Love the Lord your God…

A sermon by Beth Downey Sawatzky on Thessalonians 2:1-18 and Matthew 22:34-46

May only truth be spoken and only truth received. Amen.

Our gospel reading tonight covers one of those passages that can never be preached too many times—The Greatest Commandment. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbour as yourself.”

It’s one of the platinum hits for a reason. That said, the downside of a smash hit is that it gets so much air-time, year after year, or in this case century after century, that you can kind of lose your ear for it. So much so that sometimes the only thing that can really make an old hit new, is context. Something in the music, or the words, or the way the artist spins the line, it strikes you fresh because of where and how and with whom you hear the song, or because of something that happened yesterday morning, or what’s in the headlines this week, or who you’ve recently become.

Who I’ve recently become is a mother. On my best days, I really get how the Greatest Commandment applies to my situation and meditating on it truly expands my perspective, my compassion, my humility, attunes me to the areas where my character needs developing. On my best days, I contemplate the knowledge that I am called to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, by loving my kids in that way.

On my best days, when I’m listening well, I notice Jesus using my experiences to instruct my empathy, so that I can better love my neighbour as myself:

I think about how long it takes me to get myself and two tiny people out the door in whatever weather and how brutal it is to walk the children all the way across town to the post office only to realize I forgot. my ever-loving. mail key. On good days I think then about how hard it must be for my brothers and sisters with complex disabilities—physical or mental--to get out the door, complete basic errands, and how devastating it must be when small things go wrong, or worse, when silly hurdles are placed in their way.

Getting around town with a stroller attunes me to the physical accessibility of buildings and neighbourhoods. I think then about the fact that I have choices: stroller? Ditch the wheels and use a baby carrier? Maybe forget both and leave the kids with Dad for ten minutes while I do what needs doing myself, with my fast gate and good balance. Or maybe I just take the car… Most of the time I’m spoiled for choices, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Many of my neighbours do not have those same choices.

But on weaker days, I really lose my grip on the applied Greatest Commandment. It’s played as a joke but in some painful ways it’s true—“I am not the same me that packed my lunch this morning. 7am me was excited about veggies and good habits but 2pm me has had to recommit her life to the Lord three times today.” I don’t know if you’ve seen or perhaps heard about the recent film Women Talking, but the director Sarah Pauley did an interview about it in which she was asked if it was difficult coming back to filmmaking after a long time ‘out of the game’ so to speak, raising her children—specifically, was it difficult starting out with a huge ensemble piece like Women Talking? So many moving pieces to manage. “No,” Pauley said. “It wasn’t. Because everybody I was working with had fully-functioning frontal lobes.”

Again, it’s really funny, except as far as it’s really sad. On weaker days I am not good at seeing Christ in my toddler, treating him as Christ, mothering him in a Christ-like way. On weaker days I lack every fruit of the spirit: I lack joy, I lack peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, generosity, faithfulness (you could also call that consistency), and—especially bad when you’re the grown-up—self-control. On weaker days I do not respect the authenticity nor the sacredness of my son’s imperfect, unfinished condition. Indeed that’s when I fail to see how much we are the same. That I too am deeply, exasperatingly imperfect and unfinished, still developing, myopic in my perspective…trying really, really hard. That God is for all of us the author and finisher of our faith, and our character. And if I struggle to keep hold of this reality with my own child, how much weaker might be my compassion for other people—adult people—trying to do life with the same types of poorly understood, disregarded and disrespected yet legitimate limitations?

Woe betide!

Now, if you were a psychologist, or even a student beginning studies in psychology, you might be starting to sense, in my picture of Beth’s Bad Days, a whole lot of something called “fundamental attribution error.” That’s a cognitive bias where, in looking at others, we chalk failings up to their character or their them-ness, but when we look at ourselves, we chalk failings up more to circumstantial or environmental factors. Example: Emily was late to the meeting because she’s bad a time-management. I missed the meeting because my life is really, really crazy. Or another example: my toddler is being rough with the cat today because he lacks basic self control. But I am being rough with my toddler today because I haven’t slept well this week and I have a cold and he’s not listening to me when I try to speak to him. (Dubious, self-spoofing look.)

Conversely, when we feel we don’t measure up to others, we may look for ways to attribute their strengths or successes to circumstance, so that we don’t have to feel insecure about our own character or personal makeup, or discipleship.

At the beginning of this sermon I spoke about how context can make an old passage new. The particular spot in early motherhood, where I am made tonight’s Gospel fresh to me in humbling ways. But another contextual factor was our reading from Philippians earlier this month—the passage Chris Whitmore preached for us. In that passage, Paul exhorts the church at Philippi “make [my] joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”

That fragment there: in humility regard others as better than yourselves. In reading over our text for this evening I was suddenly struck by a fresh sense of the relationship between these two exhortations. Love others as yourself. Regard others as better than yourselves. I think these two fit together in the sense that, if I am to treat others as I want to be treated—love them as I would love Christ--I have to afford others as much benefit of the doubt as I would like to be afforded. I have to assume they are doing as well or better under their own personal circumstances than I would do under the same. My threenager included.

Now, I honestly hope, a little, that this sermon has bored you to death. I hope this is old hat for everyone listening and that you are all doing just fine at this stuff in the areas of life where it applies to you, regardless of age or family status or any of that. But I stand by what I said, about this being a passage that cannot be preached too many times. After all, life—life writ large, life in Christ—is not about learning many things, but about learning a few things many, many times. May we all be so blessed as to find others near, willing to remind us that we are all works in progress. After all, why did the Pharisees call the Messiah ‘the son of David’? Could it be, perhaps, less for the fact that he would be a great King, and more for the way he would model afresh what it is to be a person in constant pursuit of the Father’s heart? Could it have been for the way Christ would complete and perfect David’s fallen plot arc just as he completed and perfected Adam’s?

Let us hang on the hope. And invite God’s finishing work afresh.

Amen.