Back to Basics

This weekend we will be looking at the most central of Jesus's teachings: the dual love commandments.

It is rather ironic. When preparing the bulletin materials, what we found is two things.

First, our denomination's catechisms mention these two commandments only once. They focus exclusively on the Ten Commandments instead. For a tradition that is handed down from someone who believed that Christ and his words are the very center of everything we do - that is remarkably ironic.

The second thing we found is that the word "neighbor" appears only twelve times in the entire book of Confessions. Again, a foundational principle of Jesus's teachings and yet, barely present.

Somehow it is now not so surprising that the world misses the mark when it comes to understanding Jesus. Understanding who our God is, too.

The focus keeps going to legalistic renderings and dogmatic destruction of one another - much the way that religious leaders in Jesus's time abused the teachings of his own tradition.

And yet Christ said that all the law, all the prophets, everything, can be summed up in how we love God by loving our neighbors. Neighbors who are every other human being on the planet, because we are all made in God's own image.

In the end, the rest will not matter. Only how well we fulfill this one command (because let's be honest, it really is only one).

Blessings,

Rev. Janie