Pastor Darren: The United Methodist Church has come together, our bishops, and they have put together what they're calling a guiding vision for our denomination right, our brand of Christianity.
Pastor Darren: They're putting together a guiding vision for where we're headed as a denomination going forward.
Pastor Darren: And so today, well, I can tell you it's three things.
Pastor Darren: It's love boldly, serve joyfully and lead courageously, which I thought was pretty good.
Pastor Darren: They've even got a little video.
Pastor Darren: Maybe we'll send it out in the email this week.
Pastor Darren: I thought I'm going to do a sermon series on the three and we'll have a little time to think about.
Pastor Darren: Well, who are we United Methodists these days?
Pastor Darren: So we start with loving boldly.
Pastor Darren: And our bishops, they picked this passage from the Gospel of Matthew.
Pastor Darren: It's chapter 22, verses 34 to 46.
Pastor Darren: And a lot of our gospel passages.
Pastor Darren: They are conversations between people like the Pharisees those who are running the church of the day and Jesus, and they're debating, to a certain extent, what they are supposed to be doing.
Pastor Darren: They're debating theology about who God is, and the Pharisees.
Pastor Darren: They ask Jesus a fairly straightforward question what is the greatest commandment?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: And most of us know the commandments being the 10 commandments from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible.
Pastor Darren: Does anybody here have their favorite commandment?
Pastor Darren: What's your favorite commandment?
Pastor Darren: Thou shalt not steal, all right.
Pastor Darren: So not a big fan of Ten Commandment group.
Pastor Darren: Okay, noted, noted, you take or leave of Ten Commandment group.
Pastor Darren: Okay, noted, noted, you take or leave the Ten Commandments, all right, very good.
Pastor Darren: Well, jesus, he not only has one, he actually offers two.
Pastor Darren: And in some ways a lot of folks have summarized all of the Ten Commandments into these two, that the first one in many ways summarizes the first five commandments and then the second of his two greatest commandments kind of summarizes the back half.
Pastor Darren: So in the first half we're talking about our relationship with God, in the back half of the commandments we're talking about a relationship with each other.
Pastor Darren: So it comes down to these two things for Jesus love God and love neighbor.
Pastor Darren: I might've showed you this before.
Pastor Darren: I had somebody pointed out that for us Christians we're all about loving God and loving neighbor, that our cross itself is sort of a metaphor for how we understand our lives.
Pastor Darren: We love God, our upward relationship, and we love neighbor, our relationships with each other.
Pastor Darren: That was his answer.
Pastor Darren: It's a fairly commonly agreed to answer.
Pastor Darren: It is a belief, a theology that most people generally agree with, and even in biblical times, even post-biblical times there was general agreement.
Pastor Darren: In fact, many people of faith would use this as if you're really going to barrel down the Christian faith, or even faith more broadly, into a statement.
Pastor Darren: It might be that Professor Nicholas Shazer he's at Malacaster College and he works in workingpreachercom.
Pastor Darren: That's a website I really like.
Pastor Darren: He says Jewish sages who lived in Jesus's era described these biblical verses in very similar ways.
Pastor Darren: For instance, according to the Jerusalem Talmud, it'd be around the fourth century in the common era, or AD as we have commonly understood it.
Pastor Darren: Rabbi Akiva, who was born around 50 years after Jesus, says that the Levitical command to love your neighbor as yourself is the greatest principle of the Torah.
Pastor Darren: So this is right.
Pastor Darren: After Jesus' life, they're already claiming this as an important part of the teachings.
Pastor Darren: Another famous story preserved in the Babylonian Talmud this would be 600 CE, so 600 years after Christ was living states that the renowned first century sage Hillel once paraphrased Leviticus 19.18 for a non-Jew by saying whatever is hateful to you, do not do it to your neighbor.
Pastor Darren: That is all the Torah.
Pastor Darren: The rest is commentary.
Pastor Darren: Go study.
Pastor Darren: I like that last bit.
Pastor Darren: Go study.
Pastor Darren: I've told you what is Now.
Pastor Darren: Go figure it out, go live it.
Pastor Darren: Make it real.
Pastor Darren: In Matthew, jesus couples the same verse with Deuteronomy 6.5 and asserts on these two commandments, hang all the Torah and the prophets.
Pastor Darren: Hopefully you're understanding a significant verse, a significant teaching, so much so that for many this barrels down what it means to live a life of faith, and not just for Christians, but in the Judaic tradition as well.
Pastor Darren: Love God, love neighbor, love the lawnmower it's those three things.
Pastor Darren: It can be a provocative message, right I?
Pastor Darren: We often ask ourselves well, who's my neighbor then?
Pastor Darren: Which is a complicated question, isn't it?
Pastor Darren: Amidst our current focus as a nation, trying to separate certain parts of the community, it forces us Christians to be asking ourselves okay, maybe there's some economic reason we're doing this, but then again, my faith says love my neighbor.
Pastor Darren: Are they my neighbor?
Pastor Darren: What makes them not so?
Pastor Darren: If they aren't, is it citizenship?
Pastor Darren: Citizenship?
Pastor Darren: Or is it possible that when Jesus says this, love God, love neighbor, he really only meant citizens?
Pastor Darren: Or maybe he only meant Christians, in which case we ask another level of question what would it mean even to love them?
Pastor Darren: What would it mean if they are of the body or even outside of the body?
Pastor Darren: Then, what is Jesus asking us to do?
Pastor Darren: What does that love look like.
Pastor Darren: Does it mean we need to let people stay?
Pastor Darren: It's a complex question, isn't it?
Pastor Darren: It's one we wrestle with.
Pastor Darren: So after he has this conversation, then Jesus, he asks his own question.
Pastor Darren: He asks of these Pharisees whose son is, or at the time, will be, the Messiah?
Pastor Darren: Provocative question, right, for many, jesus understands himself and others understand him as the Messiah.
Pastor Darren: So when he asks the Pharisees who's the Messiah it's an interesting question.
Pastor Darren: Their answer is the son of David.
Pastor Darren: But that's sort of problematic too because, as they all would know, david refers to the Messiah as being at the right hand of God.
Pastor Darren: This would be in a psalm written before Jesus came to take body in this world, on this earth.
Pastor Darren: So now you have this question well, who's the son then, if Jesus was already in existence, right hand of God pre-David, but also is the son of David?
Pastor Darren: So some of you who are wrestling with that last bit, that's kind of the overview and it was just a really interesting question that Jesus poses to them and overall it's an interesting conversation.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes those conversations with Jesus and the Pharisees they get a little contentious and you can tell they're working at things.
Pastor Darren: But this one felt like a real honest conversation about theology, but it brings us back to the meat of the passage today.
Pastor Darren: What is love?
Pastor Darren: Baby, don't hurt me.
Pastor Darren: What is love?
Pastor Darren: That was for all the Gen Xers, I don't know, did anybody?
Pastor Darren: I apologize for my music reference, but hey, I'm a Gen Xer and we don't get a lot of pub.
Pastor Darren: What is love, and what does it mean?
Pastor Darren: To love boldly, I mean, we can assume it means in the scriptural sense, right, our bishops chose this.
Pastor Darren: So what are we to make of this love?
Pastor Darren: You know, when we think of love, just hearing it in our common culture and outside of the church, we often think on this range from romantic to kind of silly.
Pastor Darren: Right, we hear of love out of a faith context and we're thinking well, ross and Rachel, should they have been together or not?
Pastor Darren: Sam and Diane, right, did they fit?
Pastor Darren: What was it?
Pastor Darren: Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell?
Pastor Darren: I'm trying to hit all the generations here, right.
Pastor Darren: Right, I mean.
Pastor Darren: But that's when we think love, right, we don't automatically go to agape.
Pastor Darren: Godly love, right, we think love, oh, yeah, that's when you're 22 and you're oh, whatever, this and that and the other thing, and you know it's this thing that's really meaningful and yet we can kind of compartmentalize it.
Pastor Darren: You know, that's just romantic things, the stuff of movies and TV.
Pastor Darren: We don't generally think of agape love and maybe that's why when we hear this phrase from Jesus, love God, love, neighbor we have trouble kind of putting it first, neighbor.
Pastor Darren: We have trouble kind of putting it first, putting it as the lead of our lives, because it makes us feel a little vulnerable.
Pastor Darren: Wait a minute, I'm going to love, I'm going to give my heart, I'm going to make myself vulnerable to others.
Pastor Darren: How am I ever going to succeed, how am I going to flourish in this world if I do something like that?
Pastor Darren: I can't do it unless he's going to do it or she's going to do it.
Pastor Darren: So I thought today it might be helpful for us to actually reflect on what we think agape love is Right and I'm going would this be old school?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, on what we think agape love is right and I'm going would this be old school?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, right, here I'm going old school.
Pastor Darren: I've got an easel, I've got here some paper, right, we're gonna get this organized, we're gonna get it decided.
Pastor Darren: See, and you don't think there's like choreography involved in this at all.
Pastor Darren: But no, paul and I, we had to work together on this.
Pastor Darren: We decided that this was a good spot for this, so all my brothers and sisters at home can make sure they see it.
Pastor Darren: I would like to know from you, right here today, what do we think agape love is, and don't feel like you've got to embrace it completely.
Pastor Darren: Just give me some words.
Pastor Darren: What is agape love?
Pastor Darren: When you think of agape love, just throw them out there, I'm ready to go.
Pastor Darren: Kindness, kindness, respect, respect, respect, respect.
Pastor Darren: Maybe I should have done two of these.
Pastor Darren: Commitment oh, I like that.
Pastor Darren: Grace, amen.
Pastor Darren: I got a Methodist out there somewhere.
Pastor Darren: Giving of oneself, giving of oneself I heard intentional Compassion, all right.
Pastor Darren: Empathy it's a lot of stuff, see, maybe this is why it's hard.
Pastor Darren: I heard one over here, but I didn't make it out.
Pastor Darren: Unconditional All right, all right, we got it figured out.
Pastor Darren: Unconditional forgiving, empowering I like that too.
Pastor Darren: We often don't think about that.
Pastor Darren: Does my love for you empower you?
Pastor Darren: Pretty good list, service, service, service, service.
Pastor Darren: I did alright, we got a pretty good list.
Pastor Darren: Alright, we're doing alright here.
Pastor Darren: I like this.
Pastor Darren: That is a good list.
Pastor Darren: Agape love isn't quite that unfamiliar to us Now.
Pastor Darren: Some of you have been here.
Pastor Darren: Well, many of you have been here long enough to remember Brother Walt when he was here and he had his mantra right.
Pastor Darren: What was the mantra?
Pastor Darren: Oh, if I say it, you're going to go.
Pastor Darren: Oh yeah, let love lead.
Pastor Darren: Right, let love lead, amen to that.
Pastor Darren: Right, let love lead.
Pastor Darren: Now, we had poster up.
Pastor Darren: It was on a website, it was in the emails.
Pastor Darren: You know, it's a good phrase, it's a good mantra, it's a good motto.
Pastor Darren: Now we took it down because we're thinking, all right, new guy, we probably ought to do something different.
Pastor Darren: But on a day like this it does make me think.
Pastor Darren: You know, should we be bringing it back?
Pastor Darren: Are we really good at letting love lead, which really love God, love neighbor.
Pastor Darren: That's kind of what that means.
Pastor Darren: It's been a difficult week for this scripture, am I right?
Pastor Darren: This kind of passage for this scripture?
Pastor Darren: Am I right?
Pastor Darren: This kind of passage?
Pastor Darren: We had a big event this week to follow other big events, a couple big events a couple weeks ago, as I mentioned in prayer time 358 big events since Jan 1 in our country, and it hits us this one this week right in our polarized weak spot.
Pastor Darren: See, you guys think my job is easy.
Pastor Darren: I've got to come up here on Sunday.
Pastor Darren: I've got to preach something when this happens In this society where we have committed and entrenched, we're not only on two different sides, but we're trying to figure out how to undermine, how to take the legs out, how to take each other out, a little difficult to preach in.
Pastor Darren: I'm just going to say it.
Pastor Darren: So we have a young man.
Pastor Darren: He was killed and he's mourned by many.
Pastor Darren: He's seen as this conservative activist who was able to ignite passion in young people, especially young white men.
Pastor Darren: He really was getting them organized and it's a time where young white men are nervous a little bit.
Pastor Darren: They're nervous.
Pastor Darren: You know, america has been a place where white men had a lot of say and as it evens out, it makes young white men get nervous, get anxious.
Pastor Darren: At the same time, in doing his activism, he said a lot of things that were very polarizing, super aggressive things said about pretty much every non-white culture and about women.
Pastor Darren: These are things that, if they had been said about us or about our own families, we would be led to be scared, to feel unsafe about the society around us, about the people around us, worried that we might be oppressed, we might be harassed, worried that we might be oppressed, we might be harassed, we might even be killed at some point.
Pastor Darren: That is the environment that we're living in, so I don't want to pick a side.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to let you all live into your own beliefs and how you understand this situation, but what's clear to me is that the killing is wrong.
Pastor Darren: I think that's an obvious thing to say.
Pastor Darren: Not only is it wrong, but we really can't afford for people to be getting killed for their opinions, any more than we can afford people being oppressed or even killed for their skin color, for their gender, for their sexual identity.
Pastor Darren: We can't live as a society where that kind of jeopardy, that kind of violence, is a reality.
Pastor Darren: It's a world that is left blind and toothless for you scriptural orientators.
Pastor Darren: This is why this morning, I'm pointing to the tone, to the way that we relate with each other and how we work through our disagreements.
Pastor Darren: You know there's a lot of philosophies, approaches, guidelines that we can put ahead of love on our list of things.
Pastor Darren: There's a lot of them.
Pastor Darren: Instead of letting love lead, we could defer to power.
Pastor Darren: Let's let the strong lead.
Pastor Darren: That's why they're there.
Pastor Darren: We could defer to money.
Pastor Darren: Let money lead.
Pastor Darren: We can let government lead.
Pastor Darren: We can let caustic words lead.
Pastor Darren: We can let destroy the other lead, we can let caustic words lead, we can let destroy the other lead, we can let division lead, we can let hate lead, we can let fear lead, we can let disengagement lead, we can let anger lead, but can we all agree, at least for this moment, on this day, that none of these actually work?
Pastor Darren: Can we all agree that none of these really bring us to any sense of justice or peace, or equity, or fairness or harmony or, most of all, love, the thing that Jesus claimed as the most important, the thing that most believers, for 2,000 years, have claimed as the most important?
Pastor Darren: I wonder if Jesus is telling us to love God and to love neighbor, not because he thought life was just a really silly sitcom where we could all be tutti frutti, silly, in love with each other and let all the flowers and the hearts grow around us.
Pastor Darren: Maybe Jesus is saying it is because it's the only thing that works in a society in which we are engaging each other daily, where decisions that we make affect everyone, not just mine.
Pastor Darren: I am not just affected, ours are not just affected.
Pastor Darren: We are all affected by our own decisions as a society, and we're in a society in which we all disagree on things.
Pastor Darren: Not only that, we're in a society, as human beings, where mistakes happen, we hurt people and it's not always intentional.
Pastor Darren: We live in a society where mortality is real.
Pastor Darren: Maybe Jesus was telling us this 2,000 years ago, because it's the only thing that really works.
Pastor Darren: Our question for today and I'll put it to this community because I know and I'm learning this community we are a heart community, we are a head community, we want to be blessings in this world.
Pastor Darren: So I put it to this community Are we ready to believe Jesus?
Pastor Darren: Are we ready to trust in that scripture, to love God and love neighbor?
Pastor Darren: Because I tell you what?
Pastor Darren: It isn't easy.
Pastor Darren: Today we have moved in our society so far from any trust in that scripture.
Pastor Darren: We've convinced each other we really need to destroy each other.
Pastor Darren: Are we ready to hold each other accountable and by holding each other accountable, I'm not talking about holding the other guy accountable, the other gal accountable.
Pastor Darren: I'm talking about holding your own folks accountable.
Pastor Darren: I'm talking about holding yourself accountable when something is said to convey that anyone else or anything that anyone else in this world is anything less than a child of God.
Pastor Darren: Are we ready to hold others account?
Pastor Darren: Are we ready to hold them to account to say hold on, we are all children of God.
Pastor Darren: We need to figure out how to live in this way, in this place, with peace, because I think that's what it's going to take.
Pastor Darren: Are we ready to accept accountability for our sense of humanity, even in the tough decisions we need to make as a society the economic decisions, the political decisions?
Pastor Darren: Are we ready to be held accountable to a sense of humanity in the way we deal with each other?
Pastor Darren: And I'll tell you what it doesn't mean nothing if we're just going to believe it.
Pastor Darren: We got to live it.
Pastor Darren: The United Methodist Church is taking on this mission to love boldly, and it will take boldness in this world for what we have allowed to come to fruition, to come to existence.
Pastor Darren: I, for one, am going to be praying for them.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to be praying for us as we seek to live out our part of that mission to love boldly, and I pray that you will too.
Pastor Darren: Amen.