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.
Love God. Love your neighbor. That’s all. As Jesus explains in this morning’s reading from Mark, there is no commandment greater than these. It seems to me that many religions and the people that follow them have lost sight of this. How much easer faith and evangelism would be if we kept returning to this?
It seems to me society is hungry for goodness. And hope. And a power bigger than the current worldly power struggles. Than leaders who claim to be anointed. All of that is irrelevant if we focus on loving God. Who cares what worldly leaders say? Who cares about darkness here and now? Or even about insidious illness in our world? In the end, love God. God is bigger than all of that, brighter than that, truer than that. Yes, cruddy things happen here and now. Stupid people say stupid things, and horrible diseases ravage loved ones. And all the while, a loving, all-merciful God is with us. Love God. God’s bigger than all of that.
It also seems to me that society is hungry to be shown compassion by others, and to show compassion to others. People want to love and be loved. They want to see that their fellow humankind, can in fact be human-kind. People want to love and care for others. Maybe we struggle with loving all of our fellow human-kind, but we want to care. We want to love. We want to serve. When we do that, even when we struggle with loving the unlovable, we are living into God’s second commandment. Love your neighbor. God is bigger than all of the petty human-unkindness. We are each called to Love our Neighbor.
If I could do that, just keep these two commandments in front of mind and actually live like that, I wonder what my world would look like?
This morning, I’m thinking about how simple this Christianity thing is. Love God. Love your Neighbor. Easy to remember, definitely not easy to do consistently. But today, I want to start by remembering it all day, and make at least a few decisions as if this was all that mattered. Love God. Love your Neighbor. Because in the end, that’s all that really matters.
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