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.

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)