Practice Loving Relationships Read Matthew 22:34-40 The scripture seems clear about what is to be our first priority: “Love God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.” How do we love God? Is it enough to go to church for worship services? In my personal beliefs, church is the place where we can go to worship God with others. In church we give of our time, talents and gifts, praises, thanksgivings, financial gifts and surrender our needs into God’s care. While attending worship can certainly elicit a sense of closeness to God, I believe that there is more involved in loving God first and foremost in our lives. Most of us spend more time with co-workers on any given day than we do with God. Some of us communicate more over the internet than we do with God. Some of us are quicker to serve our back yard birds’ needs than we are to serve God. Now I have nothing against co-workers, the internet and back yard birds! But if we are to love God first, we need to also spend time with God, communicate with God, and serve God. I believe that a relationship with God requires several things: S olitude - That time alone with God where there are no distractions such as the telephone, television, or people going in and out. S ilence - Absolute quiet is required if we are to let go of the spinning of our minds and listen for the voice of God. I ntentionality - I am intentional about taking my son to soccer practice. I am intentional about planning time with my life-partner. I am intentional about checking my email every day. In the same way, I need to be intentional about taking time for my relationship with God. I ntimacy - I have learned that if I am intentional about taking time for solitude and silence with God, the relationship becomes very personal and intimate. I find myself sharing my deepest fears, deepest pain and deepest hope in those times. I sense God’s presence within me and all around me. It is an incredible experience! P rayer - I believe that prayer is communication with God. I can write and speak eloquent prayers but the ones that really communicate with God are the words that come from my heart. When I have intentionally spent time in solitude and silence I develop an intimacy with God and everything in my life becomes a prayer. I see God in the flutter of a butterfly wings, hear God’s voice in a sunset, and silently speak to God of my praises as I watch a Scarlet Tanager bathe in our birdbath. Once we make time with God a priority, it opens the door to God’s presence in the activities of daily life, such as our time with co-workers, communication on the internet and care for the back yard birds. “O taste and see that God is good” Psalm 34:8a Take a S S I I P and know that putting God first is the ultimate blessing in life. ______________________________________________________________________ And the second priority is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Because of this second part of this scripture taken from Matthew 22, most people have decided that this means we are to love other people second in our lives. Often times when I am doing a workshop on this subject and ask people to state their life priorities they will say: God Others Self I want to point out a part of this scripture that is often ignored. It says that we are to love others in the same way we love ourselves. When I think about the opinions some of us have of ourselves, it concerns me that we are called to love others the same way as we love ourselves, because some of us do not love ourselves! Some of us are carrying around old bags and baggage that have been used in negative ways to define us. Perhaps the problem with the world today is that we DO love others the same way we love ourselves. I believe that this scripture assumes that we already love ourselves. However, this is not always the case. Therefore I will be so bold as to state that our top three life priorities, at least according to this scripture, should be: God Self Others If we can truly love and care for ourselves, and love others in that same way, can you imagine the impact on our world? Or even the impact on our churches? What a concept to love ourselves so that we can then love others! Here’s another way to look at this: When we take good care of ourselves we can be there to help others. If you’ve ever flown in a commercial airliner you know that the flight attendant instructs us to put the oxygen mask over our own nose and mouth before trying to assist others. I asked a flight attendant I knew personally about this once. He told me that when people insist on helping others first they end up passing out from a lack of oxygen. Then they are no good to themselves or anyone else. If we want to practice love, we must practice on ourselves as well! ______________________________________________________________________ I must admit that in 2002 when I learned that I was expected to attend an all day workshop on the subject of Love & Appreciation I was less than thrilled. It’s not that I had any doubts about the writer and facilitator of the workshop; Wendy Foxworth is an excellent speaker and teacher. It’s just that I knew what Jesus called the greatest two commandments like the back of my hand. What could I learn about this subject that would take a full day? By the end of that day I had the answer to that question: PLENTY! It was Wendy’s workshop that helped me to see the need to build a culture of love and appreciation in the church I was serving. We were bogged down in a culture of command and control that stemmed from old leadership ideas, old biblical beliefs and a group of people living in an oppressive culture in a very oppressive town. I admit that I initially came away from the Love & Appreciation workshop with a lot of new ideas, but also resistance. I liked my personal style of leadership and was quite comfortable with it. It would take a great deal of work to move from a culture of command/ control to a culture of love and appreciation. I suspected, however, that if we could do this successfully it might make a difference in the life of the church. Maybe we’d even start growing. In response I came home from that conference and set up a plan that looked like this: * Gather all the resources I can find on this subject * Preach a sermon on the basics of Matthew 22:32-40 * Develop a workshop part I on love & appreciation and set a date to present it * Present the workshop and listen closely to the written evaluations of it * Begin to incorporate these concepts into worship. One example might be, “Can we show some love and appreciation to our choir this morning for the many ways they bless us?” * Develop a workshop part II and set a date to present it * Present the second workshop, look for both repeat and new attendees and listen to the evaluations. * Integrate concepts from these workshops into the newsletter, board meetings and our times of prayer * Develop a workshop part III and set a date to present it * Present the third workshop, look for both repeat and new attendees and listen to the evaluations * Follow up with another sermon relating to these themes * Develop a Love & Appreciation team of people who bought into these concepts and realized how critical they were to the life of our church. This team would perform skits at different times in the life of the congregation, promote the concepts individually and as a team, and eventually train others to be leaders in this ministry. For those of you who might wonder what I chose to do those three workshops on, I should tell you that I focused them on what was needed contextually by that congregation at that point in time. In other words, I looked at the history, culture, theology and experience of that faith community in order to determine where to begin. Later the team would decide what was needed and how to incorporate it. The first workshop had three components: * A basic introduction of Wendy’s workshop * An introduction of Rev. Elder Lillie Brock’s The Change Cycle * An initial discussion on the history and culture of our congregation and how it influenced us The second workshop focused on communication: * Awareness of word choice, voice inflection, body language * The skills needed in order to deal with someone in a loving manner * Healthy ways to demonstrate love and appreciation in our lives and in the life of our church The third workshop centered on conflict and the need to love unconditionally: * Conflict per se/in itself is neutral, it’s what we do with it that makes it healthy or destructive * Conflict can be dealt with in effective and healthy ways * We are always at choice in how we choose to act and react to people, places and situations I then followed these workshops with a sermon on the PLATINUM RULE. You’ve heard of the Golden Rule? Well, this rule is similar but has a distinct difference. I learned about this rule while attending a Career Track workshop as a part of my research on love and appreciation. “Treat others the way you want to be treated”. The Golden Rule “Treat others the way they want to be treated.” The Platinum Rule I personally began to incorporate the Platinum Rule into every aspect of my life. Here’s an example: While I enjoy working independently on projects, there were those in my church who much preferred working in teams. I began to look at more team approaches for those people. While I’d love it if my life-partner sent me a dozen roses, she’d much prefer I cook dinner for her. If I wanted to take my son to the zoo, I might learn that our plans have changed because he’d much rather go and see a new movie. We are not all the same; why should we assume that others want to be treated the same way we do? It made our ministry much more relational and much more enjoyable when we adopted the Platinum Rule. I remember a one-frame comic, drawn by an artist named Guindon, that used to appear in a Minneapolis newspaper years ago. In this particular cartoon there were two older plump and rather frumpy appearing grown-ups jumping and leaping into the air in a comical fashion. The caption read: “Happy Practice. If you want to be happy you have to practice.” In the same way, I believe that if MCC cartoonist Jean Gralley, illustrator of What a Fellowship (available through Chi Rho Press) were to draw a similar cartoon she might draw MCCer’s embracing despite our differences with a caption that reads: “Love Practice. If you want to love you have to practice.” Our practice of love will never make us perfect at it, but it sure will make us better! In the video, God, Gays, and the Gospel Millennium Edition, the Rev. Elder Troy Perry was speaking about Jesus’ greatest commandments when he said: “When He was asked one time, ‘What’s the greatest commandment?’ He didn’t say ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’ or even ‘thou shalt not kill.’ He could have, but He didn’t. He said, ‘The greatest commandment is this, and on this hangs all the law and the prophets. The first commandment is you’re to learn to love the Lord thy God with all your heart, your mind and your strength. And the second is likened to the first, you’re to learn to love your neighbor as yourself.’ And brothers and sisters I tell you this day, if we could learn that lesson, if we could just learn to live by those two commandments, everything would be all right.” Amen Troy. Amen. QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION What do you honestly see as the top three priorities in your life today? How might you keep God first in your life? How might you make yourself the second priority in your life? Do you believe that practicing the platinum rule would enhance your relationships with others? Can you give an example? How do you think the implementation of the platinum rule might affect your church? Can you give an example? How do you deal with conflict in your personal life? How does your church typically deal with conflict? How does (or could) your church practice love and appreciation using the Matthew 22:33-40 text? Copyright © 2005 by Nancy J. Horvath-Zurn, MDiv. Published by UFMCC