MICHAEL SPENCER HERZOG                                                   26 October 2008


THEREBY HANGS A TALE

You know, if you were paying attention to that children's time thing we just did with the door hung by two hinges, you can be excused for the next twelve minutes or so because that’s pretty much today’s message.   The pathway we take to a relationship with God -- the door we enter -- is hung on those two commandments.   Love God.  Love neighbor.

Mary and I spent some time in England in September and as card-carrying church junkies, we peeked into quite a few churches.  Mostly we visited Methodist Chapels.  In England, “Church” refers to the established church, the Church of England -- the Anglican Church -- that’s the one that most people stay away from.  Any other place of Christian worship is a “Chapel” -- so the Methodist “churches” we visited were properly called chapels.  I don’t know if it was just a characteristic of the area of Devon and Cornwall where we were or if it was standard among all Methodist chapels, but almost every one had two very large framed placards in the sanctuary -- often on either side of the pulpit -- up high.  They were three or four feet square and under glass -- made to last -- and they looked old.  One poster was headed LOVE GOD and had the first four of the Ten Commandments that deal with our relationship with God.  The second poster was headed LOVE MAN had the remaining six commandments about how we were to deal with other human beings -- and below that was the passage we heard today about the greatest commandments from Jesus, to love God and to love neighbor.     I suspect that the 18th and 19th century circuit riding Wesleyans felt that these two documents contained pretty much all a person needed to know about living a Christian life.  Basics from the Old Testament -- the Hebrew Scriptures -- interpreted by Jesus.  Love God.  Love neighbor.

The scripture passage from Matthew that talks about Jesus’ response to the Pharisees who tried to trap him into dealing with a question about the law doesn’t say anything about doors.  But the door is a common metaphor in the Bible.  We have Jesus standing at the door and knocking.  Jesus as the gate and the gatekeeper.   A long time ago I was involved in the breeding and training of horses -- but my specialty was as the country carpenter who built stalls in old poultry sheds and put up what seemed to be miles of fencing for paddocks and pastures.  All that involved a lot of constructing and hanging gates and doors.  Creating a well-built door was always a very satisfying experience.  Making everything fit was very fulfilling.  Achieving balance was critical.  We have a door in our home that will not stay put.  At rest it hangs not quite fully open -- and no matter how often you push it back where you want it, an hour later it has moved a few inches out from the wall again.  Balance is an important thing.  It is delicate.  You’ve probably seen huge bank vaults with doors that weigh tons, but because of the perfection of their balance, the massive door can be opened with the pressure of one finger.  Balance.   Love God.  Love neighbor.

As you saw with our Mr Wizard experiment with the children, the door is essentially useless without two hinges, one on the top and the other on the bottom of the door.  Without the two hinges, the door just doesn’t work;  it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do.  For a door to operate correctly, it needs two hinges.  One hinge is not enough.

This allegorical door of ours, the one we’re imagining is the door to a relationship with God, requires two hinges -- two hanging points -- in equal balance.   The balance is important.  To love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.  The Pharisees that Jesus had so much trouble with loved God.  And to prove it they followed every one of the commandments that they believed constituted the word of God. 

They had identified 613 commandments from God out of the Pentateuch -- the five books of the Law. Two hundred and forty-eight of them were things that God told them to do. You shall!   Three hundred and sixty-five of them were things that God forbade them to do.  You shall not!   Six hundred and thirteen laws, each one of them carrying the truth of a divine mandate, each one of them carrying the authority of the divinely appointed leader, Moses.  No wonder the Pharisees felt justified in demanding that all the commandments be followed.

The Pharisees focus however seems to have been somewhat one-sided.  A one-hinged door, if you like.  A fair number of the laws that the Pharisees so carefully followed were harmful to the people that Jesus cared about -- the people on the margins of society who were deemed to be ritually unclean.  Jesus ate with these people -- the lepers and the harlots.  A clear violation of the laws of purity.  He made friends with sinners like the tax collectors. 

I came across a quote the other day; it’s from the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay .   “I love humanity,” she said.  “It’s just people that I have trouble with.”  That’s not an unusual sentiment.  There’s often a disconnect between principle and practice. 

The Pharisees could feel good about their behavior.  After all, they had cataloged all 613 commandments and they had obeyed them all.  Sometimes I suspect they felt excessively good -- smug, perhaps -- and superior.  But feeling   good is not the point, not to Jesus.  Doing   good is.  But I’ll grant doing good is harder to measure than counting up all the laws you’ve obeyed and putting a big checkmark next to each one.  When I worked for a living I was involved with an industry that produced things.  At the end of the day I could go into the warehouse and count up the pallets of iron oxide we had produced that day and know if it had been a good day or not. 

My wife Mary during those same years was involved in the delivery of social services.  She had a much harder task trying to evaluate  whether she’d had a good day or not.  It’s a quality issue rather than  quantity.   Jesus was interested in quality -- and we should be too.

Jesus was unpopular with the Pharisees because he spoke out against their legalistic approach to relating to God.  God’s favor was not gained through toting up credits in our account by following all the intricate laws, but only through God’s grace.  Paul preached salvation by faith not works and it was central to Martin Luther’s theses that sparked the Protestant reformation, but Jesus said it first.

In today’s Gospel passage, the lawyer comes to Jesus and asks which commandment in the Law is the greatest.   That actually seems like a reasonable question to ask a teacher -- and Jesus was a teacher -- a rabbi.  But the question had potential for endless debate because most religious people, and especially experts like the lawyer in the story, assumed that they already knew the answer to the question. They would have answered that every commandment in the Law is great, because all of them come from God, and it is God’s will that we obey all of God’s commandments. That would have been the orthodox response.

The lawyer believes that he now has Jesus in a box. Surely Jesus, who claimed to be sent from God, could not deny any  of the 613 commandments, but if Jesus gives this answer as the lawyer assumes he must, then the lawyer can follow up and ask Jesus if every commandment in the Law is great, why is he guilty of breaking so many of them.

According to Jesus, we must first love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind.  That means that our love for God is not just some spiritual and emotional experience.  If we are also to love with our minds, our love for God must also be rational.
That means that we do not have to check our minds at the door when we come to church. That means that even as we worship God in spirit, we can at the same time consider what we believe and why we believe it as we continue to worship God with our minds.

Now, to just reply “to love God with heart and soul and mind” would have answered the lawyer’s question; however, Jesus also went on to answer a question that the lawyer had not raised. He added,  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Why didn’t Jesus just give us the greatest commandment as he was asked by the lawyer and leave it at that? We cannot really love God with our heart, soul, and mind unless and until we love our neighbor as we love ourselves.  The second greatest commandment is not just secondary to the greatest commandment. It is essential to the greatest commandment.  We cannot love God whom we do not see and despise our neighbors whom we see every day. If Jesus had only given the first commandment, we would be off the hook and allowed to piously proclaim our love for God like the Pharisees while we treated one another badly.  So Jesus says, Love God with your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.  Like the hinges on the door -- in balance.

When this story is told in Luke’s Gospel, the writer has Jesus illustrate the point as to exactly who ones neighbor is with the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Jesus teaches us that our neighbor is not just the person who shares and agrees with our values and our perspectives or even our religion. Jesus teaches us that a neighbor is anyone lying along the road of life in need.  Jesus made the Samaritan, the despised outsider, the hero of the story.  Our neighbor, according to Jesus, is not just the person who agrees with us. Our neighbor is anyone who is in need. 

To love as Jesus commands us to love means mourning for the loss of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan but also mourning for the lives of our neighbors, the Iraqi and Afghan soldiers and civilians whose lives have been lost in this unfortunate war.  Showing compassion for the members of our family that suffer -- and also compassion for the unknown homeless person on the street.  We hear Jesus say again, Love.  Its all about love.  Love for God and love for one another.  Jesus said, “On these two commandments, hang all the law and all the prophets.“  Balanced.  Equal.

For us to enter into a full and meaningful relationship with God we pass through this make-believe door we’ve been talking about.  A door hung by two equal commandments in perfect balance.  Without both commandments to support the door -- we have an imperfect portal -- a broken door that just doesn’t work  -- keeps us separated from the God we long for.    

So:  Love God and love neighbor.  It’s just that easy -- and just that hard.

AMEN