Count on Me: Connection
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – November 5, 2023
Count on Me: Connection – Matthew 22: 34-40
It’s pretty easy to see meanness in the world today. It seems like its own pandemic. There’s the horrific violence wrought in Israel and Gaza. There are the mass shootings in the US, most recently in Maine. There are instances of domestic violence throughout the Fox Valley and all too close to home. Then there’s just the meanness that’s all too common among folks who used to be friends, all over social media, or even at the checkout counter. I think it’s understandable that many of us would often feel overwhelmed and discouraged, maybe even to the point of despair.
Things weren’t all sunshine and roses in Jesus’s day either. Rome violently occupied his country. And the religious leaders could be downright mean to each other, to the people, and to him - as we see, violently mean, too.
Today’s passage from Matthew begins with infighting:
“When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.”
Given the vast array of religious law and its history of interpretation, it was basically an impossible question. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus quotes Deuteronomy and Leviticus but then he turns the question on its head, declaring:
“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The commandments? Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
The Greek here for love is the big one. It’s agape love that is big enough even for enemies. It’s the kind of love we can practice even when we don’t agree. It’s the kind of love we can practice even when we don’t much like each other right now. It’s the kind of love we can practice cultivating even in a world of violence and meanness. Because agape isn’t about returning an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth. That big love is not about being kind and gracious to people who are already kind and gracious to us. No, that agape love is next level love. It’s the kind of love that changes the math. It refuses to return meanness for meanness. Instead, it returns meanness with a focus on what we really mean to each other.
I don’t know about you but I love Halloween. I love Halloween because it begins the season I like to call the Season of Great American Folk Art when so many of us trick out our houses, our vehicles, our workplaces, and ourselves with festive decorations or costumes. I love Halloween because we get to pretend to be someone else if we want. It’s a playfulness even adults can join in on. But most of all I love Halloween because it’s the one night a year that neighbors open their doors to strangers with a wide, wide welcome. It doesn’t matter if you’re wearing weird clothes, too much make-up, or if you are actually a little scary, the idea is you will be welcomed to the door and given good things.
Growing up, I lived in a close-knit rural community, where it was common for my sister, my Dad, and me as a merry band of trick-or-treaters, to go all the way into the house of the person whose door we knocked on. Then the adult with the candy was supposed to guess who was under the costumes. We were related to a lot of them. Others we saw at church or on a softball field or at school. So, they were pretty good at guessing. But if they didn’t know our names, it was an opportunity to reintroduce ourselves to our neighbors. Too often and for too long to my candy-focused brain, my Dad would then sit and visit before we could move on to the next house. I have never experienced trick-or-treating like this in any other place I have lived. But I think it’s just a more intense and deliberate version of what Halloween can be: a night of community-building and connection-making, especially for the kids. It can be an opportunity for children to learn their community is a place where they are known and cared for. It can be a night of abundant neighborliness.
Jesus has a pretty broad definition of neighbor in the gospels. In Luke, a similar interaction with a “lawyer” leads to the story of the Good Samaritan and the understanding that neighborly actions can come from unexpected people. In the Sermon on the Mount in this Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. I feel fairly confident that Jesus would welcome all the ghouls, goblins, and fairy tale princesses at the door with whatever delicious things and the warmest neighborliness he could afford.
What if we could greet each other with that expectation of good things and with that wide, wide welcome all year round? What kind of neighborly, agape love-connections would we make? How might we affect the meanness of the world?
That’s the hope I know I have to carry. It’s the hope that loving big will do some big good – maybe not in all the ways I’d like or on the timetable I’d prefer, but in ways that could not possibly be estimated to be insignificant. That big neighbor love to which Christians are called gives me hope in this too often too mean world.
What Jesus teaches though is to “love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s a teaching predicated on the assumption that we love ourselves. Some of us clearly do. Others of us struggle for many different reasons.
There’s a strand of folks in the movement we call the Church of the Brethren and beyond who were taught to always put others before ourselves. For some of us, this meant we always put ourselves last, we learned to ignore our own needs, and we maybe even feel that talk of “loving ourselves” is self-serving drivel rather than something Jesus assumed we were already doing. Many of us who feel this way would be appalled to realize we were treating our neighbors in this fashion. But I don’t know how we get good at genuinely loving other people when we are so very unkind to ourselves. I can’t believe that’s what Jesus meant in this passage. I can’t believe that does much to undo the meanness in the world. My experience is that it only adds to it.
Extending neighborly, loving connection to ourselves can be hard though when we don’t have a lot of practice. It takes baby steps, and it can feel very vulnerable. For me, this year I’ve been practicing loving myself by allowing myself to make more friends and spend time with them. That can be pretty vulnerable, just being with someone for fun instead of for pastoral, therapeutic, or business reasons. Maybe some of you can relate, but I have found that cultivating a loving connection with myself has helped me tremendously to cultivate loving connections with others, too.
It’s weird how all these avenues of love seem connected. It’s like it’s all one big river, soup, or super highway. Because my experience of trying to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength has led me to be able to better experience love and to love others, too. And the reverse has also been true, at least for me. Maybe it’s more like electricity. Maybe it’s like God is the ultimate source of love, and we can plug into that love and share it with others – sometimes, yes, in shockingly unexpected ways. Because when we live out our call as followers of Christ to practice loving connection to God, to self, and to neighbor, we may just be surprised at what may happen.
This weekend at the IL/WI district conference I ate lunch with people who didn’t look like me and didn’t believe like me. I sang other people’s songs and some of my favorites, too. I heard about church clothing closets and dinners for teachers and food pantries and after-school ministries. I didn’t really want to go, to be honest. In the past it’s felt more like an all-day infomercial than anything spiritually uplifting. But this year I was touched by moving tributes to churches that had closed, generous purchases of homemade pie, and connections made across difference and distance. When the most controversial question of the day rose to the floor, the discussion ended quickly, and the paper ballot was decisive. That doesn’t always happen. I was surprised. But I wondered did connection have something to do with it? Have we learned something about how to be with each other just as we are? Maybe so. Maybe not. Maybe time will tell.
But I believe there’s a lot of healing that can happen when we practice agape love-connection with others, ourselves, and God. It’s the only antidote to violence and meanness that I know of. I think it’s how we build the kind of beloved communities God wants to see. I think it’s how we become the kind of people who can say with integrity, you can count on me.
I give thanks to God that I can count on so many of you.
May we all learn to count on God, too.
May it be so. Amen.
