Well, the World Series goes to Game 7 tonight down in Anaheim and you know things will be pretty intense down at the Big Ed [Edison Field]. Earlier this week, I heard a story on the often bitter rivalry between northern California and southern California. After reciting the familiar litany of all the mutual stereotypes and insults hurled across our state, top to bottom and back, the commentator, quoting Rodney King's now famous line, quipped: "And you wonder why we can't just all get along?"

The rivalry personified by the Anaheim Angels and the San Francisco Giants, with their rally monkeys and rubber chickens, is, for the most part, just good old-fashioned fun. In the heat of the game, it's fun to trash the other team and its hometown. But in the end you see, all our sports rivalries really serve to unite us in our shared love of the sport.

Real hatred is another matter. It is vicious and vile. It tears people apart and sets them against one another. Some of you are old enough to remember the song from the musical, South Pacific, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" . . .

You've got to be taught to hate and fear.
You've got to be taught from year to year.
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear.
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade.
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate.
You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be carefully taught.

The teaching of hatred persists in this world, does it not? Sadly, it's now been taken to new, vicious, commercialized forms. I read recently of a whole new batch of video games that promote racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry. These new video games take that to a sickening extreme. With names like "Ethnic Cleansing" and "Shoot the Blacks," players "shoot" Blacks and Hispanics and descend into a subway to kill Jews, and so on. Of course, these are extreme and grotesque expressions of sick minds, and we pray that none of our kids would ever be attracted to them or seduced by their edgy violence. But by their extremity, they do reveal to us a current of hate and prejudice and fear that runs through all societies and finally emerges full blown in barbarous acts of killing and genocide in our world. To this high-tech hatred, to all hatred and bigotry and violence, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ still speaks the very low-tech commandment to love. Simply love.

My sermon this morning brings to a conclusion a series that we've pursued through this Fall on various aspects of God-God's love and forgiveness, God's humility, God's promise, God's peace. Today the focus turns 180 degrees and shines the light right squarely on us. Today, Jesus gives us God's Imperative, the commandment to love.

It's as if the Scriptures have been revealing to us that if God is this and this and this, if God is love, forgiveness, humility and peace, then we must ask: If this is our God, who are we? What's expected of us? What kind of lives will reveal the God in whose image we are created? How are we to live?

The answer to all those questions comes to us this morning in the passage we hear from Matthew's gospel, as Jesus sums up all the commandments about how to live. We can boil it down to the simple phrase: "Love is the answer." I guess if Russ Whittenburg could quote the Beatles last week in his Laity Sunday address, so can I this morning. Only today, we hear the sentiment expressed by Jesus himself. Love is the answer.

This answer is deceptively simple, almost Zen-like in its clarity that opens into a profound and complex depth. Think back for a moment to the context of this exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees, the religious authorities. Following along in Matthew's gospel, Jesus has entered Jerusalem in triumph on what we call "Palm Sunday." He has cleansed the temple. He has healed the lepers and the lame. The Pharisees are trying to trap him, corner him, find some way to undermine his growing popularity and cause him to do himself in by going too far. This is a high stakes game and at this point in Matthew's story, everything is on the line: Jesus' very life and the kingdom of God, which he has come to inaugurate.

Folks, if you think politics in our day can be pretty slimy-the big bucks spent on misinfor-mation, the negative campaigning, the name-calling and petty personal attacks-it's got nothing over this show-down between Jesus and the Pharisees, as the final hour approaches. They've been going back and forth, and in this scene, we hear this morning, the Pharisees surely think they've found a way to silence this very problematic upstart from Nazareth. They've got him in a corner and they're going to ask him what is the greatest commandment and there will be no way he can answer without offending a whole bunch of his supporters. Or so they think.

After all, there were 613 commandments-if you remember from our Mitzvah Day sermon-613 commandments to follow: 248 positive commandments, the thou shalts, linked to the number of the parts of the body; and 365 negative ones, the thou shalt nots, corresponding to the number of days in the year. "Which is the greatest?" they ask, mocking him, taunting him, daring him to dishonor the sacred tradition by elevating a part or leaving something out, and he says, "Love."

Love is the answer, to that question and all questions. " 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.' This is the greatest and first 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." Jesus not only answers the question put to him, but his answer takes the matter to a whole new depth and meaning his questioners could not have imagined.

You see, the kicker in this passage really comes in that one little word that Jesus uses to link the two, love of God and love of neighbor, that word like. He gives the first commandment-complete and total love of God- and then says that the second, love of neighbor, is like it. Exactly like it. And that's where all this love business starts to get really hard. It is perhaps easier to strive to love God, a love that can remain pure and spiritual and private and personal, than to love your neighbor as yourself, especially when that neighbor has become, through the ways of the world, your enemy.

I recently heard a powerful and moving story which reveals how such love can actually happen in our torn and violent world. It's the true story of a young man, a Scotsman. His name was Yoni Jesner, just 19, and he had traveled to Israel to spend some time there exploring his Jewish heritage and faith before starting medical school in London. This young man had always wanted to be a healer, a doctor. But instead, his life was ended last month when a suicide bomber boarded a bus in Tel Aviv and detonated a bomb, killing himself and six others, Yoni Jesner among them.

At the hospital where he died, the doctors attending to him knew of his desire to be a doctor and save lives. And they knew of a seven-year-old Palestinian girl, Yasmin Rumeilah, who had been born with a failing kidney. Every week, her parents had braved the Israeli checkpoints and long waits and intimidation to bring her to the hospital for treatment. The doctors asked Yoni's father if his kidney could be transplanted in Yasmin. The whole family quickly agreed. Indeed, they said that they were "delighted." They expressed delight at the chance to save a life. Yoni's brother said, "We believe it's a real satisfaction of God's name, to bring something positive out of this terrible conflict." Later, looking at his daughter, who is expected to do very well, Yasmin's father expressed his deep gratitude. "After all," he said, "we are all one people. We are all one family."

It is so much easier in this world to hate than to love. But there is love in this world that is stronger than hate, love that is more powerful than violence and death. It rarely makes the headlines.

All we hear about incessantly is hate and violence. No wonder we feel cynical and hopeless. We have been persuaded to give up on love and think it unrealistic, naive, even misguided. Left to ourselves, we could become fearful, narrow, selfish folks. Left to ourselves, we act out of self-interest or out of fear of others. It is inconvenient and uncomfortable to move beyond our comfort zones. We don't want to be rejected or offend. And we don't want to be endlessly obligated to strangers. And sadly, if we're honest, ofttimes we could just care less about people we don't know, whether they live across the street or halfway around the world.

Jesus knew that. And so, his words today should serve to grab us by the shoulders and look us right in the eye and go right to the very heart of who we are and how we live. He doesn't invite us to love. He doesn't suggest that we love. He doesn't offer love to make us feel better or have a happier life.

Christ Jesus quotes the ancient teachings and commands us to love God with all our heart and with all our mind and with all our soul. And he commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves. And through his own life and witness, he gives us the power to do it, if we only will. Love is his answer. Love-among us within this congregation. Love-within our families. Love-within our community. Love-within our nation. Love-among the nations. Love-even of our enemies.

We opened our worship this Reformation Day morning singing Martin Luther's great hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." It's a strong and powerful hymn that praises God's strength and power over anything that would threaten it. We sang: "The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him. His rage we can endure. For lo! his doom is sure. One little word shall fell him."

What is that one little word, that fells the powers of darkness in this world? "Love." Mind-boggling, life-changing, world-confounding love. Perhaps especially now, for the time in which we live, a time of increasingly high-tech hatred and rampant bigotry and selfishness, a time of saber-rattling and fear. Still, for a time such as this, love is God's imperative. Love is our command.

NOTES

1. Homiletics, October 2002.

2. NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. September 28, 2002. Scott Simon essay on "Hope from the Middle East."

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