Introduction
By the time you read this, one month of 2024 has become history. Hope you had a good ‘break’ in January. I have enjoyed reflecting on the Book of Ruth during Januray with those who worshipped with us. It’s our Second Summer Series. Last year we focused on Micah 6:8: ‘He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness.’
MUC Theme 2024
As mentioned in my last Sankofa for 2023 I like having a theme for the year. It helps us to stay focused. Yearly themes are simple, one-to-three-word intentions that guide us and set the tone for what we’d like our year to be about.
I have mentioned that my theme for 2024 is, The Way of Love: Love God and Love Neighbour.
According to Michael B. Curry, “In the first century, Jesus of Nazareth inspired a movement. A community of people whose lives were centred on Jesus Christ and committed to living the way of God’s unconditional, unselfish, sacrificial, and redemptive love. Before they were called “church” or “Christian,” this Jesus Movement was simply called “the way.” Amen! Unfortunately, the movement has become an institution. The movement has become a religion.
In Mark 12:30, 31: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
In Matthew, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘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 first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:36-40)
Our task is to love and, in the case of Christians, to witness the way of love that came to us from Jesus’s teachings. I hope by the end of 2024 we can say that we have loved God more and loved our neighbour more.
Let’s explore together, what it means to love God and Love neighbour. Scot McKnight calls these two commandments the ‘Jesus Creed’. Remember, both love of God and love of neighbour are equally important. Joint winners! “Both commands are biblical commands, found within the foundational books of scripture within Judaism. They were texts that Jewish people, such as Jesus and his earliest followers would have known very well. Each command appears in a significant place within the books of Torah, the first five books of Hebrew Scriptures.”
Love God
Remember there are two commandments, not one. I suspect most people find it easier to talk about loving neighbours than loving God. Do you agree with me? Why do you think this is the case?
When the scripture says to love God with “heart, mind, soul and strength” it is referring to every facet of our being. We are called to love God with all our spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical strength. We are called to wholeheartedly love God, not just with our minds.
According to Rev Dr John Squires, “… we could, perhaps, paraphrase the command of Deuteronomy as love God with all that you are—heart and soul, completely and entirely. Love God with “your everythingness” (to coin a word). There’s a cumulative sense that builds as the commandment unfurls—love God with all your emotions, all your being, all of this, your entire being.”
What does it mean to love God? Does God need our love? How does someone love God? And what does loving God look like? These are hard questions. No easy answers. Maybe one way out is to turn God into an idea, a concept, a mystery, a power, and then we don’t need to wrestle with the first commandment: “With all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
If one Googles the internet on: ‘How do you show your love to God?’ you get about 3,430,000,000 results (0.33 seconds). Blair Parke a freelance writer for BibleStudyTools.com who wrote her first book, ‘Empty Hands Made Full,’ suggests, ‘Seven Beautiful Ways We Can Show God That We Love Him:
Giving God Praise
Praying to God
Reading the Bible
Loving those around us
Tithing
Fasting
Have Hope
According to her the seven ways mentioned here are recognized ways mentioned in the Bible that people before us showed their love and appreciation for God, and we can do the same.Truthfully, I don’t find the suggestions helpful. I think number four comes close, ‘loving those around you’. The other six are good practices, however, they don’t necessarily demonstrate we love God.
John is clear, “Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:20) Loving God is intimately and intrinsically connected to loving others. Two sides of the same coin.
Love Neighbour
I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot recently. Love your neighbour as yourself. It’s easy to love the people who agree with me, the people I consider friends and love spending time with, the people I work with side by side to bring social justice and change to the world. It’s easy to love the people who love me.
But what about the people who aren’t easy to love? What about those who don’t agree with me, those with whom I have fundamental differences, those who have made life choices that I look down on or those I just don’t get, who seem to be angry or want to argue all the time, who seem to work against my values? What about those who are just plain different from me, those people I don’t understand—not their way of life or their priorities?
Most of us Christians accept the challenge to love our neighbour. But like the lawyer in Saint Luke’s Gospel, we are anxious to know who our neighbour is (Luke 10:29-37). We often want to limit our circle of concern. We convinced ourselves that ‘charity begins at home’. Perhaps the needs of those who are not close to us seem too complex or remote. We are used to distinguishing between family, loved ones, neighbours and the rest of humanity.
In the parable of Good Samaritan, Jesus reminds us that everyone is our neighbour, and we have to treat them as such. Like the priest and the Levite, we can all find good excuses for not treating the person in need as our neighbour. The man who fell into the hands of robbers had no difficulty in identifying the Good Samaritan as his neighbour.
In short, our neighbours are the ones in need, even when they are not part of our community. We are to love across boundaries. Love not only family and tribe, or those of our race and nation, or gender and religion, or sexual orientation and socio-economic status. Love not only the citizen but also the refugee.
My neighbour does not always look like me or believe like me but that’s no matter. Jesus collapses the two great commandments. If we love God, we love our neighbours, whoever they are. We love our neighbours because we love God.
It’s clear if we say we love God yet are cruel to the people and the world around us, we are hypocrites. We have all seen such people. And perhaps at times in our lives, we have been such people.
Do you know in the first few centuries, Christians were famous for their love? According to Robyn Whittaker, author of ‘Even the Devil Quoted the Scripture: Reading the Bible on Its Own Terms’, “It is not that the surrounding cultures didn’t love, but that Christian love was different because it crossed cultural and familial borders as new faith communities formed.”
In a letter written in the second century CE, an anonymous author writes about Christians:
“They love everyone and are persecuted by all. They are not understood, and they are condemned. They are put to death and made alive. They are impoverished and make many rich. They lack all things and yet abound in everything. They are dishonoured and they are exalted in their dishonours. They are slandered and they are acquitted. They are reviled and they blessed, mistreated and they bestowed honour. They do good and are punished as evil.”
Tertullian, a prolific early Christian author from Carthage in the Roman province of Africa records that non-Christians are aghast when they look at the behaviour of Christians. He quotes a Roman pagan exclaiming, “See how these Christians love one another.” Wow!
Unfortunately, these days the view of Christianity from the outside, at least in the media and popular culture, is of a religion marked by judgment, homophobia, racism, sexual abuse and subsequent cover-ups, anti-science views, misogyny, and even anti-vaccine.
Let’s be clear: being for someone and loving someone is not the same as excusing or condoning hurtful or destructive behaviour. But loving someone as Jesus commands us may mean setting aside our anger and simply imagining them as an equal in God’s love. Loving them means accepting that God loves them just as much as God loves us.
I know this is not the complete picture and does not do justice to the millions of Christians who daily perform acts of love and service in their communities. But, sadly, the point stands: we have moved a long way from being a group known primarily for our love.I often wonder when ‘strangers’ come among us what kind of community would they find? A squabbling community? A divided community? Or a loving community?
In his book ‘The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others’, Scot McKnight explores the lesson Jesus taught and how to live out those commandments. His first bit of advice when moving forward into loving others is this: “To love another person in this world means you are committed to being with that person and to being for that person, and you are committed to growing with them to become the person God made you to be.”
Love for God’s Creation
We can’t talk about loving God and neighbours and not talk about caring for creation. As bearers of God’s image, all people have the responsibility and privilege of caring for God’s creation. We ought to love and care for the Earth because it is God’s very good creation, and because we must care for the most vulnerable people on the planet (neighbours). The science is clear: because of human activity, we see effects like species extinction and climate change.
The Challenge
One of my laments for the church is that we are becoming increasingly corporate. In the process, we lose our soul. We are more than an institution or organisation. We are God’s beloved community seeking “to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” (Luke 4:18,19)
Structures, governance, and policies are important. It’s not about power and control. They are to assist us in becoming a beloved community, not just a ‘well-managed’ community. If a ‘well-managed’ community does not lead us to love one another more, we have missed the mark.
Truthfully, on the surface, the theme might appear simple. Believe me, it’s going to be a challenge for all of us to live up to the theme. However, I am looking forward to journeying together with you – The Way of Love: Love God and Love Neighbour! If we commit ourselves to doing this, it will change us and, in the process, change MUC.
An important question for us: Does what we do together in Manningham Uniting Church lead to more love for God and neighbour? This ought to be the reason for our being and the measurement for all we do together.
Shalom
Swee Ann Koh