Welcoming the World

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself," says Matthew 22:34-46

Welcoming the world seems to take love for granted. Welcoming is inviting -- making the strangers feel they belong. When we welcome the world around us, we love God.

In the Bible, the word for "Lord" means the very God who created world, us, and the person next door. God made the world and us and others to be his friends forever. So the term "Lord" refers to the "making-for-friendship" and "setting-free-from- slavery" One.

And then don't miss the next word in the Matthew verse, probably the most important: "your". The whole gospel is in that word. The Lord is your God. The Lord is crazy about you, the Lord adores you, the Lord yearns for you even through the long lonely times when you couldn't care less, and turn back to your burger, your ball game or your biology book. The Lord cares so much for you that in Jesus, the Lord lays down his life for you. The Lord cherishes every one.

And the next word is "God." The Lord your God. This Lord, the making- for-friendship and setting-free-from- slavery One, your Lord, the one who adores you and likes you.

The one who scattered the stars in their heavens is the one who made the universe as a stage for friendship with you and gave his life to take away everything that might possibly come between you. . .

So give all to God, and receive back all of God. What does giving everything mean? First of all, says Jesus, it means your "heart". In other words, the very center of your being, the vessel that makes every other organ function, that pumps blood to every distant part of your body. Your heart is your passion, your sheer physical humanity, your visceral sense of need and desire and drive and power.

Then second there's your "soul". Here "soul" means breath, means sheer existence. Give God your pumping heart, yes, but give God also your whole soul, the whole meaning of your existence, the whole mystery of your precarious conception and inevitable mortality, your whole location at this apparently arbitrary moment on this tiny planet at one dull corner of a pretty ordinary galaxy. Give God the wonder and the anomaly of your existence, its glory and its contingency.

And third, give God all your "mind". You have been given your mind for one thing more than anything else: to wonder.

Welcoming the world! Well it's about the "neighbor", the love that God has for you and has for the person sitting in front of you and behind you as well; that the way God is crazy about you and longs to cuddle you and rub your cheeks until you gurgle and giggle with joy - God feels that way about the person ahead of you and behind you at the stop sign, in the Social Security office, at the ball game, at the supermarket checkout. And you give your whole heart and soul and mind to God by the way you treat their hearts, their souls, their minds.

If God so cherishes you, he makes your heart, your soul, your mind into a temple, and a temple in the Bible is a place where God encounters his people. Your heart and soul and mind are a temple, a place where God meets you. But so is your neighbor. Your neighbor is a temple too, a place where God will meet you. Think about your neighbor's heart - think about their physicality, their playfulness, their passion, their drive and desire.

This may be a place where God will meet you: this person may be an icon to you of God's passion for you. Think about your neighbor's breath, their tenuous hold on life: think about their hunger, their sickness, their despair, their neediness: this too may become a temple where you meet God, the God who in Christ was needy and desperate himself. Think about your neighbors' minds -- their ideas, their fears, their wonderings, their humor, their tenderness: this too may become a temple for you; their ideas may change yours for the better, their humor may strip you of your self- importance, their contrariness may dismantle your sentimentality.

This is the Lord - not some general faraway deity but the very real God of Israel made flesh in Jesus Christ. This is your Lord, who made you because he wanted one like you and set you free from a slavery that only you know. This Lord, your Lord, is God, the maker and restorer and sustainer of all things. And the Lord your God, who has given you everything, wants your whole heart, every fiber of your being.

He wants your whole soul, your very life itself. And he wants your whole mind, in all its independence and contrariness. He has given you your body as a temple in which you can meet him in heart and soul and mind. Cherish that body, because it is a place of encounter with God, and therefore holy. But he has also given you the gift of your neighbor, not the person you choose but the person that happens to wash up next to you, in the house next door, the plane seat, or the library.

And that person's heart and soul and mind are equally a gift to you, equally a temple where you may come face to face with God. And just to demonstrate that you are cherishing the precious gifts God is giving you because he is crazy about you, then listen to your neighbor's heart, nourish your neighbor's soul, and drink from your neighbor's mind as eagerly as if you really believed your neighbor was a temple given to you by God as a place to worship him. And remember when Jesus said "Go to the ends of the earth," the "end" of that earth may be simply wherever God's love has stopped being experienced or understood. The ends of the earth could be across from the dinner table, the person over on the lawn next door, or women in Guatemala trying to make ends meet.

If this is what love is, then let's welcome the world of next door, or next in line, or across from you right now. Let's welcome that world with love.