Over recent years, I have found myself growing more and more impatient with people who drone on about their love for God or offer me impassioned tales of their affection for Jesus. Clearly, they love God with all their heart and soul and mind but I wonder to myself...so what? What does that love mean beyond their own warm and tender feelings? What affect does it have on the world? If Christianity is nothing more than slapping a bumper sticker on the back of my car that says, " I © Jesus"...then, really, I’m not much interested.

I do suspect that some of this same thinking was rumbling around inside of Jesus, as well. Speaking to the pious and faithful church members of his day, Jesus shocked them all by claiming that one’s love for God is intimately involved with one’s love for neighbor. In other words, you can’t love God unless you love the world as well. This is why Jesus is so problematic. It really is quite easy to love the great warm fuzzy in the sky. It's a cinch to sing God’s praises in four-part harmony and launch long and lofty prayers upstairs but the fact of the matter is that none of it seems to matter much, at least to Jesus, unless we’re also willing to get down and dirty, to mix it up with our neighbors, to encounter our enemies and emerge from it all loving them as much as we love God. That is what it really means to love God with all your heart and soul and mind.