Sometimes when reading the gospel, we marvel at the new things Jesus is teaching or doing. Yet, when reading Matthew 22:34-36, one simple truth emerges. When Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind . . . and You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” he was not saying anything new. These words were grounded in the law of Moses and the people testing Jesus knew this as well, or even better, than he did. The problem was never knowing the law. The problem was (and ever is) obeying the law.

Like generations before us, it’s easier to say we love God and love our neighbor than it is to figure out how to do that well in this time and place. There is no step-by-step roadmap or one-size-fits-all answer about how to love God and how to love our neighbor.

Figuring this out takes conversation and discernment as community together and that’s really hard work. It takes time. It requires listening closely to each other and sometimes, asking ourselves difficult questions about our own preferences and commitments. Sometimes as we do that work we disagree about how to proceed, and it’s hard to be in conflict with people we want to love. It’s hard to have different ideas, especially about things we hold dear.

If that weren’t enough there’s the added reality that it’s just plain hard to love, even when we have a really clear idea of what love might look like. Choosing love challenges us to notice what we love more dearly than God and who we love more dearly than our neighbor.

Naming this truth — that loving God and neighbor is easier said than done — is the heart of our confession as Lutheran Christians. This is what we mean when we begin worship saying: We confess that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. As Martin Luther taught, we are wholly and utterly dependent on God’s grace and the good news of the gospel is that we can’t change God. God is faithful, even if (and when) we are not.

We can’t change God, but God can — and does — change us. We are changed by God’s love. The life we share together in Christ is not about holding on, it’s about letting go. Letting go — of judgement, of fear, of imagining there is only one right way forward, of holding so tightly to my ideas or my vision or whatever gets in the way of making room for my neighbors needs and desire. It’s about remembering that God is faithful and remains by our side through every change and through all uncertainty. It’s about remembering that God’s speciality is about finding a way when there is no way. It’s about looking with hope to the next amazing, miraculous, surprising, inspiring, challenging thing that God might be doing among us next!

As baptized children of God, we know what we are called to do: love God and love our neighbors. And as Lutheran Christians, we know that we only have the power or possibility of fulfilling that call with the help and by the grace of God.

May it be so!