title, "Loneliness: The New York Condition", (3/20/78) and described the
American urban dilemma as follows: "Your closest neighbors know that they are not
supposed to taik to you (this is one of our greatest traditions), nor, happily, do
they have any wish to do so, People on the street do not exchange greetings: no one,
unless specifically invited, will interfere with your life,”

Even in romance we seem to be afraid of intimacy and the vulnerability of total
commitment, A New Yorsx Times Macazine editorial focused on the numbing sociological
jargon with which ve now describe romantic love, “Ed and Jane announce that they
relate beautifully and communicate Statifyingly, Instead of a lover's quarrel they
explain that they are not relating and communicating," The writer observes, "It takes
a very cool pair of cats to talk about the grandest of passions as though it were
only an exercise in sociology, Imagine Dante Filling pages about the satisfactory
nature of communicating with Beatrice, or Juliet taving on through five acts about
her fulfilling relationship with Romeo." (N.Y, Times, Magazine, 3/19/78),

We are searching for relationship, for community, for love ~ if you will, It
doesn't require a very astute observer of our culture to conclude that it has become
an obsession with us, that the search is painful and basic to our humanity and our
happiness,

We are learning, as we search, some very old lessons: that there is a life-
giving and life-enriching power about human love that borders on the mystical, We
are learning that to love a child helpzully and honestly is to affirm and respect who
that child is, positively, supportively ~ not negatively and critically, We are
learning ever so slowly that children don’t become better people by being made to
feel bad about themsclves, I was dalighted to read a vignette about two literary
societies some ycars aso at the University of Wisconsin. ‘The men's society, full of
bright and brilliant young journalists called themselves Tho Stranglers, At each of
their meetings one would present a short story and the others would criticize it
brutally, mercilessly, An alternacive society was formed for women students. Known
as The Wranglers, this group encouraged all efforts, Twenty years Later an alumnus
analyzed the results, "OF all the bright young talent in the (men's society}; not
one had made a literary reputation of any kind, Out of the alternative group had come
six successful writers, some of national prominence, led by Marjorie Rawlings, who
wrote The Yearling," (A Touch of Vender, Arthur Gordon, p.51-2),

~4-

There is a creative power in love, And a healing power, Karl Meninger once
told a class of psychiatric residents that the most important part of the treatment
process was "diasnosis" ~ which means "knowing through and throuch," He would have
his students understand that healing depends on “the interested effort to know the
patients fully, in all their joys and sorrows, ups and downs, hichs and lows,,."
(H. Nouwen, Reaching Out, p, 66-7),

"Love your neighbor as you love yourself," There is a creative power and a
healing power and it isn't confined to the psychiatrist's couch, We can help one
another more than we xealize simply by Listening, by being interested in what
another person is trying te tell us,by net interrupting with a better story of our
own, Sometimes I think our greatest failure in love is precisely here, A dozen
times a day people reach out = wanting simply to share a joy, a disappointment, a
hurt. And, too frequently, we either don't have time - or are so preoccupied with
ourselves, that ve interrupt their story with one of our own,

To love others strongiy, as we should Love ourselves - anc as we are catied to
love God - begins with basic respect, It is to grant the other the space to be, [t
is to allow and accept the other for who he or she is. ft is to sacrifice all the
manipulative devices we use to transform others into what we desire, Rilke said it
eloquently, “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute
each other,” (fH, Nouwen, Ibid, p31).

it is to listen: to try to feel vhat the other is feeling: to try to see the
world through his eyes: it is to vefrain, often, from respondins verbally in order
to allow the otuer to tell his story, It is to accept and forgive: not in weak
indulgence: but in honest Love that sees more potential in the other than he or she
is able, for the moment, to see: in honest love that grants the humanity and there~
fore the imperfections of the other, And it is to express it, to say it: to learn,
all over again, the words, "I leve you", "I need you", "I care about you’,

We come, in conclusion, full circie, We began thinking about religious rules
and how to fulfill religious obligations, but mow we are talliing about basic human
needs, We began thinking about law, but now we're talking about grace, We began
with our responsibility to other people, but now we're talking about our salvation,

To love is not simply to please God: it is to be alive, Walt Whitman wrote:

“Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy
walks to his own funeral drest in his own shroud," (Sone of Myself)

To know oneself lovei of others is to be whole and free and able, then, to
value self and love self, And because of that it is to be able to Love them back,

To know cneself loved of God, is wuat we mean by salvation, It is to be saved,
It is to be alive and whele an free, It is to know, finally, that I can - because
I am who I am - love God with all wy heart, and all my soul, and all my mind. [t
is to know that I can be part of a miracle: part of what Ged intends for His creation,
Because in Jesus Christ He has loved me, I can ~ with strength and integrity, Love
my neighbor as myself, Amen,

Father, give us strength and prace to love, Keep us from that smallness of
heart that refuses to acknowledge Your love for us, Give us, rather, gratitude and
joy - and love for You and ourselves and one another, Throuwch Jesus Christ our
Lord, Amen,