"Distracted by Love," a sermon by Dr. Anthony D. Baker, Interim Lecturer in Theology, given on October 25, 2005, in Christ Chapel

Pentecost 23

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Kierkegaard said that by commanding us “to love our neighbor,” the gospel makes love into a duty that lifts real love out from the messy ebb and flow of human feelings like erotic desire and friendship, so that our love can be pure and unchanging and beyond all preferential attachments. A truly holy love is above fickle affiliations.[1] Kierkegaard said this, and I think he’s wrong.

What’s more, I think this because of Saint Paul. In the first letter to the Thessalonians we get a delightful image of him distracted into a hopeless mix of metaphors by his love for the long-suffering believers of Thessolonica. He’s trying to remind them about their chief duty, to continue to reject all idols and serve the living and true God. He’s trying to remind them to continue waiting for the return of the risen Christ — to continue to gather under the sign of the Holy Spirit; when he suddenly gets sidetracked by how much he loves them.

“We have cared for you so gently, like a nurse — no like a mother”; in the next verses he’ll say, “we think of you as brothers and sisters; I’ve treated you like a father treats his own children; to be separated from you makes us like orphans who are weeping for lost parents.”

Paul doesn’t write this way to everyone. Maybe he’s letting his preferential attachment to this congregation get in the way of his higher calling. What would the Corinthians say if they heard how he talks to the Thessalonians? Would 2 Thessalonians be jealous if it could read 1 Thessalonians?

In this passage where he is distracted by love, I think we’re seeing Paul the theologian morphing into Paul the Icon. His desperation to be with them in the midst of their sufferings is battling for space with his desperation to remind them to love the God who remains faithful to them.

But there is already a desperation about the commandment to love God when it follows immediately after the Shema in the Old Testament.

“Hear oh Israel, the Lord your 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 might. 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. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)

I think Israel was meant to remember that one. But why the urgency? Why the doorposts and the foreheads?

The tribes here are heading into the Land of Canaan, where there are competing gods. And they will be tempted time and time again to complement their worship of the God of Abraham with other names, other rituals, other sacred objects. For those who know the name of the One God, any effort to worship this God short of turning one’s soul inside out in passion is idolatry, because only the God of Israel is life. If Israel forgets to love God, then Israel is lost; but here’s the rub: the rest of the world will be lost too — because it is through this covenant that all the nations will be blessed. This awareness is already emerging in today’s passage from Exodus: I am also the God of the “resident alien” in your midst.

So that’s the reason for the desperately excessive plea to remember in Deuteronomy.

And it’s this great irony built into Torah that Jesus helpfully points out to the Pharisees: If the Spirit of Israel’s God is Life for the World, then only by refusing to stop loving their God in the midst of the competing spirits of Canaan can they really love their neighbors. And to refuse to love God would be to refuse to love neighbors. Israel can assimilate to, mimic, and loot her neighbors’ rituals. But to do that is to refuse to love them, because love comes from God — the God of Israel.

When Christ responds to the Pharisees with these citations, he’s quite clear here about the order of the commandments: there can be no more confusing the commandments to love neighbors and to love God for him than there can be in the Law. The first is the one we bind on our foreheads, write on our doorposts. The second is like it. Homoia — not the same, but a variation on the melody. In the commandment to love our neighbors, he’s not offering up a “principle of love” that could be applied to multiple religious cultures and contexts. He’s not boiling the gospel down to a basic practical application, “be loving people.” Like the Law before him, he’s saying that the second is intrinsically related to the first. Love your neighbor, for Christ, means “When you love the Lord your God with all your soul, do this for the resident alien and the one nearby as much as you do it for yourself.”

This is also the impassioned plea that echoes in Paul’s longing for the Thessalonians: “I came to preach to you the gospel, and now I’m giving you my very self. I planned to raise you up like a nurse, but now I’m weeping over you like a mother.”[2] Why? Because his love for God drove him to preach the risen Christ in the far reaches of the empire, and then, quite by accident, he found himself loving his neighbor as himself. The Love of God is transforming. It will overwhelm you, and remake you in the image of supreme love itself. It will shake you, like Paul, right down to the point of verbal incoherence. But . . . not love in the abstract: Paul doesn’t say, “I love you, so don’t get hurt, whatever you do.” He says, “God’s spirit will turn your sufferings to joy.” In other words: I love you so much that I’m calling you to Love the Lord your God in spite of it all.

That’s why I say that Paul has turned into an icon here. He is performing both of the great commandments in his passionate attachment to the Thessalonians. He longs only to “mother” them: to feed them on faith in God, hope in Christ, joy in the Spirit. He loves them so desperately that he can’t bear to think of them as anything but lovers of the One God. In allowing us this rare peak at his feminine side, he has become both commandments at once: The stubborn and persistent love of God that is finally the only true love of neighbor.

And we can be imitators of Saint Paul[3]: the world desperately needs us to name its one true God. It will scream and wail, it will bite, and it may kill us. But if we truly love our neighbors, how can we refuse this one mitzvah that is the greatest of all: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind? Write that down, trim it into your hedges, tattoo it backwards on your neck so that you’ll see it as soon as you look in the mirror every morning. Come into the sacred space of worship practically raging to call out the name of our beloved God who is the only hope for the world. The moment is at hand, the world leans in to hear: will they confess their love for God, or will they come up short, and settle for an idol?

I conclude today with two questions:

Do you love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind? Does the name of Israel’s God decorate your forehead and doorpost, do you prefer, above and beyond all your other names and identities, to call yourself by the name of the Resurrected Christ?

And the second is like it: Do you love your neighbor as yourself? This is not an extra duty that we should add on to the first, and not a calling on us to become a pure beam of unseeing and undifferentiating love. It’s certainly not the “secret core” of the gospel. It’s a variation on the theme. A different way of asking the same question. It is simply asking this: do you love the person nearest to you as well as the resident alien in your midst so desperately that you could not possibly tolerate the thought of him or her not worshiping the risen Christ — anymore than you could tolerate giving up your own faith?

This is the kind of treacherous icon of love into which we risk being transformed, when we set out to love the Lord our God. Lovers who could never be mistaken for the hollow clash of a gong or cymbal. Lovers who wear their souls inside out, desperate to lose themselves and their neighbors in that “reckless raging fury that we call the love of God.”[4]

Dear friends, love is from God; therefore let us love one another. Amen.

Anthony D. Baker

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[1] Works of Love.

[2] Augustine notes the increasing intensity of this passions when Paul shifts from nurse to a nurse caring for her own children. Sermon 23.3.

[3] See 1:6

[4] A lyric from the late Rich Mullins’s song, “The Love of God.”