Have you ever written an elevator pitch? In case it’s a term that’s unfamiliar to you, an elevator pitch is a short, memorable description of an organization, a service, or an initiative. The elevator pitch should cover what something is and either why it is important or what the return on investment is for the thing being described. In some cases, the elevator pitch is framed as a way to get someone or something to come onboard. Or in other cases it’s to have a short easily understood description.
Because you should be able to deliver your elevator pitch in the course of an elevator ride. I used to live in a building with 56 floors, so your timing may vary, but short is still the point.
What would be our elevator pitch for what we are called to do and who we are called to be as people of faith? Jesus gives us a pretty great elevator pitch for our lives. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” You could cover that in a single one-story ride. And it is such a great and beautiful encapsulation of our faiths. It is something we can wrap our arms and our hearts around as we might try to talk about how our faiths influence our lives.
Love God and love your neighbor. Absolutely easy to understand and so it should be perfectly easy to do.
But I wonder if it’s all too simple. If it seems too easily explainable. In this age of AI, a frequent line of discussion we hear is that AI has removed some of the struggle. That answers and what might seem like understanding comes too easily. That part of what helps us learn and what helps us deepen our understanding of things is the time where we are muddling through trying to understand something. Trying to connect dots in ways that are new to us. As we are just doing the hard work of practicing a new skill. I wonder if the simple statement of loving God and loving our neighbor is too simple and because of that we aren’t engaging in the struggle of that statement. What does it mean when the core of our faiths feels like it has been reduced to a slogan on a bumper sticker? A theology and lives of faith that only go to a surface level.
So let’s wrestle a bit. Let’s start “And you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” This might be the easiest to understand, but perhaps the hardest to do. Here again, the word and the concept of love has sometimes been simplified, it has been tamed and defanged. Love has been made cloyingly sweet with no depth. Because loving our neighbor is active, it is engaged. Loving our neighbor means working to create a world of justice and of fairness, working to create a world of care for the vulnerable and the marginalized in our communities, working so we realize that our own individual flourishing is dependent on and heightened by the flourishing of our neighbors. To love our neighbors as ourselves necessitates that we need our neighbors to flourish as we ourselves flourish. Both sets of flourishing must happen.
Loving our neighbor in this way becomes a radical act in a society and culture that pushes a narrative of winners and losers, a culture that pushes a narrative that care and caring is a sign of weakness, a culture that pushes a narrative that hardening our hearts will keep us safe. In a world like this, loving our neighbors is a radical act. A radical act of meeting the hardness of the world with an open-hearted vulnerability. A radical act of meeting the world with an extended hand and not a closed fist.
And with the recognition of the vulnerability involved in loving our neighbor, we allow ourselves to start putting up fences to keep us safe. We start to pare down our definition of neighbor. We notice the struggles of those around us but assume it’s someone else’s responsibility to do something about it. Perhaps the struggle of our lives in loving our neighbor is to maintain as radical and as open-hearted a stance as we can. Perfection is not the goal, persistence is.
Loving our neighbors as well as loving ourselves is supported by the understanding that we are all created through love and in the image of God. Our response to our neighbors and our response to ourselves is knowing that, at the end of the day, how we treat each other and how we treat ourselves is ultimately how we are treating God. If we wouldn’t do something to God, then we definitely shouldn’t do it to our neighbor or ourselves.
So how do we love God? Our love of ourselves and our love of our neighbors is rooted in the knowledge that we are all beloved children of God, created in their image. That our love of our neighbor is rooted in care and action in support of their well-being and their flourishing. In contrast, what does loving God look like when no human action can support God’s well-being? What is the action or actions that grounds our love of God? What does loving God look like in practice?
I think this is the harder question, the one that requires more engagement, more struggle to come to an answer on.
One place I land on is the understanding that we and all of creation were created as a manifestation of God’s love. That we were created in the image of God. That perhaps one aspect of loving God is to love God’s creation and their creatures. We can’t love God and not love their creation. That the love of God and the love of all of creation is so deeply intertwined and is like a vine growing on a trellis. That we love God by being careful, diligent stewards of God’s creation. That we love God by seeking justice and wholeness in our communities and in the world. That we love God by extending mercy.
And while vital, showing love for God through our love of creation still feels like it’s missing something. It seems to be missing a direct connection with and to God. Part of what our love of neighbor is built on is our relationship with our neighbors, with our being in community and in communion with our neighbors. How do we be in relationship with God? How do we be in community? I think one way is exactly where we find ourselves this morning–together as we hear God’s word and celebrate the Eucharist. In the readings each week, we get to hear about God’s work in the world, we get to hear about our redemption, we get to hear letters from those who came before as they worked to support nascent Christian communities and who were sometimes doing theology on the fly. Through corporate prayer–prayer in community–we grow and nurture our relationship with God. To show our love for God.
But what about each of our individual relationships?
What does our individual relationship with God look like and how do we foster it and how do we ensure we make time for it. What does an individual relationship even mean and what does it look like? Like with our fellow humans, I think it’s being open to being in community with God. To speaking to God and to leave space for God to speak back to us. The centuries and millennia of our shared lives of faith has given us a number of ways and tools to prayerfully engage with God–from various forms of contemplative prayer, to journaling, to individually reading the Daily Office. For some it’s walks in creation or the creation of artistic works. But whatever our individual way of showing love for God, at its core, love is relationship. Whatever that relationship looks like.
What is your relationship with God and how do you express love of God that we are called to? What does that look like for you? I’ll be a bit confessional, this is a space where I sometimes struggle, where I wrestle. Where the habits and patterns of my relationship with God is in a time of transition. Where what worked previously doesn’t work anymore. Where there is a longing in its absence. So I try things, new ways of inviting God into my life. I talk to others about what I’m seeing, or not seeing, in my relationship with God. Sometimes it takes time to find the way back. But something I hold as a truth is the struggle to be in relationship is part of the relationship. The struggle to be community is part of that manifestation of love. Love doesn’t need to be perfectly executed for the love itself to be perfect.
So my homework to us all, what does your individual expression of your love of God look like? And let the answer surprise you.
Celebrate the ease of an answer. And honor the struggle.
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