April 6, 2017

Our Love Your Neighbor Sign

Our Love Your Neighbor Sign

Each Sunday we’ve prayed for our efforts to “love your neighbor.” Highlighting a particular group on our sign every week has helped us consider how we might pray best in relationship to the particular needs of each affinity group. We’re about half way through the list. At this point, I’d like to share that the sign has generated a lot of conversation, not least of which has been naming groups who aren’t on the sign. So, this Holy Week, let us focus on the universality of the message through a parishioner’s reflection.

Loving, caring, and ensuring the well- being of ALL of our neighbors, regardless of race and culture is what God requires of all of us. 

The two great commandments – love God and love thy neighbor as thyself- are the foundation of unconditional love.  Loving specific groups of people based on their race and culture, makes “Love” conditional, and thus detracts from God’s greatest love when His Son, Jesus Christ, paid the ultimate price of dying for All of us.

As  Christian Members in Christ, we have the spiritual responsibility of leading a life of love, compassion and mercy that strengthens the community in which we live and serve, and making sure that all peoples receive unconditional love because God creates All of us in His own image and likeness- God’s love has no superiority over anyone. 

It is my prayer that God’s abiding love open the hearts and minds of all those that are closed to experiencing the true feeling of unconditional love- to love God, love all their neighbors – then love themselves.