The Imperative to Love

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15; Luke 17:11-19; Psalm 66:1-12; Jeremiah 29:1-7.

I once knew a pastor who was ruined by his accent.


Actually, that’s scapegoating: it was not the accent that destroyed him, but his congregation’s reaction to it. As national debates heated up surrounding issues of citizenship versus illegal residency, his congregation began to complain, with increasing fervor, about his Columbian accent. They couldn’t understand him, they claimed, and so he couldn’t possibly really understand them. The communication gap, they believed, was too great.

Oddly enough, these complaints hadn’t really existed in years previous, and so it came to seem that their problem with him was not really that they couldn’t understand what he was saying; it was more that they didn’t want to. He came to represent the Other, the foreigner, the person against whom they must rally. They forgot he’d been their trusted spiritual leader. And, sadly, the overarching leadership caved, and the pastor in question was relocated to an area more likely to react favorably to the fact that he was Hispanic.

I’ve been very angry at his congregation over this for awhile now. It seemed self-evident, to me, that a Christian community should not react this way to someone, particularly a spiritual leader, based on negligible, even imagined, differences. They let themselves get too caught up in the ideas of proper “citizenship” and nationality, and in the process lost a really good pastor, one who had cared for them and done his utmost to exemplify Christian ideals. His “other”ness was not the problem; theirs was. By rejecting him based on his origins, they made themselves “other” to the Scriptures.

Our readings this week are full of aliens, sojourners, foreigners. They are not what we’ve come to expect from people shouldered with such terms. Indeed, the common rhetoric here, in our time, is that he who is the Other must be villianized and kept at a distance. “Other” is considered dangerous. But in biblical contexts, “others” are those who often surprise established nations or groups by being more faithful, more committed to God’s message, than those charged directly to live it out.

In 2 Kings, Naaman, a chieftain of another nation, is encouraged by an Israelite to go to the king in Jerusalem and petition the king’s prophet to have his leprosy cured. Doing so means deviating from all which he’s always known to be true. Yet he listens to the Israelite child and goes before the Israelite king. He is told to perform a simple act of faith—“wash seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will heal, and you will be clean”--in order to become well (2 Kings 5:10).

Naaman wrestles with himself internally, but eventually decides to show this faith, and is rewarded by becoming healed. And, the text tells us, “he returned with his whole retinue to the man of God. On his arrival he stood before him and said, ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth, except in Israel’” (2 Kings 5:15). A hefty concession for any Israelite whose faith was daily tried; a grand one for a foreigner, of whom belief was not required.

In Luke 17, we read again of an afflicted foreigner, this time a Samaritan. He goes before Jesus as part of an ailing group. They beg to be healed. Jesus, never one to put too much stock in silly boundaries, of course heals them—as an act of love, as any creator would do for his created. And the Samaritan who is cured, one of many cured, the only foreigner among the cured, is the only to offer thanks: “realizing he had been healed, [he] returned, glorifying God in a loud voice; and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him” (Luke 17:15-16). Jesus comments on this, affecting perhaps not entirely genuine surprise that this devotion comes from one not bound, by covenant, to Israel’s God: “Ten were cleansed, where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” (Luke 17:17-18)

The message that can be derived from these readings is not that sometimes, some foreigners surprise us by being better than we’d expect; rather, it’s that the notion of “foreigner” is entirely absurd in the context of faith.

Anyone can live out Christian principles. As such, we are required to love all people as our neighbors, not just those who “officially” belong to our communities. The communities mean nothing unless they’re built on values of inclusion.

We cannot rest in notions that, because we have been privileged, because we live in times and locations which are very blessed, we are ourselves blessed over and against other peoples. God loves all; he hears all petitions. And if we fail to welcome into our communities the “foreigners,” those who outwardly seem to be “Other”, we fail to do the work of being like Christ.

Before God, we are all slightly “other.” It is not until we begin the work of faith, of living out Judeo-Christian principles, that we become more of what God envisioned and designed us to be. By appropriating faith into all aspects of our lives, we begin the cautious approach towards accepting God’s grace. It waits us always, regardless of our locations—as the 66th Psalm tells us, shouting “joyfully” to God is a task enjoined of “all…on earth”, who “fall in worship before” God, singing and worshipping. The events in the land are evidence of this love; the mercy and favor they represent is available to all, in all lands.

We are charged, as were the Israelite exiles, with the responsibility of living amongst our neighbors with love. Even if they seem different from us. Even if their “ways” aren’t always easy for us to understand. They, too, are God’s—this is what binds them to us, what makes loving them an imperative. We are to “build houses to dwell in; plant gardens, and eat [shared] fruits,” and the welfare of the ground which we share is essential—our own rests upon it (Jeremiah 29:4, 7). We’re promised joy if we do this—not the joy of living without tumult, in a state of sustained tolerance, but the joy of living truly well, in the borderless community envisioned in scripture.

I worry for us, travelling along these paths we’ve designed. Our communities become less and less hospitable to those who we deem unlike us. This has not become a place where it is easy to be the “Other”. If we’re truly invested in the notion that we’re a nation built upon Judeo-Christian principles, continuing to alienate “aliens” does our foundations an inconceivable injustice. It becomes, in fact, absurd.

We cannot refuse to engage in spiritual communion with people who have different accents, or are differently acculturated; we cannot reject human beings without having even tried to understand them. A Christian community which is only open to some is, it would seem, closed off to Christ. We must counter such trends by doing work which is Jesus-like, which starts at the most basic levels of human communication. We must seek to engage one another, on ground which we find is shared despite our resistance, from a position of faith. All are beloved by God; living in his image, so must we love all.

Photo Credit here

November 1 -- The Law of Love

This week’s lectionary texts: Ruth 1:1-18 or Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Psalm 146 or Psalm 119:1-8, Hebrews 9:11-14, and Mark 12:28-34.

In this week’s lectionary texts, we hear – not once, but twice – the greatest commandments in the Christian faith. First in Deuteronomy, and again in Mark, we are instructed in our duty to God as God’s faithful people:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your strength, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:2-30)

No doubt many of us have heard this commandment repeated over and over. And indeed, the first line begins the Shema Yisrael, arguably the most important prayer in Judaism.

But what exactly does it mean to love God all our heart, soul, strength, and mind (or might)? At first, it seems that the injunction to love God so deeply and with virtually every one of our faculties would essentially be a full-time job.

Many of us struggle with even knowing where to begin when it comes to loving God. For some, God is so enormous, so incomprehensibly grand and majestic that trying to love God seems like an impossible task; how could a single person’s love even gain the notice of God?

For others, loving God seems to mean loving a deity who has let terrible things happen. How can I love a God, they might think, who let my husband die, or my neighbor lose her home? The commandment to love God, utterly and completely, seems to them like a cruel joke.

Yet I would argue that the commandment we hear in Deuteronomy and Mark is not just a commandment to blindly love God – rather, it is also a call to awareness and attentiveness, a call to pause and take stock of our lives and the ways in which we have sensed God’s presence.

In Deuteronomy, the commandment continues, “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). We are instructed to keep God on our minds and in our heart – to not let our days just fly by, but to be continually reflecting on God’s goodness in our lives.

The passage from Deuteronomy hints at another facet of this commandment to love: the fact that we are to share our love for God with one another. We are to talk about God with our families, and carry God’s spirit with us wherever we go.

Jesus’s teaching in Mark echoes this idea. After explaining to the Sadduces that the commandment to love God is the first commandment, he adds a second: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31).

Here we see that the commandment to love God does not exist in a vacuum. We are not instructed to just sit in our homes all day, meditating on how much we love God (though such a practice can certainly sometimes be beneficial). Rather, we are called to love God by loving God’s people – to go into the world, showing love to all those we meet. We cannot truly love God if we are not actively loving others.

As is written in the first letter of John, “Those who say ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from his is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.” (1 John 4:20-21)

The commandment to love God totally, utterly, and completely can seem overwhelming. God is God, and loves us with a perfect love; how could we ever hope to return even a tiny portion of God’s love? But perhaps our concern ought to be remembering that we can show our thanks and love to God by loving our neighbors: our families, friends, classmates, coworkers, those people we like and those who frustrate us, men and women and children in our own country and around the world.

One of the psalms appointed for this week praises God, noting that God “executes justice for the oppressed,” “gives food to the hungry,” “sets the prisoners free,” “opens the eyes of the blind,” and “lifts up those who are bowed down” (Psalm 146:7-8). Let us join with God in these acts of love, being mindful and attentive to the needs of others, and serving one another in love for God and our neighbor.

Photo credit here.

December 28--What it Means to Be Free

"But when the right time came, God sent his Son who was born of a woman and lived under the law. God did this so he could buy freedom for those who were under the law and so we could become his children. Since you are God's children, God sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, and the Spirit cries out, "Abba, Father." So now you are not a slave, you are God's child, and God will give you the blessing he promised, because you are his child" (Galatians 4:4-7).



What do you think of when you think of freedom? No fences? Hippies marching with signs? Martin Luther King Jr.’s "Let freedom ring"? Freedom from exams? Freedom from illness? Freedom from war?

A spiritual mentor of mine once told me, “I became free when I said, ‘Lord, I will do what you want me to do.’”


It is an odd thing to think about spiritual freedom in a country that defines itself so fundamentally by that word. It is difficult to translate the freedom of which the Apostle Paul speaks into our current cultural climate. It is difficult to imagine the kind of freedom Paul longed for and experienced as he preached the gospel in the midst of persecution, in the midst of imprisonment, in the midst of the very real practice of slavery throughout the Roman empire.


What does it mean to be free? What does it really mean to be "free"?


When Paul was writing this letter to the Galatians, he obviously was not thinking about American freedom--or American slavery--at all. He was, instead, thinking about first century Gentiles: non-Jews living in the northern part of the Roman province of Galatia, an area of the world we know today as the nation of Turkey. He was thinking about the God he worshiped as a Law-abiding Jew and how that God had extended grace to these Gentiles and all others through the faithfulness of Christ.

Unlike competing evangelists who were teaching the Galatians in his absence, Paul believed that only Jews should observe Mosaic Law; for the Gentiles of his ministry, Paul saw the Law as a stumbling block. The gospel message Paul preached to the Gentiles was about spiritual freedom in Christ. Paul believed the message preached by his opponents would lead to spiritual slavery, rather than freedom.

But those who opposed Paul’s gospel message of spiritual freedom warned that his emphasis on God’s grace did not provide sufficient instruction for daily living. They thought Paul’s emphasis on grace left too much room for doubt about whether or not a Gentile had sufficiently converted to Christ. So Paul responded with a letter full of pastoral advice for those who would live in Christ’s realm of freedom. “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters,” he writes. “Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.” Be led by the Spirit in order to inherit the kingdom of God, he says. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Gal 5:13).

Be slaves to one another? This is the way to be free?! Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

But we've heard this language before in the gospels from the mouth of Jesus. It’s the Great commandment, and the second which is like it. Living in Christ’s freedom means loving God, loving neighbor, loving self. On this commandment hangs all the Law and the Prophets. It is, in fact, THE law for the Galatians and for us. And it is what it means to be free, for the Galatians and for us. The only way we can be free is to devote ourselves entirely to this law. It is the spiritual paradox of divine freedom.

So how do the Galatians know when they are living according to this law, when they are living according to this freedom? When they live by the fruits of the spirit, Paul says. How do they know when they are living by the fruits of the spirit? When they relate to one another with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. With such things we live into the very kingdom of God.

What do you think of when you think of freedom? In twenty-first century America it is too easy to forget we are at war and it is too easy to give in to a materialistic mentality and it is too easy to bite and devour and destroy one another, all in the name of freedom. We do well to listen with fresh ears to God’s Word to us through these words to the Galatians.

We who follow Christ have a responsibility that comes with our political and spiritual independence. “Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence,” God says to us through the words of the apostle Paul, “but through love become slaves to one another.” Love your neighbor as yourself. Live by the Spirit and be guided by the Spirit.

And as we continue to pray for the world’s freedom from sin and suffering and despair, when too many people still live in political and personal bondage, we do well to repeat what seems on the surface like a contradictory word to “Stand firm . . . and not submit again to a yoke of slavery. For Christ has, indeed, set us free in order to live in freedom.” Slavery in love to one another. Freedom for those who live in bondage.

May we sing it with voices that will never be shaken. May we live it with a conviction that will never be challenged. May we proclaim it with a hope that will never be forsaken. May we pass it on from generation to generation until that final day of freedom when suffering and evil and pain will be no more. We pray it in Jesus’ name. Amen

Gusti Linnea Newquist

(additional lectionary texts: Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 148; Luke 2:22-40)

October 25--Loving at the Edge of the Promise

“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”


Lectionary focus: Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Matthew 22:34-46


When I read this Sunday’s lectionary text from Deuteronomy about the final days of Moses I think immediately of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech the night before he was assassinated in 1968. He had proclaimed the story of the Exodus and the vision of the Promised Land as a liberating hope for African Americans struggling to integrate after centuries of slavery and segregation. Martin Luther King felt a personal identification with Moses on the mountaintop after decades of marching and speaking and submitting to jail on behalf of justice. He had prayed and preached and inspired a community through a long wilderness, and he could see that land flowing with milk and honey just a few steps away. But he was not there yet, and he knew he might not get there in his lifetime. So he called upon others to take up the struggle in the months and decades ahead. And he died the next day without seeing his dream become reality. He died, like Moses, at the edge of the promise.

Forty years later, this biblical vision embraced by Martin Luther King, Jr. continues to propel many of us forward toward racial justice and reconciliation. And as a white woman who has lived almost her entire life in the American South, I know we still live at the edge of the promise Martin Luther King envisioned, even though we have come so much farther than ever before. Because racism and economic oppression are still all too real, I want hold up this promise of hope for all who continue to struggle for liberation and life abundant. I want to proclaim with Martin Luther King that this vision is what it means to “love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength . . . and your neighbor as yourself.”


But there’s a pretty big catch. The “promise” for some can be a nightmare for others.


I have learned in the past several years that it is a radically different experience to read this text from Deuteronomy in my current New England congregation: a community that includes Palestinian Christians. Their very presence in our midst requires us to consider again the biblical community on the other edge of the promise Moses hears repeated on that mountain in the desert. Because if you are the neighbor already living in Jericho or Gilead or Judah, you hear this “promise” as a mandate from a tribal god to drive you from your land and destroy your way of life forever. If you are a Canaanite living at the edge of the promise, your neighbor is not anything like your friend. Your neighbor is really your enemy.


If this is the case, then, what does it really mean to love the LORD our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength? What does it really mean to love our neighbor as ourselves? What in the world was Jesus talking about when he gave us the two great commandments?

He was not talking about Valentine’s Day and touchy-feely Hallmark cards! What we learn from Martin Luther King and what we learn from the Palestinian members of my congregation is that anyone who has lived on either edge of the promise—the one seeking liberation from oppression and the promise of new life and the one suffering invasion and occupation and conquest—knows that loving God and loving neighbor is the spiritual discipline of a lifetime. And it is really, really hard.

Yet when the lawyer asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest, Jesus tells the entire crowd to love their God and to love their neighbor. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

He is quoting his own Scriptures (Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18). He is saying that we should interpret everything in them through these two commandments: love God; love neighbor.

The 4th Century theologian St. Augustine, says the same thing. If you read a biblical text and it does not lead you to love God and to love your neighbor, then read it again. You didn’t get it right the first time.


So let’s go back to Moses in Deuteronomy, at the edge of the promise he never entered himself, and see if we can hear a life-giving message for everyone. Even though we know what happens next—especially because we know what happens next—let’s hear that story again as the final word of the five books of the Law, which hangs on the commandment to love God and to love neighbor. And if we read it again, with this commandment in mind, we see that the final word of the Law is not about conquest and destruction. Neither is it about slavery and persecution. It is about hope.

And I think Jesus would say that we all live at the edge of God’s promise when we claim a vision of justice and peace that is right in front of us and yet so very difficult to achieve. We all live at the edge of God's promise when we trust in the living God who is beyond definition, geographic location, and tribal identification. We all live at the edge of God's promise when we follow a God who has chosen to persevere with all the nations through the particular history of the people of biblical Israel, a persecuted minority through most of its existence. God’s promise to that people is the same promise to all, Jesus would say. It is not a claim; it is a gift.

In return, God insists on healing and reconciliation among those with historic tensions. God calls for personal transformation in the midst of social transformation. As we live and love on the edge of that promise, we are owned by the vision, rather than owning it ourselves. We work for its partial implementation, even as we trust in its coming fulfillment. This is what it means to love God, to love neighbor, and to love self.

May God grant us the grace and the courage to follow these two great commands in this week and in the weeks to come. It is really hard. But with God, all things are possible. Amen.


Gusti Linnea Newquist



(additional lectionary texts for this week: Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8)

July 27-- God For Us

Passages: Genesis 29:15-28, Psalm 105:1-11, 45b, Romans 8:26-39, Matthew 13:31-33, 42-52

Hello, those of you eagerly awaiting another segment of the Massachusetts Bible Society lectionary blog! As a newcomer to this blog, but not to MBS, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself before getting to the actual text for this week’s lectionary. I’m Kelsey Rice Bogdan, third year student at Harvard Divinity School and 2006-2007 MBS seminarian. I had the pleasure of working with MBS the year before Joe came on board, in the Society’s pre-blogging days. I was an avid blogger before the student life ate up all my time, though, so I’m excited to be back in the blogosphere. I also look forward to setting aside some time each week with you all to pause and reflect on a little snapshot of Scripture from the Revised Common Lectionary. I hope it will be a time for all of us to consider, be challenged, and grow together.

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? ... Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” --Romans 8:31, 35-39

Have you ever wondered why John Calvin, the great Protestant Reformer of the 16^th century, ever made such a big deal about the idea that God chose some people for salvation and others for destruction? After all, it isn’t such a warm, fuzzy doctrine, and a good chunk of Christians (even Presbyterians like me, who claim their religious heritage from Calvin’s teachings) don’t really buy into it today. But Calvin was very emphatic on the point, and today’s lectionary passage is a perfect example of why.

In Romans 8:26-39, being God’s “predestined” (v. 29) suggests that God is with you, God will take care of you, nothing can come between you and God. In Calvin’s day, it was a comforting thought to reflect that, though the French authorities might threaten to kill you for your faith, God would vindicate you in the end because you were a beloved, chosen child. In Paul’s own first century context, it must have been likewise reassuring to think that despite all the vulnerabilities that come from being poor (as the majority of those living under the Roman Empire were at the time) and a follower of a strange new Jewish sect, God was on your side. It is no coincidence that, whether they agree with Calvin’s take on who or what is “predestined” in this passage, Christians through time and space have clung to it to claim God’s stake in their cause.

And therein lies the danger, the key element that can make Paul’s words both a clarion call for justice and the all-too-easy weapon of the oppressor: God is for us. Too many times we gloss over this phrase in verse 31 and just assume that if God is “for us,” that means someone—the devil, that particularly nasty co-worker, corporate America, Iran—is against us. We then go on to scan the rest of the passage with a smile on our face, knowing that we can be assured that God will make us “more than conquerors” over all those people we’ve brought into our reading of the text.

When I look again at Romans 8:31 and 35-39, though, an important character is missing from our little scenario: all the people who are against us, all the people we are supposedly going to conquer. The Holy One who created all of us, who embraces all of us as a mother embraces the sometimes squirmy child, is ultimately for all of us. Jesus, who reached out to Mary Magdalene and Nicodemus, Matthew the tax collector and Martha the busy housewife, doesn’t have to pick and choose who to love. When we think of God as a God of abundance, rather than through our own frame of scarce, coveted resources, who indeed is excluded from God’s overflowing love to stand against us?

Perhaps this is why, through Christ, we can be more than conquerors. Through Christ, the text suggests, we can transcend the lens of limit and lack through which we see others. We can go beyond winners and losers, beyond the notion that my gain is your loss. That’s not to deny the brokenness that exists in the world—in verses 35 and 36, Paul acknowledges the realities of persecution, hunger, and war, some of which humans and human systems cause. But none of those things can alter the fact that the God who appeared among us did so because that God is for each and every one of us.

In the gospel Paul presents here, no one—no individual, group, or society—can lay claim to God’s special favor over another. For just as Jesus embraces all of creation in this troubled world, we are called to embrace all those who we might view as standing against us. What would it mean to look at the enemy, even one that perpetuates injustices we rightfully oppose, as someone whom God is ultimately for? Maybe that means revising our belief that an enemy is someone to be vanquished, conquered, bent to our will. Maybe that means seeing our opponents as God sees them—broken, flawed creatures like us, desperately in need of transformative love.