October 25, 2026

Sermon Transcript

Jesus said, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  (Matthew 22:37-40)

Today’s readings from the Book of Deuteronomy and the Gospel of Matthew remind me of something that happened to me a long time ago, in a state far, far away.  One rainy April school night, my older brother convinced me that taking the old family car out for a spin would be just the way to spend the evening.  The defogger wasn’t working, so visibility was poor, but my brother put the pedal to the metal anyway, and sped through some industrial park in the city where we lived.  Sure enough, the road we were on came to a T.  We jumped the curb, flattened a newly planted tree, and bounded across a soggy, vacant lot.  We came to rest at the edge of a retention pond filled with water.  The car was going nowhere under its own power.

In those days of yesteryear, when no one had a cell phone, all we could do was start walking through the rain.  I remember thinking that my life was over, even though I was only in high school.  I was supposed to be home studying for a test.  Instead, we had gone out and wrecked the family car.  That was it for me.  At last, we found a phone booth with a phone book (remember phone books?).  We called a man named Rex who went to our church and owned a service station.  Rex was a rakishly handsome guy with a hot wife.  Sorry, but you notice these things when you are a teenage boy.  Everyone else noticed, too.  Let me tell you, heads turned when Rex and his wife came up for Communion.  That night, Rex understood our plight, and agreed to come out in the rain.  I still can’t find the words to express how happy I was to see him pull up in his tow truck.  He stretched forth a long, long winch, attached it to the car and pulled it out of the ditch.  Remarkably, the car was fine.

Rex gave me back my life.  I would not die, but live.  I would be in school the next day to fail my test.  Perhaps my parents would allow me to drive again.  At that moment, were the whole realm of nature mine, it would have been an offering far too small for Rex.  I remember trying to hand him every bill in my wallet, but he wouldn’t accept it.  Rex came out in the night, pulled us out of the water, and waved off any payment we tried to make.

Today’s reading from the Book of Deuteronomy has reminded me of Rex.  Why?  Because the reading is about Moses, who pulled the people of Israel out of their predicament in Egypt.  Moses obeyed the call of the Lord and rescued the Jews from slavery.  He pulled them through the waters of the Red Sea, and led them across the desert for forty years.  Now, on the brink of the Promised Land, Moses had reached the end of his journey.  Moses was able to see the land that God swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but he died before entering it.  The people grieved for an appropriate period, and wondered how to thank the one who had been God’s instrument in bringing them out of death and into life.  Any offering would be far too small.  They owed him everything.  Eventually, they discerned that the best way to honor Moses would be to follow the Law of Moses.  By obeying the Commandments that God had given them through Moses, the Jews would be a holy people, even a light to enlighten the nations.

The problem was, obeying the Commandments turned out to be no easy task.  What did God really mean by do this, and do not do that?  How could they really be sure?  Filled with anxiety, they scoured the Law, and found not just Ten Commandments, but 613.  These they grouped into positive and negative categories: positive for what God said to do, negative for what God said not to do.  They noticed that the negative commandments amounted to 365, the same number of days in a calendar year.  Such knowledge might provide the Rev. James Morton a lesson plan for his “Bible Verses for Bad Days.”  Here’s a prohibitive Commandment for every day of the year, making every day a bad day!  Then the lawyers noticed that the remaining positive Commandments totaled 248.  What hidden meaning might we find in the number 248?  Well, if you count the parts of the human body creatively, you might wind up with 248.  Presto.  If it sounds overly complicated and spiritually unhelpful, it was.  The excessive calculations could not stave off the suspicion that they were not fulfilling the Commandments, and thus the wrath of God was upon them.

It was one such professional Commandment-keeper – or, Pharisee – who came to Jesus in today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew.  The Pharisee approached Jesus arrogantly, but arrogance is usually a cover for insecurity, is it not?  The insecure, anxious Pharisee wanted clarification about all the laws they had discovered in the Torah.  Which one is the greatest?  Jesus replied with what we have come to call the Summary of the Law: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  You see, Jesus too, had scoured the Law of Moses.  But instead of expanding the Ten Commandments – or, Decalogue – into 613, he boiled them down to an inseparable pair.  “Love God with all your heart,” he found in Deuteronomy.  “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he found in Leviticus.  The genius of Jesus is that he took these two apparently disparate Commandments and fused them into one.  In so doing, he offered to his people then and now a simple way forward.

Do you want to walk as a child of the light?  Do you want to follow Jesus?  If so, have I got a deal for you.  It’s called the Annual Campaign for Grace Church.  Surprise!  No warning!  This year I am preaching my annual ‘Sermon on the Amount’ a week before, not on Pledge Sunday.  My purpose is not to be tricky or catch you off guard, but to talk with you before the letters drop in your mailbox.  Yes, I’ve spent the last week signing letters – lots and lots of letters inviting all of you to think and pray in advance about supporting the ministries of Grace Church.  If you don’t get a letter, it’s because you’ve managed to fly under the radar of our data base.  But you are here today, and what I want to say is that the annual campaign is a blessing.  It comes to us like a tow truck in the night to pull us out of our fearful, foolish, selfish ways.  It offers us a clear way to express love for God.

Why should we love God?  Perhaps to this point your spiritual quest has been merely to believe in God.  Now we say love God?  Yes, love God.  We love God because God first loved us.  God chose to share with us the gift of life and the grace of existence.  The fact that we are, and are aware of it, is not only the greatest evidence of God’s existence, but also the greatest reason to love God.  Evolutionary biologists tell us that life emerged from the water, and we have no need to doubt what they say.  God, who dwells in light inaccessible from before time and forever, declared that the joy of being was simply too good a thing not to share.  So at the beginning of creation God’s Spirit moved over the waters and painstakingly pulled life into existence.  In the desert, God rained down manna from heaven to sustain the people.  On the night before he died, Jesus gave us the bread of life.  God in Christ gives us life, and through the resurrection pulls us over from death to life everlasting.  God is our maker, defender, redeemer, and friend.  I love God, and I need a meaningful, substantial way to express it.

The mailing that most of you will receive includes a letter from me, a brochure, and inside the brochure, a pledge envelope with two parts that the vestry and I hope you will complete.  The top part of the envelope asks you to list the blessings that you have known in 2026.  This year I want to thank God for the bread of life itself.  For all the times when God’s grace has grabbed hold of me and set me on my feet again.  For Rex the tow truck driver, who pulled me out of the water all those years ago.  For the love of family and friends.  For crisp autumn days with leaves of changing color that God makes beautiful merely for the sport of it.  For the completion of the south aisle restoration thanks to your generosity.  Today, the windows shine with a brightness we haven’t seen in three years.  Thank you, Lord, for all the blessings of this life.  These are the blessings that you will hear in the Prayers of the People all throughout next year.

So that’s the first part of the pledge envelope, and the second is like unto it.  The pledge envelope has two parts, and you heard Jesus summarize the law with two commandments.  The second great commandment is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  The second part of the pledge envelope asks you to write a number on it, and the number you write is a way to fulfill the second commandment.  The financial promise you make gives Grace Church the resources to reach in and reach out in all the ways that we do: with the proclamation of the gospel in word and deed, with music, with Christian education, with support for agencies of mercy, with pastoral care, with an open door and a steady presence in a bewildering time, with aid to struggling churches in impoverished communities.  Indeed, the only way we can give adequate thanks to God for all the blessings of this life is to pay it forward.  We share the bread of life with others.

Dear People of God: I do not mean to stand here today as if I were an ostrich with my head in the sand, oblivious to the financial challenges we all face.  But let me tell you about a formative experience in my life when I had to decide what it meant to follow Jesus, and walk as a child of the Light.  I was newly ordained and working at my first job: the curate on the bottom rung of a clergy staff with three other priests.  My annual salary before taxes was $19,000, out of which I was renting an apartment, making car payments, paying off student loans, even making monthly payments on the bed in which I slept.  I was a bachelor, so my diet consisted of breakfast cereal, peanut butter, and blocks of Velveeta cheese.  The point is, by the end of every month I didn’t have two nickels to rub together.  As one wit put it, “I just had too much month left at the end of my money!”

One evening I received a cold call from a financial planner with a large, well-known investment firm.  It was part of her firm’s effort to seek out new clients early in their careers and begin a lifelong investment relationship.  Given the state of my finances, I had nothing to lose, so I agreed when she invited me to visit her office.  On the appointed day she began by reviewing some budget worksheets that she had had me prepare in advance of our meeting.  She spoke of how I needed to build up a cash reserve for adequate protection, and begin investing in equity assets.  As she spoke, running her pencil up and down my budget sheet, she kept stopping at the charitable giving line, which represented my tithe to the church.  Finally she stopped her pencil right there, tapped it three or four times and said, “This is not helping you.  You need to cut this in half at the very least.”  From a purely mathematical standpoint, I suppose what she said made sense.  But her words were a direct challenge to my understanding of what it meant to live a faithful Christian life.  I decided that this person was not the financial planner who was going to pull me out of the ditch.

I decided that she wasn’t for me because I’d known too many people like Rex.  I’d known too many people for whom the joy of being was simply too good a thing not to share, and I aspire to this day to be like them.  Their way of life has taught me a secret that the world stubbornly resists learning.  It’s a wonderful paradox at the heart of the Christian faith: you cannot out-give God.  I’ve discovered it to be true myself, and I invite you to give it a try.  The more I give, the more I seem to have, and the better I feel.  On the other hand, the more I accumulate and grip the things of the earth, the less I seem to have, the more anxious I become, and the worse I feel.  My pledge helps me.  It truly is more blessed to give than to receive.

Jesus said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments hang all the law, and the prophets, and our pledges.

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