If there is one passage of Scripture most of us have memorized, it is this one. Jesus' response to the question about summarizing all the laws and commandments. It's a trick question of course and Jesus handles it in an astounding way. Part one: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and all your mind." Good point there, Jesus. Love God. Focus your life's energies on ultimate things, not on things close to your face. Put life into perspective and all the little pieces will fall into place.

Nice.

It's got a nice New Age sort of ring to it. And you can't beat the logic, really.

Jesus also includes the mind in the love of God. I like that, since I think of myself as a person of the mind. I don't like the idea of having to leave my mind in the trunk of my car while I go off to church to worship God. I can bring all my mental faculties along with me. If something doesn't ring true, I can examine it, peruse it, decide whether it is essential or non-essential. It's OK, Jesus seems to be saying, "Use your mind. If it doesn't make sense, struggle with it. Don't just take what the church has said historically, just because the church has said it historically. You've got to love your God with your mind." I like that a lot.

I also like the individuality of that first part of Jesus' answer. You, as an individual, can love the Lord your God by using your heart, your soul and your mind. You can love the Lord your God without the intercessions of an overbearing priest or minister. You don't need some authority figure telling you what to believe. You can work it out for yourself.

All the laws and commandments can be boiled down to just this one. Love God and do as you please, as one of the great bishops of the church once said. If you love God, what you please to do will please God, who is the giver of all the laws and commandments.

Good one, Jesus.

And ... ? Oh, wait, I wasn't listening there. My mind drifted off for a second. What did you say Jesus? And ... what?

"And the second is like unto it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Oh. I don't like that part very much. Well, that's not completely true, I used to like that part when I liked my next door neighbor, but we're currently having a feud with our neighbors to our immediate south and I don't find them altogether too likeable. See, I liked the part about loving God with my heart and mind and soul, but this whole thing about having to get along with all humanity is a little bit distracting from the primary purpose about loving God. You always have a way always of putting us in this interesting box, Jesus.

Love God. Love your neighbor.

Can't we just pick one? Like, in times when our neighbors are easy to get along with we could focus on the love of neighbor thing, and when our neighbor is not so likeable, much less loveable, maybe we could just love God with our heart, mind and soul. Sort of an ala carte Christianity.

I'll have the pork tenderloin with the grilled onions, but I wonder if I could substitute the creamed spinach and the mountain of onion rings for the broccoli and asparagus? Sure, anything you want Mr. Gorman, we're here to please.

I'll love God with everything I've got, but at this point, the neighbor thing just ain't gonna work. Or maybe I could love the neighbors to the east, west and north? Actually, we've not really met the neighbors to the west yet, they moved in at some point last year and we haven't yet gotten to know them, but I'm sure they're awfully nice people, very loveable. They keep to themselves. I think we've waved to them once or twice.

Actually, the neighbor thing in Jesus' summary of all the laws and commandments is worse than my having to love the neighbors to our immediate south. In Luke's Gospel, when this question is asked, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" Jesus answers as he does in Matthew's gospel--love God, love your neighbor--but then in Luke the Pharisees get a follow-up question: "Who is my neighbor?"

And Luke remembers Jesus telling the Pharisees the parable of the Good Samaritan, about a guy who is categorically unlikeable because of his race (Jews and Samaritans did not associate with one another or like each other very much, Luke tells us by way of explanation in another story). Samaritans were pulled over regularly by the police and charged with a DWS, "Driving While Samaritan." But the Samaritan in this parable is the good guy. He is the hero in Jesus' story. He cares for the man beaten by the side of the road. "Who," Jesus then asks, "Was the neighbor to the man left for dead by the side of the road?"

"The Samaritan," the Pharisees have to answer.

So the problem of loving my neighbor is worse than loving the folks to our south. It's about loving folks who are

fundamentally,

racially,

ethnically,

sociologically,

educationally,

economically,

different from me.

And here lies the complexity of Jesus' simplification of the laws and commandments. I'd almost prefer the 600 plus commandments to follow. Don't eat meat that comes from an animal with a cloven hoof, or from fish with scales (or is that without scales? I forget). Don't mix dairy products with meat. Don't do any form of work after sundown on Friday. At least you know where you stand. But this "love your neighbor as yourself" leaves too many loose ends, wouldn't you agree? Who is my neighbor? Shouldn't my neighbor have to love me first?

Spell it out for me, Jesus! Don't leave me hanging here.

Actually, as we know, the great two-part commandment can never be split apart. You have to do both and not just one part or the other. There are plenty of folks (myself included) who want to care for all humanity by getting involved in all sorts of do-gooder projects, but have an essentially unlovely aspect to their personality. Their love for the poor and outcast sometimes has a kind of paternalistic quality. And the love turns cold when the objects of their affections fail to return their love or follow their advice.

Loving God has a way of getting some distance on good works that can exhaust us and make us cynical. There is some virtue to going off to a quiet place apart from the all the slings and arrows of our social work to reflect on God, and God's purposes for this crazy creation. Jesus did that several times--removed himself from the healing and preaching to go off by himself to pray.

I think that meditation and prayer focused on God has a way of giving us back a sense of humor that can be lost in all our doing of good things. Doing good, handing out bread and soup (or chili mac in our case) at St. Benedict the Moor's Church at 9^th and State downtown Milwaukee and seeing the same folks in the line night after night can get discouraging. All our good works for our neighbors have the danger of creating a kind of dependency.

Removing to a quiet place for meditation and prayer has a way of focusing our love on God alone.

At St. Ben's all this happens on two floors of the building. Downstairs there are about 20 or 30 eight-foot tables from which five or six hundred folks are fed every night. Upstairs, just one floor up, there is the sanctuary, small as Roman Catholic sanctuaries go, the focus of which is one table, where one loaf of bread sits next to one chalice of wine. That's where the community gathers each day to pray. To love God. To gather as a smaller community in thanksgiving and praise for God in Christ, who remains with us in all things.

The people who dine downstairs are invited upstairs, but only a few come. Their ability to dine downstairs is not dependent upon their coming upstairs. They may go to their own parishes to give honor and glory to their God; who knows? This is the place where community members can gather their wits, their hearts and minds and souls before God, to learn to love God anew so that they can meet the challenge of loving their neighbors, all their neighbors, as they love themselves.

And then a miracle happens.

They don't just see the same people day after day at the 30 eight-foot tables downstairs. They see children loved by God, coming because they must, because their families have fallen on the worst of times, or because they have no family at all. They see, as I did one time, a 12-year-old girl leading her younger siblings through the feeding lines to get some bread and a bowl of chili mac, no parent in sight.

The great Bishop of the Church of South India, reflecting on just these things, once defined evangelism as "One beggar showing another beggar where to find bread." We are all beggars, when it comes down to it. And the bread we seek--the bread we need--is both the bread for the body and bread for the soul. And in that act of showing our fellow beggars where to find bread, we finally discover the real meaning of loving God with all our heart and mind and soul and our neighbor as ourselves.

So it was. So it is. So it shall ever be.