A wise woman was travelling in the mountains. Crossing a stream, a glitter caught her eye, and reaching into the water, she pulled out a nugget of pure gold the size of a golf ball. Placing it safely in her bag, she continued her journey.

The next day, she met a very hungry traveler. She opened her bag to share her food with him. His eyes caught the golden glimmer of the nugget, and he asked, "May I have that golden nugget as well?"

Without a moment's hesitation the wise woman gave him the nugget. The traveler left rejoicing in his good fortune, because he knew that that nugget was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime.

But then he began to think about what the woman had given him. He thought about that a lot. He held on to the nugget and didn't sell it. A few days later he went back to the wise woman, and handed her the golden nugget.

"I know how valuable this nugget is," he said. "However, I am returning it to you in the hope that you can give me something even more precious."

"What would that be?" she asked.

"Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the nugget so freely."

The proverbs say that wisdom is far more precious than gold or precious jewels. Jesus is reported to have said that "it is more blessed to give than to receive." (Acts 20:35) And today, we come seeking the kind of love is the first and greatest commandment, love for God which gives us a deep sense of security and peace that frees us to freely love our neighbours as ourselves.

John Calvin once wrote that "to know God we must know ourselves, and to know ourselves we must know God." Knowledge of God and of self are inseparable. In the same way, loving God and loving neighbour are linked. We can distinguish them, but we cannot separate them. We cannot love our neighbour without having some sense of what our neighbour needs, without having a sense of what is good for him or her. Rosemary Haughton once pointed out that "Contrary to popular belief, the best marriages and the happiest families don't happen because people concentrate first of all on the quality of their relationships, but rather when the couple, and then the family, is involved in something bigger." If we do not love God, then our efforts to love our neighbours will be shallow and empty, lacking in a connection to the deepest good of life.

The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart once wrote that "your outer work can never be small if your inner work is great." But the reverse is also true: "If our inner work is small, our outer work cannot be great."The inner work of loving God, of delighting in God's presence, of experiencing God's forgiveness, of trusting in God's protection, overflows into an outer work, an abundant generosity, a capacity to allow ourselves to be with other people without anxiety, without insecurity, without fear, the willingness to allow ourselves to love without holding back.

As Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary General of the United Nations, once wrote: "God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason." [both quotations from The Living Pulpit, Jan-Mar, 1997]

What all of this suggests to me is that if we wish to love our neighbours, we must love God, we must love love, we must love life. In the same way, to love God, we must love our neighbour and the other creatures who inhabit the world God created. God is not distinct from the world, but right here, present in every person, every relationship. Loving God cannot be separated from loving those around us. "If you do not love your neighbour whom you can see," wrote the author of the first letter of John, "you cannot love God whom you have not seen." [1 John 4:20]

Too often, in our globally interconnected world, our actions impact others whom we may never meet. Those who make our clothes and shoes work in factories in China, Indonesia or Central America. Those who grow our food live in California, Equador or Chile. But one of the great opportunities of our time is the opportunity to visit some of those places where our products are made and to see our neighbours who may live half a world away, to visit and perhaps to share a skill, a caring hand, a few dollars that might make a huge difference. And when we do that, we are transformed, and we can never quite be the same again.

To love God, and to love neighbour, is not something we come up with ourselves, rather it is to respond to God's love which is there right from the beginning; it is to open ourselves to a love that precedes us, and surpasses us and transcends us. Love is like water, and we are like faucets. The faucet doesn't produce the water; it just allows the water to run through it. That is all we are called to do; to open ourselves to God's love and allow it to pass through. And when we do that, we receive a gift more valuable that gold or diamonds or rubies: the ability to love, to be generous, to be free.

Let us pray: Open us, O God, to your overflowing love, that in every minute, of every day, we may be channels of your grace, your profligate generosity. AMEN.