Mark 12:30-31 "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighour as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
I was watching Oprah one day (oooh, the evils of Oprah) and she was interviewing these men who were on her show 20 years earlier. They were skinheads back in the day and they were speaking absolute hate and prejudice in their first appearance on the show. But when they came back on, they were different people. They were weeping, apologizing, and talking about how ashamed they felt about their former life. Oprah asked one man what made him change. Here is what he said in a nutshell.
After he did the first Oprah show, he ended up going to prison for burning down a synagogue and assaulting some black men.
While in prison he was assigned to a group of guys who was doing manual labour. Every single man on that team was black. He was the only white guy. His back was covered with tattoos of swastikas and racial slurs. Every man in that group knew he was a white supremisist. And yet, all those men accepted this guy, befriended him, and treated him with respect. Their act of love broke that man's heart and changed him forever.
This tore at the fabric of my heart. Here was this group of black men. They knew this guy was in complete opposition to them. They could have beat him up, shunned him, condemned him, judged him, told him that he was wrong, argued with him about the truth. But instead they just loved him, accepted him and treated him as they would want to be treated.
The concept of loving my neighbour has been mulling about in my mind lately. The Bible says that this is the greatest commandment (along with loving God). The Word of God says that the entire law is summed up with this command (Gal. 5:14) and it is also described as the royal law (James 2:8). God makes it very clear that loving our neighbour as ourselves is the one thing He wants us to fully grasp and practice.
Are we actually doing this? We say we are. We claim to be appalled by the history of Christianity that is bathed in the blood of the crusades and the hate of the religious war in Ireland. We are ashamed that the KKK claimed to be a bible based organization and feel so thankful that we have a better grasp on scripture than that. Do we?
What does loving our neighbour look like? Does it look like a inviting someone over for dinner just so that we can preach to them? Does it look like protesting abortion with signs like, "you are a baby murderer" as desperate women grasp at solutions? Does it sound like us preaching vehemently against homosexuality? Does it involve taking new Christians and laying down a set of laws about what they can wear to church, what language they are no longer allowed to use, and how they must immediately stop drinking, smoking, dancing, and having premarital sex?
I am disgusted with the church today because although many of us would say that we are loving our neighbour, we are not. Somehow we have interpreted Jesus' words to mean that our job, first and foremost, is to convert people and then bring them into our set of rules. Frankly, this makes me sick. Our job is so very simple and yet we complicate it so much. We are asked to love God and love people. It is not our job to change people. It is not our job to hammer them with rules that they don't buy into. We simply need to love. We simply need to show people who Jesus is.
Is it true that God has given us guidelines and boundaries for our lives? Oh yes. But we have messed that up as well. You see, our mission is to show the love of God to people. It is HIS job to change their hearts. And when He changes their hearts, he gives them a desire to be more like Him. And when they have the desire to be more like Him, they begin to make choices that align with those guidelines. This is God's process, not ours. This is His mission, not ours. We have screwed it up time and time again.
So maybe loving our neighbour means we invite someone over for dinner to just love them and bless them. Maybe instead of protesting abortion we can be a support to these women before they make their decision and, heaven forbid, after they have gone through with it. Maybe loving our neighbour means that we start to see homosexuals as people instead of freaks. Maybe it looks like showing new Christians how to have a relationship with Jesus and realizing that this process is long and messy and it will take months or years for their choices to fall in line with God's heart.
Sorry about the rant today, but I think we are doing this all wrong. Those African American criminals in the prison knew how to love their neighbour. They didn't yell at him and tell him he was evil. They didn't force their beliefs about equality on him. They just loved him. And you know what happened when they loved? That man's heart changed and his entire life was transformed.
Let's start loving people. That's all. And let's leave the changing part up to God. And let's allow Him to start with us.
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