Welcome and Introduction
 
Hello.  Whoever you and wherever you are from, I wish you a very warm welcome to today’s service. I am the Revd Deanna Macartney and I am currently living in the Central Belt of Scotland and am part of the worship team at Augustine United Church in Edinburgh.  Today we are going to think about what it means to love in a way that encompasses our whole being.  Hopefully we will understand that while we can be commanded to love, ultimately there’s a verb implying active effort and participation on our part.  

Call to Worship
 
Out of our lives and into your presence we come.
Lord God, into your dwelling place we come.
We come just as we are to worship you today. 
We will give thanks to the Lord with our whole hearts.
We come to grow in faith and learn of your wonderful deeds.
We will be glad and exult in you.
Let us sing praise to the Lord Most High. 
 
Hymn       The Lord is King! Lift Up Your Voice!
Josiah Conder (1789-1855) Troon Old Parish Church Choir
 

The Lord is King! lift up your voice!
Let earth and all the heavens rejoice.
From world to world 
the joy shall ring,
‘The Lord omnipotent is King!’
 
2 The Lord is King! 
who then shall dare
resist his will, distrust his care,
or murmur at his wise decrees,
or doubt his royal promises?
 
3 The Lord is King! child of the dust,
the judge of all the earth is just;
holy and true are all his ways;
let every creature speak his praise.
 
4 Come, make your wants, 
your burdens known;
Christ will present them 
at the throne;
for he is at the Father’s side,
the Man of love, the Crucified.

5 One Lord, one empire, all secures; he reigns, and life and death are yours;
through earth & heaven one song shall ring, ‘The Lord omnipotent is King!
 
Prayer of Adoration and Confession 
 
God of love, you are our foundation and source.
Knowing that your great love is given freely 
and in abundance for all, wherever we have come from, 
and whoever we are, we cannot help but be in awe. 
We give thanks this day for the commandment, to love and to be loved. 
Guide us in our journey to truly live as you have commanded, 
teach us to love you, to love our neighbour, and to love ourselves. 
It is the greatest of your commands, 
and though we strive to live each day attempting to fulfil it, 
all too often we fail. 
Forgive us for being fickle, 
or for those moments when we are impatient and unkind. 
In a world of conflicting allegiances and distractions, 
hating can be easier than caring, 
blaming others easier than taking responsibility for our own actions. 
In a world where money feels like the one thing 
that everyone seeks to hoard and multiply, 
may we go against the grain and give freely to help those in need.
Instead of seeking the path of least resistance, 
teach us to know a love that is patient and kind; 
and by giving may we strive for justice and equality for all.
Parent God, lead your children towards a world
that shuns the easiness of discrimination and prejudice 
for the brilliance of a world and a life lived
in the warmth of true love, given freely, for all and to all.
In the name of Christ who taught us to pray: Our Father…
 
Reading            Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
 
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy…You shall not render an unjust judgement; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbour. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbour: I am the Lord. You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbour, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.
 
Reading            St Matthew 22:34-46 
 
When the Pharisees heard that he 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 neighbour as yourself.”  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question:  ‘What do you think of the Messiah?[a] Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David.’  He said to them, ‘How is it then that David by the Spirit[b] calls him Lord, saying, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet’”?  If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?’  No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
 
Hymn       Beloved, Let us Love for Love Is Of God
Horatius Bonar (1808–1889) Members of St Francis Lutheran Church, San Francisco
 

Belovèd, let us love: 
for love is of God;
in God alone hath love 
its true abode.
 
2 Belovèd, let us love: 
for those who love,
they only are God’s children 
from above.
3 Belovèd, let us love: 
for love is rest,
and those who do not love 
cannot be blest.
 
4 Belovèd, let us love: 
for love is light,
and those who do not love 
still live in night.

5 Belovèd, let us love: for only thus
shall we see God the Lord who first loved us.
 
Message
 
If you ask anyone in the church if they have a Bible verse or a passage that they like to keep going back to, they will probably have a passage or two that they could quote to you. This is my passage. Whenever I am presented with something in my life that seems to challenge my understanding of God, or of Christianity, or if something needs to be examined in the context of my faith, this is the passage I come back to. I think about Christ’s command to, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”   To which Luke’s gospel also adds “with all your strength”. Jesus says, “This is the greatest and first commandment.” Before anything else do this.
 
So, tell me. If you love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength what’s left?  What is it that doesn’t fit into one of those categories? It seems pretty straight forward to me. We tend to think of love in terms of romance, but that sells it short. Jesus is telling us that we need to love God with our whole being. Love God with everything that we have.  When we do this and then we love our neighbour as ourselves we are actually fulfilling the entire law. 
 
We don’t need to memorise the entire Bible, we don’t need to build a routine around improving our knowledge although those things are good to have and to do. The entire Old Testament and its 613 laws can be summed up in a single command.  That should tell you something: it is an important command to keep.  So, I wonder how we all think we are doing? When we read or hear this passage we understand it differently than Jesus’ audience would have heard it.  Living in a scientific age we have separated all the parts of the body to their specific functions.  The mind contains the sum of all our worldly knowledge, it controls our thoughts, and is what we use in conscious decision making.  Conversely the heart is where our feelings come from.  You know the saying from Emily Dickinson, “the heart wants what it wants, or else it does not care”. Our emotions are not always logical and sometimes we feel our way into a choice or decision. 
 
Jesus’ audience would have understood that he was quoting from Deuteronomy, but they would not have made the same distinctions about the emotional and the physical that we make.  For Jesus’ audience there is a significant overlap between the heart and the mind and in their eyes the heart carries out the more important functions.  Your flesh gives you your appearance of who you are, but your heart is the reality of your nature and identity.  This is where God looks, in our hearts.  
 
The Pharisees who Jesus continually had problems with looked great on the outside, they were good upstanding citizens, but they were actively conniving to keep their power and silence Jesus. The act of testing him was deliberate to try and find something they could use against him, because Jesus was upsetting everything they had worked so hard to build. Yet when Jesus answered the question about the greatest commandment, he said to love God. Loving God with all your heart and soul requires not just doing the right things, but doing them for the right reasons. Our love for God must be true to the very core of who we are. If we do not love God with our hearts then we do not really love God at all. Which is why Jesus brings Leviticus into his answer. 
 
“You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”
 
Love is not passive, but active. Love is a verb and is something we do. Jesus, surrounded by lawyers and Pharisees, shows them that somewhere along the line people got so caught up in how to interpret the law that they completely forgot about how to live according to the spirit of the law.  So, Jesus added Leviticus 19:18 to flesh out his answer.
 
And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ 
 
When you love God with your heart, soul, and mind it changes the motivation for everything that you do so it changes your interactions.  You no longer do good things because you’re supposed to, you do them because you want to. 
You do not live a Christian life out of obligation or fear. 
 
You don’t come to church, or donate money, or volunteer to help at different events, desperately hoping that you will collect enough loyalty points to enter heaven, but you do so out of a genuine love for God. And we are told that God is Love. That genuine love that we feel on the inside, keeps spilling outwards, impacting every interaction we have. Whether we mean it to or not.
 
We know who our neighbour is…whether we like them or not is an entirely different prospect, but we are commanded to love them. Love our family, our friends, our neighbours, our work colleagues. Strangers, LGBTQ+ people, addicts, foreigners, migrants, refugees, the politicians, rich folks, poor folks, anyone we have ever been told are, “those” people, are God’s people and therefore our people too. Once you understand that your neighbour is literally anyone and everyone. We have all been created with the image of God, then we are all made in love and worthy of love. We cannot love God unless we love ourselves the way that God loves us, and we cannot love others unless we treat them the way that we feel we should be treated. So, knowing everything that we know now,  do we really love God with everything we have and everything we are?  Or do we struggle a bit?  Because not everyone is easy to love.
 
Billions live on less than £3 a day while some people are billionaires and trillionaires. Millions of people are trafficked, bought and sold and living in slavery all over the world, many of them being sexually exploited.  Millions die in wars nobody asked for, or are accused of exploiting countries systems when they flee the bombs and bullets with their families.  2.2 million women and 1.5 million men experienced domestic abuse last year, but the police think that less than 25% of cases ever actually get reported.  Millions die from treatable diseases because healthcare and access to water and shelter are just ways for companies to make profit.   Terrorism, racism, addiction and othering is on the rise. AI and social media have led to self-worth being attached to interactions and online bullying and abuse are rampant as folks feel safe to tear strangers down from the safety of their own homes without consequence.  Politicians, influencers and broadcasters tell us who to fear and who to loathe. 
 
And in all this mix, Christians are often perceived as being out of touch, judgemental people who pick and choose what they want to believe and who constantly tell everybody else what they should and should not be doing whilst ignoring their own advice and not even getting along with one another.  This is our world. These are the people we are told to love as much as we love God and ourselves. 

• We have the knowledge to do this. We have some resources to use. 
• We could make a difference, especially if we work together. 
• Ask yourselves, what are we actually doing? 
• We know that Jesus loved the poor, the hurting, and the lost people of the world. Those on the margins.  

If we watch as the world suffers when we could do something about it then the love of God is not in us.  We build nice buildings, and comfortable seats but are we giving the world what it desperately needs?  Why is it when we have an abundance of resources there are still those who are hungry? The Church is designed to be God’s redemptive agent in the world.   We are not meant to sit back and watch.   Let’s not sit back and wait for someone else to do what God has called us to do.  I want to see us become a church that changes the world.  I want to see people referring to those loving Christians, who accept everyone, forgive everyone, help everyone, love everyone, just like their God. Because for me, that is what it means to keep this command to love God with all our heart, our soul and our mind. If we love this world with all that we are, then we will change the world. 
 
This isn’t a simple command that Jesus gave.  Ultimately we are aiming for godliness, holistically loving is difficult to do and to mean, and we will struggle in our lives to truly live up to that, and at times we will fail, inside and out. But just as surely as God will always love and forgive us, we can keep going, we can keep trying, and keep bringing God’s light into this world that knows so much darkness.
 
To our Lord be all the glory this day and forever. Amen.
 
Hymn       Lord of Creation, To You Be All Praise!
Jack C Winslow (1882-1974) © Mrs J Tyrrell OneLicence No. # A-734713 Sung by Gareth Moore of the Isle of Man Methodist Church and used with his kind permission.
 

Lord of creation,
to you be all praise!
Most mighty your working, 
most wondrous your ways!
Your glory and might are 
beyond us to tell,
and yet in the heart of 
the humble you dwell.
 
2 Lord of all power, 
I give you my will,
in joyful obedience 
your tasks to fulfil.
Your bondage is freedom, 
your service is song;
and, held in your keeping, 
my weakness is strong.

3 Lord of all wisdom, 
I give you my mind,
rich truth that surpasses my knowledge to find;
what eye has not seen and what ear has not heard
is taught by your Spirit and shines from your word.
 
4 Lord of all bounty, 
I give you my heart;
I praise and adore you 
for all you impart,
your love to inspire me, 
your counsel to guide,
your presence to shield me, whatever betide.

5 Lord of all being, I give you my all;
If I should disown you, I stumble and fall;
but, led in your service your word to obey,
I’ll walk in your freedom to the end of the way.
 
Offering and Dedication
 
Holy One, 
we come before you offering you all that we are and all that we have. 
We offer you what we can, 
knowing that they are given in response to the gifts of love 
already received from you.
We offer our whole lives to you 
for the building of your Realm of love and justice throughout the earth.
In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen
 
Intercessory Prayers
 
Ever loving God, mother and father of all. 
Creator and sustainer of everything that we perceive, 
we come together today in praise and joy 
to give thanks for your love and to rejoice 
in the gifts you have given us. 
God of all kindness,
through Christ you offer us a meaningful connection to you.
In gathering in person or online at church 
we also find a meaningful connection to one another.
And so we come before you in this moment, 
thanking you for the chance to connect with you 
and with one another today.
We are here, seeking to know your support, 
to feel your presence in our lives 
so that we may go and be a source of goodness and justice 
in a world in which we so often see cruelty and injustice.
 
God of all people,
we pray for nothing short of peace in our world. 
A huge undertaking when we see the destruction
of war, greed, and corruption all around us.
We seek a breaking down of the barriers of 
fear, suspicion, and hatred that separate us from one another.
Heal this human family of our division – 
in particular we pray for all trans and/or non-binary folks, 
and anyone who stands out in this society 
that so often excludes anyone who does not fit in 
or differs from them in some way.
 
We pray for anyone suffering mentally or physically.
The refugees and the homeless who are among us 
and yet so often treated as invisible, pushed out of sight and out of mind.
There are so many people, going through so much 
that we could bring so many names before you today:
So send your Spirit, that they may guide us, bless us, 
surround us all with your love, support us with your strength.
Console us with your comfort, 
and give us hope and courage beyond ourselves.
 
God of all Creation,
unite us in pursuit of a world where kindness,
and co-operation are normal 
and diversity is not just tolerated but celebrated.
Let us use what we have to strive to look after this world, 
to undo the damage that has and is being done 
to the natural wonder that is all around us, 
to make this world a better place in any small way we can.
 
Let us work towards a better future, 
one where we live in mutual love and understanding of our neighbours.
We pray for those in our community who are not here with us, 
and ask for your blessings to be upon them, 
may we not forget those who cannot be here with us today.
As we each chart our own path through life, 
seeking to do good, at times succeeding and at times failing, 
may each of us find strength in your love to live well 
and show the radical love offered in, and commanded by, 
your son today and every day. Amen.
 
Hymn       Thy Hand, O God, Has Guided
Edward Hayes Plumptre (1821-1891) Public Domain BBC Songs of Praise
 

Thy hand, O God, has guided
thy flock, from age to age;
the wondrous tale is written,
full clear, on every page;
thy people owned thy goodness,
and we their deeds record;
and both of this bear witness;
one Church, one faith, one Lord.
 
2 Thy heralds brought glad tidings
to greatest as to least;
they bade them rise, and hasten
to share the great King’s feast;
and this was all their teaching,
in every deed and word,
to all alike proclaiming
one Church, one faith, one Lord.