Today is the great feast day of All Saints, a day on the Christian calendar to celebrate the saints, known and unknown. Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day – the commemoration of the souls of the faithful departed. Since I don’t expect that any of us will be in church tomorrow, we’re marking both feasts in our service today! Our lessons are taken not from the All Saints’ reading assignment but from the regular sequence of readings and I could give you a well-developed justification, but the real reason is that I just love the readings from Ruth and from Mark too much to skip over them. And, well, the reading from Hebrews is mercifully short.

The story in Mark picks up right after Jesus has been arguing with temple leaders about religious doctrines and customs. Specifically, they’ve been disputing issues of marriage and heaven and the meaning of scripture. Jesus’ exasperated response to religious leaders is “you are constantly missing the point!” (Wow. We haven’t made a whole lot of progress in the last 2000 years, have we?) Then a scribe – someone with a high degree of skill with reading and writing and considerable knowledge of the law – in other words, a wise and learned man – asks Jesus which commandment in the Torah is most important. Maybe it’s a trick question. Maybe it’s an innocent question. The Gospel of Mark doesn’t say.

Jesus’ answer is so familiar to us that it can sound trite. It was even a well-known answer back then. In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome (13:8-10) he instructs, without attribution, “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for the one who loves a neighbor has fulfilled the law. The commandments…are summed up in this word, ‘you will love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” And it’s not a peculiarly Christian idea in spite of whatever we were taught in Sunday School.

The Babylonian Talmud contains a story of a Gentile who sought the wisdom of two Pharisaic teachers: Shammai and Hillel. He asked them to teach the whole Torah standing on one foot. The story goes that Rabbi Shammai shooed him away with a stick, but Rabbi Hillel said, “What you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and learn.” (Shabbat 31a).

Love of God and love of neighbor as oneself are essentially, radically, and primarily handed down to us from Hebrew scripture. It’s one thing to treasure our inheritance and claim it for our own; and it’s quite another to grab it and claim it as uniquely ours because Jesus said it. I was reading one of my favorite contemporary theologians the other day – Walter Brueggeman – who said something like, “those who assert that the Hebrew Scripture is about law and the Christian scripture about grace demonstrate that they have read neither.” (1) Variations on the theme include ideas like Hebrew Bible – God of vengeance, Christian testament – God of love. It’s just not true no matter how often it is repeated.

In asking the question of Jesus, I think the scribe is inquiring, “What do you stake your life on?” And the answer is: listening to the Holy One, and listening will lead to loving the Holy One, which will lead to loving others, which will lead to needing to listen to the Holy One. The only verb that is in the command form, is the word for hear, whether in the Greek (ákoue) of this Gospel passage, or the Hebrew (sh’ma) of the scripture that Jesus is citing from Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The commandment is to hear. Listen deeply. Wake up! Pay attention!

In Deuteronomy, where this first commandment resides, the instruction – the command for Israel to listen is found five times (Israel means one who struggles with God). Here are the five times: “listen to the commandments so that it may go well with you” (5:1), “listen – you are about to cross over the Jordan” (9:1), “listen, you are drawing near to battle – don’t panic” (20:3); “listen, you have become the people of God – so act like it” (27:9), and this one, “listen so you will love.” A parishioner reminded me the other day about the important distinction between talking and listening compared with talking and waiting – you know, waiting until it’s your turn to talk again.

Grammatically, the command is not to love; the command is to hear – to listen; and the consequence – that is, what follows – will be love. The verb tenses for the word love in both Hebrew and Greek indicate ongoing and future action. For you grammarians in the congregation (and I know you’re out there) – the Hebrew word for love is in the imperfect tense; and the Greek word for love is in the future indicative. Listen and you are going to love God with your whole heart (which back then meant your intellect); with your whole person (the essence of your being – your soul), and with your whole strength (literally, “your very muchness”). And when they say strength, what the rabbis have always meant is wealth – abundance. It’s not about your physical prowess. It’s not about exerting as much effort or force, trying as hard as you can. It’s about sharing all of your abundance as a consequence or compassionate response to waking up to hearing the Holy One.

You know, along with our inheritance of the treasure of the love of God and neighbor as self, we’ve received the heavy handed misbegotten idea of a finger-wagging, scolding old man god, and maybe that’s what some people are looking for when they come to church, but I’m not one of them. I want to be invited and encouraged into loving with a more open mind, a more gracious spirit, and more generous giving out of my abundance. I want to be inspired to go further than I’d thought possible when I’ve hit some kind of wall, when I’ve bumped up against one of my many limits. I need all the help I can get – and often I get that help in community. In fact, I almost never get it by myself, which is a little surprising, as introverted as I am. I find that the help I give myself is never as good as the help I get from a community of faith when it comes to expanding my capacity to love. And sometimes I need even more help than I can get from the gathered community, and that’s when I call on the saints.

You know, sometimes people ask me why one would need a priest or a faith community or saints to get to God. “Can’t people get directly to God?” they ask. “Yes,” I always say, “they can but they don’t.”

Who are the saints that you could call on in your heart – your mind – right now to inspire you, to push or stretch you to an even greater capacity to listen to the Holy One so that your love will grow?

• Take a minute right now and think about some of the people who have modeled faithful listening and big expansive love for you.
• They might have been aware that they were modeling the most important commandment for you – and they might have been totally unaware.
• Name their names in the silence of your hearts.
• Now call the spirit of those people into this place, into this time.
• Feel how much fuller this sanctuary is now.