Matthew 22:34-40

Today is Reformation Sunday, the day we remember the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517.  Pope Leo X had decided that he wanted to complete the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and to finance that work he authorized the sale of indulgences.  An indulgence was a means of paying money to have your relatives’ souls released from purgatory sooner.  The Dominican friar Johann Tetzel who was put in charge of the indulgence sale came up with a clever slogan, “As soon as the coin into the box rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.”  The campaign was so vulgar that it shocked most serious-minded believers, including Martin Luther, a theology professor at the University of Wittenberg.  And so Luther wrote a response opposing the sale of indulgences, the 95 Theses.

The basic question of the church reformers was, what is essential for salvation?  Their conclusion was that salvation came through faith alone, not through good deeds.  In other words, salvation is a gift of God’s grace, not a payment for good behavior.  The essential thing was to believe in justification by faith alone.  But the Roman Catholic Church held that good works were necessary for the soul to find salvation.  Another point of disagreement was that the reformers held that the Bible held all that was necessary for someone to come to salvation; the Roman Church held that papal teaching was of equal importance.

It seems fitting that we consider the question of what is essential in our faith on this Reformation Sunday.  What really matters most?  What is the heart of the matter?  I think we find the answer in this passage from Matthew’s gospel.

What was the first Bible verse you memorized when you were a little child?  I’d bet that it was John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”  But if you were Jewish, the first verse you learned would have been Deuteronomy 6:5, known as the Shema:  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”  And the next verse, which says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  These verses are the basic and essential creed of Judaism.  They constitute the statement that every Jewish service of worship opens with, and every Jew repeats it twice daily.

You might wonder, then, why this Pharisee came up to Jesus to ask, “What is the greatest commandment?”  In my Bible, Deuteronomy 6 has the heading, “The Greatest Commandment.”  Certainly, most Jews would give that answer, whether it was in the year 30 or 2023.  Of course, it says that the Pharisees asked Jesus this question in order to test him.  This conversation happened on Monday of Holy Week, and Jesus’s enemies had been looking desperately for some reason to have him arrested and put to death.  Maybe they could even get Jesus to utter some heresy right there in the Temple courts.

But Jesus didn’t utter heresy.  Instead, he confirmed the truth of the centrality of this commandment to love God.  Jesus had already told his followers that he had not come to abolish the law; he was there to fulfill the law.  Jesus was there to remind people of the basic truth of the law, as God had given it, not as generations of lawyers had interpreted and added to it.  And this commandment – the greatest commandment – is the center of our faith, as well as the center of Judaism.  It is one of the great truths that carries over from the Old Testament into the Gospels.

What does it mean to love God this way?  To love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind?  It is to give yourself to God entirely.  It is to love God emotionally, to feel love in your heart for the One who loved you into being.  It is allowing the love of God to fill your heart so that you can love God in return.  It is also to love God with your will, to love God with your essential being.  And it is to love God in your thinking, to allow thoughts of God to fill your mind and shape your thoughts.   It is to learn about God, to acquire knowledge about God.

And that love for God will naturally lead to love for others.  As Jesus said, the second greatest commandment is found in Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  This commandment, I think, is much harder than the first.  It is easy to love people in the abstract; it is something else entirely to love people one at a time.  And this kind of love is not necessarily emotional; it is a concrete responsibility that leads to caring for others, serving others, in Jesus’s name.  It includes putting our love into action.  In a sense, we demonstrate our love for God by showing our love for others.

Sometimes it can be intimidating to think about our responsibility to love and care for others.  After all, the needs are so great and we feel so small.  We look at the great needs and our meager resources and we want to throw up our hands in despair because we can’t solve the problems.  But we aren’t responsible for what we can’t do; we are only responsible for what we can do.  And what we can do is probably more than we think we can do.

I remember hearing about a woman named Helen Bunce.  On the third Sunday of Advent one year, this 86-year-old woman got herself ready to go to church for the first time in a long time.  Her joints were stiff with arthritis and her bones were brittle, and she hated to leave her sick husband Karl for even an hour.  But today was the day that her church was going to dedicate the mitten tree.  And the members of the congregation were going to find out the identity of the person they had only known as “the mitten lady.”

Ever since 1949, the mitten lady had knitted dozens of pairs of mittens and hats each year to hang on the pine tree at the front of the church at Christmas.  The first year, she made 25 sets of mittens and hats.  Each year after that, she tried to donate more.  For the past 20 years, she had made over 100 sets of mittens and hats every single year.  And on each of them, she attached a tag that said, “God loves you and so do I.”

The knitting never left her side.  Helen knitted in her chair.  She knitted as she rode in the car.  Her daughter told of a day they were riding through a snowstorm, and her mother was so scared that she prayed out loud, “Lord, you have to get us home safe.  I have to get these mittens done.”  When her husband became ill with Parkinson’s disease and had to go into a nursing home, Helen would sit with him for twelve hours a day, every day.  She took a thermos of coffee, a sandwich, and her knitting.  When her own health began to fail, they moved into a different nursing home together.  When the pain in her back became too much for her, she taught herself how to knit lying down.

At church on that third Sunday in Advent, when the mitten lady’s name was finally announced, Helen Bunce listened as the congregation began to applaud, and then gave her an ovation that lasted a full five minutes.  They wanted to thank this woman in person for all those years of love put into action.

And I remember the story of the funeral director who was admired and respected by everyone who knew him.  But there was one thing about him that was a mystery.  It was the little black book that he carried with him everywhere.  It was on his desk in his office, and in his pocket when he was away from his desk.  At funerals, he could sometimes be seen jotting something down in it.

This little black book was the subject of a great deal of gossip and speculation among the staff at the funeral home.  One person’s theory, of course, was that the little black book was where the funeral director kept his list of girlfriends.  The receptionist thought that it was where he wrote down the list of horses he bet on at the track. 

One day, the funeral director had a massive heart attack and died.  Four days later, they held a grand funeral for him.  Flowers were everywhere, and the governor sat in the front row.  The minister went on and on about what a great man the funeral director had been and how just knowing him had made others better people.

Then the minister invited the man’s wife to come up and talk about her husband.  Imagine how surprised everyone was to see that she was carrying the little black book!  She walked to the pulpit, stood with complete dignity, and said, “Thank you all for being here for my husband.  I want to share with you a secret about his character.  You see this small book?  Most of you know that he carried it with him all the time.  I would like to read you the first entry, dated April 17, 1920 – Mary Flannery, she is all alone.  The next entry is August 8, 1920 – Frederick W. Pritchard, he is all alone.  The next entry is November 15, 1920 – Frieda M. Gale, she is all alone.  You see, when my husband made funeral arrangements or saw somebody at a funeral that he knew was all alone, he would write their names in this book.  Then, on Christmas Eve, he would call each person and invite them to share Christmas dinner at our house.  This was the true character of my husband.  He was concerned, compassionate, and caring.  I also want you to know that, this being 1971, he did this for fifty Christmases.”

Two people who, in their own small ways, changed people’s lives in tremendous ways over many years.  They embodied the spirit of the commandment to love God and to love their neighbors.  They made a difference where they were as they were able.

It seems to me that loving God by loving others is the most essential teaching of the Bible, from cover to cover.  Loving God, loving others.  I would like to leave you with a quote from Bishop Michael Curry’s book, Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubled Times:  “Love your neighbor … Love the neighbor you like and love the neighbor you don’t like.  Love the neighbor you agree with and love the neighbor you disagree with.  Love your Democrat neighbor.  Love your Republican neighbor.  Love your Independent neighbor.  Love your Black neighbor, your White neighbor.  Love your Asian neighbor, your Latino neighbor, and your Indigenous neighbor … Love your LBGTQ neighbor, love your Jewish neighbor, love your Muslim neighbor.  Love, love, love, love your neighbor as yourself.”