Proper 25 A – 2005 [Modified lessons] Deuteronomy 26:1-11 Psalm 1 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 Matthew 22:34-46 October 23, 2005 The Rev. J. Brian Ponder Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Shema Yisrael! Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echod. Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. Amen. These are words that find great meaning and are dear to me and, realizing it or not, I’d dare say to a good number of [you who / folks especially amongst the 8:00 crowd which] gather(s) weekly and keep(s) the tradition of receiving some of the oldest words of Scripture and prayer here, in this very place. As part of Rite I Eucharistic services in particular, immediately following the opening acclamation and the collect for purity, unless we hear the entirety of the Ten Commandments, we receive the command: “Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith,” (BCP, 324) followed by the outlining of the two greatest commandments. It is a variation of this, one of the oldest and richest prayers retained from the most ancient of recorded history. In fact it is a prayer that is sung weekly in the liturgies of my seminary field placement parish; and it’s one that we, too, keep at our service of Advent Lessons and Music. It is a treasured and holy utterance from the very roots of our faith tradition. The Shema stands as a daily reminder to the Jewish people of not only the call to the greatest commandments, but of covenantal relationship, covenantal living with the one true God. “Shema Yisrael! Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai echod.” Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone; or Hear, O Israel! The LORD our God is one LORD; or Hear, O Israel! The LORD our God, the LORD is one; or Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one. … However translated, one underlying principle of the Shema under-girds a host of great teachings: the people of Israel are in relationship with their God. It is a daily reminder—said or sung once in the morning and again in the evening—of just who and whose the Jewish people are. In short, it’s a faith statement, and it’s through this fundamental proclamation of faith that the context of just how one might love the LORD God with all one’s heart, and soul and mind and strength may be understood, as well as how one might love one’s neighbor as one’s self. Jesus and his followers, as well as the Pharisees, would have certainly known the Shema and would have prayed it and lived it. This was normative. Jesus alludes to the Shema when tested. Simply put, it was part of what it meant to be Jewish—not just in biblical times, but even today, now in this busy world of ours—this hectic and filled-up life lived out daily. And it is the root of Christian and Muslim witness as well—a witness not just to monotheism (though this is very important to note) but testifying to relationship, to berit—the cutting of covenant, a completely binding promise of reciprocity. Loving God and loving neighbor sum up the understanding of covenantal relationship, and both assume the other. Everything else, as we hear in today’s Gospel lesson, hinges on these two great commandments; and though rudimentary tenets of faith, I dare say this is not always an easy task to live out. To understand right living, to understand the laws and the prophets, to love the Lord God with our whole being and to love our neighbors as ourselves, to understand relationship, we must understand something about covenant. Covenant is about mutuality. It is a promise of accountability—not in the sense of outlining retribution, but to uphold one another in promise. Berit—the cutting of covenant, much like taking a machete to overgrown bamboo, or woodland overgrowth—clears way for a new path, literally cutting a new way of and for promise. Covenant relationship has been promised to and for humankind throughout the history of our faith, each time becoming fuller and more gracious. Covenant was implied at Creation with Adam and Eve. It was promised Noah following the great flood, and later to Abraham. For us Christians, covenant—life in relationship with God—was promised through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—a Messiah much greater than would have ever been expected, as we learn in the second portion of today’s Gospel. Covenant finds its truest meaning in agape … love—unconditional love, or perhaps better understood here as a love that encompasses and embodies the outpouring of one’s whole nature in reverent devotion. Covenant is an expression of complete, reverent devotion to another, and mutuality is what is required and commanded by it … true relationship that leads us to know just who and whose we are. In his run-in with the Pharisees, Jesus is not doing anything spectacularly new to the laws as they had stood to that time. What he did with them, however, is something radically astounding. He’s not discovering the laws—everyone knew them, or thought they did. Jesus is uncovering them and in so doing, is making them new in a new picture of God and in a new defining of the understanding of neighbor. Jesus up-ends the notion of simple adherence to the law and makes the law live-able. This is a living of the law, embodying it and making it available to and for all. It is in this context of this newness that we understand ourselves to be created beings made to love and worship completely, that relationship is meant for all, not particularized, and that covenant is a mutual gift and responsibility in which we share with God and one another. Through covenant and in relationship, we become co-creators with God in the building up of the whole creation so that everything hinges in a network of connectivity meant for support and care, meant to be tended and grown. Today we celebrate Ingathering Sunday—a day when we ritually, symbolically and literally berit—cut covenant with God, making promise to God to offer from the first fruits of our lives, loves, talents and labors, and in so doing, we commit ourselves and one another to God’s and each other’s loving care … not out of a proscribed duty, but out of thankfulness … in thanksgiving for all that has and continues to and will bless us. Today we celebrate God’s goodness and the mutuality of responsibility for bringing about God’s kingdom in this little corner of God’s world, making of it, if we live into our end of the bargain, a glimpse of what could be, not for ourselves only but for those to whom we reach out in love and care and invitation. Today we honor a new path that binds us together and connects us with our God, the Great Giver. Today we give great thanks, as one poet puts it: … [for the] undeniable awareness … that the need of [God] is the truth of [us], and [that God’s] presence with [us] is the truth of [God] which sets [us] free for others, for joy and for [God] ... forever. May we ever give thanks to God for the riches and blessings of this life. May we ever give thanks to God for our lives and our life together. Amen   1. Lessons were modified slightly for appropriateness to Ingathering Sunday. 2. Deuteronomy 6:4. Plaut, W. Gunther, ed. The Torah: A modern commentary. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981. Page 1366. 3. This paragraph and the one preceding it contain paraphrasing from The Interpreters Bible, George Arthur Buttrick, commentary ed., v. VII, pages 524-525. New York: Abingdon P., 1951. 4. Loder, Ted. Guerillas of Grace: Prayers for the battle. San Diego, CA: LuraMedia, 1984. Page 43. Bracketing reflects my editing of wording.