Sunday, October 25, 2020

Stretch Goals

Matthew 24:34-46

Do you remember the “WWJD” fad of the 1990s when those four letters suddenly appeared on everything? There were t-shirts, hats, socks, pens, teddy bears…. and mostly bracelets.  Sports stars and celebrities wore WWJD bracelets, and so did teens all over the country.


Committed Christians and vague theists alike wore – and asked – the question: “What Would Jesus Do?”

And today, we hear the answer, because the Pharisees also want to know: Jesus, what’s the most important commandment to do?


Jesus doesn’t hesitate: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else depends on this.


What Jesus would do, it seems – what Jesus would have us do, too – is to love God. Which we cannot do without loving those whom God loves. Our neighbors – all God’s people. 


And Jesus isn’t talking about love as a feeling, but love as concrete, practical action. 

Like showing up and being fully present. That matters in marriage and in church and in kids’ soccer games. 

Speaking up for who you love, or what you love. Or staying silent to make space for who and what you love. That matters in friendships and faith and “water-cooler” conversations and official meetings. 

Putting muscle and time and investment into what matters – that’s love in gardens and the messy details of surgical recovery and in buildings that house family and create community.


We know that’s love, because we can feel the lack of love when someone doesn’t show up for, speak up for, or invest in us.

And we know it’s love because when we show up and speak up and invest in our spouses, children, siblings, parents, friends, it not only expresses, but increases our love for one another.


And Jesus describes love as behavior that comes with benchmarks, just like all those business consultants tell you about making your goals practical. Love God with all of your heart, your soul, and your mind. It’s a 100% benchmark.  And love your neighbor as yourself. That’s a measurement we carry everywhere we go: our selves.


Jesus’s great commandments are practical, measurable, and simple.

But not always easy.


To love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind; to love our neighbors as ourselves – these are stretch goals even for the saints. Many of the figures of faith that we look up to – from Paul to Mother Teresa and hundreds in between – have documented their sense of how far they still have to go in the love of God and neighbor.  So it’s reasonable for you and me to expect ourselves to have to stretch and grow, all our lives long.


The life of faith is not what happens when we have achieved 100% love of God and neighbor, it’s what happens as we practice, as we stretch, toward those goals. The life of faith, the keeping of the commandments, is always the stretching toward that all-encompassing love. 


That’s the whole story of spiritual growth that we’ve been talking about since we began the Renewal Works process nearly two years ago – an ongoing story of steps and exercises and reaching out a little further: small actions, things we do that shape us into the love of God, given and received and shared.


The Consecration Sunday approach to stewardship that we have been following for a few years is one of those exercises that helps us grow toward loving God with all we are, and experiencing God’s all-encompassing love for us. It’s about always taking one more step in our relationship with God, not standing still. Some of us will be stretched, each year, at the same amount of giving we chose before; some of us need to choose a new number – higher or sometimes lower – that reflects what it means to stretch toward God’s love among the changes in our world and selves. In every case, it’s a matter of making our giving decisions be about what will help us show up, speak up, and invest in the love of God. 


The same thing applies to all the other things we do, the other actions that help us grow in the love of God and neighbor. For some of us, donating money or canned goods to a feeding program is a stretch that helps us learn to love our neighbors. Others – or the same us, at a different time – will need to stretch into cooking for a feeding program or helping write new laws that make it harder for folks working full time to go hungry, putting muscle and time into practicing God-love.  For others – or at other times – we need to stretch by sitting down at the table for the soup kitchen meal as equals, loving our neighbors by the kind of showing up and listening that help us experience our neighbors as ourselves, with no distinction between us. 


Those same patterns of practicing and stretching, of love showing up, speaking up, and digging in apply to our prayer life, too. Is it a stretch to show up for a little more Bible reading every day? To speak up and ask someone else about their faith; to step back and listen carefully? Or is your stretch toward the all-encompassing love of God about putting muscle into what you’ve been praying for?


And the great commandments don’t stop there. They apply to our lives in things that may seem to have little to do with our faith.

The direction to love God one hundred percent and our neighbors as ourselves can be applied practically to help us make decisions about questions as different as whether to travel for Thanksgiving or to open a new business. 

The standards of love of God and neighbor can help us untangle knots as tight and messy as the partisan divisions of our country. When we’re focused on the love of God there’s a lot of common ground on which to love the neighbors whose votes and voices challenge our own. 
Applied one challenge at a time, the all-encompassing love of God and all God’s people can manage the frustrations and fears of this ongoing pandemic.


To love God and neighbor with all of our selves will always stretch us. 

It is not easy, but it is essential.

And we do not do it alone. 


By chance or by design, when we pray the Collect for this Sunday – the prayer of the day for the Episcopal Church – we ask God to make us love these commandments. We turn to God to fill us with the love, desire and longing to do as God directs; we rely on God to create in us the love of God’s commandments which brings us to the fulfillment of all God’s promises. 

The love we are commanded to share is not something we create ourselves. It is rooted in and grown from God’s love and care for us.


Love God. Love God’s people. Everything else depends on this.
Simple and stretching. Practical and essential.

We live our way into the love of God and God’s people, action by action, day by day, because first and always, we have been loved by God.

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