You're redundant.
Did you receive those words as a compliment or an insult?
We've been trained to hear this word "redundant" as a negative.
But in saying "You're redundant," I've just paid you a compliment that's based on one of the most essential features of life.
We hear redundancy as meaning repetitive, uninspired, not creatively useful. But for engineers and technicians, redundancy is a goal and an expression of grace.
Take electronics and information processing: systems must back up one another. Take structural engineering: supports must be designed with safeguards and second layers of strength and resiliency.
Redundancy means that safety, stability, flexibility, and endurance are built into a system. Unusual stress on a wall or ceiling is tolerated because redundant strengths are built into a building.
Airliners keep aloft and maintain altitude and manageability even through a lightening strike fries one control panel. Why? Because of redundant systems and back-up equipment.
Redundancy is vital for the continued operation of any complex structure or organism.
In fact, the human body is one of the most redundant systems imaginable. We fight diseases and infections through a host of redundant layers that make up our immunodefense system. Those nasty germs that make it past our nasal hairs and mucus membranes are later assaulted by marauding white blood cells and bug-specific antibodies. We spike fevers, we hack and cough and sneeze, we can even breathe through our mouth if our sinuses swell: all are a series of redundant systems for dealing with a rotten cold.
The Master Designer of the Uni-verse engineered redundancy into the very fabric of physical life.
And the Master Designer of the Inner-verse engineered redundancy into the very fabric of spiritual life as well. Look how God has provided us with redundant layers for experiencing the presence of God's grace and love and forgiveness.
Sometimes we're a little slow to get things of the spirit. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Sometimes we need a second chance. Sometimes we need a third chance. Sometimes we need a lifetime of chances. Thank God, the Master Engineer has built redundancy into the spiritual universe.
In today's gospel text when Jesus was asked to name The Greatest Commandment he chooses an intimately familiar portion of Scripture. Everyday a pious Jew is required to pray a morning and evening service of prayer. Among the prayers offered is the Shema, the sound of the first word of this prayer in Hebrew which begins "Shema Yisroel Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad" ("Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One").
As the Shema continues it repeats the command found in Deuteronomy 6:5 "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." By choosing this very familiar declaration as his The Greatest Commandment, Jesus elevated those words beyond their role of a rote litany, hurriedly recited, and instead held them up as a profound wisdom and precious possibility.
Abundance and Redundance
Matthew 22:34-46
The God of Abundance, the God of Abundant Love, has provided us with redundant ways to experience and discern God's abundant love in our lives.
*We may experience God's love through our heart--through an upswelling of emotion which we can call heartfelt love. *We may experience God's love through our soul--through a depth of spiritual stirrings and shakings and other soul stuff which we can call soul-felt [or soulful] love. *We may experience God's love through our mind--expanding our intellect across a universe of knowledge which we can call mind-felt [or mindful] love.
Some of us are better at loving God by making heartprints. Other of us are better at loving God by making soulprints. Still others are better at loving God by making mindprints. And God's grace and mercy have built-in redundancy into the spiritual system.
But Jesus goes on to add another layer of redundancy to this Greatest Commandment by citing Leviticus 19:18: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Genuine love itself is a redundant system of feedback loops. Anyone who seeks to love God with heart and soul and mind will encounter God's love for creation, for all of the universe, through each pathway. If we then genuinely love God then we too must love all creation--a creation which includes the self and the neighbor.
When the first-century rabbinic scholar Hillel offered his negative version of Jesus' statement, "What is hateful to you do not to your neighbor," he concluded "that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary on it; go and learn it" (b.Sabb.31a). All Scripture is a wonderful, complex, interconnected network of redundancies, designed to lead stumbling humanity to the truth about God. Enter it anywhere, and you end up at the same place: "For God So Loved The World."
" God created the universe and said "It is good." But with the image of the rainbow, God's promise to all creation is visual as well as verbal. " " God gave the Law to the people of Israel, not once, but twice! " " Look at the number and variety of prophets God sent to humanity, to teach and preach God's love, God's grace, God's presence--and that's just in the First Testament. " Talk about redundancy: Why do we have two creation accounts (Genesis 1, Genesis 2)? Why do we have four gospels--four different, unique accounts of Jesus' birth, life, death, and resurrection? Why do we have multiple epistles--letters from Paul, John, James, Titus, Peter--each one an early disciple with a repeating, unrelenting, redundant message of God's abundant love and grace and forgiveness through the gift of Jesus Christ?
Jesus cut through all the redundancy, even cutting to the very heart and soul and mind of faith, when he proposed that The Greatest Commandment wasn't really a commandment at all: it was an invitation to a love relationship with God. The greatest desire, the greatest attribute, the greatest goal of all God's redundancy is love.
But Jesus wouldn't allow us to isolate or atomize this love. Jesus made it poignantly personal: love means loving the neighbor as one loves oneself. It's easy to love humanity and yet still hate people. Jesus' greatest commandment allows for no distance, no abstention, no un-involvement. Love--of God, of neighbor, of all creation, of oneself--is only love when it's able to focus on specifics.
Have you built redundant love into your life?
We CAN love our country and yet still love all those who would wish our country harm. We CAN love those aligned against us, without approving their back-stabbing and back-sliding ways. We CAN love Red states. We CAN love Blue states. We CAN love those, who along with us, fall terribly short of God's ideal blueprint of love.
The Apostle Paul even said that "We Can do ALL THINGS . . ." because of God's amazing, abundant, redundant love.