Series: June 2025
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
"Finding Ourselves in Loving Our Neighbor"
First Reading
Leviticus 19:18b
“...you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.”
Second Reading
Mark 12:28-31
28 One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ 29Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 30you 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.” 31The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’
“Finding Ourselves in Loving Our Neighbor”
Love your neighbor as yourself. You’ve heard it the Torah of the Old Testament. You heard it in the gospels of the New. Now hear it repeated yet again in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Paul who almost never quotes any of Jesus’ teachings: “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’” (Gal. 5:14). Are we getting the picture?
And yet, I say without hyperbole that every time I have heard this central teaching preached, do you know what the preacher has focused on? Loving yourself. If you want to find the way don’t look to them, look to you. Now, as we said throughout this series, there may be a helpful corrective for some who have been told to put their needs last their whole lives. Others have sought to find a sense of worthiness through obsessive service to others. That, too, can be a strange form of self-obsession. If you’ve always subjugated your needs, then accept the gracious invitation to learn to love yourself just as you are.
For the rest of us, what does it say that we consistently take this teaching clearly about loving our neighbors and make it about ourselves? Think of this - I’m almost 50, and I’ve never heard this passage about loving your neighbor preached in a way that centers loving the neighbor. Loving your neighbor as yourself presumes you love yourself; it’s really not more complicated than that.
You could say I’m falling into a trap by including this teaching in a series about finding yourself, but I am not trying to say we love others for what it gets us. I am saying in loving others with no expectation, our true selves are born. This is not about abstract religious claims; there’s science behind it. According to the U.K.’s Mental Health Foundation, there are all kinds of benefits simply to being kind to others. Kindness here is defined as “choosing to do something that helps others or yourself, motivated by genuine warm feelings.” Kindness improves mental health, boosts mood, and increases self-esteem as well as happiness.[1]What’s more, doing it is free. How much money do we pay to get help examining our own lives—and I’m not putting that down—but how much do we spend turning the mirror back on ourselves? Maybe we should spend a little more time looking at our neighbors. It helps them and helps us, a true win-win.
What’s amazing is how remedial our skills at caring for our neighbors have become, and remember this material is coming out of the U.K., so it’s a bigger “we.” The article I just referenced encourages practices and listen to them:
- Volunteering – okay
- Mentoring others - makes sense
- Saying “hello” to someone on the street – Wait, what? We have to be told to do that?
- Calling a friend you haven’t talked to in a while – How rudimentary are our skills if this is in the lesson plan.[2]
Do need to learn how to learn to live together all over again? Maybe. The good news is that starting over with even small practices can have immediate effects. Anything that gets you connected to and caring for your neighbors counts. It can be fairly easy, low risk, little effort and yet we get from it a sudden bump in mood, a feeling of joy, the satisfaction of a good deed done, and the social fabric grows. Other times, it takes a little longer, is a little grittier, and can be harder to navigate.
Gritty and hard is often where the really good stuff is found. Has anyone seen the film The Old Oak. In 2023, it was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It’s a marvelous film; I recommend you see it. It’s about a run-down mining town in the UK. The protagonist, TJ, owns a pub that limps along thanks to a few regulars. The depressed and decaying nature of the setting cannot be missed. In an image that captures the state of both the pub and its surroundings, TJ is seen using a poll to fix the pub’s sign. The “K” at the end of “The Old Oak” has lost its grip and is hanging down as if having given up after all these years. Still, even this languid state carries a degree of stasis, a strange stability, predictability, that is until Syrian refugees are relocated there to take advantage of available housing.
The locals, at least the men who frequent the pub are not well-pleased. They’re hard to listen to, ethnic slurs rolling off their tongues, spitting vitriol. The film finds the complexity though. If you can get past the crudeness, you can understand, at least in theory, these men’s anger maybe not at the refugees—that’s just ugly—but at how their lot in life has fallen. Anger always grows out of sadness, unprocessed grief. Work has dried up, their hometown is a shadow of its former self. It doesn’t excuse their ugly behavior. It does help one understand. Even if you can’t get there with them, thinking they should have adjusted, pivoted, there’s a scene with the local children that lands differently. The British children watch as items from a truck—clothes, toys, a bike—are delivered to refugee children. The local kids are from families who can’t buy afford to buy them these things, and so they wonder aloud why the refugee children get what they cannot. TJ explains it’s all second-hand stuff. He explains these kids have lost everything, but to a poor kid who wants a bike context is abstract.
The Old Oak, it turns out, has some life left in its roots. TJ befriends one of the refugees, a undeterrable woman named Yara. It’s not as if he is an immediate and flawless ally. More realistically, and helpfully for the rest of us humans, TJ remains in a bit of an in-between state, sorting it all out, dancing between two worlds if not more. We do this as we struggle to grow or resist our own growth. I won’t give it all away, but TJ and Yara find a way to use the Old Oak to provide some much-needed shade to a burned out community.
It’s beautiful, but it’s not Hollywood. It’s a foreign film, so it doesn’t gloss over the difficulty assuming the audience can’t handle it or maybe doesn’t want to grow. There’s plenty of pain in the birthing, but make no mistake, the message is clear that we are to love our neighbor not because it will be popular, nor even because it will feel good. This series isn’t about feeling good all the time. It’s about finding our true selves. As Christians, we understand the cross as part of the story. We understand that’s how our true eternal selves are born. So, we love neighbor even when it costs us.
It helps that The Old Oakis set elsewhere. It’s much easier to examine someone else’s limitations. That’s why science fiction can be such an effective genre. How silly of these aliens to deplete their planet or systematically oppress segments of their population! Watching The Old Oak, it’s easy to feel compassion for the Syrian refugees and disdain for the racism with which they’re met by locals living in an echo chamber of limited information and insight. Of course, the real question the film raises is not how poorly they treat their neighbors but how well we treat ours. That is the whole of the law, says Jesus; it comes with breathtakingly few qualifications. Love your neighbor as if they are your very self, period.
By the time I preach this, I will have returned from the second half of the middle school mission trip in Santa Cruz. We have long ago evolved enough to realize mission trips are not merely about delivering services to those who need them. That is a portion of what happens, but there would be far more efficient ways to do that. Mission trips are primers in getting to know and love one’s neighbors. It’s an inoculation for our young people against fearing their neighbors, a booster shot many adults could use these days.
The time will have been gritty. It’s eye opening for some of our youth, even a little scary. Many of them will have been to Santa Cruz maybe many times, but not these places. Not these people, these neighbors. Some will be the kind we overlook, the kind we warn against becoming, the kind the larger society likes to blame for their problems. It’s not that they are not without responsibility—that would be patronizing—only that they are also the result of the fact we have a paper-thin commitment to shared responsibility for our neighbors.
People often report such trips are transformative, have lasting impacts. You might say it’s where people discover a part of themselves they didn’t know existed. In doing for others, they discover some of their own power. In caring for someone else, they find their own more lovable self. I can’t tell you how many young people can quickly articulate what they don’t love about themselves—that they are stupid, that they are ugly, they they are unworthy. But what they learn to honor in the other, they start to find in themselves.
In The Old Oak, there’s this sign that TJ and Yara discover in the back room, one that had closed off for years since the seating was no longer needed. It reads, “When we eat together we stick together.” One of you said to me last week, “You know whoever is trying to turn us against one another is succeeding.” They’re succeeding in getting us to turn against our neighbors. No Christian can accept that. You cannot say you love God while not loving your neighbor.
If you want to find your true self, look to them.
Amen.
[1]See mentalhealth.org.uk or https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/kindness/kindness-matters-guide#:~:text=Evidence%20shows%20that%20helping%20others,%2C%20self%2Desteem%20and%20happiness.&text=There%20are%20so%20many%20ways,time%20or%20cost%20any%20money