EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

This past Sunday there was a story in the New York Times Magazine about a school in Decatur, Georgia, outside Atlanta. The Community School, as it’s known, is a small school for teenage boys with autism. It has a student body of ten and the article begins with a description of those students gathering for Morning Meeting which is how they begin each school day.

The stated agenda for the morning meeting is to go over everyone’s spring schedules. But the real agenda is what it always is: to engage the students in “conversation, [and] debate, [and] negotiation, [and] compromise [all of which are about] the building of relationships.” (NYT Magazine, Oct. 19, 2008, p. 34). So outbursts and interruptions are actually encouraged. The whole point of the school is to help boys whose brains aren’t wired for engaging with other people learn to do so. And anything the boys offer up is an opening.

Teaching these students to engage with other people isn’t just to make them easier to be around. It’s to help their brains. In the middle of the article there’s a fabulous explanation: “Brain development,” it says, “isn’t a solo pursuit but a rich and complex flowering that occurs only in the hothouse of human relationships.” (ibid, p. 35) In other words, we can’t fully become who we’re meant to be by ourselves. Our need for other people is so basic it’s part of how our brains grow.

Now it makes perfect sense that we would be wired for relationship. We’re made in the image of our triune God, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all at the same time. We’re made in the image of God who is in His very Being an active, loving community. One of my favorite words to describe this God is a Greek one: perichoreisis. ‘Peri’ means ‘around’ and ‘choreo‘ means ‘dance’ so perichoreisis means dancing in a circle. It’s the way the ancient church described the loving community at the heart of God’s being.

And this is what’s behind what Jesus tells the Pharisees who gather to test him. When one of them asks, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.” That’s taken from the commandment in Deuteronomy known as the shema, which means, “Hear,” which is how the passage begins, “Hear, O Israel. . . Shema, Israel. . .” That commandment is at the very center of Jewish life and liturgy, so of course it’s the one Jesus picks, but then he keeps going and adds a commandment from another book of the Bible altogether.

“And a second is like it,” he says. “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” That commandment is taken from Leviticus, from a section of the book known as the ‘holiness code’.  And for Israel, ‘holy’ isn’t a description of some impossible ideal, but a description of how Israel is supposed to live. The commands in the holiness code answer the question of how can Israel live as God’s holy people?

The command to love our neighbors as ourselves in Leviticus is the second part of a command about not hating: “Don’t hate your neighbor and don’t hang on to a grudge against her, but love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” And ‘love’ doesn’t mean an emotion here, but a concrete action. To love your neighbor means to reach out to him, to befriend her, to really see the person in front of us. And the distinction between a holy action and just being nice is that part at the end where God says, “I am the Lord.” Loving the neighbor as God intends isn’t just about being neighborly. It’s an act of faith undertaken in obedience to God.

And when Jesus holds these two commandments together, he expands the idea of what it means to love God. The Pharisees to whom he’s speaking love God and they love God’s Law. Their particular gift to the Jewish community was to explore how a community could keep God’s law day in and day out, to understand everyday life as the place where holiness happens-the equivalent of saying that holiness is not confined to what we do in church on Sunday, but is something we carry with us every other day of the week, too.

But, as we humans tend to do, they’ve gone too far in one direction. Keeping the Law has become an end unto itself. Jesus is calling these faithful people to expand their understanding of what it means to be holy from adhering to the last letter of every law to an engaged participation in community and communion. Being holy isn’t about minding your P’s and Q’s, Jesus is saying, but about loving the person right in front of you-that’s what it means to love God.

The Pharisees had gone too far in the direction of legalism. We, on the other hand, have gone too far in the direction of individualism. We tend to hear the command to love our neighbor as ourselves as ‘love your neighbor as you LOVE yourself,” as if to say love for others begins with self-love and self-esteem.

Now, I’m all for self-love and self-esteem. In fact, NOT loving our own selves can be a way of denying that we are loved by God. It can be a way of saying, well, God’s forgiveness and love applies to everyone else, but me, I’m not worthy. Which is a backdoor way of saying that our sinfulness somehow trumps God’s love for us.

Holding on too tightly to a sense that we’re not worthy of God’s love can be a form of pride. So, yes, we are to love ourselves because God loves us. But that’s not what Jesus is getting at here. When Jesus says we’re to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, he means that loving others-being in communion with our neighbors-is how we love God. It’s how we become the people God created us to be. This is literally true. Human development, as the Times article says, isn’t a solo pursuit but a rich and complex flowering that occurs only in the hothouse of human relationships.

And what that means is that love has to have a face. Love that’s only an abstract idea floating somewhere off in the heavens has no meaning for us. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” has a face. God’s love for us has a face, and that is the face of his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

And God’s love for us teaches us how to love. We learn to love by being loved-just as the boys at the Community School learn to engage with others because others engage with them.  We learn to love by being loved by our parents, by our family and community, and by our friends. All of that equips us to begin to recognize what it means that we’re loved by God in Christ.

And once we begin to recognize what it means that God loves us, we start to see neighbors everywhere we look. We begin to see all the ways we divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ through race, and religion, and nationality, and gender, and sexuality. All those categories we assign people to keep us from meeting them full on as human beings. They’re ways of walling ourselves off from one another, of defending ourselves from those we label as ‘other.’

But the thing is, we have no self to defend apart from the one that comes into being by the act of loving. There is no God apart from the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit dancing together in loving community, and there is no being fully human without loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. There is the law and there are the prophets, but all they have to teach us depends on the two great commandments, the commandments to love.

This is very good news, my friends. Because we are loved we are invited to love. We who are loved deeply, unconditionally, and eternally by God are invited to love God and our neighbor. We are, all of us, invited to join together in God’s loving dance. Amen.