“You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

In our Reformed tradition we place an emphasis on a faith that we try to describe with vocabulary that is intellectual, structured, systematic, logical and academic. Other people call it dry, boring and stifling, however I think that’s more the fault of those of us who try to explain it then the faith itself.

We want to have the right answers and so we have ended up as the Mr. Spock of the Theological world!

And I never apologize for that. The two great institutions of higher learning in our state, Princeton and Rutgers, each came into existence out of that faith tradition. The Presbyterians founding Princeton and our own Reformed Church founding Rutgers – actually Queens College at the start – and they both were begun, primarily, to train ministers.

Even today, as we celebrate Chris Heitkamp’s ordination this afternoon, in a day and age where you can get ordained on-line, for free, within 72 hours, our tradition insisted that Chris complete the equivalent of 3 years of full-time graduate studies after college for ordination.

This doesn’t sit well in our American Church culture, where how we feel about things is often the final measure of truth. This has led to conflicts between the academic faith of the Seminary and the emotional faith of the pews, creating an unnecessary false choice between our heads and our hearts.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I remember, as we get ready to celebrate Christmas this week, I remember decades ago when I was speaking with a group of older and wiser ministers and I told them how much I loved December and especially Christmas Eve and I was treated to some paternalistic eye-rolling and one minister even said that he wouldn’t sing Silent Night at his Christmas Eve services because it was just sentimental emotionalism.

And they told all me that I would get over this Christmas infatuation of mine.

Doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.

But I wondered then, and I wonder today, why so many of the brightest people I have known in Church life are so afraid of the yearning, explosive, contagious power of our hearts when that power is channeled into the structures and formulas of our faith? Jesus wasn’t.

In today’s lesson he leads an attorney through a careful, academic process – the sort of thing an attorney would understand and appreciate – and that process finds it’s ultimate meaning in that sentimental, nostalgic thing we call love. Love for God with every bit of our being, every fiber of our hearts, every twitch of our souls, every ounce of our strength, every spark of our minds.

Loving God when we see those people whom we love and whose love we have received, and those people whom we are not fond of and we suspect that they share the lack of affection.

Loving God when we pray for those people with heavy burdens and few friends to rely upon.

Loving God when we were are struggling our way through the work that we do.

Loving God when we read and think and speak and listen and ponder the news of the world and of our lives.

And then he says that loving God is essentially the same thing as loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself.

And then he punctuates that lesson with a case study that we call the parable of the Good Samaritan, a parable that takes all of the fuzzy rhetoric of being a nice person and doing good things and gives it all teeth and focus.

For you see, if you take that love of neighbor and run it through the academic, logical gifts that God has given us, you will realize that we are being asked to do one of the hardest things that we could ever have to do. We are being asked, no check that, we are being instructed and commanded to do good things for people whom we know despise us, people who have hurt those whom we love, and yet there it is, from the lips of Christ himself, you and I must do just that if we dare to call ourselves Christians, if we dare to call ourselves a Church.

That is what it meant to hear about a Samaritan aiding a Jew.

That is what it means to bear the pain of others.

That is what it means to love others.

It is not easy, nor is it fun, nor is it supposed to be.

But love is often not easy, not fun, painful.

That’s a lesson we learn over and over again with all of the varied loves of our lives.

Parents learn it when they watch a toddler fall or they stand at the side of a sick child’s bed or they watch the eyes glisten when they hear of an emotional mugging that took on the bus or playground.

Spouses learn it when they watch the effects of a job layoff, or a parent’s death, or a terrifying diagnosis, on the person they most cherish in life.

Children learn it when they face the reality of mom or dad, the person who was the rock of Gibraltar and the calm center of their lives, deteriorating with age and illness.

We enter into the pain of those whom we love, we try to relieve it as best we can, but we share in it, that’s what love is. And when we pledge to love God as fully as we can, and our neighbors as fully as we love ourselves, we extend our hearts to God and our neighbors and when they suffer, we suffer.

And yes, I believe that God suffers.

I believe that Eric Clapton, in the aftermath of his son’s death, pointed us into a good conversation when he sang of “Tears in heaven”.

I think there are, I think there is suffering in Heaven when God looks at the oil on the waters of the Gulf, the endless war in the middle east, the hopelessness in our cities. This is his planet that we are polluting; these are all his children that we are sending off to kill each other. Their pain is his pain and his pain must become ours if we love him, and the person in need, the person who craves mercy, that is our neighbor – so when there is suffering, in heaven or on earth, it becomes our suffering.

Yes, I believe there are tears in heaven, tears that are – as scripture teaches us – quickly wiped dry by God’s own hand, but tears nonetheless.

And we can never lose sight of the fact that the love that we show for our children, spouses, parents, friends, is all well and good, but Christ points us to the outcasts of life. Luke’s gospel, in particular, emphasizes that the Kingdom of God belongs to, is understood by, and is found in the marginal, fringe people of life: the unwed mother in Bethlehem, the children, the women, the Roman soldiers, the lepers and this tale of a Samaritan.

And since the gospel is always meant to be reshaped in our day, who are the fringe people in our world? In your lives?

The welfare mothers, would Mary have been one today?

The elderly who have become inconvenient in a culture like ours that worships children and ignores wisdom?

The terrorists of the Arab world, are they any different than the Roman soldiers must have seemed to the Jews of Jesus time?

And what about those who come to God in ways different than ours? That was the rift between the Jews and the Samaritans, they were alike in many more ways than either side like to admit, but the Samaritans worshiped in the hills and the Jews in Jerusalem and they loved to tell each other what was wrong with the way they did it.

We need to stop that, we can’t pick and choose and only care for the people we know, the people who are like us.

The person we encounter who is in need is our neighbor to be loved.

The person we encounter who is in pain is our neighbor whose pain we must allow ourselves to feel.

The person on the fringe of society, the illegal immigrant, the suicide bomber, the latest celebrity who has melted down in a flood of drugs and drink, they are all crying out, they may offend us, but have we prayed with compassion for them?

“You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

That is an interesting promise that Christ gave to the attorney: do this, and you will live.”

And I don’t think that Christ is promising eternity here, he is promising abundance. This isn’t a guarantee about getting into heaven someday, it is a promise that heaven can be experienced today. Life, in it’s fullest and richest and deepest sense, comes to those who love God and neighbor, and isn’t that what we want?

Life that is meaningful and significant each day, isn’t that what we want?

Relationships that are supportive and nurturing, isn’t that what we want?

Serenity, shalom, at the deepest places of our being isn’t that what we want?

And the promise from Deuteronomy is that these are the very things that are possible, as close as you heart and your lips, to be found in the love that we share and the words we use to express that love.

There is no gap between our hearts and our faith, our emotions and our intellect, unless we create the gap.

I know I have said this before, I have become – as I age – increasingly and occasionally embarrassingly, emotional.

My younger cynicism has evaporated and I find that my eyes get misty while I watch the news, and tears flow when I think about how blessed I have been in work and in family and in health, and I have discovered a deep welling surge of compassion that I feel as I sit with those who suffer.

And what causes it?

A friend of mine would put it this way: “Some people say that there’s a woman to blame . . . or at least a little red-headed girl” and Jimmy might be right, watching Michaela come into being as a person has changed my life in ways that I never would have imagined.

She has been, as children always are, the reminder of the persistent victory of life, the inevitable victory of God in the world. That is such a remarkable and beautiful realization that I become overwhelmed with joyous sentiment – I suffer from leaky eye syndrom. You see the world remains God’s and all of the human hate and suffering and despair has never been able to change that.

We may be celebrating Christmas this week, but we do it always in the bright aftermath of Easter. We do it knowing that God has won, continues to win and will always win the battles of this world.

Will there still be pain and suffering, of course there will, these are battles that we are fighting on God’s behalf! People get hurt in battles, feelings get hurt, hearts get broken, but if we share in the pain of the people around us, if we add to the healing – as the Samaritan did – rather than the hurt, the victories become clear, the beauty of the world becomes obvious.

That is what it means to love God, to share in God’s work here on earth, day after day; to love others as much as we love ourselves, to place people above profits, to have compassion, to stop trying to justify ourselves with questions about the minimum we can do and to seek out the maximum that we can do, that is what it means to see the glories of God in every day, every encounter and every relationship, that is what it means to live.

“You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”