Bible Sunday and Black History Month

 

This was shorter than usual because we were celebrating the end of Black History Month, so needed to make sure we didn't overrun too badly.  Which we didn't!

Today, we are celebrating the end of Black History month, 2023.
I hope that most of our liturgy is reflecting that, and we will have some more contributions to our celebration later on in the service.

It’s also Bible Sunday;
when I was a girl, this was celebrated during Advent, but they changed the calendar around some years ago now, so now it’s celebrated on this Sunday.
I had to learn the collect, the special prayer for the day, off by heart when I was a schoolgirl!
I used to love “help us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them….”

And it’s that which we have to do with the Scriptures, isn’t it?
Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them,
until they become part of us, part of who we are, part of our lives.
We are told to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly!

But, having said that, we do have to be aware that our reading of the Bible is always going to be flawed,
we’re always going to read it through the lens of our own prejudice,
our own experience, our own political viewpoint.
Or, if we read with the help of a daily commentary, of that commentator’s prejudice, experience, political viewpoint, and so on.

But, by and large, we want to internalise Scripture;
to let it dwell in us richly.
And I rather think the passage that [the reader] read to us earlier is one that we really need to internalise: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

Love.
Of course, there are all sorts of different kinds of love, and our English language, unusually, doesn’t have different words for the sort of love we give to our parents, our partners, our children, our friends, even strawberries or our teddy bear!
Greek does, which is helpful, and the word it uses for loving God is “agape”;
it’s not used anywhere else.
St Paul gives that wonderful definition of agape love in his letter to the Corinthians, you may remember:

“Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.”

Pretty amazing, really.
This is the sort of love that Jesus was talking about, when he told us to love God with all of our being, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.

We need to be centred on God, not on ourselves.

But how do we do that?

After all, most people manage pretty well without God, and even those of us who try to be God’s people spend vast swathes of time doing other things,
sleeping, for one, or cooking, or working….

We are, of course, still God’s people while doing all those things,
but it’s not often at the forefront of our minds!

In John’s first letter, he equates loving God with loving our neighbour,
saying, basically, you can’t have one without the other.

“Those who say, `I love God', and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars
for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen,
cannot love God whom they have not seen.
The commandment we have from him is this:
those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

But then, just to get us even more confused, he says
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,
and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.
By this we know that we love the children of God,
when we love God and obey his commandments.”

So for John, loving God and loving our neighbour,
our brothers and sisters,
are one and the same thing.
And, indeed, that God's love for us is first and foremost –
our love for God is just a response to that.

And I think he's probably right.

We love, we are told, because God first loved us!
The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

And without God, our human loves can be desperately flawed.
Parents can be overly possessive of their children, not allowing them to grow and develop in their own way;
I don’t need to tell you how often romantic love can go wrong;
and even friendship can be more about excluding another person or group of people than anything else.

But if Love is the most important commandment in the Bible, then we mustn’t exclude anybody, for whatever reason.
Not even if they hold views we find abhorrent.
It’s not always easy, of course –
how do we pray for politicians whose views we loathe?
And how easy is it to forgive, and to love, those who have rejected us for whatever reason?
I know my experience is peanuts compared to what many of you have gone through, but I was rejected by my peers at boarding-school a lot of the time, and those were not always happy years.
And even though we are all friends now, over 50 years later, I still have to bite my tongue on occasion!
Loving and forgiving those who have hurt us, or those whose views we find abhorrent, or those who have inflicted gross damage on the world –
it really isn’t easy.
And I really think it’s only through God’s help that we can.

We are, we are told, to love our neighbours as ourselves;
and sometimes that is a case of “pity the poor neighbour”.
We are often either totally self-absorbed, or we fail to value ourselves as we should.
And, there again, it’s only through God’s help we can .


Just as we can’t love God without God’s having first loved us, so we can’t love our neighbours, or ourselves, without God’s help.
It’s all one, really.
We need to allow the word of God to dwell in us richly, to allow God the Holy Spirit to indwell us;
we need to allow the Spirit to grow us and change us and teach us to love.
Amen.

The Great Commandments

 I did actually leave a little more time between the prayer at the start and launching into it than can be heard on the recording - this is because I made a nonsense of the recording and had to concatenate the prayer and the main sermon, and cut it just too fine!!!

Today is called Bible Sunday, largely because of the Collect for the Day, which, when I was young, used to be the Collect for the second Sunday in Advent, but has since been moved!

“Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:
help us so to hear them,
to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them
that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,

help us so to hear them,
to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them
that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,

we may embrace and for ever hold fast the hope of everlasting life,” and so on.

I had to learn it off by heart as a schoolgirl!

I wonder, if you were asked,
what you would think was the most important rule in the Bible?
Some people would be horrified at the thought that any one rule could be more important than another,
as they would say that all the Bible is the inspired Word of God and we need to obey all of it –
and then they don’t, being perfectly happy to wear polycotton clothes or eat bacon and oysters.
Other people would pounce on their own pet hate, finding justification for it somewhere in the Bible, even if it is a bit of a stretch –
gay marriage, for instance,
or abortion,
or divorce,
Sunday trading or sex before marriage.

Still others would try to use the Bible to justify their political worldview, whether far right, far left, or somewhere in between.
Or to place perhaps undue emphasis on social justice,
or homelessness, or poverty.
But in our Gospel reading, when Jesus was asked what the most important rule in the Bible was, he replied that it was to love God, one’s neighbour, and oneself.
Love, for Jesus, was the most important thing.

Now, you know as well as I do that you’re apt to find whatever you look for in the Bible.
If you want to find a picture of God as determined to send people to hell at all costs, and only grudgingly accepting those who trust Jesus,
then it’s easy enough to find that.
If, on the other hand, you want to find a God who moves heaven and earth to save people, any excuse will do not to condemn someone,
then it’s easy enough to find that, too.
We have to accept that our reading of the Bible is always going to be flawed, we’re always going to read it through the lens of our own prejudice, our own experience, our own political viewpoint.
Or, if we read with the help of a daily commentary,
of that commentator’s prejudice, experience, political viewpoint, and so on.

But Jesus said that the greatest commandment is love.
Love God, love your neighbour, love yourself. Anything else is subordinate to that.

So what is he talking about, and how do we do it?
Our English language lets us down here, unusually.
Normally, as it has both Latin and German roots,
we have several synonyms for most words, words that mean the same thing, like illness, sickness and disease,
to name the one that is on top of most people’s minds just now.
But when it comes to love, it lets us down,
as we only have the one word that has to cover an awful lot of meanings,
from loving God down to loving cheese on toast,
including loving
our families,
our friends,
our pets,
our old teddy-bear,
our hobbies
and the person we're in love with!

In Greece they managed better, and had several different words!
There is “storge”, or affection,
the kind of love you feel for your child or your parents
then there is “eros”,
which is romantic love
“philia”, which is friendship,
and “agape”, which is divine love,
and this is the word that is used in this passage,
and is actually only found in the New Testament.

It is also, as you may or may not know, the word that St Paul used in that lovely chapter in 1 Corinthians,
when he talks of the nature of that sort of love:
“Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.”

One of the interesting things is that when Jesus reinstates St Peter after he has denied him, you remember, by the lakeside,
when he says to him “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
he uses the word “agape”.
Peter can’t quite manage that, so he, when he replies
“Lord, you know that I love you”,
he uses the word “philia”
in other words, “Lord, you know I’m your friend”.
Then when Jesus again asks him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”,
he again uses the word “agape”,
and Peter again replies using the word “Philia”.

And then the third time, Jesus himself uses the word “philia” –
which is why Simon Peter was so hurt.
He’s already said twice that he is Jesus’ friend,
why does he have to say it a third time?

Simon Peter found that committing himself to agape love,
to God’s love,
was pretty much impossible.
I’m not surprised, are you?

Let’s look at it again:
“Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.”

This is the sort of love that Jesus was talking about, when he told us to love God with all of our being, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.
We need to be centred on God, not on ourselves.

But how do we do that?
After all, most people manage pretty well without God, and even those of us who try to be God’s people spend vast swathes of time doing other things,
sleeping, for one, or cooking, or working….
We are, of course, still God’s people while doing all those things,
but it’s not often at the forefront of our minds!

Jesus said we need to love God, our neighbour and ourselves.
St John equates loving God with loving our neighbour,
saying, basically, you can’t have one without the other.
“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God
everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
God's love was revealed among us in this way:
God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us
and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”

And a bit later on, he says
“Those who say, `I love God', and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars
for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen,
cannot love God whom they have not seen.
The commandment we have from him is this:
those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

But then, just to get us even more confused, he says
­“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,
and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.
By this we know that we love the children of God,
when we love God and obey his commandments.”

So for John, loving God and loving our neighbour,
our brothers and sisters,
are one and the same thing.

And, indeed, that God's love for us is first and foremost –
our love for God is just a response to that.

And I think he's probably right.
But it's not always easy, is it?

Again, I dare say we would find it easier if we were more aligned with God.
The trouble is, quite apart from anything else,
our human loves can be so desperately flawed.

You might think that there is nothing more wonderful than the love between parents and children
but how easily that love can turn into wanting to dominate the child,
to dictate how they should live,
what they should do,
which university they should attend;
which career they should follow;
and so on, often up to and including the type of person they would like them to marry….

And I don’t need to spell out just how easily romantic love can go wrong,
do I?

As for friendship, you would have thought it would be difficult for that to go wrong.
People tend to be friends because of shared interests
Robert and I have a great many very dear friends with whom we would not otherwise have anything in common, apart from our love of skating.
That is the thing that we are friends about.

But sometimes friendship can be more about excluding the other person, not including them.
Particularly among children, of course, but it can happen among adults.

Sadly, we see it a lot in the churches –
we exclude those who, perhaps, are not of the same denomination as we are, or don’t worship God in quite the same way.
Or perhaps we are Evangelical and they are not, or vice versa, so we tend to be sniffy about their way of being a Christian, and exclude them.

As I said at the beginning, we all read the Bible through the lens of our own prejudices,
and we are apt to exclude those who don’t read it quite the same way we do.

But if Love is the most important commandment in the Bible, then we mustn’t exclude anybody, for whatever reason.  Not even if they hold views we find abhorrent.

I don’t know about you, but I found it really difficult when Donald Trump was taken ill with Covid-19 the other week –
how do you pray for someone you are required to love,
but whose policies and values you really don’t like?
In the end, I just said “Oh well, God, you sort it out!”
because it was far too difficult to pray the way I knew I ought….
I sometimes have to resort to that when it comes to praying for our own Government, too!

We are told the most important thing is to love God, our neighbour and ourselves.
Now loving ourselves is, very often, the most difficult bit.
It's all too easy to have the wrong kind of self-love,
the kind that says “Me, me, me” all the time and demands its own way –
the absolute opposite, in fact, of the love that St Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians.
You can't love your neighbour –
or God, either, for that matter –
if you are full of that sort of self-love.

But then there is the equal and opposite problem –
we don't value ourselves enough.
We don't really like ourselves, we have a big problem with self-image,
we are not what the French call “comfortable in our own skins”.

And often it is the people who appear most self-absorbed,
most unable to love others,
who are the most wounded inside,
and who are totally not comfortable with themselves.
And again, it is only through the love of God,
and by the power of the Holy Spirit,
that we can be made whole,
and thus enabled to love ourselves and other people, as we should.

So really, it's all one –
we love, because God first loved us
we can't love God without also loving our neighbours
we can't love our neighbours unless we love ourselves –
or, at the very least, have a healthy self-image,
which amounts to the same thing
and we can't love ourselves unless we are aware that God loves us!

So the important thing, as it always is,
is to be open to God's love more and more
to continue to be God's person
and to continue to be open to be being made more and more the person God designed us to be.
To be open to a different interpretation of the Bible to the one we grew up with.
To know that if we get love right, the rest will fall into place.
To know that be fully human is to be fully God's person.
Amen.