“You 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.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:30-31

This is my house and you’re not welcome here! Those are pretty harsh words that I hope I never hear. But sometimes even though the words aren’t spoken, we carry with us hardness in our hearts that rejects and shuns others who don’t act or look or think the same way we do. That kind of attitude eats away at our relationships and makes it difficult for us to live in community with one another.

People are meant to live in relationship, not isolation. God’s intention was for us to live in harmony and peace…to share all that we have and treat our brothers and sisters in Christ with mutual understanding and equality. God’s intention was for us to love one another and to show dignity and respect to all God’s children. So what happened?

We wanted to be more powerful, more popular. We wanted more control. We wanted the best seat in the house, the spot at the top! So we invented ways to push other people down, to shove others out. We invented structures and barriers that oppressed and dismissed the very same ones that God intended for us to love and care for.

God’s intention was for right relationships, where each person is treated with equal worth. God’s intention was for community and concern for one another in mutual care and support. And we invented judgments and rules that threaten the fabric of our existence together. Our hearts have been hardened to the cries of the oppressed. We have been blinded to the needs of those who lay on the bottom rung.

Jesus’ words from the Bible bring into our midst a vision of the commonwealth of God…where voices are heard (not just the powerful and prestigious ones), where goods are shared (beyond an occasional clothing drive or food shelf donation), where anger is acknowledged before sundown, where enemies are faced and forgiven, where promises made in love are honored and God’s intentions are adhered to and lived out in our lives.

But how do we live out God’s intentions in our fragile and broken world? We live out God’s intentions by practicing forgiveness and tending to our relationships with loving care.

They came to condemn and banish from society the divorced, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t one of them. They came for the mentally ill, and I kept my mouth shut because it wasn’t me. They came for the homeless and the jobless, and I didn’t say a word because it didn’t include me. They came for the poor, the abused, and the disenfranchised, and again I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t one of them. And then…they came for me, but there was no one left to speak on my behalf!

My prayer is that we will work faithfully at creating a society where all people are treated equally, where everyone is invited and embraced, where all people have the opportunity to hear God’s promise, “I love you. You are forgiven.” My prayer is for a community of people with Christ at the center, where people pray for the strength to tend to and nurture their relationships and that God would fill our narrow minds with broad brushstrokes of grace as we invite all God’s children to come, to be received into his loving arms and blessed.