Loving God & Neighbour
(Boys' Brigade Founder Day - St Paul's Cathedral)
(Boys' Brigade Founder Day - St Paul's Cathedral)
“Above all, clothe yourselves with love which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” (Col 3.14)
To dwell above with those we loveYou would think from the press over the last few weeks, that all Christians ever do is squabble and fall out with each other. Of course there are genuine issues to debate. And it is no use pretending that we all agree when we don’t.
O that will be glory;
But to dwell below with those we know
Is quite another story.
But the attitude of Christians, even when they disagree, must be that of love. So Paul reminded the church in Colossi, in the part of his letter that was read earlier, that they should ‘clothe themselves in love’.
Today, the last Sunday in October, is Founder’s Day for the Boy’s Brigade. William Alexander Smith was born 149 years ago tomorrow, in Scotland. In 1883 he formed the first company in Glasgow. By 1909 it was a world-wide movement and Edward VII knighted him for his work among young people.
He died just around the corner here in St Bartholomew’s hospital in 1914, and although he was buried back in Glasgow, there is a memorial plaque here beneath us in the crypt. BB officers will lay a wreath there after this service.
In the 1950s and 60s I was one of the thousands of boys, mainly from large working class families like my own, who was in the Bruin Boys, the Life Boys and then the Boys Brigade.
The uniform was a very important part of belonging. I can still remember having to whiten my landyard with blanco; brasso my badges and buckles, and spit and polish my shoes.
The uniform was to remind me that although I was just a snotty nosed schoolboy, I belonged to something bigger, with high Christian ideals.
So Paul tells the Colossians that they should be clothed, uniformed, in love. This was to cover all their natural human failings and petty jealousies. It was their mark of belonging to Christ.
As our Lord himself said - “by this shall all know that you are my disciples, in that you love one another”. (John 13.35) Paul adds, that it would bind them together in perfect harmony. Love is the uniting principle of Christian living.
Our Lord makes this the central plank of his ethical teaching, and like Paul, he gives it practical content.
In Matthew’s Gospel we read of the Pharisees testing Jesus by trying to pose such a question about The Law that any answer would put him in the wrong.
They ask “What is the greatest commandment?”.
Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, bringing together two well known Jewish commandments. He replies: “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” (22.37f)
Christ turns this sterile academic wordplay into a lesson on practical religion and life. And then later, he turns the same weapon of sterile academic wordplay back on the pharisees and silences them.
In fact the account ends with a verse which must be every Prime Minister and certainly Ian Duncan Smith’s dream: “neither from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.”
There was to be no more trying to catch him out.
So what do these two great Judaeo-Christian commandments mean?
Loving God with all our heart. In the Anglican tradition in Britain we’re not very good at fervour and enthusiasm. Like the man at Evensong who kept shouting out ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Praise the Lord’. Eventually an exasperated verger sidled up to him and asked him if he wouldn’t mind being quieter. The man replied: “I can’t help it, I got religion!” To which the verger responded: “I don’t know what you’ve got sir, but you didn’t get it here!”
The very word ‘enthusiasm’ was originally an insult, meaning ‘possessed by a god’. The church has usually expelled the lovers of God who display too much emotional zeal for the faith, like Luther and Wesley.
Sometimes we need to recapture that enthusiastic love for God which is a hall mark of the saints, and of many of the growing parts of the church around the world. We will do it in a way that is culturally appropriate, but we should love God with all our heart.
But on it’s own, emotional, enthusiastic love without content and depth produces simply sentimentality. God falls into the same category as puppy dogs, old church buildings Harry Secombe and Cliff Richard. And this is not enough.
So we must love God with all our soul. “Out of the depths my soul cries out to you” says the psalmist. De profundis. Profound love of God can come out of those experiences of life which furrow deep into our psyche, into our very being: extreme pain, or mental anguish; inconsolable grief. The suffering which CS Lewis called ‘God’s megaphone’.
But also existential moments of bliss; the unbearable lightness of ‘being’; the palpable pain of overwhelming beauty; the moments of supreme well-being flowing from human love and affection.
But this too has its dangers. Deep love which never looks outward produces introspection and self-absorption. It can even induce pride and a sense of superiority.
That’s why, on its own, however profound the love of God, it is not enough. So we must love God with all our mind.
Some of us are more at home here. We enjoy discussions about the existence of God and the finer points of doctrine. Although as Lady Bracknell reminds us in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, it is not quite respectable in polite society to be too intelligent. Perhaps Britain is the only country in Europe where the expression “too clever by half” is an insult.
I am alarmed sometimes when talking with students to find that their understanding of Christian theology has not gone much beyond their understanding of Father Christmas and the Teletubbies. And what they do know they have learnt from the Vicar of Dibbley or Father Ted.
My Church Primary School children know more about Pokemon than they do about the Christian heritage that founded their school.
Part of our Christian devotion to God is to read, to study, to think hard about our faith and love for God. But loving God, purely as an academic idea without emotion or depth simply produces a sterile formula, devoid of spiritual power. And at worst, dogma to be fought over.
Plato did great damage to the development of Christian thought by his splitting of the human into two parts - body and spirit. For the Jews at the time of Christ, any one of these three things - heart, soul, mind - would have sufficed to indicate the whole person. We are one complex, integrated human being.
The command, then, was to love God with our whole being: the affective, reflective and intellective; heart, soul and mind. Strong love with checks and balances.
If we love God in this way, then we cannot but help love our neighbour as ourselves.
This is the second commandment, inextricably linked with the first. And it is not an easy command to keep. CK Chesterton once remarked that the Bible tells us to love our neighbours and to love our enemies - because they are generally the same people!
This love of God means we will care for the homeless and the refugees; we will protect the weak; we will look out for one another. As William Smith did, we will reach out to help children and young people to grow up into mature and loving men and women.
And we will build societies and churches which do this. If we do not, then we deceive ourselves, and we do not genuinely love God, with heart and soul and mind.
John adds a further dimension to this in his epistle where he writes ‘perfect love casts out fear’.
I have always remembered this verse in 1 John 4.18. ‘Perfect love casts out fear’. At a wedding where I was best man a pious absentee sent simply that reference in a telegram. But without checking, I quickly turned to John 4.18 and read out: “Jesus said to her, ‘You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband!’"
The result of loving God and neighbour in this way is freedom from fear: the irrational fears that haunt us. As Paul reminds the Colossians in the next verse, when they clothe themselves in love, then the peace of Christ will rule in their hearts.
In our troubled and uncertain world, if we would be free from fear and full of inner peace, then we must love God and neighbour. Or as St Paul puts it:
“Above all, clothe yourselves with love which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” (Col 3.14)
