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“Seeking Common Ground”

Mark 12:28-34
November 8, 2009 

          This morning’s New Testament passage with its teaching about love of God and neighbor is one of the foundational texts that express simply and yet comprehensively the heart, spirit, and soul of Christianity.  In our diverse faith communities, this text provides the framework for ethical thinking and conduct, theological reflection, and how we understand as well as apply the teachings of the Bible.  Even with the horrible news out of Fort Hood, Texas earlier this week, Jesus’ words about love of God and love of neighbor are instructive even in the midst of seemingly impossible situations.

          Please listen for how the Spirit is enlivening our understanding of God’s word found on page 46 of the New Testament section of your pew Bibles from the Gospel of Mark chapter twelve verses twenty-eight through thirty-four…

          ²⁸One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that [Jesus] answered them well, he asked [Jesus], “Which commandment is the first of all?” ²⁹Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; ³⁰you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ ³¹The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” ³²Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; ³³and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ —this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” ³⁴When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question.

This is God’s word to us…

          Love God and love your neighbor: sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?  But where in the world can you really find such a radical idea lived out to its fullest?  I found an answer to this question on a seminary pilgrimage to the Holy Lands in January of 1996.  As part of our preparation for that trip we were required to read a book titled Blood Brothers by Father Elias Chacour, pastor of the Melkite Catholic church in the village of Ibillin, north of Nazareth, Jesus’ boyhood home.   

          If you don’t know who Elias Chacour is or anything about his story, his is a side of the Arab-Israeli conflict that few in the West are even aware of.  Elias Michael Chacour was born in 1939 in the village of Biram in Upper Galilee in the British Mandate of Palestine to an Arab Christian family, members of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. At the age of eight he was evicted along with his whole family and all the villagers of Biram by Zionist forces and became a deportee and a refugee but remained in the region.  Because he remained in his homeland, he was granted Israeli citizenship when the state was created in 1948.

Completing his schooling in Nazareth, he studied theology in Paris, returning home in 1965 where he was ordained as a priest and was sent to Ibillin as his first and only parish for thirty-eight years before becoming Archbishop of Galilee in 2006.  While serving as priest of the Melkite church in Ibillin, Elias Chacour saw that the educational opportunities for the Arab Christian and Muslim families who made up that small community were lacking and so he created a school for them that has become the Mar Elias Education Institute.  During his early years of expanding the school and growing the church he attained post graduate degrees from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, becoming the first Palestinian Christian to do so.

When I met Father Chacour in January 1996, along with my seminary classmates, what struck me the most about him and the incredible ministry that has consumed his life is that both the students and faculty of the schools in Ibillin which range from Kindergarten all the way through University are made up of Muslims, Jews and Christians.  After nearly two weeks of travel in Jordan and Israel where we saw firsthand the tensions created by hatred, mistrust, and fear, between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims to arrive in Ibillin and see adherents of all three Abrahamic faiths accomplishing so much together was quite astonishing.

To see such loving coexistence in a part of the world where there has been so much violence and revenge since the middle of the 20^th century was an eye opening experience for our group of seminary students from Richmond, Virginia.  It was a real lesson in the possibility of living out the foundations of the Gospel, part of which we have before us this morning where a scribe approached Jesus and asked “Which commandment is the first of all?”

After the hostility and blindness of various religious authorities’ reactions to the teachings and actions of Jesus throughout Mark’s Gospel, this morning’s story should come as quite a surprise.  After all, up until this point in Mark’s Gospel the scribes have been mentioned twelve times in all but three of Mark’s chapters and in none of those other passages were they as accommodating as this morning’s scribe turned out to be.  In chapter three some of the scribes accused Jesus of being Beelzebul ruler of the demons while in chapter ten Jesus predicted his own passion by saying, “the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death.”  

And so when the unnamed scribe from chapter twelve responds to Jesus’ answer by saying, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; ³³and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself;” when the scribe replied in such a way it opened a whole world of possibility.  The scribe’s answer is a reminder to anyone reading Mark’s Gospel that while the scribes and Pharisees were often opposed to Jesus or disagreed with his interpretation of the Scriptures, at the heart of the religion they both shared is the radical love of God and love of the other, also known as the ministry of hospitality.

So where does such radical hospitality come from?  The earliest answer comes from Genesis chapter eighteen where the Lord appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre.  In the heat of the day three strangers approached Abraham’s tents and in the custom of his day, as well as in Jesus’ day along with contemporary cultures of the Middle East today, Abraham’s first thought was about how to make the strangers comfortable.  Abraham’s first thought wasn’t whether or not they shared the same convictions about God or whether or not they were from the same family or of the same people.  Rather, first and foremost Abraham saw fellow children of God and offered them hospitality.   

This story of Abraham greeting strangers in the Judean desert is shared by adherents of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is the model of hospitality as established by the Scriptures.  Within our own Christian tradition the writer of Hebrews would later think of this story in the thirteenth chapter when saying, “Let mutual love continue.  Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”  

This article of faith, of loving God above all others and extending hospitality to those who are created in God’s image that is shared by both the scribe and Jesus may sometimes be lost on those of us who read and hear this passage today.  It is easy for us, in the safety and relative homogenous culture of Middle America to somehow think that loving God and therefore loving our neighbor are ethical standards exclusive to Christianity.  But summaries of the Law that emphasize love of God and of the other do not originate with Jesus, but with Deuteronomy chapter six and Leviticus chapter nineteen.

Similar ideas also exist outside of our Judeo-Christian heritage.  Even as we have all been confronted by the reactionary extremists within Islam, Muslim adherents have devoted themselves to the supremacy of one God over all creatures while Buddhism has taught compassion for all living beings.  That such an idea that such articles of belief and faith are not unique to Christianity might lead us to wonder, “So why bother?”  Why bother then raising infants, children and youth in the faith?  Why bother encouraging one another in a strong and vibrant faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior?  

We embark on the journey of faith because Jesus told us to. We encourage one another in the love of God found in Jesus Christ because we know it to be at the core or who we are.  That other faiths and traditions embrace devotion to God and welcoming of others only encourages us to do so all the more.  Is it difficult?  Is it challenging?  Do we wish Jesus might have told us to love God but be a little suspicious of others?  You better believe we do; especially in a world where men like Nidal Hasan killed so many at Fort Hood or devout Christian Timothy McVeigh killed even more in Oklahoma City or when Orthodox Jew, Yidal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. 

But even as these men who perverted their respective faiths did not lead faithful Jews, Christians and Muslims to leave their faith; neither should we abandon dedicating ourselves to loving God, passionately following in the footsteps of Jesus and being empowered to love and serve others through the gifts we receive from the Holy Spirit.  Our love of God and our love of even those who come from different religious backgrounds only make us stronger.

Or as Elias Chacour used to tell his students before they started their day of school, “You, Muslim and Jews you are not accepted here out of tolerance; you are not accepted here out of Christian charity; it is not for the sake of Christ that I accept you here.  It is because I learned and I am convinced that you are loveable as you are and I need you different from me in order to respect you and to get to know myself better.”  

That others are different than us, that we can learn more about ourselves and the faith we hold so dear is what I believe Jesus wants us to see from Mark’s Gospel today.  That he and the unnamed scribe were able to see past “all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” to the more important center of their faith—that of loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength and loving your neighbor as yourself points us to many opportunities in the world we now find ourselves living.

As Sophia Marie Long grows and matures in faith it will be the responsibility of all of us to share with her the amazing grace and love we receive so freely through God whom we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  But we are also responsible for teaching her that our fervent and passionate love of God and God’s Son does not prevent us from respecting the many others who inhabit our community.   Radical hospitality, the hospitality that Abraham showed the strangers by the oaks of Mamre, the hospitality Jesus and the unnamed scribe lifted up as being at least as important as fully loving God are what will enable us to be faithful to the One who grants us grace and life eternal.

We too can join the unnamed scribe in getting even closer to the kingdom of God by realizing that, in the words of Elias Chacour “no human being is an island, isolated; we are all exposed to our own fears and unless we use other ways to affirm ourselves we might bear the germ of our own destruction.”  His point here is that we cannot allow our fear of the other, our hatred of the other, no matter who he might be or what her religious convictions might be, we must not allow such feelings to define who we are.  Instead we must see God’s love above all else and in that vision of God’s unconditional, all expansive grace, make room to see those who are different from us first and foremost as a child of God.

Our responsibility for raising Sophia Marie Long in the faith and all those other young people whom God has placed in our trust has only gotten more difficult in the last decade as our world has gotten both smaller and more connected with varying faith convictions not only across oceans but also across the Magic Valley.  How we react to such challenges and what we teach our young people and one another will reflect on how well we have learned this morning’s Gospel lesson, how close we will come to the kingdom of God by loving God and our neighbor whoever he or she might be.

          Amen.

SOURCES:

Information about Chacour’s life from Wikipedia.org article about his life

Quotes from Chacour came from www.vpt.org video interview

Commentary describing different religious beliefs about devotion to one God and compassion for others from New Interpreters Bible volume VIII pages 675-677

 

 

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