Overivew
The greatest commandment is “Love the Lord our God with Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength AND to Love our Neighbors as We Love Ourselves.” This command is two parts, not two separate commands. We have to love God and love others. It’s both/and.
Loving God is something I think we understand. We think about our relationship with God a lot, and we engage our understanding of the Divine often weekly. We worship. We pray. We lean towards God and think heavily about our engagement with the Divine.
Where the rub comes is how often, or how little, we think about neighborliness. We are called to love our neighbors just like we love God. Full stop. No exceptions. No addendums. We are to love our neighbors. All of them. Our global neighbors. Our cantankerous neighbors. Our sick and wounded neighbors. Our confused and misguided neighbors. We’re to love all of them. Period.
To say loving our neighbors is revolutionary is an understatement. To say it is easily done is nice yet naive. Loving our neighbors takes work, self-examination, and paying attention to explicit and implicit biases we carry.
Neighborliness means we see others for who they are and love them for that version of themselves. It even means we let, what spiritual masterclass teacher Marjorie Thompson says, “the stranger remain strange.”
Practicing this greatest commandment only strengthens our faith and example in the world. And the only way to do this well is by loving our neighbors well.
January 3 | John 1:10-18 | All Our Neighbors
To begin this sermon series, we need a philosophical framework for what it means to be a child of God. The Prologue to John offers this in spades. We will see that all of God’s children include all the children of the world. This means we are to extend love to every single person in this world. To love less is to miss the Greatest Commandment.
January 10 | Matthew 2:1-12 | Our Global Neighbors
Jesus is born! Magi come from the East bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. To dismiss these travelers would be to dismiss the moment the world-stage declares Jesus as the rightful king. The only way this moment could have happened is for Mary and Joseph to not be afraid of the strangers. They opened their soul to their global neighbors.
January 17 | John 1:43-51 | Our Cantankerous Neighbors
Loving the cantankerous souls of the world is challenging. It may need to be said that loving others doesn’t mean we have to be in constant relationship with them. Instead, loving our neighbors means we genuinely wish them well. In John 1, Jesus calls disciples and not all of them have the most open spirit. Philip takes convincing. He’s hard-hearted. But through love, relationships change.
January 24 | Mark 1:29-39 | Our Sick Neighbors
In the gospels, Jesus heals the sick constantly. There are a lot of people sick. So much so that it becomes a priority of ministry for Jesus and the disciples. Nothing has changed today. Sickness is a part of life. Being neighborly means creating the space necessary to see who is ill and showing up and offering healing. This happens in Mark 1 and can/should still happen today.
January 31 | Mark 2:1-11 | Our Wounded Neighbors
Most everyone we meet is walking wounded. We carry deep-pitted scars in our souls that affects the way we walk and engage others in the world. Followers of Christ must be able to see those around us who are wounded both emotionally and physically. And we need to do what the characters in Mark 2 do, carry those people to Jesus.
February 7 | Mark 3:22-30 | Our Confused Neighbors
Mark 3 contains some of the harshest language in all the gospels. Jesus is called names by the religious leaders. Jesus returns the favor by offering parables that are confusing and biting. The back and forth ends with anxiety, yelling, large crowds gathering, and a call for those confused in the world to seek forgiveness, for it will be granted unto us all. There are people around us who hate us for being who are. Even those people need to be loved and reminded that there’s space for even them to be forgiven.
February 14 | Mark 9:2-9 | Our Sweet but Misguided Neighbors
Today is known as Transfiguration Sunday. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up to a mountain and they see Jesus transform before God, Elijah, and Moses. Immediately Peter wants to start talking and build an alter. God steps in and noticeably changes the energy of the discussion. Peter is being sweet, but he’s misguided. Sometimes there are those people like us too. They have a good heart, but they don’t have all the facts. Even these people need to be loved.