Simple faith?

This weekend I went to my local Catholic church on Saturday evening and on Sunday to Rosedale United church with my brother and sister-in-law. In both services the reading of the Gospel was the same. Someone asks Jesus (hoping to trip him up perhaps) 'which commandment of the Law is the most important?'( Perhaps expecting a rather complicated, institutional reply). Jesus replies however, that the greatest and first commandment is to love God with all your heart, and mind, and soul. He then goes on to say that there is a  second commandment like that, 'you shall love your neighbor as yourself'. These are the commandments that come from Jesus' Jewish heritage.
   
I was struck first of all by one thing that the Deacon at Saturday's service said. He said that that word 'like' meant that the second commandment was as important as the first; that essentially, to love your neighbor is to love God, or conversely, to love God means to love your neighbor. This is the way we show our love for God. I sometimes think we forget this in our practices of religion. We may think that going to religious services is a sign that we love God or that by saying certain prayers it is a sign that we love God. I guess these may be some kind of reflection of our love but it seems to me that the core of all faiths is, more than anything, meant to be a quite practical living out of the love that God is and has for us. It is, as Doug said next day, meant to be quite simple.

At the Sunday morning service, Doug (who gave one of the best sermons I have ever heard) quoted from a hymn we had just sung. The hymn by Carolyn McDade is called This Ancient Love and, to quote from the sermon's description of the hymn: 'God is a woman who has wrapped her arms around the hills and the sea and the wounded child and she says, as we wrap our healing arms to hold/ what her arms held/ this ancient love, this aching love, rolls on. Doug then pointed out the main themes of the hymn: There is love; it comes from long before us; it is both deep joy and deep pain; and it rolls on.

I loved this sermon in part because it reminded us that God is simple; simple love. There is nothing complicated here. And yet of course, we know that we find real, unselfish loving pretty difficult in the day to day. But the hymn reminds us that God wraps metaphorical healing arms around us and that God's love is an aching love and an ancient love. God's love is not going to leave us any time soon.

As I hear it, both of these sermons tell us that our faith at its heart is simple, uncluttered, free and full of joy and love. We seem to have become so bogged down in the institutions of our faith (religion?) that we may have lost sight of this, the heart of all faiths.