Church of St. Mary at Clinton Heights

At the risk of dating myself, do any of you remember the old song that Dionne Warwick sang in 1966:

 

What the world needs now is love, sweet love

It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of

What the world needs now is love, sweet love,

No not just for some but for everyone.…

 

Jesus , when asked by the Pharisee, what the greatest commandment is resounds with the Shema.  The Shema is said everyday in the Jewish community.  It is akin to the Our Father for us.  The greatest commandment is to love God above everything.  What does it mean to love God?  I think is is total dedication to Him.  Love is not a feeling.  It is a commitment.

I love to eat chocolate chip cookies, but that feeling goes away when I am hungry again. Also, if I eat too many, than I am putting my health and waistline at risk.  To love God is to actively commit ourselves everyday, every hour, every moment to God.  It is not dependent our our feelings.    God’s love is incarnate in Jesus; God gave us everything he could give us; his very self.  Why would Jesus go the Cross if not for Love?  I think what we need to teach our young people is about God’s abiding love.  We need to help them (and ourselves) commit our entire life’s to God.

But, the Shema and Jesus don’t stop there.  After, we commit ourselves to love of God, we commit our selves to love all people.  It is very clear who our neighbor is:

Isaiah is quite clear:

Do not molest an alien..remember you were aliens in Egypt

There are no strangers in the Christian Community

God loves each of us equally; saint and sinner

We need to ask ourselves who is the alien among us; the stranger,

the person who needs us

 

You shall not wrong the orphan and the widow.  Remember there was no Social Security, no Food Stamps, no governmental assistance.  A widow had no standing in society..she was dependent on her family and friends to survive and if they didn’t take care of her, then she could starve, or have to beg, or worse

Who are the widows and orphans among us?

Who do we as a church community need to reach out to…..who has no one?

 

Finally, the Love that God shares us with us and calls us to share with others….it is a call to justice.  Justice meaning everyone is treated with fairly.   To take someone’s cloak and not return it, is equal to making someone sleep on the street; hopefully over a subway grate; if there is one.    If not, the person will sleep on the cold hard ground.

 

Granted we need to prudent with our sharing, but we can take care of the homeless and poor in many different ways.

 

Finally, we are called to love our selves……this is to see ourselves as God sees us.  Too many times, we cant love ourselves because of old messages that say we are not worth anything or because we don’t feel like we deserve anything.  This is not how God sees us.   God looks at us, even in our sinfulness and shortcomings, and sees himself.  We are told in Genesis that each human person is created in the image of God.  Our love of self and others is the rooted in the divine image within.

 

So maybe, Dionne Warwick had it right.  The world needs love……..from you and me

This weekend’s Gospel is a challenge for us.  It would appear that Jesus is telling us to keep our civil responsibilities and our religious responsibilities separate from one another.  Pay your taxes; pray to God, but not at the same time.  At one time in the history of the Church, pre-Vatican II, this was the prevailing attitude.  In this view, the world was not a good place, but the Church promised heaven.  However, since Vatican II, the documents of the Council have challenged us to be salt and leaven to society.

We read in Lumen Gentium 31: ” But the laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God. They live in the world, that is, in each and in all of the secular professions and occupations. They live in the ordinary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven. They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function and led by the spirit of the Gospel they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven. In this way they may make Christ known to others, especially by the testimony of a life resplendent in faith, hope and charity. Therefore, since they are tightly bound up in all types of temporal affairs it is their special task to order and to throw light upon these affairs in such a way that they may come into being and then continually increase according to Christ to the praise of the Creator and the Redeemer.”

In other words, we all are called to season society with our witness to the faith.  This includes the ordained bishop,priest and deacon and religious women and men.  Each one of us, no matter our state in life, is challenged to bring the message of Jesus into the world.

Our world today is in need of the saving message of Jesus.   You just need to listen to the news for 2 minutes to hear of violence, war, bullying, latent and overt racism and prejudice,  sexism, and the list continues.  The call of the Gospel is not isolate ourselves into a rigid world set off from the world with walls; I truly believe that the reality of Vatican II challenges to embrace the world with the same love and acceptance that Jesus embraced the Cross.  Salt flavors the food we use and can be coarse at times, but is needed.   So too our faith.  We need to flavor the world with our beliefs even when it may rub someone the wrong way.  Leaven makes bread rise and grow.  The leaven of our love will help the world grow into the Kingdom of Jesus.

May we witness in our world to the love of God may real in Christ.