Second Sunday of Advent with a nod to Ted Lasso.

Sermon by the Rev. Paul Canady, Rector of Christ Church, on the First Sunday of Advent.

For more about the Way of Love, visit https://episcopalchurch.org/way-of-love.

Loving God. Love your neighbor. Change the World

A sermon by the Rev. H. Paul Canady III

Rector of Christ Church, New Bern, NC, on October 25, 2020

http://lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp25_RCL.html 

“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” Jesus said.

Loving God and loving our neighbor is the summary of all that God had told the Israelites 1,500 years or so before Jesus’s time on earth. The law was first given on a mountain top to a man named Moses. Our readings from the Hebrew scripture in the month of October have traced that journey. Moses’ run as leader of God’s chosen people concludes with today’s reading. He gets a glimpse of what is coming next, even though he doesn't get to cross over to the Promised Land. It had not been an easy journey for the people or for Moses, or even for God, if we’re being honest. But God’s trust was in Moses, and Moses’ trust was in God, and God’s people, with the Law in hand, crossed over to the promised land. 

The work that Moses the Lawgiver began on that mountain top with the voice of God coming from a burning bush carries for generation after generation through countless prophets of God, both Hebrew and not, right down to a carpenter from a backwater town in Roman-occupied Palestine who knew his birth and calling to be the Messiah, the Chosen One of God. Like any good Rabbi, Jesus knows the law inside and out. And since Jesus is also God-made-flesh, Jesus understands the intent of the Law better than anyone ever has or ever will. 

A few years ago, a parishioner gave me this book. It’s called The 613, and it is the retelling in graphic-novel format of the 613 laws from rabinic tradition that was in development before Jesus’ lifetime. I’ll leave it over on the bench if you want to look at it after the service. It’s really great! Jesus took these 613 laws and boiled them down to the two most basic: Love God. Love your neighbor. Rule One. And Rule A. 

The most important thing to remember about this moment in Jesus’ ministry is that he is not making up anything new. He is citing directly from the words God gave Moses on Mt. Siani. Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. Two sentences that were the very core of Jewish life and belief.  

Rule 1, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,’ is also called the Shema, which means “Hear” because the first words of the passage in Deuteronomy are “Hear O Israel…” Jesus is holding up the belief that the point of the Torah, the Law, is not to be burdensome or weighty, but the aim is to orient one’s entire life toward God. And boy, did Moses know that since he spent 40 years on that effort! 

But here is the thing: One cannot love God without loving what God loves and how God loves. And I get that it’s not easy. If it were easy, I wouldn’t be preaching on it. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Any deficit we have in loving God and loving our neighbor is rarely a lack of ability. It is most often a lack of the willingness to do it. And if we can’t put forth that effort, then what are we really doing trying to follow Jesus? 

It is impossible to love God with all our heart and our soul and our mind if we oppress and exclude and deny rights and earned privileges to any of God’s beloved humanity -- even those we see as our enemy.  While Jesus’ fellow Pharisees used the law to limit and exclude those whom they were required to recognize as their neighbors, Jesus uses the same text to obliterate the boundaries of neighborliness. There is no limit to the love God has for all humanity. And the only way humanity sees it is when we show it. 

To love God is to love the way God loves -- completely and indiscriminately, even when it is costly.

To love God is to love what God loves -- which is everything and every one, even when it’s hard. 

To love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our mind, means to love God with our whole life. And it means we love our neighbor with our whole life, too. And if you need a reminder of who our neighbor is, I would point you to the story of the Good Samaritan in the 10th chapter of Luke’s Gospel. 

To love God and love our neighbor is to build up people and communities, not defences and walls. 

To love God and love our neighbor is to combat the causes of poverty and mass migration, and not combat the poor and migrants. 

This Gospel passage takes place on the Monday of Holy Week. Just a few days after this, Jesus will face an unjust trial and brutal execution. It would appear that Jesus won’t get to see the next steps in what happens with the movement he began. Like Moses, he gets to the mountain top. But what is the promised land Jesus is seeing? 

I think that the promised land is a land free from oppression, persecution, and exclusion, a land where all of God’s beloved creation is on a level playing field with equal access to the same rights. 

Here’s what I said on this same scripture passage nine years ago: How many more promised lands would oppressed and occupied and denied people be able to enter if those doing the oppressing, occupying and denying focused more on loving their neighbor, focused on the fact that those who look different, speak different, love different, believe different are indeed our neighbors. And to fully love God, we have to love them, too. 

It’s not always easy. In fact it is rarely easy. But the reward is phenomenal. We travel to the way of Jesus as one people, not as individuals. We do the hard work of loving God and loving our neighbor as the people of God, not as individual persons of God. 

Because on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. 

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The Hard Work of Peace

A sermon by the Rev. H. Paul Canady III

Rector of Christ Church, New Bern, NC, on the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

October 4, 2020 Proper 22, Year A

 May the Words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be ever pleasing to you O Lord, our Rock, and our redeemer. Amen.

Today’s sermon is briefer than most of mine, partly because I’m no St. Francis and have no desire to offer more words than necessary to our furry friends who have made their way here this morning. I also don’t want the Gospel message today to get lost in a lot of extra imagery and material. 

Jesus has a strong message to the religious leaders of his time regarding the prophets and messengers of God who came before him. To be certain, Jesus had some harsh words for them, and to be equally certain, those same words have been used over the past 2,000 years to harm and denigrate Jewish communities around the world. Jesus' words should never be weaponized in such a way, and it is imperative that as followers of Jesus in 2020 we look for how Jesus' words are reflected in our own words and actions. That’s how we show people who Jesus is. 

There was a common understanding of messengers in the ancient world. The one bearing the message was to be regarded as the one who sent the message. So what Jesus is saying here is that those who rejected the prophets who came before him rejected God. 

It’s easy to look at this passage and say, “YEAH! Go get ‘em, Jesus! Put those high-faluten Pharisees in their place!” But doing that would render the Gospel into a historical novel and not a living document for us as followers of Jesus. Because humanity, and even Christians, continue to reject the message of the Gospel on a pretty regular basis. Maybe it’s a sin of omission, something we fail to do because we are distracted by other things. Maybe it’s a sin of commission, something we do intentionally because we can’t be bothered to examine our own way of living and make a change that better glorifies God and helps us love our neighbors as ourselves. 

We should be challenged by this scene in Matthew’s Gospel to think about those places where we reject the Good News of God. We should examine those places and times where we do what is convenient and easy instead of what is right and just. We should look hard not only our own life but our whole society and culture and do the work to change those structures that make existing harder for those on the margins, for the poor, the under-educated, anyone who doesn’t look like us or talk like us. If we see another person or group of people as “less than,” we easily become like the tenants in today’s Gospel lesson. It may not always be out-and-out violence but could turn into ghettoizing of whole communities or nationalities or ethnicities or religions. And that, my friends, is not the way of Jesus. 

But the way of Jesus is love. And in this passage, set in Jesus’ last week of his earthly ministry, just a few verses removed from his tirade in the Temple, Jesus reminds his hearers then and his hearers now that the Kingdom of God will be given to the people who “produce the fruits of the Kingdom.” That doesn’t mean the people who have all the right answers or who do the most. It’s the people who emulate the love God has for this tired old world, and not tolerating the things that work to cut off that love. 

There is a saying I’ve seen on shirts and mugs and bumper stickers that goes, “Lord help me to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.” (There should probably also be one that says, “Lord, remind me that I’m better than my cat thinks I am.”) Dog and God have the same letters, and what both have in common is that they can see the capacity for love and compassion that is it our very core. The change we wish to see in the world will not be established by chance or coincidence. It will come as the people of God and followers of Jesus continue turning toward the mission of God, which is to do the hard work of peace and justice so as individuals and as a culture, we can be reconciled to God. 

As St. Francis is credited with saying, Let us preach the Gospel at all times, using words when necessary. 

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