Lectionary blog for Oct. 26, 2014
Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Text: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18; Psalm 1;
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46
By Delmer Chilton
There has been a lot of talk recently about people who say they are “spiritual, just not religious.” That is, they have an interest in God and holiness and amorphous mystery on a personal, individual basis, but they are not at all interested in communities of people with similar interests, because that would require them to take these other people and their opinions and problems seriously, and really, who has time for that? Put another way, they are happy to love the God they cannot see but they do not wish to get too involved with the neighborly enemies they can see.
This is, unsurprisingly, not a new problem in the history of humankind. We have always had a self-justifying desire to decide exactly who it is we are obliged by God to be nice to, and how nice, exactly, we have to be to get credit. In today’s Gospel lesson, we read the end of a long section in Matthew where the Pharisees and Sadducees conspire to trip Jesus up and get him in trouble with the Romans.
Politics certainly makes strange bedfellows. The Pharisees and Sadducees cooperating makes about as much sense as the Tea Party and the Re-elect Obama Committee working together, but these folks are determined to keep Jesus from upsetting their very settled and profitable way of life. In the few verses prior to our text the Sadducees have tried a silly question about the resurrection, which Jesus easily rebuffed, and now the Pharisees take their turn with a poser about the commandments.
This is not a question about the Ten Commandments. They are talking about the ongoing Hebrew theological tradition that numbers the commandments in the hundreds, some say 613, and are arguing about which is the most important or most pivotal. In response, Jesus does two things. First he answers their question with a very serious theological opinion, siting Deuteronomy 6:5 and our lesson from Leviticus 19:18, tying them together as the greatest commandment. Then he politely shuts them up with a semi-serious riddle from Psalm 110. It is an unanswerable question, somewhat akin to “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” The crowd is delighted with Jesus’ wit, realizing he has just told the Pharisees, “Look, two can play at this game, and this time, I win.”
The most important thing in this lesson, to Jesus and to us, is the business of loving God and neighbor. As G.K. Chesterton once joked: Jesus commanded us to love both our neighbors and our enemies because they are generally the same folk – this is not at all easy.
It is not simply a matter of being nice and getting along. It is hard work. It involves getting beyond our likes and dislikes; it involves hanging in with individuals and communities when the going gets tough; it involves self-sacrifice and devotion even you’re not “getting anything out of” the relationship. It involves taking the neighbor seriously as a child of God who deserves our respect and care. It involves being religious as well as spiritual.
This is why Jesus hangs loving God together with loving the neighbor. Loving God can be easy. God is away off there somewhere. We can define God in such a way that God is not responsible for any of the pain or discomfort we experience in life. That way, we don’t ever have to be angry with or resentful of God.
We can love God with an easy conscience because we don’t expect anything from God, and God doesn’t expect anything from us, and such a spiritual love will never intrude upon the very earthly, confusing messiness of our lives.
But if, as Jesus says, loving God and loving our neighborly enemies are tightly bound and inseparably linked co-commandments, then we are forced to deal with love in the real world of people who are imperfect and incomplete – people who are at times undeserving of our affection or unresponsive to it, people who are sometimes incapable of loving us back.
And we have to live out our love for God in a world of people who also sometimes care about us when we don’t really want to be cared about. It is, as I said, a bit confusing and messy.
The people who say they are spiritual but not religious have spoken more truth than they realize. “Spirit” is formless, wispy, barely there. It is so indistinct and disembodied that one doesn’t really have to deal with it. It is more feeling and impression than anything else.
On the other hand, the root of “religious” is “ligare,” which is also the French root of “ligament.” You can’t get much more earthly than that. “Ligare” means to tie to or to tie back. Ligaments connect muscle to the bone; religion ties us to God and one another.
Those who seek to be spiritual without being religious believe they can float free of the ties that bind, feel good about God and be confident that God feels good about them. A willingness to be religious indicates an awareness that an amorphous, spiritual Godlikeness would not have plunged interferingly into the midst of our pain and suffering. Rather, it took a God of compassion to, quite mysteriously and inexplicably, give up whatever it means to be divine and plunge headlong into the muck of our lives.
God in Christ took on ligaments and sinews and walked among us and suffered among us and died among us and with us and for us. God in Christ was raised from the dead and draws us together, ties us together, as the body of Christ, held together by ligaments of love and sinews of service. And we, the tied together body of Christ in the world, are called to the task loving God, most especially by loving our neighbors and enemies in God’s stead and in God’s name.
Amen and amen.
Delmer Chilton is originally from North Carolina and received his education at the University of North Carolina, Duke Divinity School and the Graduate Theological Foundation. He received his Lutheran training at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C. Ordained in 1977, Delmer has served parishes in North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.
