Dear Friends,

Our Gospel reading for this Sunday is a very familiar one. When asked what commandment in the law is the greatest Jesus says, “'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

Those listening at the time would have been familiar with both of these commandments in their Scriptures but in different books (a fact that I wasn’t aware of until seminary). The part about loving God is found in Deuteronomy 6:5 and the part about loving neighbor is in Leviticus 19:18. What Jesus does here is to link them and make the two inseparable. We cannot truly love God and at the same time not love our neighbor. By loving we come to realize ourselves as a participant in the abundant expanse of God’s love, and see everyone and everything as a part, too. 

I am not sure when I truly came to this realization. My guess is that it had something to do with how I felt when someone loved me for who I was and not who they wanted me to be. Or when I truly listened to another. Or when I reached beyond my comfort zone or my fears into another’s world to see with their eyes. Perhaps it was when I thought I didn’t have it in me to love once more, but something in me did. Or when I see or experience how out of situations of great pain, suffering, and loss, compassion is so often born and inconceivable generosity and kindness are extended.

Though life is and will remain for me a great mystery, perhaps now more than ever, I trust that love is the great call on our lives – what we are made of, what we are created for, what is Eternal.

With this in mind, I invite you to consider some questions about what love means to you, or, in the word of this fall’s stewardship campaign, what it means to be rooted in the abundance of God’s love. How do you give it and to whom? Think back to how you may have been changed by another’s love, or by loving another. Who, right now, might be the neighbor in need of your love?

In Christ,

Amelie+