Sermon Notes — August 1, 2025
Mark 12:28-34
August 3, 2025
“Love Can Build a Bridge”
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
Last Thursday, July 31, was the Feast Day of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and I only know that because my daily devotion on Thursday reflected on the life and work of St. Ignatius. Part of that devotion included Ignatius’s prayer called the Suscipe, Latin for receive. The prayer goes like this:
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. You gave all these to me; to you, Lord, I return them. All are yours, dispose of them entirely according to your will. Give me only your love and your grace; that is enough for me."
As I pondered this particular prayer another one came to mind, one that is probably more familiar to most of us, the Wesleyan Covenant Prayer, part of which goes like this:
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
After much praying and pondering it struck me that these prayers – and so many others, like the Prayer of Abandonment by Charles de Foucauld which says in part
Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart
– all of these prayers written by different people at different times in history in a multitude of different contexts are all prayers for the same thing: They are prayers that God would help us to love him with a singular devotion by giving all of who we are and what we have back to God for God to use.
These prayers – and all the prayers like them – are all responses to the text that Reagan read for us just a few moments ago:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself”
Will you pray with me and for me?
Now, if we had started reading this morning all the way back at the beginning of Mark chapter 11, we would see that this interaction between Jesus and the scribe is the last of four interactions that Jesus has already had with the Jewish religious leaders. The first three are confrontational: Mark tells us that the leaders come to Jesus and ask him questions because they want to trap him or undermine his authority or shame him in front of the crowds. But the scribe that Reagan read about comes to Jesus in earnest. He has been watching Jesus and listening to Jesus’s interactions with the other religious leaders and he is impressed.
And so he comes to Jesus and he asks him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” By most counts the Law of Moses that God gave to the Israelites on their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land contains 613 laws for the people to follow. And it was not uncommon for rabbis – Jewish teachers – to use one or two of those laws as guides for interpreting all of the rest.
For example, here’s a story told about Hillel the Elder, one of the most famous rabbis. He was born in Babylonia in the first century BC. And the story goes that a Gentile – someone who isn’t a Jew – approached Rabbi Hillel and told the rabbi that he would convert to Judaism if the rabbi could teach him the whole Torah – the whole first five books of the scripture – while he was standing on one foot. And Hillel did. This is what he said
What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this — go and study it.
So it would have been at all unusual for the scribe to ask Jesus which commandment is the first of all. And unlike other instances in which Jesus turns the question back to the person questioning him, Jesus appears pleased to be asked the question and to answer.
“Hear O Israel,” he begins, quoting Deuteronomy 6:4, “The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” He continues to Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
“And the second is this,” he says, going backwards to the Book of Leviticus
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
There is no commandment greater than these.
The scribe doesn’t seem to mind that Jesus gives a second commandment in addition to the first, despite the fact that the scribe only asked for one. It is almost as though the scribe understands that the two simply must go together. The best analogy I’ve heard is the two hinges analogy. Picture your kitchen cabinets for a moment. They’re probably hanging on two hinges. These two commandments are like those two hinges – if you don’t have both your cabinet is going to hang crooked. If we don’t love God and neighbor then our lives are going to be off-kilter.
Jesus is clear that love of God means giving our whole selves to God – heart, mind, soul, and strength as reflected in the prayers of so many of our church mothers and fathers through the centuries.
But what does it mean to love our neighbor?
As the story goes, Naomi Judd was in an airplane flying across the country, looking down at the vast expanse below. As she gazed out on the immensity of the world she considered what might span the vastness – what could build a bridge from one side of the world to the other, and the seeds for “Love Can Build a Bridge” were planted.
What Naomi and Paul Overstreet, and John Jarvis got right in “Love Can Build a Bridge” is that love of neighbor is not merely a sentiment or an emotion. Love is a verb. It is an action. Love walks across the desert to share our last bite of bread with someone who is hungry. Love shows up to sit with a person who is struggling. Love builds a bridge.
Love is not an unconscious choice over which we have no control, as in “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” Love is a very intentional choice. And at no point does it become any more intentional than when our neighbor – the one whom Jesus has told us to love – is someone that we really don’t like. There’s a meme that’s been making the rounds that makes this point nicely. Maybe you’ve seen it.
This is more in line with Luke’s telling of a similar story, but the point is the same. No one wants to love the person they don’t like when love means acting in ways that are in that person’s best interest – the best interest of the person that we don’t like, or don’t agree with, or don’t look like, or don’t understand. It’s just not in our nature as humans. And yet it is exactly what Jesus tells us to do. To act in the best interest of the person we enjoy the least, just as we would act in our own best interest.
There is a reason that Jesus prioritizes love of God and love of neighbor above all else. Because, in this pastor’s opinion, those are the hardest things to get right. And if we get those things right – the hardest things – then everything else will start to fall into place.
There is a reason that so many of our church mothers and fathers wrote prayers – prayers that they prayed every day and that centuries of Christians have prayed every day – asking God to help us love God most of all. Because they knew – and we know – that the minute our feet hit the floor in the morning there will be countless things and people and ideas that will start asking us for our singular devotion.
And the other commandment, the one that is like it? Love your neighbor as yourself? Why? Because if we don’t do it – if Jesus’ people – those of us who devote our lives singularly to Jesus and his kingdom – if we don’t do it? If we don’t look out for the interests of others the same way we look out for our own interests?
Who’s gonna?
Who’s going to do it?
Who is going to build the bridges between people and people – and between people and Jesus – if we don’t? Who is going to prioritize the best interests of people who have no one else to look out for their best interests if we don’t?
I want to go back to the Book of Leviticus for a minute – I know you were hoping I would say that. This is how Leviticus 19 starts. God is telling Moses what Moses is going to tell the Israelites, and God starts with this
Say to the whole community of Israelites: You must be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.
This is God saying to the Israelites, “I created you to reflect me.”
And what is the whole sweep of our faith story? That from the moment that we were separated from God, God has been building bridges to span the distance between us and God. That’s the story. We were estranged from God because of our own brokenness and ever since God has been building bridges to connect us again. Throughout the whole Hebrew scripture, God builds bridges over and over between Godself and the humans and the comos that God so loves.
And then God built the ultimate bridge. God came to us. God became human and came to us in the person of Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul tells us this in 2 Corinthians 5 –
in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. (2 Corinthians 5:19)
In Christ God built the bridge between himself and us, and then handed over to us the job of building bridges.
Our whole world is so very, very broken. I won’t make a list. You can make your own in your head. But Jesus has given us a mandate – to be the peacemakers, to be the bridge builders, to be the people who look out for the best interests of those who have no one else to look out for their best interests. Even when it’s hard. Even when we don’t want to. Even when the people who need us are the people we don’t like or don’t understand. Because we are called to reflect the character, the love, and the compassion of God, who gave his own life in Jesus, for us.
In this holy meal we remember Christ’s offering for us. We remember that Christ gave up his own life for us so that we could be reconciled to God. We ask the Holy Spirit once again for the strength and the power and the mind that were in Christ Jesus so that we can be bridge builders in a broken world.