Jesus answered, “The first is this, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’  The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’  There is no other commandment greater than these.”  (Mark 12:29-31)

We are in the final two weeks of our six-week journey through these verses.  We have looked at what it means to be rooted and grounded in God’s love.  We have looked at what it means to be transformed by the renewal of our minds – a whole new way of thinking, of perceiving, of seeing.  We have looked at what it means to love God with all our heart and soul, the part of us beyond words; the seat of our wills and intentions and emotions – to respond to God in praise with thanks and joy.  We have looked at what it means to love God with our strength – to demonstrate God’s ways of mercy and grace and justice and compassion and faithfulness with our deeds – our giving and our service – and our words.

Which has brought us to the place where we consider the second part of Jesus’ command.  It’s not a new command but may we hear it newly.  Love your neighbour as yourself.  The two commands aren’t independent of each other.  They’re more like two sides of a coin.  As someone has said, loving our neighbours is loving God and vice versa.  We’re talking about the vertical.  We’re talking about the horizontal.  Let’s ask for God’s help as we consider this week what it means to love one another in the Christ’s church.  Let’s pray.

We said at the start of January that we would spend these weeks of Epiphany figuratively sitting in the grass at Jesus’ feet, listening to his words.  It’s been good has it not?  This morning we’re not sitting in the grass so much as sitting in the house.  Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”  But to the one who told him of this, Jesus replied “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”  And pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here is my mother and my brothers!  For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matt 12:47-50)

How do you feel about the church and what does this mean in your life?  What are signs of life in the church?  Do you love Jesus?  We are talking about what it means to be a follower of Christ, to be in Christ, for those who are following Christ or those with some level of interest in knowing what it means to follow Christ.  All notions and practices of love in Jesus are founded in God’s love for the world and all that is in it.  Our love for one another in the church is rooted and grounded in the truth that Jesus loves the church.  Listen to these verses from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in which Paul writes of love between spouses.  Paul takes the opportunity to lay down this truth – “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by the cleansing her with the water of washing by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendour, without a spot of wrinkle or anything of the kind – yes so that she may behold and without blemish… For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body.” (Eph 5:25-27. 29-31)

I ask once again, how do we feel about the church?  Do we love the church and if so, how do we show that love?  Love that is not borne out in action is not love at all, after all.

None of this is to condemn us, but may it challenge us. Jesus takers the opportunity which the arrival of his mother and brothers affords to speak of who we are in him.  His brother and sister and mother; in other words his family.  I’ve got all my sisters and brothers and me! We are family.  I don’t mean this in a cultish “We’re your new family now” way of course. Despite the lack of attention paid to his family in Matthew 12, we know that Jesus was obedient to his mum and dad. (Luke 2:50)  We know that Jesus showed loving care for his mother even while he was dying. (John 19:26-27)  This is not to say that family members won’t turn us away or hurt us or maybe even mock us for our life in Christ. At such times our church family might take on a whole new importance.  We might be far away geographically from family and our church family takes on a whole new importance.    In Christ, we are sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers (and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and cousins and….)

So let’s spend some time together!  Before we get to that though, let’s stay with Jesus in Matthew 12.  I know that some families can be difficult (I mean I’ve heard that).  Our families tend to the people who know us best.  The people who have seen us at our worst and our best.  The people we have hurt.  The people we have delighted and made proud.  Few families are perfect.  When Tolstoy wrote “Each happy family is alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” he surely wasn’t thinking that there was such a thing as a perfectly happy family!  We’re talking about spending time together and it is in spending time together that we find out how imperfect we are; how in need of grace we are; how in need of forgiveness and mercy we are. This is who we are, family of God.  We want to be mature about this.  Clear-eyed.  Sharp.  Grace-filled.  Grace extending.  To say we’re imperfect is not to say we don’t have ethical standards.  Jesus knew we’d cause problems for one another and laid out how to handle such problems in Matt 18.  The church is being prepared for Christ as a bride is prepared for a wedding (to use another metaphor for the church).  Let’s stay together as we move on down the Jesus road together.  Do not become one of those people who say “I want nothing to do with the church because it’s full of hypocrites or fill in the blank”  The church is full of people who know their need for grace and who know their need to be formed in the image of Christ, and God is doing that in His church.

I want us to note one final thing about this story.  “And pointing to his disciples” is how the NRSV translates a Greek word in v 49 which means Jesus stretched out his hand.  When we talk about God stretching out his hand over, we’re talking about protection.  I can’t help but be reminded again of the line from John the Baptist’s birth that went “The hand of the Lord is on him.”  I sometimes wonder that God has entrusted his work to us.  We’ve not been left on our own.  We are united with one another in the common experience of the Holy Spirit.  I read a church’s self-description recently as a community of like-minded people.  We’re much much than that family (and often less than that!).  We share the Holy Spirit of Christ together.  The hand of the Lord is on us, what might we become?  Pair that with Jesus’ promise to his church with which Matthew’s good news ends – “And remember I am with you always even to the end of the age.”

The hand of the Lord is on you.  God is with us always.  We’re considering what the love of God looks like in the community of faith (or the family of faith).  Love that is not expressed in action is no kind of love at all.  We looked at that truth last week.  I’ve called this “Signs of Life.”  We’ll be looking for signs of life outside in the coming weeks (hopefully) if not months.  What are the signs of life (or signs of love) in a community of faith? 

Luke describes such a community in the second chapter of Acts.  The church is starting out.  They’ve waited for the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit has come.  They’ve been baptized.  Then this – “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)

They were (hopefully) devoted.  We’re talking about the practices in which we engage together which show our love for one another.  We don’t want to love only in word and speech, do we?  Our love for one another looks like something, and Luke spells out what it needs to look like.  They were devoted to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers.  The word for “devoted to” also means to continue in, to persevere in, to hold fast to.  These activities were not marginal to but central to the life of the community. 

We take our inspiration where we get it.  Norman Powell was a part of the Raptors 2019 championship team.  He had a personal motto which went “Understand the Grind.”  I’m not saying that life in Christ is a grind – it’s life.  I’m talking about how we in the church persist together in practices that are part of our everyday/everyweek life, no matter what it going on.  Even in the dog days of winter.

We hold fast together to the apostles’ teaching.  The teaching of those who had been with Jesus.  The story of the good news of Jesus.  The good news of God’s grand redemption plan.  Forgiveness.  Reconciliation.  Wholeness.  Restored relationship with God and a new perspective on everything.  Coming back to the cross again and again.  Looking to the whole of scripture as Jesus did with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and considering how everything from Moses to the prophets speaks of him.  Considering what it means to apply our lives to this story.  This is not simply an ancient collection of stories and poems and history that we have to figure out how to apply to our lives.  The question is how do our lives apply to this story?  Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote so well about life together put it like this:

We become a part of what once took place for our salvation. Forgetting and losing ourselves, we, too, pass through the Red Sea, through the desert, across the Jordan into the promised land. . . . We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there He still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the history of Christ on earth. . . . [Then] a complete reversal occurs. It is not in our life that God’s help and presence must still be proved… The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I shall die, and the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, shall be raised on the Last Day. Our salvation is “external to ourselves.” I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ.

The devoted themselves to fellowship.  Koinonia.  Participation with.  Sharing in as co-sharers in the life of Christ.  That in-real-life sharing of life for which we long.  It is not for nothing that Tolkien called the first book of the Lord of the Rings series “The Fellowship of the Ring.”  A group of disparate (and sometimes desperate) people (actually a couple of people, a couple of hobbits, an elf and a dwarf) joined in a common goal.  The church as a group of people bearing one another’s burdens and in so doing fulfilling the law of Christ. Making sure that anyone in need was taken care of.  Living open-handedly with one another. 

Breaking bread together.  Breaking bread at the Lord’s Table.  Breaking bread in homes (or after church).  Sharing meals.  May we continue this?  I’m thankful for those in my life who have been examples of hospitality for me.  May we continue it.  I was saying recently here in church, isn’t it wonderful to know one another well enough that we know how we take our coffee or tea?  Just like a family. 

Finally never forgetting to pray together.  On our own.  In groups of two or three.  In small groups.  Once a month on Zoom.  In our worship services.  How are we doing with praying together as a family?  It is in prayer together that we are actively seeking and submitting to God’s direction.  It is in prayer together that we actively acknowledge our dependence on God.  Someone has said that it is in prayer that we acknowledge that heaven and earth have been brought together in the person of Christ.  It is in prayer that together we express our praise, our adoration, our trust, our gratitude, our burdens.  In so doing we are transformed by the Holy Spirit of God. 

Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”  This is who we are family of God.  This is what we do.  This is how we show our love for one another – holding fast to/persevering with/devoting ourselves to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayers.  May we continue to seek and to see signs of life/signs of love in this and every family of faith.