Each week we light three candles that symbolize the Trinity. Rev. Donna often refers to the Trinity as a dance of love. I think of this as a dance where nobody is “leading”, a dance in which all three dancers are equal partners, and nobody is controlling the flow of love. Nobody has power over the other...and love is how the partners know how to move. All three, Yahweh, Yeshua, and Ruach, lead at various times, and always lead in love.
When I read the newspaper, though, I don’t read about a dance of love. And often what we see on social media doesn't seem much like loving our neighbour, does it?
We have a lot to learn from Jesus about the dance of love. Here's what he says in our reading for this week (Luke 10.25-37 MSG translation):
Just then a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?”
He answered, “What’s written in God’s Law? How do you interpret it?”
He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence—and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself.”
“Good answer!” said Jesus. “Do it and you’ll live.”
Looking for a loophole, he asked, “And just how would you define ‘neighbor’?”
Jesus answered by telling a story.
“There was once a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the way he was attacked by robbers. They took his clothes, beat him up, and went off leaving him half-dead. Luckily, a priest was on his way down the same road, but when he saw him he angled across to the other side. Then a Levite religious man showed up; he also avoided the injured man.
“A Samaritan traveling the road came on him. When he saw the man’s condition, his heart went out to him. He gave him first aid, disinfecting and bandaging his wounds. Then he lifted him onto his donkey, led him to an inn, and made him comfortable. In the morning he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take good care of him. If it costs any more, put it on my bill—I’ll pay you on my way back.’
“What do you think? Which of the three became a neighbor to the man attacked by robbers?”
“The one who treated him kindly,” the religion scholar responded.
Jesus said, “Go and do the same.”
We have to arrive at the point, as believers in the Christian faith, that in every human being there is a spark of divinity. Every human personality is something sacred, something special. We don’t have a right, as another person or as a nation, to destroy that spark of divinity, that spark of humanity, that is made and created in the image of God.
- Congressman John Lewis (1940–2020)
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