*Episode 100!* - Love God, Love People

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Welcome to the one hundredth episode of Christian Mythbusters! We have tackled a lot of topics in our time together—everything from gender to sexuality to immigration and divorce and the proper application of concepts like the “Order of Love” in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thanks for sticking with me. As I saw this hundredth episode approaching, I’ve been pondering what to talk about. And what I keep coming back to is a small line on the prayer book of my church. When I began attending The Episcopal Church, I was a campus minister at an evangelical church in West Texas. But early on Sunday mornings I would sneak into the local Episcopal Church and attend their early morning service of Holy Eucharist. After the opening words of greeting and prayer, the priest would almost always recite the following: “Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Over and over again, week after week, I would hear those words spoken at the beginning of worship and they began to work at my heart and my spirit. So, with them as a starting point, this week I want to break the myth of what really matters in Christianity. Because, truth be told, much of what we hear from Christians doesn’t meet the test that Jesus himself set out. Those words are known in our church as “The Summary of the Law” and they are a quotation of Jesus from Matthew 22:37–40 in the old King James Version. In these verses, Jesus himself is quoting two different commandments in the Hebrew Bible, one from Deuteronomy 6 and one from Leviticus 19. While they had been linked at times in pre-Christian Judaism, Jesus was the first to link them this precisely and concretely. “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus is telling his disciples (and us) what the interpretive key to all of Scripture, all of religion, really is. And the interpretive key is simple: love of God and love of neighbor. Everything hangs on those two loves. And the two must be held together. Because there are times in Scripture (and in the Church) when the people of God have let their love and zeal for God lead them to do hateful and violent things to their neighbors. And there are times when a focus only on the neighbor has led humanity to lose sight of our connection to the divine reality that is the ground of all being. This is what really matters in Christianity: growing in love of God and love of neighbor. And that means being willing to be curious about what you may not actually know about God, what you may have wrong. It means loving not just the neighbor close to you, but the one who drives you bonkers. It means always asking what will advance this love of God and love of neighbor. And anytime any follower of Jesus says or does something that violates that dual love, that cuts people off from God or that harms their neighbor, that person has missed the plot, they have lost sight of what is at the heart of this whole spiritual journey we are all on. Love God. Love your neighbor. It all comes down to that. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.