Possible Kingdom

Text: Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
Other texts: Matthew 22:32-46

If there were a mission statement of this church, which there is not, we could do worse than borrow the answer Jesus gives to the Pharisees when they ask about the law. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. After all, this is the trunk on which hang all the branches of the law and prophets. It is a summary description of the way to a holy and good life, a way to which Jesus subscribed. In this summary, Jesus combines two essential passages and ideas in the Bible from Deuteronomy and Leviticus (which we heard today).

On the pledge cards that are in your bulletin today are three pictures. (They are supposed to represent worship, fellowship, and service.) One of them shows this room, called formally the nave, informally the sanctuary. But it shows it backward, so to speak. It is the way I, standing up here, usually see this space. It is also shows the threshold to this room. There is a doorway. It is bidirectional. We come in to worship together and we go out to serve the world through our daily lives and actions. It marks the two parts of our lives with God. Sanctuary, a place set apart, a place of rest and worship, a sacred place. And mission, our lives in the world, a place of action, mercy, and kindness, another kind of sacred place. Both are a part of a holy life, both subjects of the law about which Jesus speaks.

It is common, and unfortunately especially so by Lutherans, to portray the law as legalistic and nit-picky. But it is a mistake to do so. The laws—the commands and guidance given by God via Moses to the Israelites—are a means of grace. They seek, in the large, to order the universe. To maintain harmony within creation and between people. They are a way—as there are in all faiths—a way of right action. And a way of reminding us that the world was both created by God and that God is here with us in it. They teach us to be holy because, as it says, God is holy. Be holy, says God, because I am.

The law has two approaches to doing this. One approach is interested in purity. Keeping things separate, the enforcement of boundaries, the prevention of pollution, all of which seek to keep the channel clear. To keep us on message. But the other approach—and the subject of today’s reading in Leviticus—is the opposite. It is interested in breaking through or ignoring the boundaries because of the need to do what someone called the “messy, disruptive ethical obligations … to set wrongs right.” What it takes to take care of our neighbor, even if our neighbor is not one of us, is outside of our walls. Even if a stranger, an alien, even if our enemy. To be just and kind and merciful to others.

To love God with all your heart, soul, and mind is first of all to love God with all yourself. Not just your prayerful self, or your generous self, or your good-natured self. Not just your intellectual, clear-thinking or believing self. But with your angry self, your selfish self, your mixed up self. Not just with your self that desires to be good but the self that would rather not. You cannot therefore love God by feeling good about God. It is not about your feelings, which you cannot control, but about your actions, which you can. This commandment does not ask us to like God—although we may—but to be loyal to God. To do what God says, to listen for God, and to put God ahead of all the other things that call us.

The command to love our neighbor works the same way. It calls on us to love other people with the same impartiality as we love God. We are not perfect, but since we know our own motives and inner good will, we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. To love our imperfect neighbors is to extend the same benefit to all others. Loving your neighbor as yourself means to put your neighbor ahead of all the other things that you might otherwise like to do in regard to your neighbor. This is unlike enlightened self-interest. It does not say that loving ourselves leads in the end to good things for our neighbors. It is the needs of the neighbor that call us first; whether it benefits us is not the main point of this commandment. This command puts the burden of care and justice on us, not on some other force or system or people.

It also does not ask either us or our neighbor to be good, or likable, or admirable. Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan. We can like our neighbor, or be afraid of our neighbor, or be disgusted by our neighbor. It is all the same. Partly this is because we are all made in God’s image, even people we despise. Partly it is because we realize that we could be them and vice versa—love foreigners, the Bible says a few verses down in Leviticus, remembering that you yourselves were once foreigners in a strange land. But in the end it is because we belong to God. Love your neighbor, it says, I am the Lord. The two things are tied together.

Loving God and loving other people are not the same thing. The second command to love others, says Jesus, is like the first to love God, but not identical to it. Yet though one follows the other, they are not separate. The are alike and connected. You cannot love God without loving what God loves. Loving others reflects and is modeled on our love for God.

The reason why this all is part of the law, rather than just something nice to do, is that the purpose of the law—as lived and taught by Jesus—is to create the kingdom of God, the world as God intended it to be and we hope it to be. These commandments on which hang all the others seek to create a world in which all people might thrive. They are like the laws of physics—here is how things work. Or like a recipe—here is what to do to make things be the way you want.

We who gather here in worship, fellowship, and service in the name of Jesus—who come in to this sanctuary and go out from here in mission—we share the idea that such a world is possible, and that we have a hand in helping it come to be. Though we cannot follow these commandments always or easily, being not perfect, we acknowledge that they are the right ones to follow. That they lead to the world that we hope for.

So if we would like to have a mission statement, which we do not now have, we could make it this. So that the world may be as God’s kingdom and that all may thrive, to love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds; and to love others as ourselves.