As you've been hearing, this Fourth Sunday of Easter is also the second annual Mitzvah Day. With leadership from our Missions Council and our youth, Santa Monica First United Methodist is joining with all kinds of congregations today to give something back to our community. Methodists, Jews, Episcopalians, Mormons, Buddhists, Christian Scientists, Quakers, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Unitarians-all working together today to help others. It's a wonderful witness to the power of faith and service, and I would hope that the newspapers and local TV and radio stations pick it up as a front-page story.

Work at 77 projects is underway today. You can paint a school for children whose families are homeless, run with a jogging club for blind and disabled people, sort clothes for underprivileged kids, make cookies for the Florence Crittendon Center, make gift packages of household necessities for battered women and their kids, knit and crochet for premature babies, clean an elderly person's home, serve brunch to homeless men and women, repair a hospice serving women with AIDS, plant a tree, stuff envelopes, arrange flowers for nursing homes. There's just about something serving anyone who finds themselves in need in any way this day. Our youth are leading a group from our congregation to work this afternoon at Angel's Flight, a shelter for runaway and needy teens in downtown LA.

If you close your eyes, you can visualize this great troupe of wonderful people, men and women, young and old, all in their Mitzvah Day T-shirts, fanning out all across many communities today to love and serve this city, that it not be a city of despair, as the hymn said, but a place where God is present. Present today in the lives of all who give of themselves to serve others.

Now this word "mitzvah" may not be familiar to all of us. It's a Hebrew word. As someone jokingly said, "It's not matzoth, as in matzoth ball soup." It's mitzvah. What's that? The Mitzvah Day brochure says: "A mitzvah is a good deed, and you don't have to be Jewish to do a mitzvah." Now, that's true as far as it goes, but there's more, much more, to know about mitzvah. And for Christians, it goes to heart of what Jesus was about and how we are to live as his disciples.

The basic meaning of mitzvah is "commandment." Commandment. For those of you who've served in the military, that means it's an order. And there are many in the Old Testament. There are, of course, the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai. But, in all, there are 613 commandments, 613 mitzvot-that's the plural of mitzvah-which deal with almost every aspect of our relationship with God and with one another.

Let's start with the Ten Commandments. Do you remember them? The first four address our relationship with God: You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself any idol. You shall not take the Lord's name in vain. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

The next six deal with our relationships in human community: Honor your father and your mother. You shall not commit murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Starting from these foundational ten, all kinds of deeds of loving kindness towards one another are commanded. We are to visit the sick, comfort the mourner, rejoice with the bride and groom, offer hospitality to strangers, and make peace where there is strife.

In our Judeo-Christian faith, we cannot separate love of God from love of one another. Referring back to the Hebrew scriptures, when asked for the greatest commandment, remember that Jesus said: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength, and your neighbor as yourself." This was Jesus' summation of all the mitzvoth into one mitzvah. We are commanded to love God and to love our neighbor.

Now let's go one step further. The scriptures give special emphasis to loving those who are in trouble, those who are vulnerable, in need of help. The poor, the orphans, the widows, the outcast. We are supposed to take care of them all. We are commanded to have special love for them all. You might say that we are commanded to do a mitzvah, to do good deeds on their behalf. We are commanded to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, free the prisoners, and never oppress the stranger or the sojourner among us.

My friend Rabbi Jeff Marx, whom many of you know, and some of you affectionately call "our Rabbi" because he speaks here annually to the UMW and brings his whole congregation to cele-brate the High Holy days in our facilities, puts it this way, "We are commanded to do all these sorts of things because, left to our own devices, we might never do them. We'd have all kinds of excuses: we don't speak their language, we don't feel comfortable around those people, we don't feel safe going to those neighborhoods, we don't know what to say, we don't know if what we're doing really helps, we're very busy, we have our own families to take care of . . . and so on and so on and so on."

So, says the rabbi, the scripture says that it's not about what we feel, it's about what we're commanded to do. Just as the State of California doesn't care how we feel when we pull up to a stop sign. The law says, regardless of how we feel-happy, resentful, cooperative, impatient-we must stop. In fact, the well-being of the whole community requires that we do.

You see, for people of faith, good deeds were never intended to be optional. They are commanded of us. They are to be part and parcel of who we are, how we live in this world and how we honor and love our God.

I know many in this congregation are doing mitzvah every day of the week through a variety of organizations and programs in our community. And we were all deeply inspired last summer by the experience our youth had working through the Appalachia Service Project, and we will again support them this summer as another group works through the Sierra Service Project.

I want to tell you about one parish, I learned of recently, where mission projects and work teams are going on all year round, which involve not only youth, but adults and families from the parish. This is a thriving parish in New Jersey, just outside New York City. Their involvement started small and has spread infectiously, as members go out to serve and return to share their transformative experiences with one another. The story I heard was of a young woman, a nurse, who joined a medical mission team to Haiti, one of the poorest nations on earth. She spent a week working in a clinic that had virtually no supplies. And she met a young boy who was deaf. She reported that this little boy had lost his hearing because he'd had high fevers that most likely could have been fairly quickly and easily cured using a drug commonly available here in the United States. But in Haiti, there wasn't money to buy the drug, and that little boy paid a horrible price.

The nurse returned to [her] parish just before Ash Wednesday that year. She spoke at each of the masses that day, telling the story of the boy. She said, "He will forever live in silence and we could have prevented it from happening." That very day, more people signed up for work teams, and mission teams, and their whole parish has been transformed. I pray the same blessing might be given to this congregation, as well.

On the night before he gave his life over for us, Jesus left us with a new commandment, a new mitzvah. To his disciples, then and now, he said, "Love one another, as I have loved you." What wondrous love, what generous, outpouring love. What an incredible mitzvah: to live with and for each other, never in isolation. This mitzvah so transformed the first Christians, that everyone around them noticed. As described in the Book of Acts, they rejoiced to be together, worshiping, studying, breaking bread together, praying, with glad and generous hearts, sharing all their possessions so that none was in need. And living this way, it says, caused everyone to look up to them. And thus did the Lord day by day add to their number.

As a community commanded to love one another, and all others, as Christ loved us, we live as Easter people. We become a community in which mitzvoth are lived out. Commandments become good deeds, acts of loving-kindness. Serving God's people in love, we are transformed into more Christ-like beings. And God will add to our number, not because of how wonderful we are, but because of how faithful we become.

NOTES:

With special thanks to Rabbi Jeff Marx, Santa Monica Synagogue; Mary Jo Dalton and Dr. Don Mulder for medical consultation' and Dennis Corcoran of Church of the Presentation, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

(c) Patricia E. Farris, 2002. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved.