THE HEART OF THE MATTER

October 21, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Seripture
Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:34-406

“Love...God with all your heart, soul and mind, and...
your neighbor as yourself."
~Matthew 22:37, 39(RSV)

"You shall love God with all your heart, soul and mind... and your
neighbor as yourself."

It is the heart of the matter. And it is our secret... Three loves: -
Love of God and neighbor and self. _

It is what religion is about. Jesus said it one day near the end, as
he was summing up everything. He said it in a way that forever changed the
way the world thinks ahout religian.

It was during the last week, the week we call Holy because it hegins
with his triumphant entry into Jerusalem and ends with his death on the
cross. In between he teaches daily in the Temple. Crowds of people are
coming each day to hear what he has to say. That fact alone - that a
modern, unknown rabbi from Galilee is upstaging all the official Passéver
acfivities such as making sacrifices and buying appropriate animals for. the
ceremony — has made him notorious in the eyes of the religious and
political bureaucracy. }

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What he says ta them makes matters worse. And so the high caun¢il in
Jerusalem creates a scheme to get rid of him without turning the people
against them. They appoint some of their number, lawyers, actually the
ones trained in argument, those who can tangle a common person hopelessly
in his own words, and they send these men to provoke him, to get him to say
something so bizarre, so intemperate, so subversive, that the Romans wil]
step in and arrest him and in their brutally effective way af dealing with
troublemakers, crucify him.

So he sits in the Temple every day and crowds gather around to
hear what he has to say, and among them are these lawyers with their trick
questions; on this day they ask a sequence of three, The first one is
about religion and politics, always controversial: "Is it lawful to pay
taxes to Caesar?" The second is ahout divorce, remarriage and who is the
real spouse...? a matter with which lawyers are still fussing.

And then this: "Teacher, what is the great commandment of the law?"
Tt must be a trick. Everybody knows the answer. It's as familiar to them
as the opening words of the Gettysburg Address are to us. It's in the Book
of Deuteronomy at the beginning of the Law. It's called the Shema and
God's peaple have memorized it, worn it around their wrists and on their
foreheads, nailed it to their front doors for several thousand years.
“Hear QO Israel], the Lord your Gad is one," the hasic theological
assertion, the bedrock of Judaism, monotheism, one God. And then, “You
shail love God with all your heart, soul and mind." There was no other
answer. I'm not sure what they expected him to say. It doesn't seem like
a trick question.

But then, having tald them what they already knew, he went ane better
and pulied something out of an obscure corner of the Scripture:

"And you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

They knew that one too. What they had probably never thought of is
the relationship between the two commandments to love. Separately they are
not unique. Love God. Love neighbor. Together they fundamentally alter
the religious landscape.

Jesus puts the command to love neighbor on an equal footing with the
basic imperative to love God and suggests that the way to fulfill the first
is by-doing the second. How, after all, do you go about loving Gad?
Organized religion, of course, never had a shortage of suggestions:

~ kill a spotless lamb, or a bull,
det the blood run down over the altar,
burn the dead animal.

~ abstain from evil, don't kill, steal
or cheat, obey the religious rules.

- say prayers, sing hymas, go to church,
perform the religious rituals,

Jesus forever altered the way we think ahout religion by proposing
that the abstract imperative ta love God becomes concrete, specific,
tangible and doable in the person of the neighbor. Forget the sacrifices,
the bloody altars and burning flesh, forget the legalistic moralisms and
rigid pieties. Love your neighbor. Who is your neighbor? He answered
that in a memorable story about a man set upon by robbers and left to
die until rescued by a Good Samaritan. Neighbor is the one who needs
you. How? Just like you love yourself. No more. No less,

It is our secret. The good news of God's unconditional love is
inseparable from the necessity of putting love to work in the trenches, as
it were, in the human relationships which characterize all of our lives.
Love God and love neighbor as self.

It seems simple, but it's not. There are complications and the first

one is the neighbor. Sometimes he appeals ta us, touches our hearts, But
sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes the neighbor is obnoxious. Sometimes a

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neighbor is te~he-avoided-at<all costs. Robert Frost reminded us that a
good, stout Fence makes good neighbors...

And, after the Birmingham Church bombing which resulted in the deaths
of several little children, Martin Luther King said that it's a gonad
thing Jesus didn't command us to like our neighbors

“Like" is a sentimental and affectionate word, How can we be
affectionate to a persen who is threatening to kill] our children?

“Lover is greater than Jike," he concluded.

And different. Love, King said, means "creative gsaod will" - and he
didn't say, hut we know, that may mean not liking the neighbor at ali

And while we're thinking ahout neighbors, who needs them? The goal
of our life seems to be autonomy, individualism, independence.

Lesslie Newbigin who spent most of his career as a missionary and
Bishop in India has a fine new book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, in
which he observes a peculiar similarity between the introspective,
meditative religions of the Rast and modern Western culture. Both, he
says, focus almost exclusively oan the individual.

In the case of Eastern spirituality, individual] alitonomy, apart from
others, invulnerability, the ability to distance aneself from physical pain
by concentrated meditation; or in the case of Western culture, from
physical need by surrounding oneself with a mountain of consumer-saciety
gadgets -the goal of both is to isolate and celebrate the individual.

Biblical religion is very different. You can't go it alone in the
Bible. You shouldn't. You're not made to go it alone. You are made for
relationship, community, mutuality - in a word, for love. Biblical
religion wants to make lovers of everybody.

A second problem with loving neighbor as self is the “as self" part.

We have learned all our lives that the self part of us isn't so good.
We've been reminded that we are sinners, that a goad synonym for sin is
selfishness. And, it would seem, love of self is to be avoided, or at
least discreetly disguised. What possibly could Jesus have meant?

Fortunately, we've learned what's wrong with the older logic. We
know, thanks to the psychologists and psychiatrists, that you can't lave God
or anybody else for that matter if youn have no self-esteem. We know now
that if you don't think of yourself as valuable, warthy, loveable, you are
condemned to a lifetime of either acting out anger, or pathetically
trying to become worthy and valuable and loveable

We know now the appalling societal consequences when a whole
generation of people grow up having been told that they are not valuable,
worthwhile... Dr. Barry Brazelton's article in The New York Times
Magazine several weeks ago was a tragic retelling of a story we can see
every day - of young men and women who are not going te make it because the

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-learest word spoken to them from the day of their birth has been spoken in
a variety of very effective ways from negligence, to physica] violence, to
the fact that the schools they attend are underfunded...

“You are not wanted.

You are not important.

You are not worth anything.
You are not loved.'

And we also know there is a positive side to the "as self" part as
well.

Dr. Bernie Siegel is a surgeon at Yale who spends most of his time
with patients who have cancer. He has, over the years, carefu)ly observed
the relationship between how one feels about. oneself, how one feels ahout
others, and one's physical health. He has written about his experience in
several books.

Cancer patients typically come to believe "that there is same
terrible flaw at the center of their being, a defect they must hide if they
are to have any chance for love." And when people feel unlovable, their
ability to love shrivels up. There is nothing more deadly than that, he
concludes.

Siegel is convinced that "unconditional love is the mast powerful
known stimulant to the immune system" and there is evidence that he is
right. "If I told patients to raise their blood level of immune globulin
no one would know how. But if I teach them to love themselves and others
fully, the same changes happen automatically. The truth is: love heals."

A study at the Menninger Foundation added scientific data to the
euphoria and aliveness which accompany “being in love." People who are in
a loving relationship feel good about themselves and simply feel good. The
Menninger people discovered that there are reasons: they have less lactic
acid in their blood and so feel less tired; their white cells are more
responsive and their endorphin levels increase so they feel less pain.

So naybe we need a whole new way of thinking religiously, a way that
encourages us to Jave the world instead of hating or distrusting the warld
as religion always does, precisely because we want to love God..., a way
that begins with our own worth as children of God and then proceeds to love
the neighbor.

God knows the world needs people with hearts hig enough to love.

There are ecological and environmental issues confronting us which
are so big that until now the best political response we have came up with
is to deny that they exist.

-There are economic issues confronting our city and our nation that

are so big and so complex that the best we can come up with is ta put off
the resolution until next year

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There are human issues at Cabrini Green so complex and difficult thats:

the best we can do is wring our hands and stop getting off the Kennedy at
Division Street.

Sometimes it actually happens. JI received a letter earlier this year
which you should hear:

“Dear Dr. Buchanan,

I am an Associate Professor at the Chicago City Colleges,
Harold Washington.

“One of my students wrote a stirring architectural paper
about your church. I've forgotten what was detailed about
much of the structure, but I still vividly remember what
Was said of the warmth and caring that was expressed by the
congregation.

“Later that week this information was shared with another
class, to my surprise three members acknowledged that they
had received tutoring from your church.

"One young man stated he would have become a gang member if
it had net been for your service. A young woman said she
believed she would have become pregnant thereby thwarting
completion of high school and college would have been just
a fantasy.

“I am convinced that the Chicago City Colleges have students
that are taking courses and succeeding in life due to your
persistent care and well

conceived and directed programs.

“Please persist in your good works."

The world needs people who know how to love; people who in Jonathan
Schell's memorable image, are big and courageous enough to be “universal
parents," care givers, and life givers and lovers of the whole world.

{t is my belief that it is the vocation of the church and of those
of us who wish to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ to give that to the
world ~ to pour our love inte the world in the name of Jesus Christ - to
love the world and our neighbor in the world with the same care and
stewardship and creativity with which we care for and ahout ourselves.
That's what this church is about.

Now the basic challenge or dilemma is that you can't love God until
you love your neighbor and you can't love anybody until you love yourself.
And you can't love yourself unless somebody tells you you are lovable,
shows you that you are worth loving.

That's what Gospel is... a good word about us... Christianity begins
not as a religion, but as good news that we are loved: that the creator of

Tn 49171 san

the amiverse loves us, intends us, knows us, has given the life of an only --~~-

son for the sole purpose of showing us how dearly we are loved.

The revolutionary genius of Jesus was in teaching that the way to
experience that love, our salvation that is to say, is by expressing it to
others. We experience God's love for us as we love neighbors

Tt is our vocation to do that for the world: ta show the world that
there is another way, that it makes a great deal of sense to love by
valuing the life of every man and woman and child: the one who works with
you or for you, the child in the C.H.A. project, the young man on the
street, the young girl trying to decide how to deal with issues of
sexuality, your spouse, your friends, to give them the gift of God's love
in your love, which in turn, is what they need in order to be lovers tao.

It's really what this stewardship business is about. Once a year we
ask everybody who is affiliated with this church to make a financial
pledge. Every church does it. We spend a lot of time and energy getting
ready for it, creating budgets, brechures, materials, making telephone
calls. We look carefully at the work the church does in worship, nurture
of individuals, education, mission and service to our neighbors, and we
look carefully at what it costs to do all these things and then we ask one
another to support it.

But it doesn't take very long thinking about it to come to the
conclusion that the real issue is the Gospel and our personal response to
Jesus Christ. The real issue is not corporate fund-raising, which is
really rather uncomplicated, but personal faith. The real issue is that
the Christian faith announces God's love and urges our active response.
The real issue is that the oldest moral imperative in our tradition — to
Jove God with heart, soul and mind - begins to happen when we affirm the
worth, fight for the dignity, work for the rights, care for the needs of
our neighbors as we care for ourselves. That is why we dare ask one
another to give. It's the heart of the matter.

Jesus summarized the law as love of God and neighbors as self in
response to a question, remember. “What is the great commandment?" a
lawyer asked him and I concluded, as I thought about this familiar passage,
that in the sequence of trick questions, this one was different. The
scholars say it was an attempt to entangle and entrap him, but I don't
think so. There's no duplicity here. That's what he came for... and he
did his job - asked two tough ones and then this, which isn't devious at
all.

I think the man wanted to know. He wanted to know because he had
tried the formula, had loved God in all the prescribed ways, sacrifices,
duty, rules, prayers... and it didn't feel right.

He was missing something. He missed the connection between the love
of God, his love for his neighbor and his love for himself. He missed the
necessity to love his neighbor and in that process he missed the best part
of all.

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One of Dr. Siegel's dying patients, put it succinctiy: "Death isn't
the worst thing. Life without love is far worse." {Love, Medicine &
Miracles, p. 179ff]

And years before Dostoevski, "I am convinced that the only hell
that exists is the inability to love."

That lawyer 2,000 years aga had not yet heard that he was valuable in
God's eyes, the object of God's unconditional love; and because he hadn't
heard, his religion and his life was a determined, but joyless effort to
get it right.

The question he asked is the religious question. It is our question
of course.

He wasn't getting it in the abstract, nor do we.

He wasn't going to know God's love until it began to flow through
him - to change the way he thought about himself and the way he acted toward
his neighbor.

Jesus made a Jover of that man, I like to think. Because of his
encounter with the Christ he began actually to like himself and then he
began to love his neighbor.

Ged wants to make a lover out of you.

It is the heart of the matter.

Amen.

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