Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

One of the losses of the contemporary liturgies in the Episcopal Church is the reading of the Summary of the Law at the beginning of each service. In the more traditional liturgies (Rite I) which we say at 7:45am on Sundays and at many of our weekday services, you will hear the following:

“Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

The Summary of the Law includes the two commandments that call for the love of God and the love of neighbor. These commandments appear separately in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18). Although there is some precedent in pre-Christian Judaism for bringing these two commandments together, Jesus was apparently the first to formulate them precisely in this way as a summary of all the requirements of the Law (Mark 12:29-31). The Summary of the Law was part of the Scottish liturgy of 1764, and from there it was adopted by the first American Prayer Book of 1789.

This summary of the law appears in our Gospel today and is, to my mind, a succinct expression of essential Christianity and quintessential Anglican identity. Ultimately, our call is not to judge but to love. Not to debate but to love. Not to condemn but to love. Not to harry, press, or lambaste but simply to love.

That will look different in different contexts—indeed to love might even sound harsh at times (I’ll ask my kids). But it is easy to over-complicate what we do. Ultimately we are a body of people who pray together and we do so that we might find ever deeper and more profound ways to live into the love which God calls us to—God who is love.

Our prayers take distinct forms and (even when I’m grumbling about the loss of some thing or another in our modern prayer book) are the best expression of our collective attempts to express our hopes and fears and longings and heartaches to God. This is the essence of love: deep calling from one soul to another. This is the essence of the life of the Church, too. We pray together that we might learn to love together more deeply, more lastingly, and more fully.

Let us go and love God and our neighbor more faithfully this week.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert