By Bishop Jane Allen Middleton (retired)
2021 Susquehanna Annual Conference, June 19, 2021. Juneteenth.
tinyurl.com/y2havbdm (12:47-35:44)
Scriptures: 1 John 4:11-16, 19-21 and Luke 10:25-37
Love God with all your heart and mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself. That is the commandment which Jesus gives us. He calls this the most important of all commandments. It sounds so simple but it isn’t because we humans, even we who are good church people, are very complex.
The neighbors Jesus tells us to love refers to all people. So this commandment sounds quite simple, but [in addition to us being] really complex, this word neighbor is all-inclusive—everybody! Neighbors really does means all, and some of the neighbors we are called to love are not the ones we want to love at all.
Underlying all of scripture is the fundamental truth of the power of God’s love. God out of His infinite love created the world and all that is in it and called it good. Underlying all of theology is God’s unconditional love of all people. All means all people.
Who are these people? That troublesome neighbor? Yes. That difficult father-in-law, parent, child? Yes. The ‘never Trumper’ that drives you nuts or the ‘Trumper’ that drives you nuts? Yes. The homeless, unkempt one with the sign “Will work for food”? The arrogant millionaire? The person who is constantly rude, even cruel to you? Yes, yes, yes! All are God’s beloved.
Love is so very basic. Love that a child learns in the crib in a wondrous cycle of love. The mother gazes at her child and smiles. The baby smiles in return awakening profound love in the mother. She reaches for her precious child and the child giggles, the sound brings joy to the mother who in turn embraces the child in a warm embrace. It’s a cycle; love is given, love is received, love is returned.
This is the loving gaze that God gives to every human being. We can love because God first loved us. This is our source, and when we can reach into our hearts for that source our capacity to love grows and grows. That same love relationship happens between people, or it can.
Mary Janecek was my classmate in third through sixth grades. Her family immigrated from Czechoslovakia when she was eight because of World War II. She really bugged me. The truth is, I was very jealous of her and I tried to make her life miserable, and it may be that she made mine miserable as well. Everything changed in the sixth grade. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember as if it were yesterday, that one day she invited me to her house after school. It was a beautiful spring day. We wandered in the woods near her house, picking beautiful wildflowers and rejoicing in the warmth and loveliness of the day, which was made more beautiful because we were enjoying friendship. Those years of hostility were obliterated by the glory of mutual friendship and yes, love. At the end of the school year my family moved away and I never saw her again, but I’ve never forgotten the wonder of that reconciliation and how it was so much more fun than being enemies.
How do we do this? What is expected of us? How do we love everyone?
When Jesus was asked who is my neighbor, who is the one I should love? He answered with a story. You probably know this story by heart. Perhaps not like the way I’m going to tell it, but this may be how Jesus would tell the story today...
A man was walking from Jerusalem to Jericho when suddenly a band of robbers attacked him and stole everything he had and left him half dead by the side of the road.
The first to come by was a pastor. He may have been a United Methodist. He saw this poor man but the man looked almost dead, beyond help and he walked on by. The second to come along may have also been a pastor, maybe an evangelical or Roman Catholic who also saw the terrible state he was in and kept walking.
And then a third came down the road. Who was he? We’re told he was a Samaritan. Today, perhaps a Hindu from India. Or Black. Or even an apparent recovering drug addict. Maybe he was Jewish, from Brooklyn. He was the ‘other’. And he immediately gave this wounded, suffering stranger his own garment, bound his wounds as best he could. And took him to a hospital telling them he would pay for everything and would check on him when he returned from his trip.
Well, that’s not exactly what the bible says but you get the picture.
Over and over the stories Jesus tells reach across societal and prejudicial boundaries and the mighty are struck low and the lowly are lifted up. The heroes of his stories are the tax collector, the woman with an issue of blood, the poor widow, the leper, the Samaritan woman. He turns the values of the world upside down and challenges us to do so today. But it’s hard. We are so much a product of our prejudices and assumptions.
I’m reminded of a time when our grandson Anthony was about nine years old and we were spending the day in New York City. As we were walking down the street I saw a man I recognized. I said as we approached him, “I know that man.” It happened that the church which I pastored at the time had a ministry called Midnight Run. About once a month we would take a van into New York City, arriving about midnight, and we would spend the night distributing soup, beverages, bag lunches, clothing and blankets. This man was frequently one of the people we encountered. Truthfully, I was actually trying to impress my grandson, but as we walked by I said nothing and I assume he didn’t recognize me. Anthony said with a puzzled expression, “Why didn’t he say hello?” I felt a huge pang of guilt. Why didn’t I even say hello? He wasn’t my friend and [I’d treated him like] an object, as one-among-many receiving my benevolence at 62nd and Park. I didn’t love him.
The kind of love Jesus is calling for is a profound love in which the Christ in me sees the Christ in the other—every other.
The power of love Christ requires of us is its all-inclusiveness. The most impossible reality of that love is its all-inclusiveness. How can we love, knowing our own frailties? We cannot love in this radically inclusive way through our own power. Only by surrendering our will, our idiosyncracies, our dysfunction, and our prejudices to God can we even begin to love with radical inclusiveness. Perhaps—even most important—if we can accept with every part of our being that we ourselves are unconditionally loved by God, perhaps then we can truly love.
For those of us in the white majority, the commandment of Jesus to love becomes much more specific. And it is more of a challenge as we face the reality that this wondrous nation of many peoples is a nation of immigrants, except for native peoples and blacks who came as slaves, representing almost the entire human spectrum.
And we are called to love all, people of every race and creed.
Love is a verb. It is a decision, a practice. Do it until you believe it.
Jesus calls us to a better way, The way of truly seeing one another as sisters and brothers, the way of infinite love.
Jesus calls us to understand that when one suffers we all suffer. One hundred years ago, in Tulsa Oklahoma, racial hatred resulted in the deaths of some 300 people and the destruction of an entire community of people whose only crime was to be born black. Jack grew up in Tulsa and had never even heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
The horrendous acts of May 31 and June 1, 1921, not only destroyed a whole community but these acts destroyed the future for hundreds. This truth struck me profoundly because our parents come from there. When the massacre occurred, Jack’s father who was born in Tulsa was four. My father who was born in nearby Muskogee was seven. Our mothers were both three years old. None of them were children of college graduates, but in spite of poor beginnings they accomplished a lot in their lives.
In contrast, many other three, four and seven year olds were also living in Tulsa at that same time. They were among approximately 13,000 people who lived in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa. It was a thriving community with many college graduates, doctors, pastors, teachers, financiers, as well as many large and small business owners. Their children could look forward to a very bright future. This community had only one very huge problem. The citizens of this very successful, thriving part of Tulsa were black.
The whole area of Greenwood was burned [by white rioters] overnight leaving some 10,000 people homeless. Details are still unknown but it is estimated that from 300 to 3000 were killed, wounded, or missing. Most of the area was destroyed by fire including over 600 businesses.
All of this was stolen by hatred. But more than that, those three, four, and seven-year-olds, along with hundreds of other surviving children, lost their future.
In her book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson compares the 400 years of blacks in the United States to the caste systems in India and Nazi Germany. She writes that the creation of a caste system happens when one group stigmatizes another and dehumanizes them in order to justify a system of perpetual domination. A caste system, according to Wilkerson sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits.
Jesus invites us to live into a beloved community which destroys these systems and replaces them with justice and love.
Howard Thurman, the great African American scholar and pastor of Boston School of Theology, said, “When I have lost harmony with another, my whole life is thrown out of tune. God tends to be remote and far away when a desert and sea appear between me and another. I draw close to God as I draw close to my fellow people. The great incentive remains ever alert; I cannot be at peace without God, and I cannot be truly aware of God if I am not at peace with my fellow people.”
The words of first John remind us that the source of this love is God in Christ Jesus. We can’t do this by our own power but by God’s gift. It’s a wondrous circle of love. “If we love each other, God remains perfect in us.” (1 John 4:12) Only by God’s grace can we even hope to live a life of love. The proof of our capacity to love is in our relationships with the near one and the far one, with those closest to us as well as those who are unlike us, our opposites. “If anyone says I love God and hates their brother or sister he or she is a liar.” (1 John 4:20)We must love with every fiber of our being. We must love because God first loved us. How can we do this? By allowing the Christ in me, to recognize the Christ in you.
All things are possible through Jesus Christ who loves us. With this love in our hearts, anything is possible.
Can we be God’s beloved community? May it be so.
