Offering

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 neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. -Matthew 22:37-40

Love. If you stripped away everything and boiled our faith down to the most important element - it is love. Love for God, neighbor and self. It is about loving in every fiber of our being, about love spilling out of the way we talk, work, interact and make choices. It is love in how we share, decide, show up and companion others. It is love in how we parent, teach, create and steward. As Bishop Curry often says, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.

If faith is to be anything more than a mental exercise, we need to put our faith into action in our lives, with love as the action verb that sets it into motion. We’re called to discern the most loving way to pray and to vote. The most loving way to work and to play. The most loving way to hold ourselves and loved ones accountable, and move forward courageously in the hard but right way of Jesus. Every thing we do can be done more faithfully by examining our motivations and planting them more firmly in love. If it’s not about love, it’s not about faith.

We live in a society that says you can love everything from mom to apple pie to baseball to Chevy trucks. But the kind of sacrificial love shown to us in Christ is not just about personally liking something a lot because it pleases us or makes us feel good. Christ’s love is a pouring out of self; a giving oneself away to God and neighbor. Love means putting the needs of others on at least equal footing with our own, and sometimes even putting them ahead of our own. This is very counter cultural to our consumerist society. The world teaches us to grab and to own what we feel love for. Jesus tells us that love is about actively giving everything away. It’s a challenging thing to practice!

So here’s a small way to practice day to day:

Whenever you hear something in the news that makes you feel angry, resentful, fearful or even hateful or vengeful, notice you’re having that feeling and stop. Take a few deep breaths to calm and center yourself, then look inside at what feels threatening or upsetting to you. Imagine putting that fear or anger in a wide basket and offer the basket to God, who is strong enough to handle everything. You might even hold out your hands as if you’re literally handing it over go God. Then ask God to fill your newly empty hands and heart with love instead, and trust God is doing it, even if you don’t feel it at first. Thank God for that abundant love, and then ask God to share some of it on your behalf with the person or situation that upset you. This is a great practice if you feel you can’t muster love for someone or something yourself. It’s a way. to ask God, for whom nothing is impossible, to do it for you.

Will this practice solve the world’s problems? Probably not. But it’s a small way to re-orient yourself little by little to be more in alignment with the greatest commandments of our faith, especially when the world gives us so, so many mindless opportunities to break them.

The readings we are using for this Sunday are HERE. Please note that this is an error! I had invited Geof to speak for Consecration Sunday when we thought it was going to be on the 25th (proper 25). When we moved the date up a week to the 18th, I figured we were recording it in advance, so it wouldn’t matter to Geof when we aired it, but completely didn’t put it together in my mind that moving the date of Consecration Sunday would mean different lectionary readings! Since I only discovered my error when Geof and I got together to record, it seemed right to still use the readings Geof had prepared with. So we’ll be using the readings for Oct 18 (proper 24) on the 25th at St. James. Whoops.