Love is the long road

Deuteronomy 6: 1-9
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
October 31, 2021 – Reformation Sunday

Deuteronomy is one of, if not the longest farewell speech ever. God has told Moses that he will see the Promised Land but only from a distance; he will not enter it with his people. And so like any parent or teacher he tells them all the things, everything they will need to know, to remember who they are and whose they are. The Hebrew translation of the word Deuteronomy is “these are the words”, words to be sung and prayed and recited, to be heard and written and lived—words to be embodied, enfleshed.



Hebrew scholar Robert Alter describes Deuteronomy as persuasive rhetoric written to convince audiences “of the palpable and authoritative reality of an event that never occurred” or at least not as it is portrayed in the text. Instead, what is being created in the book of Deuteronomy could be described as a collective muscle memory. Future generations when hearing these words, this teaching will feel not only like they were there but that they are reenacting the event. The book of Deuteronomy was written in the 7th century BCE, long after the Israelites crossed the river Jordan into the land of the Canaanites, written just before and during their exile in Babylon. Hearing how they were once told everything they would need to survive as a people and how they did survive a “great and fearful wilderness”, would now help them survive captivity in a foreign land.

These are the words, and if you can remember no other words, remember these: Hear, O Israel, the Sovereign our God, our God is one. And you shall love God with all your heart and with all your being and with all your might. Write these words on your heart. Imprint them on your children. Speak of them in all you do, when you get up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Bind them to your hand and between your eyes. Inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on the city gates.



Previously, God’s people had been commanded to fear God and to worship no other gods, but this was a fresh understanding that the people love God, with heart and being and might.



In biblical terms, the heart is the seat of understanding, but it is also the source of emotions. The Hebrew word nefesh, translated as soul, is better understood as “life-breath” or “essential self”. Here there is no dichotomy between body and spirit; one does not exist without the other. The Hebrew word for “might” is not a noun. It is translated and used elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures as “very” or “extra”. Love God with all your “extra”, you who have been called “extra”: “extra sensitive” or “too smart for your own good”, too loud, too angry, too fat, too disabled, too poor, too queer, too much. Love God with all of your extra.

To recite and repeat these words day and night, throughout one’s life and the last words said with one’s last breath, is to create a collective heart muscle, a habit of love known in community, not only for God but for all life everywhere. Rabbi Malkah Binah Klein says that loving God means loving the world. In an interview she said, “God is one, humanity is one, life is one. Thus, loving God means being in the ongoing process of learning to love all dimensions of life, even that which troubles us”.



To love God and yet not love the world leads to such things as colonizing or invading a land that does not belong to you. It leads to unsafe drinking water in Flint, Michigan and the abuse of water rights on indigenous lands. It leads to a great and fearful wilderness called a pandemic raging for 2 years. It leads to White supremacy and Christian nationalism. It leads to the extinction of species, climate change and wildfires. To love God and yet not love the world leads to eviction and houseless people and families. It leads to transphobia, police brutality, abuse of workers, misogyny, anything that separates us from the earth, from each other, from wholeness.



What if we normalized saying “I love you” not only in intimate relationships or between family members, but with friends and co-workers, in faith communities and in our neighborhoods? Imagine if those words were uttered in Congress and state assemblies, or at the close of a presidential address. What if these words were considered before decisions that materially affect people’s lives and the planet we live on?

If we’re going to love God with all our heart, with our life-breath, with all our extra, and if all life is one, why would we not begin our day with “I love you” to our ancestors, to those we miss, to our bodies that will carry us through the day? Why would we not embody it in all that we do and say, leave no question in the hearts of our children about their present and their future, speak it in the work of our hands, wear it as an emblem so everyone knows we mean it, the last words before we sleep and before we leave this life, inscribed on the doorway to our homes and on the welcome signs to each city, town, and state.



In the poem “V’ahavta,” Aurora Levins Morales, a Puerto Rican Jewish poet writes:



“Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning
and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,
embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,
teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,
recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible.”



Another world is possible, not only when we imagine it but when we embody it in our flesh, when we speak it with our lives. Do you know why love never ends, why it must never end? Because evil never gives up. Love is the long road. Therefore, love your neighbor as yourself. You are worthy of love. You are enough. Don’t give up. Take time to rest and to heal, and then keep loving.



I love you, Church. Amen.

Benediction – enfleshed.com


Go forth refuting the lie of scarcity.
May it be written on your heart:
Another world is possible.
Go forth living in defiance of the lie
that systems are too big to change.
Go forth in creative and dogged hope,
for, beloveds... another world is possible.