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.’
38 This is the greatest and first commandment.
39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen
Living a Christian an authentic Christian life is hard work.
It takes discipline, perseverance, hard work all supported by the Holy Spirit and an abundance
of God’s grace.
Consider the story of The Reverend Hisanori Kano, “the Saint of Nebraska and Colorado,”
who is included in our commemorations in A Great Cloud of Witnesses.1 He died at the
age of 99 on October 24, 1988.
Recently, Canon Barbara Okamoto Bach, a member of St. Paul’s, Westfield, one of our Anti-Racism
Trainers, a member of Diocesan Council and a Deputy to General Convention wrote to me
to assure that I knew about Fr.
Kano and his powerful story.
She also sent me a book, Fr.
Kano’s Memoir, Nikkei Farmer in the Nebraska Plains2 which adds detail to the brief account
of his life in A Great Cloud of Witnesses.
Fr.
Kano had served as a priest to Barbara’s parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles
in Nebraska.
In the 1920’s, Hisanori Kano had been a farmer and educator in Nebraska.
He was also an Episcopalian.
Bishop George Beecher, who had oversight of the territory at the time, identified Hisanori
Kano and commissioned him to be a lay missionary and evangelist among Nebraska's Japanese people.
Beecher would ordain Kano a deacon Kano in 1928 and a priest in 1936.
By the spring of 1934 there were 250 baptized and 50 confirmed through Fr.
Kano’s ministry.3 On Sunday, December 7, 1941, as news spread
across the nation of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Fr.
Kano had just finished celebrating the Eucharist for one of his mission churches in North Platte,
Nebraska 180 miles from his home.
He was visiting with church members when someone came in an notified them of the attack.
He got up to return to his hotel, so that he could catch a train to Lincoln and find
ways to support his flock in what was sure to be significant blowback.
As he descended the steps from the church he was arrested by the local police.
He was not allowed to notify his family of his detention.
By 10 o’clock that night he was in prison garb.4
Despite the unwavering support and testimony of Bishop Beecher, and many other influential
people over the next serval days and weeks, Fr.
Kano would be interred for the duration of the war and beyond, most of that time spent
in a military prison camp.5 You might think this would crush him.
But Fr.
Kano knew Jesus Christ and knew that nothing could separate him from the love of Christ.
In his memoir he wrote, “With the start of the war between the United States and Japan…God
immediately imprisoned me in an internment camp.
In other words, He sent me on a special mission.
Because of this, for about five years during and after the war, I was an imprisoned person
– but as a messenger of the Gospel, I worked hard in these unique places.
I call them my churches during wartime.”6
A Great Cloud of Witness summarizes the rest of the story, telling us that after the war,
it was determined Fr.
Kano should not return to his ministry in Nebraska for fear that people in Nebraska
would be unaware of his loyalty to the U.S. and only remember inflammatory headlines…
He was, instead, sent to Nashotah House, an Episcopal seminary in Wisconsin.
He returned to Nebraska and his ministry in 1946.7
Fr.
Kano and Mrs. Kano earned their citizenship soon after the law permitted it
in 1952, and began teaching citizenship classes.
It is noted that nearly 100 percent of the Nebraska Japanese became citizens.
Forty years after WWII, when the U.S. government acknowledged that Japanese Americans had been
wronged by the internments and offered to pay reparations, Fr.
Kano told his bishop, ‘I don't want the money.
God just used that as another opportunity for me to preach the gospel.’”8
The story and witness of Fr.
Hisanori Kano is powerful.
Fr.
Kano clearly lived in Christ’s love.
He knew what it was to live the Christian life even in the most arduous, trying of circumstances.
Living the Christian life, an authentic Christian life is not easy.
It is the hard work of love, of constant, persistent, insistent love: Love for God,
love for ourselves and love of neighbor.
Jesus makes that clear in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is tested by a lawyer....Teacher, which commandment
in the law is the greatest?
(Mt. 22:36).
The lawyer was a scribe; one capable of reading and writing and with a particular competence
in interpreting the Jewish Law - the Torah.
He is the last of those who have been involved in the dispute with Jesus that we have been
reading about over the past several weeks.
When the lawyer tested Jesus by asking which commandment of the law was the greatest, he
was referring not just to the Ten Commandments, but to the whole of the Jewish law, all of
the commandments found in the Torah - all 613 of them!
In his response to that lawyer, Jesus got to the heart of the matter.
Today, we call Jesus’ response to the lawyer, “the Summary of the Law.”
He combined two parts of the Torah: a verse from Deuteronomy (Dt. 6:5) and a verse from
Leviticus (Lev. 19:18).
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 the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets....”
It’s all about love, Jesus says: Love of God.
Love of neighbor.
Love of self.
And again, it this is hard work.
It is hard work to keep on loving.
It is hard work to keep God at the center of our lives and love.
There are so many idols that entice us in our world: the enticements of money, of things,
of power, of celebrities and political personalities that would have us worship them like gods.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
How many of us can say we live into that commandment?
How many of us can say we live into it all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
That’s what the commandment requires.
It doesn’t say, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and
all your mind just on Sunday morning during the 8, 9:30 or 11:30 service.
It doesn’t say “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and
all your mind when you feel like it, or when you are up to it.
No!
The commandment demands that we love God with our whole selves, all the time.
It’s hard work!
And Jesus doesn’t just leave it there.
He ties the verse from Deuteronomy to another verse from Leviticus: “Love your neighbor
as yourself.”
Now if it is hard to love God with our whole being all the time, how much more difficult
this second part is: Love your neighbor as yourself?
First of all, we have to ask, who is my neighbor?
If you decide that your neighbor only consists of those people around you that are a part
of your immediate network, your family and friends and the people who live next door
to you, or who listen to the same news channel or have the same social-media echo chamber
as you do, or only a Republican or only a Democrat, then you are not being very scriptural.
Think of the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).
In telling that parable, Jesus was very intentionally forcing his listeners to extend the boundaries
of their neighborhoods.
To push those boundaries to include all those whom they might before have considered alien
and anathema.
And in the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew’s Gospel, in chapter 5, Jesus has already given
us a hint about his understanding of expanded neighbor boundaries when he said, “You have
heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy’ but I say to you, Love
your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father
in heaven....For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?
Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?
Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt. 5:43-48).
Be perfect?
Is Jesus kidding?
Well he’s not.
Living the Christian life is hard work!
And the reason the Christian life is hard work is that love is hard work.
Loving God is hard work.
Loving our neighbor is hard work, even sometimes the neighbor that is our spouse, child, or
parent!
When the Bible speaks of love, it is not cheap, easy cotton candy love.
As one biblical scholar, writing on today’s passage from Matthew has written, “In an
age when the word ‘love’ is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary
component of biblical love is not affection, but commitment.
Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us,
but it is not warm feelings that Duet.
6:5 demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment.
Similarly, to love our neighbor, including our enemies, does not mean that we must feel
affection for them.
To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seriously....”9 That’s
worth pondering carefully as we approach election day.
It’s worth exploring as people are suffering from the collateral effects of the COVID19
pandemic.
Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “To the Christian love is the works of love.
To say that love is a feeling or anything of the kind is an un-Christian conception
of love.
To the Christian love is the works of love.
Christ’s love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what not, it was the work
of love which was his life.”10
So how about you life?
Is it a work of love?
That’s what it is supposed to be...All the time.....That’s the Christian life....It
is hard work.
But you know what?
It is also wonderful work, our life’s work...the work to which we are called, everyone of us.
And it is a work and a life we are called to delight in every hour of every day.
So delight in it.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Delight in these laws.
Delight in them all the time.
Delight in them even when the winds and rains of life seem to threaten us all around.
For as it says elsewhere in Scripture, Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the
floods drown it11....and our world, and our country, is in desperate need for us to live
into Christ’s love today.