Love Your Neighbor! I mean it!
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
April 17, 2011


Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can purchase a CD of the sermon in the church office. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2011.

Message: “Love Your Neighbor! I mean it!”

When Nashchon was an old man,
after the Israelites had finished wandering in the desert for 40 years,
after Moses had died,
after the tribe had settled in the land of milk and honey,
he remembered.

How could you forget?
Forget the pain of slavery,
forget the awesome power of God,
forget the act of faith – to simply walk into the sea,
forget the miracle, the east wind blew and a way was made.
You can’t forget that.

Nashchon remembered that frightful night,
when everyone ate Lamb,
and marked the doors of their house with blood,
so that the spirit of God would pass them over,
as that spirit destroyed the children of their oppressors.

Nashchon remembered that violence begat violence,
and, now, near the end of his life,
sometimes he would sit and weep
for the children of Egypt
and the children of Israel, too,
and for all that had been.

Nashchon remembered.
Nashchon remembered, too, what happened in that desert.
They wandered for a long time.
More then a generation –
and it wasn’t an easy time.
There was a lot of arguing.
But while they were there,
they figured out the rules for how to live,
how God, who had set them free,
wanted them to live:
to be holy as God was holy.

Nashshon was an old man, now,
and he didn’t remember all the rules.
But he remembered the two important ones.
The two rules from which all the others were derived.
The first of these rules would later been recorded
in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 6, verse 4.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

and the second of these rules would be later written down
in that book of rules, Leviticus, in chapter 19, verse 18:

18You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Nashschon knew that if he kept these rules
then he would be alright,
and his people would be alright.

In the desert, Nashchon had fallen in love with a woman who became his bride,
and, eventually, he had many children.
And they had many children.
And when Nashchon told them about Egypt, and the water,
and the desert, and the rules,
they laughed and smiled, and they remembered, too.
And Nashchon, one day, grew tired,
and lay in his chair in the mid-afternoon
and listened to his grandchildren play,
and closed his eyes,
and died.
He was old and happy and had lived well.

And Nashchon’s descendants grew,
as each grandchild had grandchildren,
and though some of them forgot about Naschchon,
they remembered the story of when the spirit of God passed them over,
and when they fled through the sea,
and, most of the time, they remembered the rules.
Like Nashchon, his descendants were brave and courageous,
though they sometimes were fearful, their faith won out.
Most of the time.

Many hundreds of years later –
maybe 600 or so years, but we can’t be exactly sure –
quite a few of Nashchon’s descendants found themselves,
to use a phrase, weeping on the shores of the rivers of Babylon.
First, the Assyrians had conquered part of Israel,
and then the Babylonians had conquered the Assyrians
and the rest of Israel.
They sacked Jerusalem and burned down the temple.
And though many Israelites got to stay,
the brave ones, the leaders, the priests and the ones who would walk into water,
they were exiled to Babylon,
to live in captivity,
apart from their land, their people, and, it was thought, their God.

Why did this happen?

Oh, you could give geo-political explanations.
But that’s not what they meant.
They meant, why did God do this to us?

Folks started asking this question
when the Assyrians conquered part of Israel,
the people wondered: what happened?

And a group of folks – Amos, Micah, and others,
proclaimed they knew what had happened:
people forgot the rules.
They remembered the story,
they remembered the rituals,
they remembered how to do the sacrifices and what prayers to say,
but they forgot the two essential rules,
to love God and to love your neighbor.

This is the prophetic tradition:
I despise your festivals, but let justice roll down like waters, says Amos.
What does the Lord require of you but humility and justice?, says Micah.

And one of these prophets –
who knows, but let us imagine that he is the great-great-great to the 10th power
grandson of Nashchon – why not?
is Isaiah.

Isaiah, like all the prophets, speaks in the voice of God,
he says, I know why this happened:
bringing offerings is futile, what we need is justice.
In the first chapter, verses 21-23, Isaiah has God say this:

21How the faithful city has become a whore! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her— but now murderers! 22Your silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water. 23Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them.


This is the refrain of the prophets:
we have forgotten to love our neighbor,
and we can tell that we’ve forgotten
because we care more about our own wealth,
then we care about the most vulnerable – the widows, the orphans.
We chase after profit,
but are deaf to the cries of the prophets.
Everyone loves a bribe.
And it is for these inequities, these injustices,
that God decides to punish the Israelites.
To destroy their temple, to send their leaders into exile,
to make them, once again, subject to the will of a foreign power.

This is the story the Jewish people begin to tell about what has happened to them.
That God punishes a people for their hubris, for their greed:
this is what happened in the time of Noah,
and this is why they were in Egypt,
and why they had to wander in the desert after the whole golden calf business,
and this is what is happening now.

But, as the story goes, God will redeem them,
if they redeem themselves.
If they pledge themselves to justice,
to care for those widows and orphans,
then they shall return from exile.
After the flood, a rainbow.
After Egypt, the red sea parted.
After the desert, the river Jordon.
After the rivers the Babylon, homecoming.

And this is what, in the end, happens:
the Persian King Cyrus conquers Babylon
and sets the Jews free, allows them to rebuild their temple.

One of Nashchon’s descendents –
let’s call her Sarah, only because we don’t know her name,
or even that she was a she,
but let’s say it’s Sarah,
after the people have returned to Israel,
Sarah takes her ink to the scroll of Isaiah,
and adds the next part of the story,
how God has restored them, just like before in Egypt.
Scholars now call Sarah’s writing “Second Isaiah”,
and this comes from chapter 51, verses 9-11:

Awake, awake, put on strength,
O arm of the Lord!
Awake, as in days of old,
the generations of long ago!
Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep;
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to cross over?
So the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Note here that Sarah says it was God who cut Rahab –
the slaying of the sea-dragon Rahab is part of the Babylonian
creation myth,
and it is here the work of the God of the Jews,
the God who dried up the sea so the redeemed could cross over.
In chapter 54, Sarah, speaking for Isaiah speaking for God,
renews the promise of old.

This is like the days of Noah to me:
Just as I swore that the waters of Noah
would never again go over the earth,
so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you
and will not rebuke you.

For the mountains may depart
and the hills be removed,
but my steadfast love shall not depart from you,
and my covenant of peace shall not be removed,
says the Lord, who has compassion on you.

This is the promise, renewed.
This is the hope, eternal.
This is the covenant between the children of Abraham and the spirit of God:
that God shall remember God’s promises,
and hold the people in love,
and the people, in exchange, shall love God,
and show that love,
make that love real,
by loving their neighbor.
By how they live –
how they treat, in particular, the most vulnerable:
the widow, the orphan, the poor, the slave:

for we, the Israelites say, have been slaves,
so we shall value freedom.
We have been the victims of war,
so we shall work for peace.

This is the promise, this is the hope, this is the song
of the prophets,
let there be peace.
Let there be peace – that we might go home,
and worship and live and make music,
that we might die, not in war, not in violence,
but in old age, with the sounds of laughing grandchildren ringing in our ears,
let there be peace.

Let there be peace.

The family of Nashschon, Isaiah, and Sarah continues.
Sarah’s niece marries a tradesman,
and she has many children,
and they have many children,
and over generations, they live through the great sweep of history:
Greek culture which sweeps into the Holy Land,
to be followed by the conquerors, again:
this time, the Romans,
the resistance of the Jewish people,
who want freedom, who have tasted it,
who remember the story,
and what it means.

The descendents of that brave young man
join the rebellion, and see the terrible wrath of the Roman army,
as they destroy, once again, the temple in Jerusalem.
They see a new religion,
the followers of a carpenter’s son from Nazareth
and a former Rabbi, Saul who called himself Paul,
a new religion rise in the land,
and become – inexplicably – the religion of the Empire.
And though many stay in Palestine, between the shores
of the river Jordon and the beaches of the Mediterranean,
many disperse –
they go to North Africa and Spain, the head north into Eastern Europe,
and they tell the stories –
why is this night different from every other night –
and they remember the teachings,
most of the time.

And parents have children, who grow,
and have children of their own.
And maybe they don’t know,
that Sarah, and Isaiah, and Nashchon are in their blood,
but they are.

The bravery, the memory, the outrage at injustice,
the promise renewed,
the longing for peace – not a false peace,
but a peace built on freedom for all,
on justice for the most vulnerable,
this longing for this real peace,
this courage of love,
the love of God as made manifest in the love of your neighbor,
this courage of love,
it flows in these descendents,
it beats in their heart and breathes in their lungs.

Generations come and go.

And they tell the old stories and remember.
And, like their ancestors, they ask hard questions.

Hard questions about justice and fairness.
And they wonder, like Isaiah wondered long ago,
why has this happened to us?
Why the Shoah?
Why the pogrom?

And more intimately, why do widows and orphans still suffer,
and need protection?
And how is it that God allows the rivers to be polluted,
and the ice caps to melt,
and bombs to go off,
and children to live in squalor?
Why?

There is a concept in the Jewish tradition –
Tikkun Olam - to repair the world –
Tikkun Olam.

That it is our obligation to repair the world,
to make it better,
to, as the prophets of old said,
make justice roll down,
make freedom ring,
but why?

This is the question asked by the poet Jacqueline Osherow –
might she be descended from this line of brave ones? Maybe.
Maybe she is Nashchon’s great great great to the 80th power grand-daughter. Could be.





































Sometimes God forgets the rules, too.
It happens.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Take care of widows, orphans, the poor.
This is the promise, this is the covenant, this is how you repair the world.
Sometimes, God forgets.
And we must do the work.
Or maybe there isn’t a God at all,
and we must do the work.
Or maybe God, whatever that word means,
is so deeply incarnated into life that it is only through our hands and hearts
that God’s work of justice is done, and that the promise is kept.
However you think of it,
Tikkun – repair – is our work.

Let us imagine –
let us imagine that the poet has a 8th cousin, eight removed,
or something like that – anyway, a distant relative,
and another member of this family.

And for whatever reason, this cousin –
let us call him Nathan,
a derivative of old Nashchon,
Nathan has found himself worshiping in a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
Maybe Nathan got interested in Buddhism as a young man,
so UUism was a place he could do both.
Maybe he married a Gentile, and they wanted to worship together.
Sometimes reasons are hard to figure,
but for whatever reason, Nathan counts himself one of us.

And . . . and he hasn’t forgotten the old story.
He hasn’t forgotten the rules –
indeed, Nathan knows that among the sources of this living tradition
is “Jewish Teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbor as ourselves.”
We remember the stories, we remember the history,
so that we can remember this:
to love our neighbor as ourselves.

That’s easier said than done.
But the witness of Nathan’s ancestors tells us what this means:
instead of a city of bribes,
a city that sells itself for expediency, for power,
instead of this, to build a city – a society – a world
that serves justice, that sings freedom,
that cares for the widow and the orphan and the poor,
the most vulnerable.

And Nathan knows that this is not abstract.
This isn’t just theory or pretty words.
This is right now, today.

So Nathan writes a letter, he gets on the phone,
and he shouts it out like the prophets of old:
a budget proposal which slashes Medicare and Medicaid –
those programs which care, explicitly,
for the widows and orphans and poor,
for those with disabilities,
for the most vulnerable,
a budget which does that
but gives even more tax cuts for the very wealthy,
that budget is, as Isaiah put it long ago,
indicative of a city which has become a whore,
which sells its soul to the highest bidder.
It is not a budget in which we love our neighbors,
it is one in which we say, “tough luck, sucker.”

A budget in which we keep spending more than 600 billion dollars a year on war,
which is 42% of all the military spending by the whole world,
and 6 times larger than anyone else,
and yet, at the same time,
we cut back on community policing and school teachers and rehab programs,
this budget doesn’t make peace,
it makes violence.
So Nathan writes letters, and he votes, and he speaks up.
It’s what his Unitarian Universalist faith calls for him to do,
and what his anscestors did,
and it is what, even though he isn’t sure about whether such a being exists,
it is what his God calls him to do.

It’s not just big national questions, of course –
where we are called to love our neighbors.
It is how we interact with each other, right here in this room,
in our family, and in our community.

It is about how we treat those who might “seem” different,
but who we know are our sister, our brother, our kin,
and worthy of our justice and our love.

It’s about hospitality, about how we welcome the stranger in to our community.
It’s about compassion,
whether our hearts bleed as God’s heart should,
when we see children harmed, abused, forgotten, cast off.
It’s about the decisions we make,
by intention and by habit,
every day.

We are called to love our neighbor.
It is the ancient call of an ancient religion,
and we freely take it upon ourselves as who we are, what we are for.

It’s a journey – a journey of compassion,
a journey of building connections,
a journey of love.

From injustice to justice,
from slavery to freedom,
from what was to what might be,
it is a journey.
Nathan’s on it,
and so are all of us,
a journey of repair, a journey of hope.

We remember the stories,
for they are good stories,
but we remember them,
most of all,
because they help us remember the rules:
not all of them, maybe –
but the important ones:
love, and love.
start with the forgotten.
keep going.
love everyone.
don’t stop.

And thus shall the old prophets be heard,
and thus shall the promise be kept,
and thus shall our lives be worthy of memory,
and thus shall we sing.