By Reverend Laurie DeMott

The reason this question is the plague of every discipleship class is because an earlier question requires that they be able to recite all Ten Commandments and we spend a lot of time using mneumonic devices to help them memorize those Commandments. For those who are wondering how we do that, I teach them them to furnish a room in their imagination with items that they can associate with each commandment -- for example, a Pinocchio doll sitting on a shelf to remind them "Do not lie" and a window that looks out on their neighbor's porsche for "Do not covet". (I won't tell you the image for "Do not commit adultery" since this is a G rated sermon.) Once they have furnished the room, they can walk around it in their mind and remember the commandments associated with the objects.

The excercise is quite effective, and the kids become quite proud of their ability to rattle off the Ten Commandments in order, so it is no surprise that after all of their work, they develop a mind freeze when I ask, "What did Jesus say were the two greatest commandments?" They walk around their mental room trying to remember, "Was it the ice cream Sunday -- Keep the Sabbath holy -- or the corpse on the floor -- Do not kill?" What always confuses them is that the two commandments Jesus said are the greatest are not two of the Ten but two that he said summarize the Ten. "Those ten are important," Jesus told his followers," but if you can't remember the furnishings of your imaginary room, simply remember and live these two commandments that I will give to you now, and the ten will automatically follow."

And then Jesus said, "Love God with your whole heart, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself." If you love God and love your neighbor, you won't kill anyone, you won't lie to them, you won't worship images, and you won't even drool over the Porsche in your neigbor's driveway -- at least not so much that you forget what's really important. Not only do these two commandments summarize the more famous ten but for Jesus, they summarized everything he was trying to teach his followers. In other words, if anyone were to ask you what Christianity is all about, you wouldn't have to get into the history of the development of Trinitarian doctrine, or recite the Westminister confession, or explain the debates of the Nicence council over the substance of Christ versus the substance of God. You could answer simply, "This is what Christianity is -- Love God and love your neighbor," and Jesus would say, "Exactly. A+. Do this and you will live."

An entire religion summed up in these few words -- Love God and love your neighbor -- so simple to say and remember, yet so incredibly hard to do.

We have all loved. Love is not hard to feel. The soft sleep of a newborn baby evokes equally soft feelings of protection and care. We easily shower affection on our close friends and of course, our eyes can shine with deeply abiding love for a spouse. Love is not hard to feel especially when it is triggered by the instinctive responses of kinship or romance. The love which Jesus espoused, however, was not a love of feeling. How can you "feel" love for a stranger? How can you feel love toward a sinner? It would be inhuman to suppose that your breast could swell with love for a person who has hurt you even if they are kneeling in repentance before you. Jesus did not expect his followers to feel love for their neighbor, but he did expect us to do love, and that is where we stumble because it is hard for us to separate the two.

Some years ago, I was chatting with a woman who was very curious about my profession since she herself had been raised in a non-church family. She asked me about my beliefs and how I felt that they affected who I am and changed the way I lived. I sensed that she was honestly interested in knowing why someone would choose to live as a Christian yet as we talked, I became aware that our conversation was not making sense. It was as if somehow we were out of synch with one another. After many minutes of floundering about we discovered that the problem lay in my use of the word "love". Like any Christian, I had been liberally dosing my theology with references to love which she, with her non-church background, was interpreting as affectionate, romantic love. Having been raised in the church myself, I never stopped to think that I might need to define what I meant by Christian love.

Whenever early printers, using hand-set type, received an order to print a collection of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poems, they immediately ordered extra letters L and V for their presses. They knew that Tennyson used the word `love' so often in his poetry that the average set of type could not supply all the necessary letters. Christian presses must have a similar problem: the word love spews forth in our publications, our devotional books; it booms from our pulpits, and permeates our Sunday School curriculums; it trips off the lips of every believer confessing the core of his or her belief. We remember that it is love that Jesus lived and died for. We can speak with confidence the commandment to love. But what do we mean by it? We use the word but we rarely stop to define it.

In that conversation I had with the secular young woman, when I finally realized that we were defining love differently, I began to try to clarify what I meant by Christian love. The love that Jesus espoused, I told her, is not a feeling. To love because our hearts flutter is a natural human act. To love because we discover that we have interests we share with another is a natural inclination to friendship. Even to love because we are moved to sympathy is a natural nurturing response as can see by the outpouring of help in times of natural disaster. Jesus didn't need to die on a cross to get us to do what comes naturally to most human beings. No, the love that Jesus described doesn't depend on our feelings but on our willingness to act in a compassionate way toward another without necessarily "feeling the love, or even in spite of what we are feeling. A Christian is the one who continues to give money to the people of Haiti long after the media has turned its attention to other emotionally evocative news, long after we have grown numb to the pictures of rubble and devastation. A Christian is the one who acts in kindness toward the stranger who repells you because they are so different from you, and toward the office colleague who baffles you because they have chosen a completely different lifestyle from yours. And for the Christian to love his enemy or to love her abuser does NOT mean submitting yourself to ongoing abuse and oppression but it means chosing justice over vengeance and and refusing to inflict on that person the same pain that they have inflicted on you. You walk away and let go of your personal need to hurt the other person because Christianity is not about how we feel toward the other person but how we choose to act toward them.

In sorting out how we are able to love without feeling love, it is helpful to picture love as flowing water. The water doesn't spring forth from the human heart as if it's source is in us -- Christian love instead springs forth from the heart of God and flows through us and on toward the other. To love as a Christian is to open the gates of our hearts so that we become the channel of blessing from God to the other, and as long as we let God's love flow through us, our own feelings about the matter will be irrelevant.

Mother Teresa said, "People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway. If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway. What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway. In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."

Christian love is not about us; it is about our opening the gates of our hearts to the love that has its source in God and letting it flow through us to wash upon all of those we encounter regardless of whether we like them or not, regardless of whether they have treated us well or not; regardless of whether we even know them or not. "In the final analysis, it was never between you and them anyway. It is always about God."