Job Description

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

June 25, 2017

Job Description

Mark 12:28-34

One of the scribes came near

and heard them disputing with one another,

and seeing that [Jesus] answered them well,

he asked him,

“Which commandment is the first of all?”

Jesus answered, “The first is,

‘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.’

The second is this,

‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

There is no other commandment

greater than these.”

Then the scribe said to him,

“You are right, Teacher;

you have truly said that

‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’;

and ‘to love him with all the heart,

and with all the understanding,

and with all the strength,’

and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’

—this is much more important than

all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

When Jesus saw that he answered wisely,

he said to him,

“You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

After that no one dared to ask him any question.

*************************************

You shall.

I shall.

We shall.

No, “thou shalt not.”

No scolding, judgmental

cranky voice,

the type of voice that is all too common

in churches of all denominations.

No, here it is just a voice of love,

inviting us to love:

“You shall love God,

and you shall love your neighbor.”

Jesus calls them Commandments,

but really they are more an invitation:         

Love the Lord your God

with all your heart,

with all your mind,

with all your strength,

and with all your soul;

And love your neighbor as yourself.

Do that;

do these things,

and you’re on your way to new life,

a rich life,

a full life,

a blessed life,

a Kingdom life.

These commandments are the keys

that open the door to this rich life,

this full life,

this blessed life,

this Kingdom life;

this life our Lord invites us live.

The keys are paired.

We need both;

we cannot open the door with one

and not the other.

We cannot open the door

just by loving God;

we have to love our neighbor, too,

love our neighbor as ourselves.

To love our neighbor as ourselves

is to look into our neighbor’s face

and see the image of Christ in him, in her,

to look upon our neighbor and see her, see him

as a child of God,

loved by God.

And, let’s be honest

with every passing day,

we seem to be doing a

worse and worse job at this,

as our society, our world

grows  more separate,

more tribal,

more angry,

more hostile.

A Pulitizer prize-winning writer

included this observation

in an article he wrote recently:

“Today, we’re not just deeply divided,

as we’ve never been before,

we’re being actively divided —

by cheap tools that make it so easy

to broadcast one’s own ‘truths’

and to undermine real ones,…

This anger industry is now either

sending us into comfortable echo chambers

where we don’t see the other,

or arousing such moral outrage in us

toward the other

that we can no longer see their humanity,

let alone embrace them as [those]

with whom we share [many of the same] values.”

(Thomas Friedman in the New York Times

June 21, 2017)

To love our neighbor as ourselves

is not to shred them in 140 characters;

it is to put ourselves in their shoes,

to live with that endangered attribute, empathy,

through which we actively,

purposely,

think about what life must be like

for someone with skin a different color;

someone who wears a hajib

as a sign of their faith in the God of Abraham;

someone who is so desperate to escape

terrifying violence, gnawing poverty,

or utter hopelessness

that they’ll try to cross the Mediterranean Sea

in a rubber dinghy,

knowing they’ll be unwelcome

wherever they land,

knowing they’ll be branded with those terms

that we have made odious, repulsive:

“refugee”, “immigrant”.

In his masterful book “The Great Divorce”

a book that is not about

the breakdown of marriage,

C. S. Lewis describes a town

where the people are “so quarrelsome:

as soon as anyone arrives

he settles on some street.

But before he’s been there twenty-four hours,

he quarrels with his neighbor.

Before the week is over he’s quarreled so badly

that he decides to move.

Very likely he finds the next street empty

 because all the people there

have quarreled with their neighbors –

and moved.”

What Lewis is describing is

how he envisions hell.

Yes, hell.

Not the hell we’re used to imagining,

the hell of “fire and devils and

all sorts of interesting people sizzling on grids,

but a town like any other town,”

except there is no community,

no neighbors,

a place utterly devoid of love,  

love in all its forms.

It is place where there murder everyday;

not murder done with guns or knives,

but murder in the heart,

one neighbor killing another neighbor

in their hearts,

snuffing them out as if they never existed.

How quickly we forget that

Jesus calls us to be light,

to light the world with love, God’s love—

that’s our job, yours and mine,

our job as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Our job is not to wag our fingers,

judge, condemn,

wave our Bibles as weapons

as we say testily, arrogantly,

“Don’t you know Scripture says….”

In the words of Reverend Fredrick Buechner,

“we were created to love one another

despite all the differences between us,

the way God loves us despite all our differences.

If only we could see

that the very faults we find so unbearable

in those we are one way or another at war with,

are versions of the same faults

we are blind to in our ourselves.”

If only we could see

that the faults we find in others

are nothing more than

variants on the faults they see in us—

why then we’d be neighbors!

Why then, we’d be light!

AMEN