Owing Love

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Owing Love

Scripture: Romans 13:8-14

The idea of loving our neighbours as ourselves is one of the main teachings of Jesus that the apostle Paul emphasizes in his letters. In more than one passage, he describes it as the “law of love” and repeats the teaching we find here: If we love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves then we have obeyed all the laws that matter.

You could call it an antidote to narcissism, where we deliberately don’t put ourselves first. We’re not putting ourselves last, either. Rather, we are treating other people the way we would like to be treated ourselves.

In modern terms you could call it a recipe for respectful living: actually listening to others, paying attention to them as we live in community. But, love is more than just respect.

This is a serious concept of how to live, not just some idealistic fuzzy dream. This is at the core of Christianity, at the heart of what Jesus taught: “Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbour as yourself”.

We can’t forget the loving God part for that is what puts everything into perspective. Loving God is what gives us the set of values that teaches us that loving our neighbours is good. Loving God is what reminds us that God’s creation is good and needs to be protected from climate change and other problems caused by selfish living. Loving God allows us to set our priorities.

Loving our neighbours is probably the part that challenges us most from day to day. After all, it’s other people that we argue with. It’s our neighbours who let their dog bark after bedtime. It’s our relatives who can be so frustrating over decades. It’s other people at church who just don’t seem to understand the important point we’re trying to make.

We’re going to have a really good opportunity to practise loving our neighbours as we try to develop a practical vision for the future of Knox.

Later this fall you will hear about something called “holy manners”. It’s a way for us to talk about things together that is based on this idea of loving each other, where we let other people finish what they are saying and actually pay attention, instead of spending their talking time preparing our own words.

The whole point of the upcoming stage of our visioning process – not just this coming Wednesday’s potluck, but the weeks to follow, as we unpack the ideas we generate on Wednesday – the point is to imagine the future of our Knox community and to do that, we want the creativity flowing. There’s a good chance we will come up with thoughts that don’t all work together. We may hear visions of the church that are really upsetting and others that are really attractive.

I sincerely hope we get both because if we do, it means that we’re not stuck in a rut. Our creativity can startle us into new ways of thinking. It also means that we have to have a way of hearing each other’s ideas and discussing them that doesn’t blow someone out of the water or worse, ignore them entirely.

When John Wesley developed his Wesleyan Quadrilateral – a theology for moving into the future with fresh understanding, the same theology that allowed the church to reject and work against slavery – Wesley integrated that same call to love our neighbours and he explicitly pointed out that often God’s Holy Spirit speaks most clearly through the people who are most marginalized and that we have to make a point of inviting and including the people who feel left out.

Maybe the ones who are most uncomfortable talking, the ones who expect to be ignored or overlooked, are the very ones whose voices we need to hear

That reveals a dimension of loving our neighbour that we don’t always consider: we can’t expect others to step up to the microphone the way we would; we can’t just say “they had their chance to speak” and shrug them off; we have to take that step of imagining what it is like for them to say anything at all in a meeting; and then consider how to encourage them to speak, to hear and respond to their words, opinions, and stories.

Loving our neighbours can be real work, especially if we’re not used to it.

It calls us to look beyond our desire to get what we deserve. It calls us never to look down on someone else or treat someone as an inferior. More importantly, it calls us to love each other, to respect each other as people beloved by God and to want what is best for that other person.

That doesn’t mean we can’t disagree. Disagreements are healthy in any community. They are a sign of diversity at work and they are an opportunity for us to broaden our minds and re-imagine our world.

We can do this as long as we remember what Paul says: we owe each other love; it is a debt that we can never stop paying because it is a reflection of the way God’s love for us is never-ending.

May God’s love guide us into the future and may we happily pay that love forward as we join together to imagine the future.

Amen.