Sermon given by Aiden McMahon, March 30, 2025.
Do you feel worthy of being loved?
Is there some part of you that you feel is hard to love, or even unlovable?
While I can’t speak for everyone, I don’t think it’s all that uncommon to have, at times, believed that about ourselves.
Our theme for this month has been generosity, which means, broadly, going beyond what is expected of us. Sometimes, what we have been told, or have come to believe is that some part of us - something we have said, or done, or experienced - makes us dirty, or broken, or unremarkable, or somehow unworthy of love. And all too often, even after those voices have gone, we continue to tell that lie to ourselves.
But I think those things we see as broken in us, the things we would rather hide, are the things that make us both the most lovable, and the most capable of loving.
I hope I can convince you of that.
You know, one of the things they don’t tell you when you say yes to that call to ministry is that your email inbox will never be empty again. Every day you get a new slew of assorted blogs, updates from peers, and daily reflections. A couple weeks ago, I received one such message from Nadia Bolz-Weber’s occasional email blast known as “The Corners.”
Nadia, who is an ordained Lutheran minister, is one of my heroes. I have a selfie saved on my phone from one time that I met her, and let me tell you, I look like an absolute dork. I was starstruck. She is at times crass and irreverent, but always deeply raw in both her writing and her preaching, and her church in Denver, the House for All Sinners and Saints, is one of the more remarkable congregations I’ve ever visited.
That email contained an excerpt from her first book. Pastrix is a memoir, reflecting on her journey from fundamentalist upbringing, to cynical stand-up comic, to minister. Inextricable from this story is her struggles with drug addiction and alcoholism as a young woman, and this passage was no exception.
She was struggling to write a sermon for the lectionary text that week - a set of Jesus’ parables about yeast, mustard seeds, and fishing - when she received a Facebook message from an ex-boyfriend, Ben, whom she hadn’t seen in nearly two decades.
The next day they met for lunch. Life had not been kind to Ben, but he was, as they both remarked, still alive, at least. They were some of the lucky ones. And Nadia might have been luckiest of all - clean, sober, and with a successful career - a reality which often left her feeling a kind of survivor’s guilt. She says she left the diner with the ghosts of several friends in tow.
Between her conversation with Ben, and the imagined ones with the friends who had passed from overdoses and alcohol poisoning, she came to realize where her writer’s block came from.
She writes, “I mistakenly had been thinking that the kingdom of heaven was something I should be able to find an illustration for on this side of my life. Things are better now…. Any preachable image of the kingdom would surely come from gardening and being a mom and a pastor and an upstanding citizen…I’d expected to look at the past and see only mistakes that I’d moved on from, to see only damage and addiction and tragic self-delusion. But by thinking that way, I’d assumed that God was nowhere to be found back then. But that’s kind of an insult to God.”
And so, instead of telling a story about gardening, or baking bread, that Sunday she told a story from many years prior, of cleaning out a friend’s apartment before his parents flew in for his funeral. How she and several friends discreetly disposed of anything that might worsen the already terrible pain of their child’s death, or remind them of the tragic reason for it. And, how being asked to say a few words at that same friend’s funeral is what started her on the path to ministry.
Our meditation hymn for today was Ubi Caritas. I don’t know if you happened to read the little note beneath it translating the Latin, but it means “Where charity and love abound, God is there.”
Nadia encountered the divine throwing out liquor bottles and pornography. Broken people know how to love too. In fact, I think they often know how to love better than those privileged few who have managed to live untroubled lives.
It makes me think of another song, “Anthem,” by Leonard Cohen:
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
The title of my sermon today comes from a story found in both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark where a scholar asks Jesus what the first, or greatest, commandment is.
Jesus answers with a quote from Deuteronomy: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.” This forms part of the opening lines of the Shema, considered by many to be the most important prayer in Judaism. Everyone present would have known these words.
And then, as he has a habit of doing, he goes off script. He says there is a second most important commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments,” he says, “hang all the Law and the Prophets.” A little excerpt from Leviticus sandwiched between rules for farming and animal husbandry. Wisdom is often found tucked away in humble places, isn’t it?
That same chapter of Leviticus, by the way, says “when an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” Which is Old Testament speak for “I’m being serious about this one.” Certainly a message for today if there ever was one.
But I digress.
I doubt a Sunday goes by that someone, somewhere, isn’t preaching on the idea of loving our neighbor as ourselves. And can we just take a moment to appreciate how much work the word “as” is doing here? Out of curiosity I looked at three different commentaries and none of them agreed on how to unpack it.
I think that in liberal spaces such as ours, we’ve most often settled on reading it as the inability to love others if we do not first love ourselves.
And while I don’t entirely disagree with that, I also think it is far more nuanced. I know some deeply loving people who struggle to love themselves.
Forget your perfect offering.
For Rev. Bolz-Weber, it was the work of decades to find beauty in the midst of her addictions, to see the places where the holy broke through, and to own the ways in which she was shaped by those experiences, for worse or for better.
It means that she has come to see a lot of human behavior in terms of addiction, for better or worse or neutral - and it also means that she is really, really good at loving people who are addicts, both former and current.
Sometimes in order to feel loved, we need to know first and foremost that we are not alone in whatever situation we find ourselves. That someone else has made it through.
Maybe those things that we struggle to love in ourselves are just in need of someone who shares our particular woundedness, whom we can love in a way that not everyone can. This is why organizations like AA exist, because who knows better how to support someone who has gone through it or is going through it now?
We all have wounds. Some of us have more and some of us have less but we all have them. We don’t have to have made complete peace with all of them in order to practice loving our neighbor. That scholar might have been the one to ask Jesus what the greatest commandment was, but when he answered he answered it for everyone.
That “as” was for everyone.
You love them as you love yourself, and they’re gonna do the same for you.
But if we have to wait for all of us to finish therapy before we even try, or to have successfully integrated our shadow selves, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Perfect isn’t going to happen on this side of life, and if there is something on the other side, I’m not sure it’s going to happen there, either.
And that’s okay.
Because the moments when life isn’t perfect are the moments when we can be loving. The moments when we are not perfect are the moments people can love us. And wherever love is, God is there.
So much of love is about being mutually vulnerable. How well can I love you if I don’t know your pain? How well can you love me if you don’t know mine?
Sadly, I know many of us have had moments in our lives when we have tried this, have shown our brokenness to someone hoping that they would meet us with love and instead been met with rejection.
I can make no promises that such a thing won’t happen again.
But I hope you won’t stop trying, because there are people here who are trying to follow the greatest commandments.
So be generous. Show love to your neighbor. Go beyond what is expected of you, especially by you.
The second is like unto it -
Let yourself be loved.