Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert Leo Sevensky
The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26B, November 3, 2024
Click here for an audio of the sermon
Today's gospel passage should be familiar to almost everyone
here this morning. The so-called Great Commandment discourse appears in all
three synoptic gospels, though each within a slightly different context and each
taking a slightly different direction or turn. And we hear them every year in
our Sunday Eucharist readings.
Last year we heard Matthew's rendition with its wonderful conclusion instantly recognizable to any who attended or still attend traditional language Anglican worship: “...on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Next year we will hear Luke’s version. While different from Mark only in minor details, it concludes with the lawyer or scribe who posed the initial question about the greatest commandment asking Jesus a second follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?” And that, of course, leads into what is arguably Jesus’s most memorable parable, that of the Good Samaritan with its powerful concluding advice: “Go and do likewise.”
Mark's version that we hear this morning is probably the earliest and most concise of the three. And refreshingly, the lawyer or scribe is presented as a sincere seeker after truth rather than as an adversary setting Jesus up in some kind of test or trap. Maybe we can all take heart from this. Having said this, however, I find it difficult to know what more to say about this passage that has not already been said by me or by others. Is there anything new here? Anything revolutionary? Anything transformative?
This past week saw the conclusion of The Most Reverend Michael Curry’s nine-year term as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Michael, as he was known, was a gentle pastor and a captivating preacher. He preached here in this chapel in 2017. And a friend who heard him preach in Poughkeepsie said afterwards that it was like watching a whirling dervish in the high pulpit of Christ Church, so much so that he thought the bishop might just fly right out. I can believe that. I was present at the General Convention where he was elected Presiding Bishop and remember well the excitement and the hope that were palpable. I also attended his installation at the National Cathedral in Washington DC. Again, it was a service of tremendous beauty, hope, and joy. Of course, Bp. Michael became an international celebrity for his sermon at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. He was, it is safe to say, not your usual Anglican divine; he was an heir to a tradition of enslavement and exclusion and a deep Christian spirituality that found accent and voice in his sermons here and around the world. For me, however, his legacy is summed up not in a new teaching, but in the new expression of an old one, just as Jesus himself and other rabbis did in their day. And that is his teaching: “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” This axiom or formula does not tell us what we should or should not do. But it does give us a guideline, a rule, a measure to assess ourselves, our own actions or inaction as well as the dramas of our own interior life, of our own hearts. It is, as it were, the standard, the Golden Rule, for personal, social, and political life. “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
In his living this guidance and in his fearless and unembarrassed embrace of Jesus in a church that has sometimes been reluctant to claim and own the name of its Savior and Lord, and in his work around the Beloved Community as a vision toward the Kingdom of God, Bishop Michael changed the language and heart of the Episcopal Church as one friend put it. “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
But—and maybe you knew this was coming—a caveat. We need to be careful and deliberate about what we love and how we love. St. Augustine writing 1600 years ago says: “Everybody loves; the question is, what is the object of our love? In Scripture we are not urged to stop loving, but instead to choose what we love.” Augustine is right: everybody loves. Each of us has some orienting desire which shapes our decisions, our days, our lives. For too many it is quite basic. It is the simple desire for safety, food, and housing. For many others it is the desire for power. For others financial or vocational success. Or for healthy relationships. Others perhaps hope for freedom from paralyzing fear or anxiety or depression or to be cured once and for all of one or another physical malady. Truthfully, I think many of us have several such loves, and they sometimes appear to conflict with each other. And if you are like me, you have at best only a vague awareness of what many of these are. As so the 1980 Country pop song got it right: we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and mostly because we don’t know what it is we are looking for.
What to do?
A quarter of a century ago, at a deeply complicated and low point in my life, I poured out my secret pain to a priest friend who is now a bishop in the Church of England. And in response he sent me one of the most helpful letters I have ever received. It consisted solely of a long quote from the Anglican laywoman, spiritual director and writer, Evelyn Underhill (1875 -1941) It is a prayer for wholeness :
“O Lord, penetrate those murky corners where we hide memories and tendencies on which we do not care to look, but which we will not disinter and yield freely up to you, that you may purify and transmute them: the persistent buried grudge, the half-acknowledged enmity which is still smouldering; the bitterness of that loss we have not turned into sacrifice; the private comfort we cling to; the secret fear of failure which saps our initiative and is really inverted pride; the pessimism which is an insult to your joy, Lord; we bring all these to you, and we review them with shame and penitence in your steadfast light.”
It is obviously a prayer of penitence. But it is more than that. It is a prayer for the purifying and clarification and reordering of our loves so that in the end, we might love aright, that we might love God instead of some false image that we think is God, that we might say confidently with Bp. Curry: “If it’s not about love it’s not about God” and have some degree of trust that we are not entirely deceiving ourselves. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?
Today’s passage from Mark ends: “When Jesus saw that he (the scribe) answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Dean Andrew McGowan of Yale Divinity School comments: “...the scribe, being in conversation with Jesus himself, is already next to the one whose presence embodies the reign of God. Of course others have also been that close, but have failed to see what was in front of them.”
May we be counted among those who are not far from the kingdom of God. Like the scribe, let us draw near to Jesus and find in him the full outpouring of God’s essential nature as Love itself…a love that clarifies, purifies, and reorders our own precious loves…and blesses them. May we discover that Love today in Scripture and Sacrament, in prayer and service and above all in each other. And in the mirror.
Amen.
Last year we heard Matthew's rendition with its wonderful conclusion instantly recognizable to any who attended or still attend traditional language Anglican worship: “...on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Next year we will hear Luke’s version. While different from Mark only in minor details, it concludes with the lawyer or scribe who posed the initial question about the greatest commandment asking Jesus a second follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?” And that, of course, leads into what is arguably Jesus’s most memorable parable, that of the Good Samaritan with its powerful concluding advice: “Go and do likewise.”
Mark's version that we hear this morning is probably the earliest and most concise of the three. And refreshingly, the lawyer or scribe is presented as a sincere seeker after truth rather than as an adversary setting Jesus up in some kind of test or trap. Maybe we can all take heart from this. Having said this, however, I find it difficult to know what more to say about this passage that has not already been said by me or by others. Is there anything new here? Anything revolutionary? Anything transformative?
This past week saw the conclusion of The Most Reverend Michael Curry’s nine-year term as Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Bishop Michael, as he was known, was a gentle pastor and a captivating preacher. He preached here in this chapel in 2017. And a friend who heard him preach in Poughkeepsie said afterwards that it was like watching a whirling dervish in the high pulpit of Christ Church, so much so that he thought the bishop might just fly right out. I can believe that. I was present at the General Convention where he was elected Presiding Bishop and remember well the excitement and the hope that were palpable. I also attended his installation at the National Cathedral in Washington DC. Again, it was a service of tremendous beauty, hope, and joy. Of course, Bp. Michael became an international celebrity for his sermon at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. He was, it is safe to say, not your usual Anglican divine; he was an heir to a tradition of enslavement and exclusion and a deep Christian spirituality that found accent and voice in his sermons here and around the world. For me, however, his legacy is summed up not in a new teaching, but in the new expression of an old one, just as Jesus himself and other rabbis did in their day. And that is his teaching: “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” This axiom or formula does not tell us what we should or should not do. But it does give us a guideline, a rule, a measure to assess ourselves, our own actions or inaction as well as the dramas of our own interior life, of our own hearts. It is, as it were, the standard, the Golden Rule, for personal, social, and political life. “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
In his living this guidance and in his fearless and unembarrassed embrace of Jesus in a church that has sometimes been reluctant to claim and own the name of its Savior and Lord, and in his work around the Beloved Community as a vision toward the Kingdom of God, Bishop Michael changed the language and heart of the Episcopal Church as one friend put it. “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
But—and maybe you knew this was coming—a caveat. We need to be careful and deliberate about what we love and how we love. St. Augustine writing 1600 years ago says: “Everybody loves; the question is, what is the object of our love? In Scripture we are not urged to stop loving, but instead to choose what we love.” Augustine is right: everybody loves. Each of us has some orienting desire which shapes our decisions, our days, our lives. For too many it is quite basic. It is the simple desire for safety, food, and housing. For many others it is the desire for power. For others financial or vocational success. Or for healthy relationships. Others perhaps hope for freedom from paralyzing fear or anxiety or depression or to be cured once and for all of one or another physical malady. Truthfully, I think many of us have several such loves, and they sometimes appear to conflict with each other. And if you are like me, you have at best only a vague awareness of what many of these are. As so the 1980 Country pop song got it right: we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and mostly because we don’t know what it is we are looking for.
What to do?
A quarter of a century ago, at a deeply complicated and low point in my life, I poured out my secret pain to a priest friend who is now a bishop in the Church of England. And in response he sent me one of the most helpful letters I have ever received. It consisted solely of a long quote from the Anglican laywoman, spiritual director and writer, Evelyn Underhill (1875 -1941) It is a prayer for wholeness :
“O Lord, penetrate those murky corners where we hide memories and tendencies on which we do not care to look, but which we will not disinter and yield freely up to you, that you may purify and transmute them: the persistent buried grudge, the half-acknowledged enmity which is still smouldering; the bitterness of that loss we have not turned into sacrifice; the private comfort we cling to; the secret fear of failure which saps our initiative and is really inverted pride; the pessimism which is an insult to your joy, Lord; we bring all these to you, and we review them with shame and penitence in your steadfast light.”
It is obviously a prayer of penitence. But it is more than that. It is a prayer for the purifying and clarification and reordering of our loves so that in the end, we might love aright, that we might love God instead of some false image that we think is God, that we might say confidently with Bp. Curry: “If it’s not about love it’s not about God” and have some degree of trust that we are not entirely deceiving ourselves. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?
Today’s passage from Mark ends: “When Jesus saw that he (the scribe) answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” Dean Andrew McGowan of Yale Divinity School comments: “...the scribe, being in conversation with Jesus himself, is already next to the one whose presence embodies the reign of God. Of course others have also been that close, but have failed to see what was in front of them.”
May we be counted among those who are not far from the kingdom of God. Like the scribe, let us draw near to Jesus and find in him the full outpouring of God’s essential nature as Love itself…a love that clarifies, purifies, and reorders our own precious loves…and blesses them. May we discover that Love today in Scripture and Sacrament, in prayer and service and above all in each other. And in the mirror.
Amen.
