Easter 3
19 April 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
WHAT IF WE PROMISED THE PEOPLE OF CENTRAL GEORGIA JUST ONE THING?
Deuteronomy 6.4-9. 1 Corinthians 13. Luke 10.25-28
If we were to promise just one thing to all who enter the doors of our church, what would you say that one promise should be? If we were to put up a billboard along I-75 between Arkwright and Pierce promising the people of Central Georgia just one thing, a promise that would capture the essence of being a faithful church, what would that one promise be?
Sometimes churches promise that which is not exactly faithful to the way of Jesus: “Come and join us. We are here to meet your needs and provide fun for your children. You’re gonna have a blast!”
When Jesus and the early church extended the invitation to join them it went more like: “Come and take up your cross. Join us as we enter the suffering of the world. Help us make sure the basic needs of the poor are met. And grow into Christlikeness with us as we live into God’s new creation.”
So if we were to promise the people of Central Georgia just one thing what would you say that one promise should be?
I believe there is an answer to that question that could change the way the world sees the church and help the church influence the world in more life-giving faithfully Christ-like ways. What if we said to the people of Central Georgia: If you will come along with us, we promise to help you become the most loving version of yourself?
What if we promised to help people recognize when they are straying from
the way of love and help them get back on the path of love as we help ourselves do the same? What if we promised to help people face head-on the hard challenges to a life of love? What if we promised to help people become the most loving person they can be?
As I read the Bible through the lens of Jesus it seems to me that this is the
primary call of God upon our lives. We began worship today hearing the words Moses instructed the Hebrews on how to raise their children. He said to repeatedly teach them in all that they do and to write on the doorposts of your home the words: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
When Jesus was asked, “What is the greatest commandment? and when someone else asked him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the correct response on both occasions was the same: Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
The night before he died Jesus said to his disciples: This is my commandment, that you love one another. By this – not by your right doctrine, not by your righteous judgment and harsh exclusion of sinners but by your love for one another – all will know that you are my disciples.
John wrote to the early church: God is love, and those who love know God and abide in God. Those who do not love do not know God.
Paul told the Corinthians it doesn’t matter how much Bible you know or how much faith you have or how much piety you show, if you don’t act in love toward others your faith is worthless, your religion means absolutely nothing.
In light of all these scriptures and many more like them you might think that the primacy of love would be a settled matter in Christian faith. But many Christians and churches, including us Baptists, often ignore the radical way of love Jesus taught and embodied. And we choose instead rules, doctrines, traditions, and culturally shaped preferences.
And yet the overwhelming evidence of Scripture makes clear that any expression of the Christian life, any mission of the Christian church that does not have as its aim to embody a reconciling, all-embracing love is misguided and false.
So what if Christian faith returned to its biblical roots and became known once again as the place where Jesus’ followers teach and practice Jesus’ way of love? What if the church were first and foremost a School of Love?
Author and pastor Brian McLaren has suggested what he calls “a four-part curriculum”2 for the church as a school of love that I believe is worthy of our consideration. It is based on the Great Commandment of Jesus to love God and love neighbor as we love ourselves, and the First Commandment in the Bible to lovingly take care of God’s creation. McLaren divides the curriculum into four phases – what he calls Love 101, Love 201, Love 301, and Love 401. I’ve kept his titles but rearranged the order.
LOVE 101 would be Helping People Learn to Love Themselves.
The church has often unintentionally taught the opposite. The first thing many have been taught by the church and then in turn taught the world is: You are a sinner! And while studies show that we are all bonafide sinners, there is a danger in making people believe that this is the most important truth about us. This is dangerous because if we hate or heap shame upon ourselves we will most likely hate and shame others, and we may very well end up hating God, believing God to be a shaming God.
We must also avoid the opposite extreme: We need to learn to love ourselves without becoming self-centered and narcissistic, without making faith church and life all about us. But that’s the promise the church sometimes makes to the world:
“Come join us! We will make it all about you and your family!” But that’s not what I mean by helping people love themselves.
Loving ourselves begins with accepting ourselves as God’s beloved created in God’s image, refusing to expect perfection from ourselves, and allowing ourselves room to grow and become the person God created us to be. It may be
that parents or preachers or peers have unintentionally taught us to hate ourselves. May we be a church that helps us become more loving toward ourselves. And we learn to love ourselves by learning how much God loves us. And learning to love ourselves better enables us to love God.
That’s why the next course in our curriculum is: LOVE 201 – Learn How to Love God. This is the purpose of our worship: not to see what we can get from God, but learning how to give ourselves to God. Learning to love God requires a healthy theology of God shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus. We need to teach one another that God is not the angry parent always chastising us but the waiting parent always ready to welcome us home. We need to teach one another
that God doesn’t cause our suffering but is always present with us in the midst of our suffering. We need to teach one another how to love God with all that we are and all that we have. And according to Jesus one of the most important ways we love God is to obey God’s commandment to love one another.
So LOVE 301 is Learning to Love our Neighbor. Paul said we fulfill the
whole law, all of scripture, as we love our neighbor. Jesus said loving our neighbor was as equally important as loving God – that the two could not be separated. John stated it clearly to the first century church when he said: If you don’t love your neighbor whom you have seen, you can’t love God whom you have not seen. Love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God, for God is love. (1 John 4.7-8, 20). In other words: The degree to which we love one another is the degree to which we love God, even if we say otherwise.
Neighbor-love is all-inclusive: friends and family, strangers and foreigners, outcasts and enemies. We learn to love our neighbor by recognizing the radiant light of God’s image and beauty in every face we see. Christian love transforms all labels and humanizes “the other” so that we see all people as God’s beloved, loving others as ourselves.
Cynthia Bourgeault points out that Jesus said “love your neighbor as yourself” – not “as much as” yourself but as yourself, “as a continuation of your very own being.”2 Because we are all connected in the one human family and even more connected with all creation.
So LOVE 401 is Learning to Love All God’s Creation. It is the first commandment of God given to us in Scripture – to take care of the earth and everything that lives within it. If we love God we will obey God’s commandments to take care of God’s creation. If we love our neighbors we will want them to breathe clean air and drink pure water and eat healthy food. We will care about pollution and contamination, fisheries and farms and the soil.
If we’re honest many of us have ignored the damage we do to God’s creation because of our pursuit of the mighty dollar or because it clashes with our politics. But in our wilful ignorance we do harm to our own health and the health of our neighbors.
The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky writes: Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If you love each thing you will perceive the mystery of God in all; and when you perceive this, you will grow every day to a fuller understanding of it until you come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.
Love God. Love Neighbor. Love Self. Love God’s Creation. The First and Great Commandments Curriculum for the Church as a School of Love.
What do you think? Can we make the promise to help people become the most loving version of themselves, beginning with ourselves? Can we make the goal of worship to offer all that we are to God so that God can form us into the most loving version of ourselves toward God, toward others, toward ourselves, toward God’s creation?
Imagine: What if our Bible studies didn’t just teach us what the Bible says but taught us more specifically how to boldly address the obstacles to love like selfishness and greed, addiction and lust, pride and nationalism, racism and religious bigotry, apathy and perfectionism, unhealed trauma and fear? What if when our committees and church staff and deacon body met, we asked: What can we do to better teach people to love? What if we said in the words of poet Amanda Gordon that
“We will do our best to see
That no one will ever have to live without love
(Or) Know what it is liked to be shunned.”3
What if we helped our students create a circle of friends, an alternative society in their schools, where everyone was welcome, especially the kids others bullied, ignored, ostracized, or laughed at?
One young woman who sounds like somebody who would have led that kind of Christian group is Keisha Thomas, whose picture is on the front of your worship bulletin,
On a June day in 1996 members of the Ku Klux Klan stood on a street in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in full regalia – white sheets with pointed hoods. With a history of burning crosses and lynching Blacks and blasphemously reading the Bible while doing so their very presence was the defining symbol of demonic evil and God-defying hate. Across the way from the Ku Klux Klan stood hundreds of protestors shouting down the KKK with righteous anger.
Suddenly, one of the protesters announced over a megaphone that there was a Klansman in the crowd. They whirled around and saw Albert McKeel Jr., a white man wearing a t-shirt with a Confederate flag on it and a tattoo of the Nazi SS symbol branded on his arm. McKeel took off running as protesters ran after him. “Kill the Nazi!” some hollered as he was pulled to the ground. Kicks and fists began to rain down upon him, the crowd screaming for blood.
At that moment Keisha Thomas, an eighteen year old Black girl who’d come to protest the Klan pushed through the crowd and crouched beside the man, protecting his white body with hers, wrapping him in her black arms.
What was she doing? Why was she doing it? Thomas later explained to the press: “I knew what it was like to be hurt. The many times I had been mistreated, I wish someone would have stood up for me.” When Keisha talks about the incident she frames it in religious terms: “When they dropped him to the ground,” she said, “it felt like two angels had lifted my body up and laid me down.”
Months later, a man recognized Keisha in a coffee shop. He walked up to her and thanked for what she did that day and then he said: “That man you saved was my dad.”
Several years later when McKeel died his son called Keisha to tell her. Then he put his 12 year old sister on the phone who thanked Keisha telling her that if it had not been for her act of love she might never had been born.4
I’m not sure where Keisha Thomas went to church, but wherever it was it sounds like the Ivy League among Schools of Love.
With God’s help and by God’s grace, may we be such a place.
____________________
- Brian McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion is Seeking a Better Way to be Christian, Convergent, 2016. I am also indebted to McLaren for proposing that we promise the people in our community to help make them the most loving version of themselves.
- Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message, Shambhala, 2008, 31-32
- Amanda Gordon, “Text Tiles: The Names,” in Call Us What We Carry: Poems. Viking Press. 2021, 129
- I found this story in Jack Alexander, The God Impulse: The Power of Mercy in an Unmerciful World, Baker Books, 2018, 42-44.