Sermon preached at Old South Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Hallowell, Maine, November 10, 2024.

²⁸ One of the legal experts heard their dispute and saw how well Jesus answered them. He came over and asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?”

²⁹ Jesus replied, “The most important one is Israel, listen! Our God is the one Lord, ³⁰ and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your mind, and with all your strength.³¹ The second is this, You will love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these.”

³² The legal expert said to him, “Well said, Teacher. You have truthfully said that God is one and there is no other besides him. ³³ And to love God with all of the heart, a full understanding, and all of one’s strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself is much more important than all kinds of entirely burned offerings and sacrifices.”

³⁴ When Jesus saw that he had answered with wisdom, he said to him, “You aren’t far from God’s kingdom.” After that, no one dared to ask him any more questions.

Mark 12:28-34 (CEB)

It’s been difficult to figure out what exactly to say today. Should I directly address the election this past week? Should I ignore it entirely? Should I do something a little bit more subtle perhaps? I’ve had a whole slew of questions rolling around in my head, and as those questions rolled around my head, there was the realization that I had to admit that I was feeling a little bit lost, not sure what to think or feel.  But, as the days continued, with more and more issues raised that were increasingly unsettling, it felt more and more unavoidable that I couldn’t just ignore the election and its results.

There’s a famous quote that probably every preacher knows, attributed to the theologian Karl Barth:  “We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”

Of course, these days, “newspaper” has a bit of a different meaning. Yet, the advice still holds that the life of the faithful ought to be connected, in a meaningful way, to the realities of the world in which we live.  But, the preacher must be careful too, not to abuse the privilege of speaking from the pulpit, or what amounts to a pulpit, by bullying people into a perspective that is not actually grounded in scripture.  So, it is with some trepidation that I offer a few thoughts on what has transpired in the United States in the last week.

Not only were the results of the election not what I had hoped for, but the results were so much worse than I thought they could be. Perhaps some of you feel a kinship to that thought. There might even be a couple or a few of you, I might guess, who voted for the winner, but are feeling a little bit distressed at some of the early indications of what is to come.

For those of you who are paying any attention at all to social media or certain news broadcasts, you might have seen one of the more disturbing responses to the election, a sense that something truly terrible has been unleashed.  One example is a video of a man named Nick Fuentes, a young white supremacist who has had dinner with Mr. Trump in the past. Nick Fuentes is an influencer of young men.  He is a Holocaust denier and misogynist who streams videos on X, formerly Twitter, and other platforms, although not on YouTube, since he was kicked off.

After the election, Fuentes posted a video, in which he is so gleeful that he can barely stay seated.  And, in his unhinged gleefulness, he chants, “Your body, my choice.  Forever.” There is no adequate word to describe my response to that video, if I’m thinking about words that I feel comfortable saying in this sanctuary.

So what is there to say? How do we deal with all of this?  How do we live our faith in the midst of the reality in which we now and will be living?  And, still more of an issue is that a part, perhaps a big part, of the effort to elect Donald Trump came from people who claim attachment to the same faith that we do and that many of them somehow connect Christianity to policies that are not at all connected to the lessons contained in the New Testament.

It is a challenge, to be sure, to try to figure out how so many people who claim the same faith as we do, seem to have such a fundamentally different approach with passages like our focus passage for today.

Today’s lesson on God’s greatest command, God’s most important expectation, outlined by Jesus himself, is pretty straightforward. 

[Y]ou must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your mind, and with all your strength. ³¹ The second is this, You will love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these.”

There are no asterisks here in this passage, no little notes to indicate that it means something different from what it actually says. Today’s passage is one of Jesus’s clearest lessons and teachings that you can’t wiggle out of if you are a person of faith.

Yet, lots of Christians are wiggling out. And, they are the same Christians claiming that they want this country to be a more explicitly Christian country. And, somehow that means, that immigrants are not welcome, that those fleeing terrible violence in their own home countries are not allowed here, that women’s bodies belong to the men in their lives, that it is perfectly fine to demean and degrade those who appear and seem different, to demonize those on the periphery, on the margins of our society, especially targeted at those who are transgender.

How can it be that those who claim not only the same faith that we do, but also explicitly talk about the United States needing to be a Christian nation, how is today’s lesson not at the forefront of their preaching, their policies, their leadership, their lifestyle? I wish I could answer that question, but I can’t. I don’t know. But, like many of you, I have a lot of questions and I wonder a lot about how to live and be, as we move into what is likely going to be a very difficult time for those of us who do not share the vision of Mr. Trump and his advisors.

This past week as I was searching for guidance, as I was trying to find some shred hopefulness or a perspective that I thought would be worth sharing today, I stumbled upon a short little video on YouTube, offered by a retired Episcopalian priest.

His perspective offered the reflection that Christianity has never been a religion that, at its essence, is a faith of the majority.  At its foundation, Christianity calls to the faithful to love each other, to care for the marginalized, to turn the other cheek.  These are demands far too difficult for the majority to take up.

So, Father David suggests (see clip here) that this is the time to renew our faith and our commitment to the way of Jesus Christ and with confidence and with some fear and trembling know and recognize that God stands near us.

As we learn in the scripture for today:

The legal expert said to him, “Well said, Teacher. You have truthfully said that God is one and there is no other besides him. ³³ And to love God with all of the heart, a full understanding, and all of one’s strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself is much more important than all kinds of entirely burned offerings and sacrifices.”

³⁴ When Jesus saw that he had answered with wisdom, he said to him, “You aren’t far from God’s kingdom.” 

We would do well to take a moment, consider deeply and powerfully, some of the lessons from the earliest Christians, those who set themselves apart by looking out for each other, caring for those on the margins, lifting up the lowly and seeing everyone as deserving of God’s love.  In those early days, women were partners in the work, not just sent off to cook and clean and have more babies.  The New Testament is littered with stories of women who were engaged significantly in the work, in the ministry.  I’m not sure about what kind of pets she might’ve owned, but the original childless cat lady may have been Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, the one who was the first to share the good news of resurrection.

So what do we do next?

First, we continue to be people of faith, people of good intention, people who seek to love our neighbor as ourselves, people who understand that to love God, to worship God, requires that we look after and love our neighbor as ourselves.

Secondly, we do number one even more. It’s important that we wrap ourselves around those who are feeling especially vulnerable, those who are feeling targeted by the unleashed hostility toward those who don’t neatly fit into what has somehow been determined as the only way people are supposed to live their lives.

Third, we do yet even more of numbers one and two.  Over the past couple of years, here at Old South, and continuing even now, a lot of time and energy is, and has been, spent on how to deal with our buildings.  We cannot escape the issues that continue to be very much present, but this is an important moment to make sure that the issues with our buildings don’t get in the way of the work and ministry we are clearly called to do.  Taking another lesson from those early Christians, we ought to be reminded that they did not show their faith, demonstrate their love for God and neighbor by erecting buildings.  Jesus’s teaching on the most important lesson was, and continues to be, very clear.  We must stay focused on that.  We are the ones who show love of God and love of neighbor, not the building we inhabit on Sunday mornings.

Let us stay focused.  Let us be a community that takes seriously this most important of lessons, and while doing so, help and encourage each other, remaining steadfast, not collapsing under the weight of disappointment.  It’s a hard road, yet we are called to be resilient.  We have everything we need.