Homily for 18 Feb 2016

18 Feb 2016

“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”  In other words, love your neighbor as yourself.  Of course, this is how God treats us: he loves us as he loves himself.  He’s ready to give his life for us; he’s willing to pour out the good things we need—no questions asked.  “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find.”  God looks at us and sees a reflection of himself, because—of course—that’s who we are; we’re made in his image.

But sometimes it’s hard to see ourselves reflected in other people, in the way God sees himself in us.  You know, sometimes it’s just plain difficult to love others as ourselves.  Maybe those other people are on the other end of the political spectrum.  Maybe they have different views of marriage, or Church, or religion.  Maybe they don’t have any beliefs at all.  Or maybe they’re just simply unpleasant people.

But, in spite of all that, they still are . . . people.  And part of loving others as we would have them love us, is to see our own human longings at work in other people, too.  You know, we all desire happiness.  We all want companionship, or a sense of belonging; we want to know we’re loved.  Most of us don’t want to hurt others; we’re just trying to figure out what’s right and just.  There is something of us in our neighbors—even the neighbors we don’t like.  And there’s something of them in us.

And that something is the human spirit, in search of . . . meaning, life, security.  And it’s nothing new.  For instance, Queen Esther lived centuries and centuries ago, but we can still empathize with her desperate plea for help in Scripture.  And even though the psalmist lived a long time ago, too, we can still feel (or imagine) in our hearts those feelings of delight and happiness he had at having been heard by God.

How many times do we hear a story told to us, and we can feel ourselves get “wrapped up” in it?  Well, it’s because the human spirit in us is in our neighbors, too.  We can “do to others as we would have them do to us.”  And we do that by loving them as God loves us—by giving them the benefit of the doubt; by giving them “a loaf of bread instead of a stone,” and “a fish instead of a snake.”