Café - Hot Topic

Adding a little balance for Lent by Megan Torgerson

I guess you could say I’m a gray kind of girl. To be fair, in many things I’m more blue than gray: I like my sky clear, not cloudy, and I’m more apt to wear robin’s egg blue than charcoal. But outside of color preference, you’ll usually find me in gray. That is to say that I find things to rarely be strictly black or white, but colored in shades of gray.

Perhaps we can chalk this up to my life-long Lutheranism. My whole religious life I learned that we were simultaneously sinner and saint, saved by grace through faith, called and sent, living in the now but also in the not yet, and more of those dicey dichotomies that seem to epitomize the Lutheran flavor of Christianity. From my earliest, fuzziest memories, I soaked in the truth of not a world that is not either/or, but distinctly both/and.

Life as balance

Admittedly, this lens on life can sometimes be a major pain. I have trouble deciding what to have for supper, since almost all options have merit. (Well, aside from a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich on white bread, but even that at least has protein.) I can’t be the deciding vote when a group of friends splits on which movie to see. Those rank pretty low on the importance scale, though. When it really counts, understanding life as a balance between two equally important and valuable points makes a whole lot of sense.

Take, for instance, a cornerstone principle of Christian faith: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, reiterate this commandment from Leviticus 19 as the greatest commandment, set alongside full and complete love of God. In other words, to live as a fully obedient child of God, you must love God with everything you’ve got, and you must love your neighbor as yourself. It is that second half of that statement, the “love your neighbor as yourself” part, which must be walked as the most delicate of tightropes.

When you take the statement apart, you realize that loving your neighbor as yourself means doing two distinct and vital things: You must love your neighbor, and you must love yourself. The truth of Christian faith lives in the balance between self-love and other-love. If we lean too hard on one or the other, we fail to live into the abundance that the God we love wants for us and for others. (Continued on next page.)

Share a comment

Visit the study page for ideas for discussion and further reflection.

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. Leviticus 19:18

The command to “love your neighbor as yourself” turns up just one time in the Old Testament. We find it buried deep in an eclectic list of instructions to (among other things) not mix fabrics, not consume blood, and not round off the hair on your temples. This might seem a strange place to put a commandment to love yourself and love your neighbor. Consider, however, that the people of God will be set apart, living a different lifestyle than that of the people around them. They would be marked by their worship of one God. The mark that God’s people would bear would be physical in nature, evidenced by the clothes they wore, the food they ate, and the style of their hair.

However, the mark is not merely on the surface. You can recognize God’s people by how they treat others.

In that same chapter, God tells Moses that the people must not harvest their entire crop. They should leave the edges unharvested so that those who are hungry, poor, or far from home can find something to eat. Lying, stealing, or not paying someone their wages on time is not permitted. You should not make a decision that favors the rich, but instead grants the greatest degree of justice. The actions of God’s people reflect a deep concern for the others, lived out in daily life.

Some of the stranger laws, like interbreeding herds or sowing multiple grains in one field, are harder to understand in our modern culture. But there is clearly a respect for integrity and singularity. God’s people will be set apart, in the purity of their garments and the purity of their actions. Continued on next page.