Click  Epiphany 7A  for a link to this Sunday's readings which include:   Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18; Psalm 119:33-40; 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23; and Matthew 5:38-48.   

Love of God and of neighbor is the basis of stewardship.   Setting God's purposes as a priority in our lives is an expression of our love for God in our lives.  Therefore the stewardship of sharing our blessings and God's love with those around us communicates our love of God to the world around us, as well as God's love.  Our readings this week speak to this through their encouragement of our keeping God's commandments in the greater spirit of exhibiting God's abundant love for the world.

Leviticus 19 opens this week with God instructing Moses in what to say to his people.  One of the wonderful aspects of this text is God's instruction about allowing for gleanings of their fields by the poor and aliens.  What makes this doubly wonderful is that it not only serves to execute justice, but that it also is a proclamation of the abundance with which they will be blessed.  After all, these are people who have yet to enter the Promised Land, the land they will take as their own to farm which will produce the crops they are instructed to leave the edges for gleaning!  God foreshadows the blessing of abundance and instructs them that their blessing is meant to be shared for the common good for God's purposes of loving all people.  The rest of the reading continues establishing fair treatment of all people in all aspects of our relationships with one another.  God is telling us to steward Divine love by stewarding both our own property for the welfare of others and by stewarding others' property through respect and honesty of their rights.

Jesus takes God's commandment to love our neighbors the "extra mile" in our Gospel lesson this week.  He challenges us to love those who do not love us, even those who are hateful to us, because after all it is easy for anyone to love those who love us. Right?  Jesus is asking us to be stewards of God's unconditional love through sharing our possessions with others and through sharing the grace we have received from God.  What Jesus is asking of us is that we reflect to the world the love and grace God has for all of us, responding to hate or violence not with an eye for an eye but rather with love.  As Christians, God has chosen us to be divine lamp-stands shining God's unconditional love for all.  This message has been entrusted to us through our baptisms and our revelation of the Gospel so that the world will know God's love, too.  Jesus' challenge to his disciples (us) is to love and respond to whatever the world throws at us with all love's excelling, and certainly without violence!  For us really to show others God's love it's not enough to simply "follow the law."   Jesus wants us to go the extra mile so that the extraordinary nature of the all-encompassing Love that is the basis of the Law can be seen clearly by the world.  The ultimate display of this in exhibited on the cross by Jesus and is our example for responding to the world our everyday lives.  This is the foundation to which Paul is referring in the section of his 1^st letter to the Corinthians we have this week. 

Paul uses the building imagery describing our bodies as a temple of God with Jesus Christ as the foundation and the Spirit dwelling within. Paul is asking us to act in such a way that displays this reality to the world, much like Jesus asks of us. Both Jesus and Paul are exhorting us to steward all that we are and all that we have (including our emotions) to love all others the way God loves us so that the world may come to know God's love, too.  Keeping our reactive emotions in check or giving up what we possess to share God's love may seem foolish to the world, but it is perfect in God's eyes.

What extra mile in love do you need to travel this week?

What can you give up to shine God's love more brightly to the world?