Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Deuteronomy 30:9-14; Luke 10:25-28

I remember watching TV shows and movies with my younger brother when we were children – like many siblings, we could agree on enough so that we could find things that we both enjoyed watching. And yet, some of what we watched occasionally developed in ways that he found significantly distasteful. Jon is three years younger than I am, and so there were a few years when my girlish heart enjoyed some scenes that made him close his eyes and declare, “Gross…tell me when the kissing’s over.” He was OK with movies talking about love and romance, but he was very uncomfortable being invited into the experience.

It reminds me a little of how some people of faith seem to feel regarding loving God, or experiencing God. Thinking about God, discussing God, following God – all these feel OK, but being invited into experiencing God or loving God is uncomfortable. While the people I know who feel this way are unlikely to say out loud, “Eeeew, gross….,” they are clearly uncomfortable with such talk. And while I have observed this for years, and some of the people I love most in the world seem to react this way, I still find myself somewhat baffled by the discomfort.

Some reasons I can understand – for example, some people are uncomfortable talking about feelings in general. I remember a man whose teenaged daughter declared tearfully in an argument: “You never tell me you love me,” to which he replied: “Forty-year-old men don’t talk about love unless they’re in church.” For some folks, talking about what they see as emotions is uncomfortable, in church or out.

For others, the idea of experiencing God, and having any kind of emotional connection with God doesn’t make sense. It seems foreign, overly subjective, and inherently suspect. So the kinds of questions that arise are: “how do you do it?” And, “if people can experience God, why don’t I experience God?” And, of course, “is it possible that people who believe they experience God are kidding themselves?” And, “it doesn’t make sense to talk about love in regard to God – God is too abstract to be loved.” Besides, talking about loving God seems vaguely demeaning, to both God and humans, for some folks. It seems to suggest a sort of neediness that many people aren’t comfortable with, and certainly don’t expect from God.

And yet, Christian theology is centered on a loving God.

And the reason that this is important is the small Gospel story that we read this morning. Let me read it to you again, this time using The Message translation by Eugene Peterson: Just then a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. "Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?" He answered, "What's written in God's Law? How do you interpret it?" He said, "That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence - and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself." "Good answer!" said Jesus. "Do it and you'll live."

We usually rush right on from this section of the story, to the parable of the Good Samaritan which follows, as the scholar tried to trip up Jesus. And we’ll read that parable, next week, together with the story that follows. But this week, we’re just going to focus on the initial teaching of Jesus. It’s a teaching that we take for granted a lot of the time – and I think we end up trivializing this passage by equating it with The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This also is stated in Luke’s Gospel, in Luke 6:31, but it is not the same as this section.

The Golden Rule is a teaching about reciprocal ethics – behaving toward others as you would like them to behave toward you. It is both commonsense, and taught in most religions.

Hinduism teaches: "One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself. This is the essence of morality. All other activities are due to selfish desire."

Buddhism teaches: "One should seek for others the happiness one desires for one's self."

Islam teaches: "Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you."

Confucianism teaches: "What you do not wish upon yourself, extend not to others."

Baha’i teaches: “Wish not for others what you wish not for yourselves” And there are several similar teachings in ancient Greek and Roman literature. But all of these are simply reciprocal ethics: treat others as you wish to be treated. The instruction in today’s reading is much more powerful, and is theological as well as ethical. Today’s reading connects our love for neighbor with our love for God, as well as with our love for ourselves. Each of these pieces is an essential part of abundant living. We often make the connection between loving God and loving others, but we often miss the connection between loving God, loving others, and loving ourselves.

To my mind, the problem with the world isn’t that we don’t love others as we love ourselves; the problem is that we DO love others as we love ourselves. The problem at the heart of so many other problems is that we don’t really love ourselves. And I don’t know what came first, à la chicken-and-egg here, but I do know that our ability to love ourselves is connected to our understanding of God’s love for us. And when we’re uncomfortable with the idea of God loving us, then our behavior with others doesn’t flow from the richness of that love but from a sense of duty. And doing something because we think we ought to is not anything like doing something because of the joy and love which flow through doing it.

Gerald May was a psychiatrist who practiced medicine and psychiatry for 25 years before becoming one of the founders of the Shalem Institute where I study spiritual direction. He wrote a number of books, including Addiction and Grace, Will and Spirit, The Dark Night of the Soul, and his last book, published posthumously, The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature. His book The Awakened Heart is about our relationship with love. In it, May writes, “There is a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart…it is the human desire for love. Every person on this earth yearns to love, to be loved, to know love. Our true identity, our reason for being, is to be found in this desire.” He continues, “Grace is love happening, love in action, and I have seen so much grace in the midst of so much brokenness in myself and others that I know we are all in love. We are in love, within love, as fish are in the seas and clouds are in the sky. It surrounds us, penetrates and perfuses us. In a very real sense, we are made of love. Love creates us, and we create love.” The Awakened Heart is about our relationship with love, our relationship with God, and how we can be more aware of this relationship, which May argues exists whether we are aware of it or not. He describes our culture’s tendency to value efficiency over love, and acknowledges that our own brokenness, our inability to be both fully efficient and fully loving, leave us with both guilt and shame, which he distinguishes in this way: “Guilt says, ‘If only you had done it better.’ Shame says, ‘If only you had been better.’” But May reminds us, it is often our failures more than our successes that open us to love, although I have found that our own brokenness also causes us to fear love or feel unworthy of love. May tells us, “If we desire a more loving society, we individual persons must return to the deepest common sense of our hearts; we must claim love as our true treasure. Then comes the difficult part: we must try to living according to our desire in the moment-by-moment experiences of our lives.” As I read this last quote, it seems to be to be restating the teaching of this morning’s Gospel: “…we must claim love as our true treasure….” – if God is love, is this not the same as loving God with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength? And loving others as we love ourselves, this is what May describes as “…the difficult part: …[trying] to live according to our desire [for a more loving society] in the moment-by-moment experiences of our lives.”
May, coming to spiritual direction out of his background in psychiatry, is able to connect the theology and teaching of Jesus to our own personal experience in a way that seems very commonsense, and helpful. I’m still reading the book, so I don’t know yet whether he solves the problem of the barriers raised by our brokenness, which is, to me, the biggest obstacle to our spiritual and our personal growth. Our sense of guilt and/or shame is what interferes with our own sense of ourselves as lovable and beloved. And when we don’t love ourselves very well, the natural result is that we don’t love others very well either.

My own experience tells me that the most important task in both our personal growth and our spiritual awakening is to be able to look at ourselves honestly and admit that we are both blessed and broken. We have strengths and weaknesses, we have known successes and failures, we are both competent and inept. Most people have a difficult time look at themselves realistically in a balanced way that takes seriously both their own unique and real gifts AND their own equally unique and real flaws. And I find, by the way, that we have a harder time taking our gifts seriously. Many of us dwell on our failures and weaknesses in a way that not only interferes with our ability to truly love and appreciate ourselves, but also fosters a critical spirit toward others as well. (For some insight about whether we are overly critical toward ourselves, we might look at how we respond to mistakes we make – do we beat ourselves up? Or are we able to take appropriate notice, making what amends might be necessary, but being able to move on?) We may believe that dwelling on these flaws is an important part of growing and making personal progress, and we are partially right – it IS important to face our negatives. But if we don’t do so in a balanced way, taking equally seriously our gifts and positives, we can’t find wholeness and health.

And our inability to look beyond our own weaknesses leaves us unable to appreciate God. As USC philosophy professor Dallas Willard wrote, in his excellent book The Divine Conspiracy, “Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no “you” apart from your actual life. You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you and you will not truly be at peace with him….First we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being ‘right,’ we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life.”

Further, if we don’t take our own positives seriously, it’s a backdoor way to spiritual irresponsibility – we may not take our calling seriously as disciples if we don’t acknowledge and accept our gifts. If we don’t have any significant gifts, how can God seriously make use of us in the work of the Kingdom?

Ultimately though, our ability to realistically assess both our gifts and our weaknesses, to take both our blessedness and brokenness seriously, is the foundation to loving ourselves, accepting God’s love, and being able to love others. When we are able to acknowledge our flaws and still delight in ourselves, it leads to a gentleness that enables us to be equally accepting of others. When we are not permitting our own weaknesses to be an obstacle to our self-acceptance, we don’t find the flaws of others to be an obstacle to our love for them either.

I’ve talked about both contemplation and acceptance in the past, and I’m finally beginning to understand the connection between them. When I talked about acceptance, I mentioned my mother’s quoting her grandmother’s saying, “It is as it is, if it isn’t as it ought to be.” And it turns out that such acceptance of life as it really is, of ourselves as we really are, is at the heart of contemplative spirituality. Contemplation has been described by Jesuit theologian Walter Burghardt as “A long, loving look at the real.” Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh describes contemplation as “Looking deeply at life as it is in the very here and now.” The Shalem Institute describes contemplation as “…a loving quality of presence in which one is open to things just as they are in the present moment.” These quotes all stress the same kind of acceptance that Dallas Willard connects to our being able to believe in the goodness of God.

And this is why it is important to recognize the real power in what is known as the Great Commandment: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." It is the key to real wholeness and to real love. If we only love God with our minds, we are missing important dimensions of the faith experience, and of ourselves. If we try to love others without learning how to love ourselves, we will be doing good deeds but missing the wholeness and love that fully living in God is about. As the reading from Deuteronomy reminds us, this commandment is not too hard, or too far away…it is very near to us, in our hearts and in our mouths. It is in the words we use about ourselves, and the words we speak to others.

At its heart, love of God, love of others and love of self are the same love. It’s impossible to really grow in any dimension of these without learning to love ourselves. This is the first step, and it is perhaps the hardest, but it leads to a freedom and capacity for love that is the foundation to our own health, our personal relationships and our discipleship. It is the kind of transformation that Jesus calls us to, for our sake and the sake of the world. Amen.