The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost - October 25, 2026

St. Pauls - Proper 25 - October 25, 2026

There are many words in our language which if used often enough seem to ruin the word itself. These days, for example, the word is awesome. Awesome is used for everything from Friday night’s pizza party to a guest professor’s Shakespeare lecture. To a haircut. To ice cream.

Frankly, it doesn’t take long for the once-rich and evocative word to deflate. Nowadays, few people hear the word awesome and feel the spine-tingling sense of wonder, apprehension, surprise, and astonishment the word is supposed to inspire. Awesome has become a dull word. Sort of like nice. Or cool.

As a Christian, I fear that the same might be said of another word—a word central to the faith, a word Jesus himself used to sum up the whole of his identity and mission. A word upon which, he said, hang all the law and the prophets.

What’s the word? Love. The word is love.

We’ve been following Jesus during his final week in Jerusalem—a stretch in Matthew’s gospel often called The Controversy Stories. Last week we watched him escape the trap about Caesar’s coin. This week, the Pharisees come back for one more try.

A lawyer among them is sent to ask the test question: Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?

Hear that question the way the people in that temple would have heard it. First-century rabbis actually debated this. They counted up 613 commandments in the Torah and argued over which one stood at the center. So when the lawyer asks Jesus this, he’s inviting Jesus into an active synagogue debate.

And Jesus gives an answer that goes further than any rabbi before him.

He answers with two commandments, not one. And he does something no one else had done—he binds them together as inseparable.

The first is from Deuteronomy 6. It is called the Shema, from its first word, Hear. Every observant Jew prayed it twice a day. Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Jesus adds and with all your mind to the list. Everything you have. Everything you are. Love God with it.

That is the first and great commandment, Jesus says.

Then he says: and here is a second one, like it. And he reaches into Leviticus 19—today’s O.T. reading—and he pulls out one verse buried in the middle of a list of practical rules about not slandering your neighbor and not holding grudges: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

And then he says: on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Look at that imagery. Hang means the whole thing is suspended from these two commandments—the entire law, the prophets, all 613 commandments, everything God has ever said about how to live. If you take them away, the whole structure collapses. Jesus is making a staggering interpretive move: the whole Bible is one long elaboration of love for God and love for neighbor meeting actual life.

Okay. But what does it mean to actually do this?

This is where our overuse, misuse, and abuse of the word love gets us into trouble. We claim to love many things. We love our favorite celebrities, movies, bands, and television shows. We love going on vacation, reading a novel, or eating a favorite meal.

Shaped as we are by Hollywood, romance novels, contemporary pop culture, and media, we tend to think of love as a feeling. A spontaneous, free-flowing emotion that arises out of personal affinity and enjoyment. We fall in love. We think love is blind, happens at first sight, and that its course never runs smooth. We talk about it as if we have little power or agency in its presence.

But this is not how the Bible describes love. Jesus doesn’t say, I sure hope love happens to you. He says, Love is the greatest and first commandment.

It’s not a lucky accident. It’s not a matter of personal preference. It’s a matter of obedience to the one we call Lord.

When I look at our own lives, it’s not hard to see why we perpetually fail at this. Biblical love makes us vulnerable, and we’d rather be safe. Love requires trust, and these days we find ourselves naturally suspicious. Love spills over boundaries, and wefeel safer policing our personal boundaries. Love takes time, discipline, and transformation, and we are just so darned busy.

Most of the time—if we’re honest—we want to keep my circle small and manageable. Charitable actions are easy, but cultivating our hearts? Preparing and pruning it to truly feel the world's pain? That is hard and costly.

And yet, this is the call. We have a God who first and foremost wants our love—not our fear, our performative piety, or our cold compliance. And we have a God who wants every one of God’s children to actually feel loved. Not shamed, not judged, but loved.

Jesus inextricably links love of God with love of neighbor because each reinforces, reinterprets, and revives the other.

As heirs of the Incarnation, we cannot love God in a disinfected, disembodied way while remaining quietly indifferent to the neighbor across the street. Our living God insists on being loved by people whose love shows up in how they treat human beings in flesh and blood.

Neither can we love our neighbors in any sustainable way if that love is disconnected from God. Without that grounding, our service eventually runs dry. We burn out. We grow weary of other people's pain and start to resent the very people we are called to serve.

As Lutheran minister Clayton Schmit writes:

To love God with all our heart, mind, and soul seems nearly impossible when we think of love as an emotion... Likewise, loving our neighbor is difficult... But biblical love is not passive. It is not something that occurs to us without our control or will. Biblical love is something we do.

Love of God makes possible and deepens our love of neighbor; love of neighbor puts flesh and bones on our love for God. Both or neither. You cannot have one without the other.

The call today is to follow in the footsteps of the One who stood before his accusers and declared love the be-all and end-all.

Think about the setting of Paul's first letter to a church, facing the charges of the opposition:

The church was growing. The opposition charged that sedition was being preached—that a King other than Caesar was being heralded and honored. This is the setting for Paul’s first letter to a church. Opposition of one sort or the other has been a companion of the Church since the birth of her founder. God’s new thing somehow is often experienced as offense. Still, Paul advises us to declare what is entrusted …in spite of opposition. Never has the gospel charged us to defeat our opposition. Our call is to disorient the opposition by not claiming superiority of any kind, nor by threatening violence but by extending compassion to all, even the enemy. The compassion-riot we wage against the status quo is fueled by the simple fact that we’ve met Someone who changes how we do opposition in this world. (1 Thessalonians 2:1-8)

The call is to weep with those who weep, laugh with those who laugh, feed the hungry, welcome the children, release the captives, forgive sinners, comfort the oppressed, and tell each other the truth. The call is to guide each other home.

I want to end this sermon with one of my favorite blessings from A Black Rock Prayer Book:

The world now is too dangerous and too beautiful

for anything but love.

May your eyes be so blessed you see God in everyone.

Your ears, so you hear the cry of the poor.

May your hands be so blessed

that everything you touch is a sacrament.

Your lips, so you speak nothing but the truth with love.

May your feet be so blessed you run to those who need you.

And may your heart be so opened, so set on fire,

that your love, your love, changes everything.

And may the blessing of the God who created you, loves you,

and sustains you, be with you now and always.

May it be so. Amen.