Back when my husband Jay and I were Sunday School teachers, we asked our children, "What do you suppose are the two most important things that every Christian should do?"

We heard all kinds of different answers – children are quick to give answers, even to the most mysterious questions, and in that way, most of us are like children because we live in a culture that values answers far above questions – anyway, the kids gave answers like give offerings, say prayers, behave ourselves, respect parents and teachers, until eventually someone said "Love." And at that point, we held up a paper plate. On the plate, it said, "Love God."

And then we said, "Is that all God wants us to do? If we just love God is that enough?" Some of the kids said yes, that is enough, because we have been trained to think that going to church is about our relationship to God. But what is that? Being people, we need taste, touch, sight and hearing before a thing can be absolutely real and how can we, limited by our senses, know a God who is immortal, infinite and invisible? Who shows us the way to God? With this we held up a second paper plate. On that plate it said, "Love your neighbor." We said to the kids, "Jesus, who was both God and human knew that to really get it, one had to do two things. Love God. Love your neighbor. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

Now the people who asked Jesus about this in today’s Gospel were lawyers. They weren’t asking Jesus to learn from him. (Lawyers rarely do.) But Jesus knew the law. Jesus answered that love was the great law, the basis for all the others, much as "innocent until proven guilty" is the basis for our own system of criminal justice. Love is the law upon from which all other laws spring, just as life grows with air, light and water. To say that Love is law means that Love is not a suggestion, not a high minded moral principle that we try to live up to on good days, it is obligatory. If you truly believe in God, you truly believe in love. Love God. Love your neighbor. In Luke’s Gospel, of course, the next question the lawyer asks after love God/love your neighbor is "Ok. Who is my neighbor?" The next question in Matthew, while less obviously lawyerly, may be more interesting, for it is about Messiah-ship, triumph and winning your case.

But first, close your eyes. If you don’t want to close your eyes, let them relax downward just beyond your feet. Settle into the mind of prayer. Imagine loving God. Imagine God, the infinite creator, the vast expanse of galaxies, life itself beyond imagining. Imagine God loving you. Feel this love. How it chooses you. How this love has graced you with memory, reason, skill, humanity. Think of how this love can break through illness, fear, the feeling that no one cares. Imagine that it is that love which has brought you here. Surround yourself with that love.

Now, keeping that love around you, imagine a person that you love. Savor all the good qualities of that person, the smile that lights up your day, the kind words, the shared laughter and work. Now, still keeping this person in your mind, think of another person who really irritates you or has irritated you in the past, a person who really drives you up the wall. And now, keeping these two, imagine a third person in the middle, perfectly neutral, an innocent bystander, someone you walk past on the street. And now that we have all three in our mind’s eye, let’s make a few changes. Give to the indifferent person some quality that touches you, the reason you noticed them. And then, imagine that you’ve just received news that the person you like has betrayed you. Notice how their face changes from a kindly face to one just dripping with duplicity. And now, imagine that you and the person who completely irritates you have suddenly come to an understanding. Look at how that person’s face changes. So what does it mean that a person is a friend, an enemy, a neutral? Are these a permanent condition? Doesn’t everyone have the potential to be all three? Now imagine it from God’s perspective, God who sees each person whole, loving them all, God who gives us and gives them the freedom to change. Open your eyes.

Is this a mere exercise, or does it have deep meaning for the world in which we find ourselves today, a world in which nations deal in shifting alliances and the media crackles with whom to love, whom to hate, who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. Love may be God’s law, but fear and violence, bigotry, disease, special interests, pain and death are real and palpable outlaws that take life, that threaten everything we have worked for and hold most dear. "We are in an uncertain time," said Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold in his opening remarks to the Church’s Executive Committee last week. "People are prickly, people are unsettled by war and institutional failure--especially corporate malfeasance and the pedophilia scandals of the Roman Catholic Church." At such a time, what is a person to do?

Last week, at Diocesan Convention, because we are at a time when much is being put to the test, we talked about war. In a liberal Diocese like California, you can pretty well guess the kinds of things that were said, in the safety of Grace Cathedral, among friends, among fellow Christians. And then a young man stood up to tell us something. He said that he served in the military and therefore, he was the one to be at risk should war break out so he did not speak lightly. And he said that perhaps in the past, we had the luxury of not striking first, but now, in an age where a first nuclear strike means there is nothing left on the other side to strike back, that perhaps now, the rules had changed. Maybe we did need to hit them first. He wanted to protect us and he was putting himself at risk to do so. Weapons of mass destruction, said he, were not known for being forgiving.

The young man spoke with authority and I was moved. Moved because his was a voice close to my heart, one I’d heard before. I don’t know if it’s because I am female, or small or utterly lacking in upper body strength or because I appear vulnerable in ways I don’t understand, but men, both human men and my German shepherds, are forever trying to protect me. Thank you, neighbors. I need you. You remind me that I have yet much to learn and it is in this spirit that I continue with my final questions.

Weren’t the people of Judea and Galilee thinking about protection against a Roman rule of terror when they cried out for a Messiah to save them? As Jesus quotes from Psalm 110,

This isn’t about love, it’s about enemies. In these uncertain times, I find this quite a timely quote. It acknowledges, even to the most peaceful among us that we have enemies. But it does not say who they are. It doesn’t even tell us to fight them. It just says, sit at the right hand of God. If we obey the law and love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, God will take care of the rest. As our meditation suggested, enemy and friend are not intrinsic qualities for all time. The same person can be both. Enemy and friend are projections of our fears and hopes. This law is true for nations as well as individuals. So my outrageous example is that once upon a time Saddam Hussein was America’s friend, ruler of a secular and enlightened nation in the midst of Muslim fundamentalists. Today this same man is "Public Enemy Number One." Which is the correct answer? Did his regime change or did ours? Is it up to us to order the external world, or, as Jesus cautioned the Pharisees, is it up to the God who created it?

Like the Pharisees, it is our fate to live in uncertain times. All around us rages a debate, with Holy People and warmongers and bland souls and explosive ones, honest folk, dishonest folk, philosophers and demagogues – all of them children of God. In a recent talk here in San Francisco, American essayist Louis Menand suggested that the moment a person or cause discovered with absolute clarity that it was right, violence was the inevitable response. He used the abolitionist movement, dear to my heart, as an example. The abolitionists followed Jesus’ first commandment and they loved God with the fierce wild love, and they knew that slavery was absolutely and unabashedly evil, which God knows too, but they couldn’t move from the love of God to the love of all their neighbors and their cause led to the bloodiest conflagration in American history. It still can be felt in our own time in the evils of racism and bigotry. If the abolitionists loved God, they could not love the wicked slave owners. And as Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel, if God causes the sun to rise on the good and the evil alike, who are we to be certain which is which? Is any of us purely one or the other? If Jesus came, as he says in John’s Gospel, not to judge the world but to save it, why are we so quick to judge? If we only love God without loving our neighbor we risk becoming fanatics and mistaking our own or our faction’s perceptions with absolute truth. So Jesus loved God and Jesus loved his neighbor and because love never does harm, Jesus was not a fanatic and rather than harm a single hair of God’s creation, he stretched out his arms of love to encompass the love of God and the love of neighbor and he wound up on the cross. And I know this scares me sometimes, so it probably also scares some of you as well.

But Jesus won, you know.

In uncertain times, this is encouraging news, for if we are his children, so will we win, no matter what happens out there. Keep the faith, dear ones.

AMEN.