“You should love the Lord your God
with all your mind; with all your heart; with all your soul.”
In today’s gospel we hear the Jewish leaders,
the Pharisees and Sadducees,
who are trying yet again to assail Jesus.
They are trying to find something to prosecute him.
While their question is not genuine,
they do believe in the same God.
This question, “What is the greatest command?”
while it was meant to be a trick question,
Jesus answered what any good Jew would have answered.
It is called Shema law,
“Love your God with all your heart;
with all your mind; with all your soul”
and it would have been inscribed over the doorpost of any good Jew.
They would have been in little containers,
which they would wrap around their arms
and put on their forehead as orthodox Jews
to remind themselves in a prayer,
which they would say every morning and
every night before they go to bed.
So this would not have been an unusual answer.
But Jesus deepened it with the second part of the first law,
which is to love your neighbor as yourself,
which also would not have been a big shock
because that is exactly what the law said.
You had the Ten Commandments
but then there were all these other laws
which were all to do with serving others; to love others.
If the truth be known, all of us Catholics
have heard this Shema law over and over again:
The fulfillment of the law and the prophets;
love God and love your neighbor.
That is not where the struggle is.
We all intellectually can give assent to this - no problem.
It is actually doing it that is the problem.
Actually living it out in our every-day life.
What does that actually look like?
How does a person who loves God and loves their neighbor
live differently from those who do not love God
and do not love their neighbor as their highest priority?
We have to really name this;
it has to not just be an intellectual assent.
It must be a practical, lived-out reality here in our own lives.
What does that look like for today for us?
We who are Catholic Christians in this community here at St. Simons
and beyond, how do we today
in the middle of Covid-19 pandemic
love God and love our neighbor as ourselves.
It is a real struggle.
We might say to our defense.
“We are not doing anything bad to anyone, right?
I just don’t have many opportunities to do anything.
I cannot do good or bad right now.”
We are all in a sense locked up in our homes;
or at least contained terribly in our lives.
But we need to be creative.
There are ways in which we can love each other.
And they are often in little ways that we love one another;
that we show our love for God by these creative, new ways.
Love always will find a way.
The first step is we have to feel genuinely loved by God.
And that requires of us,
and you have heard me talk about this endlessly in these last days,
about having to sit in silence in prayer
and allow our God to love us.
When we feel genuinely loved, it changes everything.
And then we feel compelled.
It no longer becomes a law
but it becomes a compulsion to go and to spread that love
and as the second reading says “the joy of being loved.”
Let me give you an example:
Some of my family still live in Ireland.
But Ireland is in the middle of another resurgence
of the Coronavirus Pandemic.
They are pretty much on a shut down.
They are divided into 32 counties and
they are not allowed travel outside their county lines
except for an emergency authorized visits.
They are not allowed to go any more than 6 kilometers
beyond their house for any reason
except for a doctor appointment or some other approved visit.
That is the context.
My brother and his wife have triplets
and it is their 10th birthday.
Kids and older people find this very hard
because on one level the kids do not understand what is going on
and with the older people, they just want company.
The isolation is very difficult.
For my brother and his triplets,
it is their 10th birthday and nobody can come visit them.
No one is allowed to visit.
And they don’t really understand why not.
My sister, who loves them dearly came up with a very creative idea.
They live in a different county about 12 kilometers apart
but the cemetery is equidistant between them;
and it is just on the county line.
My brother and his wife took the three kids
to visit grandpa and grandma at the cemetery.
And that is allowed.
My sister went to visit my mother and my father in the cemetery.
They said their prayers at my parents grave
and they kept social distance
and they celebrated their birthday at the cemetery!
Love finds a way.
Love finds a way to breakthrough.
We can find some little way to express our love;
first of all to those whom we are cooped up with in the house.
Maybe it is a new routine.
Maybe you can make the coffee or
you have a break in the middle of the day
where you just sit and talk and
express your love for one another;
to have the opportunity to express that love.
Or maybe some new routine that you can do;
some new way that will bring life to your home right now.
Then look beyond the home; there are many people who need our love.
There are many people who need to feel love.
There are many people in our community
who live alone and this isolation of Covid-19 is very difficult for them.
Maybe one of the things we could do is to reach out to them
and maybe have a routine and call them,
maybe every week or every couple of days;
or reach out to somebody who you know has very few family members.
The gospel leads us to a deeper reality
not just to reach out to those who we know but to go beyond that.
What the first reading tells us is about widows and orphans;
the strangers; the people who have no one to care for them.
How can we care for these people today
when we do not even have contact with them?
And we would have limited contact anyway
but now we have none.
The very least we can do is to hold them in our hearts
and pray for how difficult it must be to be a widow;
to be an orphan.
How difficult it must be to be an immigrant,
a refugee fighting for life, for a better life
and how hard it must be to have everything disrupted.
At the very least what we can do is to hold them in our hearts
and open our hearts to them,
knowing that it is difficult and
that if we have an opportunity to give something to them,
to give support to them then we ought to do that.
This is our moment as a community to shine.
Let’s not wait till the coronavirus is over
but let’s love now in the middle of the pandemic.
The Catholic Church has historically grown most in the years following
such disasters as pandemics, natural disasters.
But it is up to us to shine.
It is up to us to love others now and show the gospel in practice.
This is our collective moment to live the Gospel.
Let’s get creative in the way we love.
The law, the Shema law is one,
which we are all called to do.
Allow God to love us and
to love God in return by loving one another.
It is simple but today we need to be creative.
Let’s come up with some simple creative ways
inside our household today to share that love with one another.
Some creative way
and then beyond our doors;
beyond our community to open our hearts and
our minds to those who are struggling;
to those who have no home;
to those who have no place.
Let their place be in our hearts
because we are called to love one another as God has loved us.
