My partner Chas used to work on audio technology at Google, and he’s also a musician, and a huge nerd. As a direct result of these facts, I have seen a video on YouTube titled “Popping a Balloon in a Reverberation Room vs an Anechoic Chamber.” In it, a man stands in a “reverberation room” - with walls designed to echo powerfully - and he pops a balloon with a needle. The sound is loud and resounding. Then, the same man stands in an “anechoic chamber” - a room with walls designed to prevent any sound reverberation - and pops an identical balloon. The result, especially after hearing the first one, is hilarious: a pathetic little “piff” that dies out as soon as it starts.
Today I want to talk about echoes and the power of reverberation. Because long before we figured out how to make silly YouTube videos about it, God knew that there was something about echoes, about something ringing out, repeating itself, that was incredibly powerful. God created canyons and placed in us the urge to shout into them. God knows what God is doing.
Today’s Gospel story is full of echoes.
Let me explain. Almost everyone knows this Gospel story - Jesus gives a very simple answer to a very complex question, and in it gives rise to the “Golden Rule,” this “love your neighbor as yourself” concept.
What a lot of people don’t know is that this story is a near direct echo of the teachings of a Jewish scholar who belonged to the generation just before Jesus. If you’ve ever been to a Seder, or wandered past the Jewish community space on a college camps, you know his name: Hillel.
Mr. Hillel was a brilliant and devout scholar of Jewish religious texts. This kind of study is incredibly difficult and intense, considered a lifetime pursuit by those who engage in it. It’s like a seminary that never ends, and the observance of the faith is itself the act of study. It’s a commitment to decades of reading, writing, thinking, interpreting, teaching, learning, debating, and questioning.
And the story about Hillel goes like this: he was such a renowned teacher and scholar that someone once challenged him to do the impossible. This person asked him to “teach me the whole of the Torah and Jewish law while I’m standing on one foot.” This is, of course, absurd, and dismissive to Hillel’s lifetime of work. How could such a dense, complex collection of texts and ideas be communicated in a few seconds?
The story holds that one of Hillel’s contemporaries was asked the same question and sent the questioner away. Understandable. But when the person asked Hillel - and I’ve always pictured them standing in the doorway of Hillel’s office, bending one leg like a snarky flamingo, daring him to provide a shortcut for his decades of learning - Hillel had an answer ready: “Love your neighbor as yourself. The rest is commentary. Now go and learn.”
Jesus says almost the exact same thing, in almost the exact same circumstance - from the summarization of the “Golden Rule” to the “go and do likewise” command. It’s entirely possible that Jesus was intentionally quoting Hillel, who would have been well known at the time. Because Jesus too knew the power of echoes. Referencing, echoing, and commenting on other teachers would have been part of Jesus’s ministry as a Jewish spiritual leader. The Bible is full of references and echoes - their power is clear and undeniable.
Hillel is not the only echo in Jesus’s speech here. Jesus is also citing Deuteronomy in this Gospel story as well - a verse called the Shema, so central to Jewish thought and practice that it’s baked into my bones as a children’s song, complete with hand motions. As soon as I read this passage in preparation my sermon today, it started bouncing around inside me like a shout echoing through a canyon. My body and mind ring with the echoes of my Jewish upbringing the same way Jesus echoed with the resonance of his ancestors.
Our liturgy, too, is full of echoes - today’s reading from Deuteronomy includes another instance of the “with all your heart and with all your soul.” And then there’s the Good Samaritan story, which has echoed so much throughout our culture and language that it’s become a turn of phrase so common some people don’t even know it’s from the Bible, let alone the context. And the eucharist, which echoes weekly; the hymns, echoing through tradition, and even the building itself, designed for the acoustics of a community speaking and singing.
So, okay, our faith tradition is full of echoes. But why? Is it because people learn better through repetition? Did God think if we just heard “love your neighbor” over and over, that we’d get it? I can assure you, as the parent of a 14 year old, that that is absolutely not the case.
I think the key is in the second part of these stories. After the main lesson, the pithy truth, we’re told to act on it. Hillel ends with “Go and learn.” Jesus ends with “Go and do likewise.” The Deuteronomy verse explains that the reason we are supposed to know God’s word is not just for the sake of the knowledge itself - it’s so we can live it out, so we can observe it.
God is reminding us of the power of the echo. God is pointing us to something sacred and baked into the fabric of the universe. God created ponds to ripple with thrown pebbles, God made sound waves to vibrate and ring, God designed our brains to sing with snippets of song, God inspired generations of prophets and writers to craft Scripture that loop, that reference, that trip that little wire in us that says “hey, I’ve heard that somewhere else…”
God calls us into the power of the echo. If we hear what God is telling us about love but we don’t “go and do,” we’re like the anechoic chamber. The sound just dies - a sad little “pfft” that doesn’t go anywhere. We set our foot down, leave Hillel’s doorway, and wander off. We get to say “I heard Jesus summarize the law - now I know the whole of God’s intention for me. That’s one thing off the ol’ to-do list. Check!”
But God is asking us to serve as reverberation rooms, resounding with truth, ringing out the love and mercy and justice that we receive from Christ. As singer songwriter Hozier puts it, it’s not the waking, it’s the rising. As our Old Testament reading tells is, it’s not the hearing, it’s the doing. God speaks first, but we must be the echoes. God calls to us, God tosses that pebble into the pond of our lives, God pops that balloon, inviting us to ring out, to echo back, to join the reverberations of love.
And so I ask myself - what am I doing to craft myself into that reverberation chamber, to align myself with the vibrations of God’s love like a tuning fork of faith? Are there parts of my heart that are anechoic, where God’s voice is heard for a moment, then goes nowhere? What are we doing, as a church and as individuals, to echo Christ’s love back, so that it fills us up with its reverberations, so that it ripples out from us in great waves? What acoustic paneling do we have up inside the rooms of our hearts? What do we invite to echo out from ourselves?
As we stand in this building, with acoustics and traditions and visual symbols intended to help echo back to us, both literally and figuratively, God’s presence, may we carry those echoes out the doors and into our lives, into our world. May we, in the words of today’s collect, not only know and understand what things we ought to do, but to have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them. May we hold onto the power of the echo, this incredible quirk of physics God has crafted into our strange world, knowing that God will never stop repeating it: I love you. Now go and do.