Loving Neighbor and Tearing Down Walls

11/3/2008

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "`You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." The Romans had a god, Terminus. He was the god of boundaries. I don’t know much about him, but the very idea of this god fascinates me. In the Greco-Roman way of things, the god Terminus is worshiped when walls are built, which, in the Greco-Roman way, is a community event that draws people together. Like the Amish build barns as a way of worship and building community, the Romans built walls. Imagine a wall, built by hand, made from the stones that are found in the fields when they are cleared to grow crops and build homes. The stones in this wall fit perfectly together, even though some are shaped like loaves and other balls, to create straight sides and a level top. Seeing such a powerful wall, I assume there is a trick to get the mismatching stones to mesh together. No, an artist of rocks has carefully, patiently, put the stones together so that the wall stands strong without any cement. Where we spent the first part of last summer in Massachusetts, there is such a wall along a road that we often traveled. It marks off a hayfield. Orange and yellow day lilies grow out of the base of the wall, and in the late afternoon, as the sun sinks behind Allen’s Pond, the light shines up from the water and filters through the flower petals and dapples the cold gray stippled stones with hues of peach and mellow blue, such that when we drive along the road at that hour, we must pull over to take in its sheer beauty. We call it Teddy’s wall, because my brother once shot an entire roll of film, because his camera has film, trying to capture the wall’s beauty. I wasn’t surprised when the photos came back, and people not there asked, “Why are there 36 pictures of an old wall?” Like sunrise in the Grand Canyon, you just had to be there. In springtime, when the farmer walks the fields after the snow has melted, or the owner of the home checks the back acreage as the grass begins to grow again, they often find that a portion of their wall has fallen over. Frost, most likely, has heaved over some of the stones and boulders, or a wayward snowmobile has clipped it, or hunters—who hunt not for sport but for subsistence in those parts—have routed out a rabbit by pushing over stones. Any survivor of freshman English knows that thus far in this sermon I am teasing out the images of Robert Frost’s iconic poem, The Mending Wall. In that poem, he sings, Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. He recounts how these walls must be mended each spring. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. We wear our fingers rough with handling them. In his poem, Frost thinks they have no need of such a wall. He and his neighbor have no cattle to mingle such that who owns them is unsure. And, My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. Frost has his neighbor reply with an adage on the lips of all my New England relatives, and adage you can easily find up in Bucks or Montgomery and certainly in Chester County: Good fences make good neighbors. Frost wonders, as do I, as to why we need boundaries to make our neighbors. Would it be that these two men would not meet unless their broken wall would bring them together. Frost sings again, Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, I know of what he means. My wall in Massachusetts is so beautiful, but it marks off a hayfield just like the one next to it. Why need there be a wall at all? Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down. Frost wants the wall down because by it, some are walled in, and others out. That is the wall’s offense. But then again, there may be walls, boundaries really, that somehow define who we are to the other as the wall brings us together. Jesus hated the walls that walled some in and walled others out. He hated the walls of the temple that kept God in and the people out. He hated the walls of the city that put the privileged in and the lepers, the blind, the possessed, out. Jesus spent his most of his earthly life among the walled out, proclaiming that to God, they were not walled out, but walled in. And Jesus wanted to turn the walls around. The meek will be strong. The rich will be poor. The last will be first. The lost will be found. When Jesus was crucified, the most offensive wall of all was destroyed, the one that walled God in, and walled the people of God out. Or as the scripture says, “The curtain of the temple was torn in two,” or as I learned it, “The veil of the temple was rent twain.” When the lawyer asks Jesus, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" he answers the question by linking two commandments. In doing so, he tears down a wall. The correct answer indeed is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind.” But Jesus then links this commandment with another, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Robert Frost and The Mending Wall has me wondering: Is there something about Jesus that doesn’t love the wall that takes piety, and religious correctness, and ritualistic piety that can separate us each from the other so as to want that wall down? Believing in God can build walls, because the human sin is to say that I believe in God the right way, and you don’t, so I put a wall between us. Islam is a wall for Christians, who are a wall for Jews, and on and on. But, by linking the two commandments, Jesus subtly suggests that if by loving God you some how do not love your neighbor, then you aren’t really loving God. And it gets even more radical than that: If you love your neighbor as yourself, you are loving God. After all, the act of loving God can be a divider; loving neighbor is always a uniter. In Robert Frost’s poem, the wall brought neighbors together, yet the wall remained between them. Maybe that will always be. Jesus then is the boundary that unites us, not a wall at all, who opens up belief in God to the most skeptical of minds. Have you ever noticed what a firm wall exists between the one who believes in God and the one who doesn’t? No more, as Jesus takes the wall down. He says, don’t worry about whether your neighbor believes in God. Just love your neighbor, and God will take on the rest. Jim Bodine used to say to me, after a long sermon that would leave him somewhat weary with me, “Tim, just preach ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ We don’t need all that other jazz.” He was right, of course.

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