United Methodist Church Westlake Village

Love Boldly: The Methodist Vision for a Divided World

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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What does it mean to "love boldly" in a society fractured by political division and violence? At a pivotal moment in American culture, this exploration of Jesus's greatest commandment couldn't be more timely or necessary.

The United Methodist Church has embraced a powerful new guiding vision centered on loving boldly, serving joyfully, and leading courageously. This sermon unpacks the first principle by examining Jesus's famous conversation with the Pharisees about the greatest commandment. His answer—love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself—has been recognized as the cornerstone of faith by Jewish and Christian thinkers for two millennia. Yet we struggle tremendously to put this teaching into practice.

When current events force us to confront painful questions about who counts as our "neighbor" and what our love should look like in practice, we often retreat to safer, more comfortable alternatives. Rather than letting love lead, we defer to power, money, division, fear, or anger. But these approaches have consistently failed to bring justice, peace, or harmony to our communities.

Perhaps Jesus wasn't offering a naive platitude but the only practical solution for human beings to live together despite our differences. The challenge for people of faith today is whether we're ready to truly believe Jesus—to trust that his commandment to love God and neighbor is the viable path forward. This requires holding ourselves accountable first, ensuring our words and actions honor the humanity of all people, even those with whom we deeply disagree.

Join us as we wrestle with what it means to love boldly in today's world. How might our communities transform if we had the courage to place love at the center of our interactions with others? What would change if we truly believed what Jesus taught about love?

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Pastor Darren:

The United Methodist Church has come together, our bishops, and they have put together what they're calling a guiding vision for our denomination right, our brand of Christianity. They're putting together a guiding vision for where we're headed as a denomination going forward. And so today, well, I can tell you it's three things. It's love boldly, serve joyfully and lead courageously, which I thought was pretty good. They've even got a little video. Maybe we'll send it out in the email this week. I thought I'm going to do a sermon series on the three and we'll have a little time to think about. Well, who are we United Methodists these days? So we start with loving boldly. And our bishops, they picked this passage from the Gospel of Matthew. It's chapter 22, verses 34 to 46.

Pastor Darren:

And a lot of our gospel passages. They are conversations between people like the Pharisees those who are running the church of the day and Jesus, and they're debating, to a certain extent, what they are supposed to be doing. They're debating theology about who God is, and the Pharisees. They ask Jesus a fairly straightforward question what is the greatest commandment? Right? And most of us know the commandments being the 10 commandments from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible. Does anybody here have their favorite commandment? What's your favorite commandment? Thou shalt not steal, all right. So not a big fan of Ten Commandment group. Okay, noted, noted, you take or leave of Ten Commandment group. Okay, noted, noted, you take or leave the Ten Commandments, all right, very good. Well, jesus, he not only has one, he actually offers two.

Pastor Darren:

And in some ways a lot of folks have summarized all of the Ten Commandments into these two, that the first one in many ways summarizes the first five commandments and then the second of his two greatest commandments kind of summarizes the back half. So in the first half we're talking about our relationship with God, in the back half of the commandments we're talking about a relationship with each other. So it comes down to these two things for Jesus love God and love neighbor. I might've showed you this before. I had somebody pointed out that for us Christians we're all about loving God and loving neighbor, that our cross itself is sort of a metaphor for how we understand our lives. We love God, our upward relationship, and we love neighbor, our relationships with each other. That was his answer. It's a fairly commonly agreed to answer.

Pastor Darren:

It is a belief, a theology that most people generally agree with, and even in biblical times, even post-biblical times there was general agreement. In fact, many people of faith would use this as if you're really going to barrel down the Christian faith, or even faith more broadly, into a statement. It might be that Professor Nicholas Shazer he's at Malacaster College and he works in workingpreachercom. That's a website I really like. He says Jewish sages who lived in Jesus's era described these biblical verses in very similar ways.

Pastor Darren:

For instance, according to the Jerusalem Talmud, it'd be around the fourth century in the common era, or AD as we have commonly understood it. Rabbi Akiva, who was born around 50 years after Jesus, says that the Levitical command to love your neighbor as yourself is the greatest principle of the Torah. So this is right. After Jesus' life, they're already claiming this as an important part of the teachings. Another famous story preserved in the Babylonian Talmud this would be 600 CE, so 600 years after Christ was living states that the renowned first century sage Hillel once paraphrased Leviticus 19.18 for a non-Jew by saying whatever is hateful to you, do not do it to your neighbor. That is all the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go study. I like that last bit. Go study. I've told you what is Now. Go figure it out, go live it. Make it real.

Pastor Darren:

In Matthew, jesus couples the same verse with Deuteronomy 6.5 and asserts on these two commandments, hang all the Torah and the prophets. Hopefully you're understanding a significant verse, a significant teaching, so much so that for many this barrels down what it means to live a life of faith, and not just for Christians, but in the Judaic tradition as well. Love God, love neighbor, love the lawnmower it's those three things. It can be a provocative message, right I?

Pastor Darren:

We often ask ourselves well, who's my neighbor then? Which is a complicated question, isn't it? Amidst our current focus as a nation, trying to separate certain parts of the community, it forces us Christians to be asking ourselves okay, maybe there's some economic reason we're doing this, but then again, my faith says love my neighbor. Are they my neighbor? What makes them not so? If they aren't, is it citizenship? Citizenship? Or is it possible that when Jesus says this, love God, love neighbor, he really only meant citizens? Or maybe he only meant Christians, in which case we ask another level of question what would it mean even to love them? What would it mean if they are of the body or even outside of the body? Then, what is Jesus asking us to do? What does that love look like. Does it mean we need to let people stay? It's a complex question, isn't it? It's one we wrestle with.

Pastor Darren:

So after he has this conversation, then Jesus, he asks his own question. He asks of these Pharisees whose son is, or at the time, will be, the Messiah? Provocative question, right, for many, jesus understands himself and others understand him as the Messiah. So when he asks the Pharisees who's the Messiah it's an interesting question. Their answer is the son of David. But that's sort of problematic too because, as they all would know, david refers to the Messiah as being at the right hand of God. This would be in a psalm written before Jesus came to take body in this world, on this earth. So now you have this question well, who's the son then, if Jesus was already in existence, right hand of God pre-David, but also is the son of David? So some of you who are wrestling with that last bit, that's kind of the overview and it was just a really interesting question that Jesus poses to them and overall it's an interesting conversation.

Pastor Darren:

Sometimes those conversations with Jesus and the Pharisees they get a little contentious and you can tell they're working at things. But this one felt like a real honest conversation about theology, but it brings us back to the meat of the passage today. What is love? Baby, don't hurt me. What is love? That was for all the Gen Xers, I don't know, did anybody? I apologize for my music reference, but hey, I'm a Gen Xer and we don't get a lot of pub.

Pastor Darren:

What is love, and what does it mean? To love boldly, I mean, we can assume it means in the scriptural sense, right, our bishops chose this. So what are we to make of this love? You know, when we think of love, just hearing it in our common culture and outside of the church, we often think on this range from romantic to kind of silly. Right, we hear of love out of a faith context and we're thinking well, ross and Rachel, should they have been together or not? Sam and Diane, right, did they fit? What was it? Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell? I'm trying to hit all the generations here, right. Right, I mean.

Pastor Darren:

But that's when we think love, right, we don't automatically go to agape. Godly love, right, we think love, oh, yeah, that's when you're 22 and you're oh, whatever, this and that and the other thing, and you know it's this thing that's really meaningful and yet we can kind of compartmentalize it. You know, that's just romantic things, the stuff of movies and TV. We don't generally think of agape love and maybe that's why when we hear this phrase from Jesus, love God, love, neighbor we have trouble kind of putting it first, neighbor. We have trouble kind of putting it first, putting it as the lead of our lives, because it makes us feel a little vulnerable. Wait a minute, I'm going to love, I'm going to give my heart, I'm going to make myself vulnerable to others. How am I ever going to succeed, how am I going to flourish in this world if I do something like that? I can't do it unless he's going to do it or she's going to do it.

Pastor Darren:

So I thought today it might be helpful for us to actually reflect on what we think agape love is Right and I'm going would this be old school? Yeah, on what we think agape love is right and I'm going would this be old school? Yeah, right, here I'm going old school. I've got an easel, I've got here some paper, right, we're gonna get this organized, we're gonna get it decided. See, and you don't think there's like choreography involved in this at all. But no, paul and I, we had to work together on this. We decided that this was a good spot for this, so all my brothers and sisters at home can make sure they see it.

Pastor Darren:

I would like to know from you, right here today, what do we think agape love is, and don't feel like you've got to embrace it completely. Just give me some words. What is agape love? When you think of agape love, just throw them out there, I'm ready to go. Kindness, kindness, respect, respect, respect, respect. Maybe I should have done two of these. Commitment oh, I like that. Grace, amen. I got a Methodist out there somewhere. Giving of oneself, giving of oneself I heard intentional Compassion, all right. Empathy it's a lot of stuff, see, maybe this is why it's hard. I heard one over here, but I didn't make it out. Unconditional All right, all right, we got it figured out. Unconditional forgiving, empowering I like that too. We often don't think about that. Does my love for you empower you? Pretty good list, service, service, service, service. I did alright, we got a pretty good list. Alright, we're doing alright here. I like this. That is a good list.

Pastor Darren:

Agape love isn't quite that unfamiliar to us Now. Some of you have been here. Well, many of you have been here long enough to remember Brother Walt when he was here and he had his mantra right. What was the mantra? Oh, if I say it, you're going to go. Oh yeah, let love lead. Right, let love lead, amen to that. Right, let love lead. Now, we had poster up. It was on a website, it was in the emails. You know, it's a good phrase, it's a good mantra, it's a good motto. Now we took it down because we're thinking, all right, new guy, we probably ought to do something different. But on a day like this it does make me think. You know, should we be bringing it back? Are we really good at letting love lead, which really love God, love neighbor. That's kind of what that means.

Pastor Darren:

It's been a difficult week for this scripture, am I right? This kind of passage for this scripture? Am I right? This kind of passage? We had a big event this week to follow other big events, a couple big events a couple weeks ago, as I mentioned in prayer time 358 big events since Jan 1 in our country, and it hits us this one this week right in our polarized weak spot. See, you guys think my job is easy. I've got to come up here on Sunday. I've got to preach something when this happens In this society where we have committed and entrenched, we're not only on two different sides, but we're trying to figure out how to undermine, how to take the legs out, how to take each other out, a little difficult to preach in. I'm just going to say it. So we have a young man. He was killed and he's mourned by many.

Pastor Darren:

He's seen as this conservative activist who was able to ignite passion in young people, especially young white men. He really was getting them organized and it's a time where young white men are nervous a little bit. They're nervous. You know, america has been a place where white men had a lot of say and as it evens out, it makes young white men get nervous, get anxious. At the same time, in doing his activism, he said a lot of things that were very polarizing, super aggressive things said about pretty much every non-white culture and about women.

Pastor Darren:

These are things that, if they had been said about us or about our own families, we would be led to be scared, to feel unsafe about the society around us, about the people around us, worried that we might be oppressed, we might be harassed, worried that we might be oppressed, we might be harassed, we might even be killed at some point. That is the environment that we're living in, so I don't want to pick a side. I'm going to let you all live into your own beliefs and how you understand this situation, but what's clear to me is that the killing is wrong. I think that's an obvious thing to say. Not only is it wrong, but we really can't afford for people to be getting killed for their opinions, any more than we can afford people being oppressed or even killed for their skin color, for their gender, for their sexual identity. We can't live as a society where that kind of jeopardy, that kind of violence, is a reality. It's a world that is left blind and toothless for you scriptural orientators. This is why this morning, I'm pointing to the tone, to the way that we relate with each other and how we work through our disagreements.

Pastor Darren:

You know there's a lot of philosophies, approaches, guidelines that we can put ahead of love on our list of things. There's a lot of them. Instead of letting love lead, we could defer to power. Let's let the strong lead. That's why they're there. We could defer to money. Let money lead. We can let government lead. We can let caustic words lead. We can let destroy the other lead, we can let caustic words lead, we can let destroy the other lead, we can let division lead, we can let hate lead, we can let fear lead, we can let disengagement lead, we can let anger lead, but can we all agree, at least for this moment, on this day, that none of these actually work? Can we all agree that none of these really bring us to any sense of justice or peace, or equity, or fairness or harmony or, most of all, love, the thing that Jesus claimed as the most important, the thing that most believers, for 2,000 years, have claimed as the most important?

Pastor Darren:

I wonder if Jesus is telling us to love God and to love neighbor, not because he thought life was just a really silly sitcom where we could all be tutti frutti, silly, in love with each other and let all the flowers and the hearts grow around us. Maybe Jesus is saying it is because it's the only thing that works in a society in which we are engaging each other daily, where decisions that we make affect everyone, not just mine. I am not just affected, ours are not just affected. We are all affected by our own decisions as a society, and we're in a society in which we all disagree on things. Not only that, we're in a society, as human beings, where mistakes happen, we hurt people and it's not always intentional. We live in a society where mortality is real. Maybe Jesus was telling us this 2,000 years ago, because it's the only thing that really works.

Pastor Darren:

Our question for today and I'll put it to this community because I know and I'm learning this community we are a heart community, we are a head community, we want to be blessings in this world. So I put it to this community Are we ready to believe Jesus? Are we ready to trust in that scripture, to love God and love neighbor? Because I tell you what? It isn't easy. Today we have moved in our society so far from any trust in that scripture. We've convinced each other we really need to destroy each other.

Pastor Darren:

Are we ready to hold each other accountable and by holding each other accountable, I'm not talking about holding the other guy accountable, the other gal accountable. I'm talking about holding your own folks accountable. I'm talking about holding yourself accountable when something is said to convey that anyone else or anything that anyone else in this world is anything less than a child of God. Are we ready to hold others account? Are we ready to hold them to account to say hold on, we are all children of God.

Pastor Darren:

We need to figure out how to live in this way, in this place, with peace, because I think that's what it's going to take. Are we ready to accept accountability for our sense of humanity, even in the tough decisions we need to make as a society the economic decisions, the political decisions? Are we ready to be held accountable to a sense of humanity in the way we deal with each other? And I'll tell you what it doesn't mean nothing if we're just going to believe it. We got to live it. The United Methodist Church is taking on this mission to love boldly, and it will take boldness in this world for what we have allowed to come to fruition, to come to existence. I, for one, am going to be praying for them. I'm going to be praying for us as we seek to live out our part of that mission to love boldly, and I pray that you will too. Amen.