Christmas Sermon

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.


As we gather to celebrate the nativity of our Lord, many of us will have in mind that familiar Christmas story. There are traditionally two different texts from the Gospel used on Christmas; the first is our passage from John 1 and the other is from the Luke 2. It is from Luke that we have all those well-known details: the journey to Bethlehem, the inn in which there is no room; the stable in which Jesus is born and the manger in which Mary places the swaddled new born, the shepherds and the angels and their song of praise and the visitation to the Holy Family. All of these come from that passage from Luke. While Luke tells us what happened on the day that Jesus was born, our passage from John helps us to understand the meaning of this birth, why it happened.

John's Gospel opens with these deceptively simple words, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Though the words are simple, what they convey can be elusive. God's Word, like our words, is the Father's self-communication. The Word is God's perfect self-expression. For John, if you want to know who God is, then you look at Jesus, the Word incarnate. That Word was present with the Father in all eternity. It was there at the beginning of time in the word of Creation. In the opening verses of Genesis, we are told, God said, let there be light and there was light. The Word created and gave order to the world. The crown of creation was the man and the woman of whom God said, Let us make man in our image. The Father through the Word, created humans to be in fellowship and communion with him and with one another. Man is invited share in the communion of love that existed for all eternity between the Word and the Father.
Of course the remainder of the Old Testament is about how the man and woman turn away from God, believing in the lie of self-sufficiency and life apart from God. This is quickly succeeded by the lie that we can live apart from one another, so that by Genesis chapter four, we hear the muderous Cain say to the Lord, am I my brother's keeper? In the succeeding history, God again and again gave his Word to the prophets who called the people back into fellowship with him. The Word, spoken through the prophets, told the people to love God with all their heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbors. This was not anything new. It was the way God had created the world to be through the Word.

The shocking affirmation of John is that this Word, the Word that created, the Word spoken through the prophets, became flesh. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. The Word would no longer need to come to man through the medium of creation or through the words of the prophets, but there is a kind of immediacy. We can see and touch the Word of God in the man Jesus. In the life of the Word made flesh we see an outpouring of love. Jesus persisted and persevered in love for the Father and for man, even when that love led him to Calvary. There is an exercise I do with our children and ask them how much God loves us. Not this much (hands close together). Nor even this much (a little further apart), but this much (with hands extended). It is the position of crucifixion but also of embrace. He persisted in love so that we could be restored to communion with God and one another.

To put it quite simply, the truth of Christmas is that, as John says, the light shineth in darkness. And in his first epistle, John states, the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth. All of this is represented in the church by all the candles that are burning tonight. In that simple stable over 2000 years ago, a light of love was placed before us and before all humanity. There is no extinguishing this light because this light is a persevering love. Even the worst of human darkness cannot overcome it. Now that we are on this side of that birth in Bethlehem, we are called to put all our lives in that light. We have to let go of those lies that have been around since the beginning of creation, namely that we can live apart from God and apart from one another. The God who made us is our soul's food; we need him and he is our true happiness. The same God has declared, it is not good that man should be alone. We need one another, in all particularities and diversities. This Christmas, let us turn again to this light of love and embrace the greatest gift we will ever receive, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

3rd Sunday in Advent

And he confessed and denied not, but confessed, I am not the Christ.

This third Sunday in Advent is traditionally given to reflecting on and praying for the ordained ministry of the church. The collect for this Sunday in the traditional prayer book highlights the similarity between the ministry of John the Baptist which prepared the way for Christ's first coming and the ministry of the Christian church today which prepares the way for his second coming. In short, the life, witness and ministry of John the Baptist are a model for Christian priests and ministers to follow, and help to give all a sense of what a priest is and what he is not. This morning I want to examine the Gospel lesson to see what we can glean about Christian ministry from the example and words of John.

In the opening verses of our passage, we are told that the Jewish leaders sent an embassy  to John to find out what kind of credentials he has. It is clear that John does not fit the established religious institutions and conventions of his time. He is in the fray, and they want to know exactly who he is and what he is doing. John is not hesitant to say, I am not the Christ, I am not Elijah or one of the prophets. You see a foundation of John's ministry was to point away from himself. Later on in John's Gospel, he will say, I must decrease, but he, that is Jesus, must increase. Christian ministry in the same way is always about pointing away from self. The most important things a Christian priest can do are not about the priest as an individual but about being a vessel for God's grace and a witness to new life in Jesus Christ. It is all too easy for priests, and for the people they serve, to fall into the trap of the cult of personality. The priest can begin to tout what a great person he is. He can begin to worship on the altar of popularity, forgetting that a priest has to have the courage to speak truth which must sometimes make him unpopular. In all of this, the priest has to say, I am not the Christ, I am not your messiah. God's grace was with you long before I came along, and your relationship with him will still be there even after I am gone. This is why I shy away from lots of personal anecdotes in my preaching. Personal anecdotes might help you feel connected to me as a person, but they probably won't make you feel connected to God. In the final estimation, when you step out of this church, I don't want you to remember some personal anecdote about me, but the message of God's grace and love. There is a time and place for getting to know each other on a personal level, as fellow Christians, but I don't believe that time and place is in the pulpit.

But I digress, in the Gospel lessons, those sent to question John persist in their inquiries. You're not the Christ; you're not Elijah; you're not that prophet, but you have to be something, they say, and indeed, John says that he is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. John is alluding to a passage in the book of Isaiah in which the prophet announces a word of hope and redemption for those who had gone into exile. One of the most important events in the Old Testament was the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. The trip was a long one; nearly a thousand miles, and there was no direct route. You had to go  far north of Jerusalem, and then loop towards the southwest toward present day Baghdad. The route as the crow flies from Jerusalem to Babylon is an expansive desert, largely uninhabited both in ancient and modern times. Isaiah describes a homecoming for the exiled Jews through this wilderness. The familiar words from Isaiah read, “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.” Of course, this never literally happened. There was no highway running through the Arabian desert for the Jewish exiles to come home to Jerusalem. What was Isaiah's meaning and John's meaning by quoting this passage? The idea is that in God, there is a straight path back to fellowship with him, not because in our human disorder we have finally sorted things out, but because God has made a way for us in Jesus Christ. Every obstacle that could separate us from the love and mercy of our Creator has been taken away. The great mountain of human hostility and rebellion against God has been laid low. The great valley of human despair in living apart from God has been raised up. John was preparing the way for Jesus Christ, and that in him, we have our highway to God. The Christian minister is called to this same proclamation. It is all too-tempting for Christian ministers to set up false obstacles between God's love and his people. A minister can preach endlessly that people are not worthy, and they aren't, but that isn't the point, my friends. We're not worthy, but the Gospel isn't about us; it is about what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. The Gospel is not dependent, thank God, on our worthiness, but on God's decision to love us and restore us in Jesus. Ministers can also set up obstacles in the way they act towards outsiders: the subtext often is maybe if you work really hard and become exactly like us, you could become a part of this church. God has flung open the doors; he has made the path straight to his redeeming grace. God doesn't need his ministers to be the gate-keeper. He needs them to be stewards of this good news for all people.

So, to sum up, John's ministry shows that Christian ministers have to point away from themselves to Jesus Christ, and their central proclamation is to be about the highway to God, established in Jesus Christ. But it should also be said, that every Christian has a ministry as well, whether it is in your home or place of work or in community work or even in politics. We all have our vocations to which God has called us, and none is any better or less than other, just different. The same applications that we've made from John's ministry about priests and ministers apply to each of us. Each of our lives have been created, preserved, and redeemed by God's grace. There really is no boasting in our own strength because everything we have and are is from the Lord. All of us are to point away from ourselves, like John, to a greater one. In addition, in our interactions with others, we should not divide humanity into two classes: the redeemed or potentially redeemed and the unredeemable. In God, there is a highway. We have to treat others as if at any moment the invitation to come home to God down this highway will strike them like a clap of thunder. Are we setting up man-made hills and digging trenches to the love and grace of God, or are we witnesses of God's highway, God's great redeeming love in Jesus Christ?

2nd Sunday of Advent

Prepare ye the way of the Lord

Today is the Sunday of Advent when we think about St. John the Baptist. The purpose of John the Baptist's ministry was to prepare the way for Jesus. Luke the Evangelist tells us that John and Jesus were cousins, but it is apparent that John began to preach and minister some time before his cousin. John went down into the area near where the Jordan River meets the Dead Sea. He told people to repent, which is a twofold action: to turn away from sin and turn to God. When they repented, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.

John was the last of the Old Testament prophets. The purpose of all those prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, David, Moses--was to point forward to the coming messiah Jesus, and for this reason, we do not have prophets any more in this Old Testament sense because the messiah has come. When Jesus did finally enter the scene as a grown man, his preaching largely consisted of the message of the kingdom of God. What is the kingdom of God, you might ask? The kingdom of God is God's rule and reign over every human disorder, chaos and sin, and even over death. Jesus showed that he was the ambassador of this kingdom by giving freedom to the burdened and oppressed, healing those who were sick and afflicted, and telling people that their sins were forgiven. We too can have our share in this invisible kingdom, with a king who has ascended in tothe heavenly places. As we are redeemed, we have new life in this kingdom. Burdens are lifted, afflictions of soul and body are healed; assurance of forgiveness is given in the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion and in the proclamation of the truth that Jesus has made the one true and eternal sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

John's message was that of repentance: he said, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. What we need to be reminded of today is that John's message was not just for his time and place. It is easy for us to talk about God's love and grace and how he invites us into his kingdom, but we forget that he also calls us to repentance and new life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to talk about cheap grace by which he meant when we sooth the conscience by pious but ineffectual platitudes or when we tell ourselves that it is acceptable to God if we continue in our self-destructive, sinful behavior. You see, the message of John about repentance and the message of Jesus about the kingdom and new life go together.

The way I like to think of this is that grace and judgment are two sides of the same coin. God gives us new life, but he also tells us that the way we are living now needs to change. That is the best type of love because it seeks for our good. Put another way, the Gospel is truly good news for us and for all, but if the Gospel is rightly to be proclaimed, it also comes with the bad news that we have to change, we need to repent. Even this, with a bit of perspective, is good news because sin and selfishness enslaves us. The Hebrews who were slaves in Egypt, you recall, were told that God was going to be their God and they would be his people. They did have to leave Egypt, however, and that meant leaving the supposed comforts of slavery. This was the bad news of the Gospel and why some of the Hebrews complained that they wanted to go back to Egypt.

We know that sin is self-destructive to us and harmful to others. We need to be told that. God calls us away from these things in repentance, and at the same time, he invites us to new life in him. You see, there will always be the need for the proclamation of John the Baptist to turn away from sin and the serving of self so that we can find new life and abiding love in God's everlasting kingdom.

1st Sunday in Advent

Thou hast delivered us into the hand of our iniquities.

With the first Sunday of Advent we come to the beginning of a new church year. Just as with the beginning of the secular year, we are called at the beginning of the church year to make resolutions in good faith and to rekindle our minds and affections for the things of God. The church year begins on the sober note of Advent, one of two penitential seasons of the church year. In Advent, we recall the three comings or Advents of our Lord Jesus, his first coming in the flesh in the stable in Bethlehem; his second coming in glory which we await with hope; finally his coming into our souls. The traditional Gospel for this Sunday is the account of Jesus cleansing the temple which is a perfect image for how he comes into our souls. We are to be the temple of the Holy Ghost, and every thing in our lives that is not godly he demands we surrender. He casts out that which is not of him. It is not simply enough that we do the right things externally, he tells us that we need new hearts. In the book of Ezekiel, the Lord says that he will remove the stoney hearts of his people and give to them hearts of flesh. He wants, in other words, to take every thought captive for Christ and to direct our love and affections to that which is good and noble and beautiful.

The truth is that so often, instead of choosing that which is good and noble and beautiful, we chase that which is bad and harmful and destructive. When it comes to sin, you see, most are not that different than from the alcoholic: we just cannot help ourselves. The addict will almost always say that he wants to quit; he is not proud of his behavior; yet he finds himself powerless to resist his hunger for alcohol. So too, rarely are we proud of our sin; we know it is destructive, and yet we keep returning to it. One of the axioms of theology is that sin is its own punishment. Sometimes we witness this firsthand with our children. They make a poor choice and the result of that poor choice is something painful or uncomfortable. The prophet states the truth of this axiom when, in speaking to the Lord, he says, “Thou hast delivered us into the hand of our iniquities.”

Many of us are likely to excuse ourselves for our sins. One definition for sin is simple transgression of God's law. When we speak of God's law, we usually mean the Ten Commandments, but how do our lives actually measure up if we take serious inventory of the ways we have broken these commandments. The first two commandments are about giving God his due and not committing idolatry. Now the common conception of idolatry is that it has to do with bowing down and worshiping images and statues. That is of course idolatry, but it is not the full extent of idolatry nor even the grossest kind of idolatry. Idolatry is anytime one gives to something or someone that is not god that which is due to God. When our greatest hope is for material goods or a perfect family or worldly success we are giving to what is not god what is due to God. When we think that some creature can make us truly happy, we are falling into the same trap. Idolatry then is far more common that we might be apt to think. In fact, John Calvin wrote that the human heart is an idol factory. The third commandment prohibits taking the name of the Lord in vain. This fairly well covers both cursing and hypocrisy, hypocrisy being when we pretend to be something that we know we are not. The fourth commandment is about keeping holy the sabbath day. We might ask ourselves is Sunday set aside as a day dedicated to the Lord, a kind of first fruits of our time? The fifth is about honoring our parents, which I think can be extended to all the authorities to which we are rightfully subject. The sixth is about not committing murder. O good, you might say, finally one I am not guilty of, but Jesus says that if we bear anger toward a brother or say 'you fool' to a fellow human being, we are guilty of breaking this law also. I don't think I need go any further; we are all guilty, and we are probably feeling like the Jews who wept at the reading of the law by Ezra because they realized how far astray they had gone. The bad news is that the verdict has come in and we are all guilty before the Judge.

In Advent, we should think about what are known as the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. We know that when our Lord Jesus returns, he will not find us perfect or without sin. The one thing he does ask us to do is to surrender to him our sins. You see, a lot of people want to cling to their sins. They are not ready to give them up. They are like St. Augustine who in his Confessions wrote, Lord, give me chastity, but not yet. The worst imaginable thing is that the Lord would hand us over to these sins, to give us into the hands of our iniquities. In the collect for Advent, we ask God to “give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness.” It is time to open our hands, time to let go of our sin and rebellion against God and to open the doors of our hearts to let the master come in and cleanse his temple.

23rd Sunday after Pentecost

Cast ye out the unprofitable servant into outer darkness.  

One of the most comforting messages of the Bible is that no injustice will escape the judgment of God. All of the lessons this morning highlight this affirmation of Scripture, as well as emphasizing the immediacy of this judgment. Zephaniah, like many of the Old Testament prophets, speaks of “the day of the Lord,” a day of reckoning in which the Lord will give to each according to his desserts. In the Epistle, Paul speaks of the day of the Lord as coming like a thief in the night; the Lord's return will be swift and unexpected. Finally, in the Gospel lesson, our Lord describes in a parable the final judgment; the parable describes an accounting for entrusted goods at the return of the rightful owner of those goods

The first thing that needs to be said about this parable is that the talents referred to are a measure of weight that was used in the ancient world for precious metals. Basically the owner entrusts his money to his servants; in modern terms they might be thought of as day traders. So the parable is representing the shrewdness of the servants with their master's money. It would be a mistake to conclude that the parable is basically about financial stewardship.

Let me explain. We all know that we come into this world entirely dependent on others for our care and nurture. In fact, we don't even have a choice about being born, and for many years, we are dependent on the love and care of others to provide for all of our needs, from the basic needs for food and shelter to the more subtle but no less necessary things like human interaction and conversation which allow for the development of speech. From a theological perspective, we would say that our entire lives are dependent for their origin and continuation on God. Everything we have and are is dependent on others and in the final estimation all is dependent on God alone.

What is interesting about the servants in the parable is that they have no property of their own. They are not told to go out and build a fortune out of nothing. The parable would have had a very different message had it been about many of our forbears who came to this country with nothing and by hard work and discipline achieved great success. Such a story would be inspiring, but it would not be good news. The servants do not have anything of their own. They trade what they have received. This is an honest assessment of the human condition. We have our origin in God. We owe our birth to our parents. We owe our eduction to our parents and teachers. Should we have it, we owe our good health to doctors and the Lord's care. Our response to all this really should be an immense sense of gratitude. There is a beautiful prayer of thanksgiving in the prayer book that probably many of you know. It states this truth in a beautifully poetic way: we bless thee for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life. But as Christians we have even more than these things: we have the knowledge of God's abundance grace and the power of faith to hold us through all of life's trials. The prayer goes on to say, but above all, [we bless thee] for the redemption of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory. 

Occasionally, people will ask questions like, if Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, the only way to the Father, what will be the eternal fate of the native, half a world away, who has never had occasion to hear the Gospel? My friends, I have much greater concern for the bishops and ministers of our church who have been entrusted with so much; some of whom cannot state with sincerity or faith the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I have no desire to be a controversialist, but I am very dismayed at how our Gospel witness is undermined when Christian leaders speak of Jesus as a way, or my way to God, as if our faith were a decision of expediency or convenience rather than the life-preserver thrown by God to us in the midst of a life-and-death struggle.

We have been given much; our life and being, our health and continuance, access to immeasurable grace and love. The parable and the other lessons remind us that we have to give account for what all this, and the judgment of God is imminent. We know cognitively, even if we don't apply it practically, that we can die at any time. What God demands of us is not that we magically produce quarters out of ears or dollars out of empty hats, but that we open our hands in surrender. You see, the two servants did not pretend that the talents were theirs. We hear no report that they were particularly anxious to guarantee the return of the investments. We know that investments by nature have a measure of uncertainty. Those two servants opened their hands to put into trade that which was not theirs anyways. It was the third who thought he needed to cling to it, in a futile attempt at self-preservation. It is the third servant who represents the solitary way, the fallen instinct to go-it-alone, apart from God and others. When we tell God and others, I don't need you, we are essentially like this third servant, clinging to our talent. The first two servants represent the way of surrender; giving away what isn't yours anyways. It is the way of love and self-sacrifice, but paradoxically the way to fruitfulness and abundant life. Love is the only thing that does not diminish when given away; in fact, it grows. My friends, how will the master find us: clinging to that sole talent, or surrendering what he has put into our hands for his purposes?

All Saints

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.  

Most people are very confused about Christian holiness. They think that to be holy is to be perfect and to be uber religious. Of course, in the world, the people that think they are perfect and are uber religious are normally some of the most hypocritical and toxic individuals. For this reason, some are actually driven away from Christianity because the mental picture they have of it is of people who are pretending to be saints. True Christian holiness is something quite different. If you examine the lives of those individuals whom everyone agrees lived like saints, like Mother Theresa, it is interesting to notice that they never talk about how much better than are becoming. In fact, with genuine saints, there is an increasing consciousness of sin and unworthiness. The road of Christian holiness is  on the one hand to plumb the depths of the darkness of the human heart and our capacity for despair apart from God and each other, while on the other hand, growing in the knowledge that we belong to the Lord Jesus, we have been redeemed by his blood and by being a new Adam he has claimed us as his offspring. You see, the Gospel proclamation is that we are God's children by virtue of our trust and faith in Jesus Christ. In the opening of John's Gospel, we are told, “To as many as believed in him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” As adopted children of God, the Lord Jesus is our elder brother. He gives to us his holiness and righteousness. Holiness is not something we can manufacture by our efforts, but something we receive as we acknowledge our sins and surrender to him as Lord.

This is precisely why we can have a feast of All Saints. It isn't simply laziness on our part because we don't want to honor each one with a separate feast day Rather, we are acknowledging that the saints belong together. The saints belong together because of whom they belong to and whose holiness they exhibited in their lives. It was his holiness that they showed forth in humility; it was his strength that they showed forth in their weakness; it was his grace that they showed forth in their insufficiency.
And inasmuch as we, my brothers and sisters, are humble; inasmuch as we are weak; inasmuch as we are insufficient, we have the grace to acknowledge that we belong to this Lord. There is nothing in us that can make us holy, but if we are marked as his then we are holy. And we are marked as his, when we are baptized, when we receive Holy Communion. These outward signs indicate the spiritual grace that we have to belong to him. He is one Christ, and all saints belong to him, whether in heaven or in earth. And every time we gather at this table, we believe that are joined to him and ask that “he may dwell in us, and we in him.” All those saints that have gone before us, the ones who are known and admired, as well as the many more who are remembered only by a few with cherished memories and stricken hearts, and even those saints who have been forgotten, they too are joined with us in Christ in our worship of God Almighty. As one of the classic hymns of our tradition states, we are separated from the saints at rest, only by the narrow stream of death. In this banquet of life, we are in put in mind that our communion with all the saints who have gone before us is established in God and in his Christ.

20th Sunday after Pentecost

This is the first and great commandment and the second is like unto it.


All of the lessons this morning relate to love for God. I suspect to many that love for God seems like a vague subject. How can one love a being that is not visible? Furthermore, how can one love a being that does not seem to need love, being wholly self-sufficient? Our society does us no favors in the way it conceptualizes love: love is thought of as an emotion, a magnetic force impelling two people together, the chemistry of two souls. Such love can strike like lightening in the first flame and dissipate like fog in the morning sun of adversity. With so many divorces today, the cause is often said to be I just don't love him or her anymore. In most of these cases, by all evidence, they seem to mean that they do not have that jittery, butterflies in the stomach, romantic feeling.

One of the pieces of good news in our faith is that God, as the 39 Articles state, is without body, part, or passions. That God is without passions means that his love is a decision of his will while his anger is an act of his justice. God does not ever loose his temper nor is the basis of his love fleeting emotion. It would be foreign to his character to say to one of us, his children, I just don't love you anymore. Why? Again, because his love is a decision of his will. Before we were born, before we had done anything good or bad, before we had any desire for the things of God, he loved and chose us to be in his image. He sent his son to be our representative and head that we might be his ambassadors in the world. God's love, therefore, is unshakable and unchanging. It is based on a decision not on emotion.

In a similar way, when we speak of love for God, and the command to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, we are talking about a decision, a reasoned commitment, that should not be based on how we are feeling at any given time—because we know that to be human is to have emotions that fluctuate and change.  In other words, loving God is about actions not about feelings. One way to describe this active love for God is to think about the Ten Commandments. Traditionally the commandments have been divided into our duty to God—the first four—and our duty to our neighbor—the last six. Commandments one and two tell us to honor and worship God. We have to acknowledge his unity, while at the same time disavowing all other gods. While this might seem like a merely formal statement, to reject other gods has profound practical implications. It means that everything in the world that would claim absolute authority, or to which we would give undivided allegiance, has to be set aside. There are so many things in the world that try to convince us that things will make us happy: whether it is material goods, a good reputation, or simply money and financial security. Anytime we think these alone can make us happy, we are treating them as gods, giving to them the loyalty and worship that the one true God alone deserves. So the first thing that we do to love God is to forsake the myriad idols of the heart that seem to promise so much but give so little.

The third commandment prohibits taking the name of the Lord in vain. While this prohibition includes not swearing, it also prohibits empty and idle religious talk.  It is easy for religious people, you see, to do a lot of talk about God and not really to be converted. Remember our Lord quotes the prophet Isaiah, these people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. So, secondly, a way to love God is to speak sincerely and reverently about him. This is precisely what Paul is describing in the Epistle lesson. He did not come to the Thessalonians with flattering words or with elegant words that were in fact a cloak for greed. Rather, he came to preach the Gospel, something that was more than just a set of beliefs, but a proclamation of God's power to save and transform. Paul writes, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves. In a sense, we see Paul's love for God in this honesty and sincerity with the Thessalonians.

It is my intention and pledge to speak to you from Sunday to Sunday with such sincerity. In good faith, I want to point you to God. I will not offer you empty religious talk in the form of devout platitudes. Nor will I stand here and give you my insights on the issues of the day, missing the point that what we all need to hear is not my opinions about politics or society but the word of God.

But, I digress, the fourth commandment is to honor the Sabbath. This commandment  speaks to our duty to God in regular religious observance, including corporate worship on Sundays, but also private devotions throughout the week. Sunday worship should not be about our being entertained or even about “getting something out of the service.” It is about recognizing that God has given us life and all things, and offering back to him our devotion and prayers. This is yet a third aspect of love for God by setting aside time consistently and regularly to honor and worship him.

A final aspect for the love of God is, in fact, to love our neighbor. You see, the love of God and the love of our neighbor are connected. In his first epistle, the Apostle John asks the question, if you do not love your brother whom you have seen, how can you love God whom you have not seen? You see, to love God is to do good to our neighbor. Jesus tells the Pharisees the great commandment is to love God, but then he goes on to say that the love of neighbor is like unto it. The reading from Leviticus gives us some ideas on what love for neighbor looks like: it means not favoring people based on their outward circumstances like for example that they have a lot of money. It means not slandering our brothers or sisters or being the vehicle for malicious gossip. It means not hating our brother in our heart. When we do such things, we are showing our love for God.
It is worth asking yourself today, do I love God? Of course, we often must fail, if this love for God is principally about our actions. There is grace on hand, of course, for us when we fail in this great commandment, but we are called to renew our commitment to love him. In eternity, we are promised the enjoyment of a communion of love in the Trinity. Now is our time to train in this activity and fellowship of love for which we have been created.