Homily for 96.5 Radio Station

There was an extraordinary occurrence at a wedding I was part of last week - a highly unusual happening in my experience - and that was...we sang hymns! You probably didn't expect to hear that, and perhaps it doesn't seem that significant. But in my increasing experience, hymns are just not sung at weddings nowadays because people don't know the hymns. And I have to share with you that I advise couples to only choose hymns if they can assure me there will be others singing apart from me. I don't have a bad voice, but it becomes rather dismal when it is just me carrying on bravely quite alone.

However, the hymns at the wedding last week were, you will be glad to know, sung well and created a lovely atmosphere.

My memory was stirred with one of their choices - "Love divine all loves excelling" - because I had that lovely hymn at my wedding. And my parents had it at theirs.... And all of this stirred up in me this week, in preparing to share with you about the Ten Commandments, one of the readings we had at our wedding, Graham and I, some 25 years ago. I can also remember my mother asking me why I had chosen this particular reading ... I share it with you now, as Moses encourages the people to keep the commandments:

3Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe them diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of your ancestors, has promised you.
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.* 5You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 6Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. 7Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. 8Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem* on your forehead, 9and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
It was part of my idealism, perhaps the romanticism of a bride, and much younger than now, of wishing, dreaming and hoping that firstly, we would be blessed with children; and, secondly, that this way of knowing God in such fullness and completion would also be the blessing on our family. Perhaps it was my prayer that I could be a parent like God, able to make this happen.

It was and is such idealism, to attain that full immersion in the words and life of the Great Commandment. And yet, I would still choose that reading, these decades on, as the reality of the way we are called to live in relationship with God.

That reality, of loving God so completely and thus living all the commandments, comes smack up against how we are so human and how we live a life of a choice of realities. The irony, in many ways, is that it is God Godself who has given us the ability to choose our life paths as gift. As we grow and develop and learn about the world, each of us chooses for ourself our own framework of belief, our own standard of ethics, and our own values as people of a society. We each choose how we are going to live with other people.

That is, of course, what is at the heart of the commandments of God - how to live with God and others in a "best practice" way. They are commandments of living that express our choice to live God's way. Jesus summed them all up into the two Great Commandments of "best practice" to honour God and people. From the greatest commandment of loving God with all our heart, soul and mind comes, in Jesus' words from Matthew..."And a second is like it: ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Matthew 22

Jesus summed up not only the story of God's people to that point in time, he took them and us right into the present and future of the way to keep being God's people.

Very, very significantly, Jesus pronounced quite clearly at the beginning of his ministry that he had not come to replace the framework of belief of his people, the people of the Hebrew Scriptures. Rather, in part of his great Sermon on the Mount, he says... "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil." His mission was to bring into fruition all that had gone before, not strike it out or replace it.

And look at what he emphasises in what have come to be called ‘The Two Great Commandments' - relationship and love. Loving God, loving our neighbour. And when it comes to the night before his death, that is exactly what he talks about and what he gives his friends, the disciples.
"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

Isn't this a wonderful chain reaction - life-changing and world-changing. From the Great Commandment of loving God completely and utterly, comes the offshoot of loving our neighbour. From these two, not ever-to-be-replaced commandments, comes the new commandment, of loving as we are loved. It's really Jesus putting a wonderful new slant on the whole package - and perhaps taking the authoritarian tone away from "You shall". His one and only verb is "love". His first and last word ... "as I have loved you."

We all know, deep deep down in our mind, body and spirit that if indeed we all lived that way, the world would be a quite completely different place. If we loved as we are loved by God, then the idealism would be the perfect reality.

This is where we sigh and think it is all ideal theory, and acknowledge, together, that we seem so far away from that kind of world. Unkindness, harsh words, even hatred, are of our experience at both personal and global levels. Where do you really begin? How on earth can we move these commandments of love into the fulfilment God needs for his kingdom to indeed come?

Where do we really begin? I reckon we have to look in the mirror. I reckon we have to take seriously the living out of God's commandment to love God, through that second commandment that is like it. We have to love our neighbour, yes, but we are to love our neighbour, our fellow human, as we love ....... ourself.

Now that's pretty sobering, isn't it. We have to face the reality that we actually cannot live out that commandment to love others if we are not jolly well loving ourself first. In fact, I will go further and challenge all those who perform the actions of loving others by saying it is false love if you are not loving God's creation in and of your very own self.

We have to express our care for those frail of body and spirit, because we are being loved in that way.
We have to bring basic life essentials, like food and shelter, to others, because we are being loved in that way.
We have to care for the balance of this planet because we are loved in balance in that way.
We have to look in the mirror and say "I love you" because we recognise a true creation of God's love. And then we can look in the face of others and say "I love you" because we know exactly how that feels, and we want to spread that kind of love.

So indeed from the first and greatest of the commandments comes all other commandments, all other expressions of living God's way. God loves each of us completely and we are called to love back in the same way.

We began with the story of a wedding; let us conclude with part of the vows that couples exchange that sum up the ideal of our own relationship with God - an ideal that is very possible, because God has said this to each one of us:

I take you..... to love and to cherish, so long as we both shall live.
All this I vow and promise.
Amen.