Loving God with All Your Strength

Abridged sermon from October 10, 2010

Deuteronomy 6:20-25; 2 Corinthians 8:1-5; Luke 14:16-24

The Message paraphrase of the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:5 is: Love God (Yahweh, personal name), your God (Elohim, office or role), with your whole heart: love him with all that’s in you, love him with all you’ve got.”

Where The Message has “with all you’ve got,” most other translations say “with all your might’ or “with all your strength.” One commentator suggests that, “with all your very muchness,” gets at the meaning.

When Jesus quotes this passage and Mark reports it, almost all the translations opt for “with all your strength.” For most of us, our first image of strength or might has to do with muscle. But let’s start with muscle and see what we need to add to get to the range of meaning: all your muscle, might, strength, energy, substance, resources, possessions, influence, excessiveness, totality, “all you’ve got,” “all your very muchness.”

In previous weeks, have suggested that your heart means the formative place within you, that your soul means your life and self, that your mind means the mental processes by which you connect your personal story to God’s great story and decide what it means to walk in God way and wisdom. Now I am suggesting that your strength or might means everything you’ve got, your very muchness. There is not much held back in this Greatest of All Commandments, is there?

What does it mean to love God with everything you’ve got? I think that a parable Jesus told will help us get at it. Luke 14:16 But Jesus said to him, “A man once gave a great banquet and invited many guests. 14:17 At the time for the banquet he sent his slave to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, because everything is now ready.’ 14:18 But one after another they all began to make excuses. The first said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. Please excuse me.’ 14:19 Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going out to examine them. Please excuse me.’ 14:20 Another said, ‘I just got married, and I cannot come.’ 14:21 So the slave came back and reported this to his master. Then the master of the household was furious and said to his slave, ‘Go out quickly to the streets and alleys of the city, and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ 14:22 Then the slave said, ‘Sir, what you instructed has been done, and there is still room.’ 14:23 So the master said to his slave, ‘Go out to the highways and country roads and urge people to come in, so that my house will be filled. 14:24 For I tell you, not one of those individuals who were invited will taste my banquet!’”

This parable is one of those that often perplexes people. They think that Jesus is asking them to choose whether they will have careers, possessions, labor-saving devices, marriage, family life, and so forth, or whether they will just serve the kingdom of God, as though the two are mutually exclusive. But that is not true. Jesus is not against any of those good things, but he wants everything we let into our lives to be dedicated to the love of God. Rather than allowing a conflict between these things and God, we are to manage them so that we serve God and celebrate God through these things, and so that they do not get in the way of important celebrations of God’s redeeming love.

Now, I understand that this is easier said than done. Any of these things can end up in conflict with loving God, and it is not always easy to figure out how to resolve the conflict. Even religious work can end up in conflict with loving God. It is especially hard when we are working for a company or an employer who does not value our goal of loving God through everything that we do. There may be situations in which we need to look for another job, but I would not urge a hasty decision on that. Employees who prayerfully seek creative ways to represent Christ can often find appropriate and surprising ways that keep the obligation they have to their employers and still show love for God. Several of you have been very creative at finding such ways.

Finding ways to be faithful in showing our love for God through the major components of our lives—our employment, our skills, our family relationships, our money, our possessions, our education, our hobbies, our friendship circles, and so forth--opens doors for larger opportunities. Our lives deepen in satisfaction.

Take a moment to select one or two areas of your life in which you would like to show more of your love for God. Ask God to show you how to do it appropriately and effectively. Listen until something I list grabs your attention. Then go with it for a few moments.

How could you show more of God’s love through:

1. Your employment?

2. Your skills?

3. Your family relationships?

4. Your money?

5. Your possessions? Don’t forget your transportation and communication devices.

6. Your education?

7. Your hobbies?

8. Your friendship circles?

Love God with all your very muchness! You’ll be glad you did. Amen.

[For posting on the Web, I have left out two illustrations of living our daily lives with God in the forefront, one illustration regarding a Christian plumber and one illustration provided live and impromptu by our youth ministries leader Scott Frame. Think about Christians you know who find creative ways to live out their Christian faith and witness].

Loving God with All Your Mind

Sermon delivered October 3, 2010

Deuteronomy 6:4-9; Mark 12:29-31

The Shema, the best known scripture passage in all Judaism, says that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, and might. When we study the range of meaning for each of the three Hebrew words translated heart, soul, and might, we discover that we could make the case that “mind” is included under each of the three words. It is clear that Moses, speaking for God, intended that this command engage the mind for he commanded that his readers/hearers teach these words to their children and that they talk of them at home and in the street, when they go to bed, and when they rise—and further that they should wear the words on their hands and foreheads and post them by their gates and doors. These words were to be the subject of a great deal of mental activity.

Even so, when Jesus reports these words, he expands them by inserting the phrase, “and with all your mind.” Jesus did not want us to miss what was already implied, that we are to focus our minds on loving God.

Why was Jesus so insistent on our loving God with our minds that he inserted the phrase, “and with all your mind” in the best known passage in Judaism?

Jesus is calling us to take our places in the great story, the story of God’s redeeming love for the children of this world, and he knew that we cannot take our places in that story and keep our faith through the tough times unless we understand the story. Loving God with all our minds means taking time to understand the great story. It is a mental activity that runs counter to all our day-to-day instincts and yet points to the fulfillment of our very deepest and best instincts. If we do not fully engage our minds with the great story, we will not get in the right story, we will not stick with the story to the victorious end, and we will not have the joy of becoming more than we can make of ourselves, becoming what only God can make of us as we live out our part in the story.

If being part of Christ’s church means to us that we are simply maintaining a small town institution where we see our friends and relatives, where we organize to do some good deeds, where we sing familiar songs and enjoy the comfort of familiar rituals, we will probably never discover what it is to become part of the great story, even though the songs and rituals are precisely about that great story.

Jesus wants more for us, far more for us than that. He wants us to find our place in the great story of redeeming love. He knows that we will not do that unless we engage our minds in the study of the Bible, unless we learn to see the threads that run from beginning to end of the Bible setting forth our calling.

That is why, in the forty days between his resurrection and ascension, Jesus devoted significant time to teaching the disciples to see his story and their story in all the Scriptures, beginning with Moses and all the prophets.

We need to be obsessed with that story, not as an end in itself, but as providing us with what we need to find our way and to stay on our way.

An important part of what loving God with all our minds means is taking time and energy to know the great story.

We need to know that we are called to be a kingdom of priests and a holy people, that we are baptized/immersed in Christ to follow Jesus the Royal Son of God, the Suffering Servant, the Ultimate Victor, to be ourselves royal children being restored to God’s image, self-giving servants showing Jesus’ costly live, connected even now to his ultimate victory, to form ourselves together as portable living temples of the Holy Spirit through which all kinds of people can encounter that living God, discover his power to answer prayer, and be covered by his gracious forgiveness, to accept our mission of bringing a new, creative Christian jubilee to our neighbors, a restoring of their hope that life can be better. The threads of our calling run all through the Bible. We need to know those threads and other major threads so that we can energetically and purposefully pursue them with discipline and focus.

I believe that loving God with all our minds means that we stop being so mentally lazy and start taking Bible study much more seriously.

Some of my favorite fiction was written by J. R. R. Tolkien, who by the way was a Christian and a Bible scholar as well as a fantasy writer. Tolkien’s story The Hobbit is a favorite with children, but the lengthy Lord of the Rings trilogy that follows, aimed at a bit more mature audience, is the greater work by far. Many of you who have not read the books have seen the movies, but it is far easier to miss the Christian themes in the movies; I doubt that the director understood them. To make matters short, all that is good in the Third Age of Middle Earth is threatened by the rise of the tyrant Sauron, Lord of the evil realm of Mordor. A more-or-less good hobbit named Bilbo Baggins had acquired a magic ring from a perverted hobbit, decadent beyond recognition as a hobbit, named Gollum, and had passed the ring on to his nephew Frodo Baggins. It turned out that the ring was a ring of power that tended to corrupt its owner, but that must be kept at all costs out of the hands of the evil Sauron. The only hope for the world was for the ring to be destroyed, but that could only be done by carrying the ring back into Sauron’s dark and threatening realm and casting it into the Cracks of Doom. The job fell to Frodo and his gardener Samwise Gamgee, two little halflings against the evil ruler about to conquer the world. Have you ever been there? At a seeming dead end in a dark and lonely place with no apparent light of hope? If you know the big story, you know that when things are dark for the faithful, the last word has not yet been spoken.

As we now join them a bit past midway through the story, they are entering evil and dangerous Mordor, something like marching into hell, in the company of their crafty guide Gollum. Don’t worry if you don’t catch all the references. I still don’t, and I read the whole thing through every five to ten years.

In a dark crevice between two great piers of rock they sat down: Frodo and Sam a little way within, and Gollum crouched on the ground near the opening. There the hobbits took what they expected would be their last meal before they went down into the Nameless Land, maybe the last meal they would ever eat together. After discussing the problem of lack of water in that realm,

Frodo: “I don’t like anything here at all, step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air, and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”

Sam: “Yes, that’s so. And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually--their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on--and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it would call a good end. You know, a good end like coming home and finding things all right, though not quite the same--like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”

Frodo: “I wonder, but I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any tale that you’re fond of. You may know or guess what kind of tale it is, happy ending or sad ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”

Sam: “No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a darker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale of course, and goes on beyond happiness into grief and beyond it--and the Silmaril went on and came to Earindil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got--you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady Galadriel gave you! Why to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! We’re in the same tale still! It’s still going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

Frodo: “No! They never end as tales, but the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended. Our part will end later--or sooner.”

Sam: “And then we shall have some rest and some sleep [laughing grimly]. And I mean just that, Mr. Frodo. I mean plain ordinary rest, and sleep, and waking up to a morning’s work in the garden. I’m afraid that’s all I’m hoping for all the time. All the big important plans are not for my sort. Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!’ And they’ll say: ‘Yes, that’s one of my favorite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn’t he, Dad?’ ‘Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that’s saying a lot.’”

Frodo: “It’s saying a lot too much.” [He laughed, a long clear laugh from his heart. Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again.] “Why, Sam, to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, Dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, Dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, Dad?’”

Sam: “Now, Mr. Frodo, you shouldn’t make fun. I was serious.”

Frodo: “So was I, Sam, and so I am. We’re going on a bit too fast. You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point, ‘Shut the book now, Dad; we don’t want to read anymore.’”

Sam: “Maybe, but I wouldn’t be one to say that. Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different. Why, even Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you anyway. And he used to like tales himself once, by his own account. I wonder if he think’s he’s the hero or the villain. [then calling] “Gollum! Would you like to be the hero—[muttering] now where’s he got to again?”

How about you? Would you like to be the hero? Don’t go running away. Run right into the story, not Tolkien’s story, but God’s story, the story that goes from Genesis to Revelation. If you want to be part of that story, you start by loving the Lord with all your mind, and then immersing yourself in the story. You will never be the same again, but you’ll be glad beyond the telling of it…in the end.

Lord’s Supper meditation: Here at this table, as we receive the bread and the cup, as we remember Jesus, we can say with Sam, “Why to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! We’re in the same tale still! It’s still going on. Don’t the great tales never end?” No, they don’t, Sam, no, they don’t. Certainly not if we become immersed in Jesus and he becomes part of us! That’s why we were baptized once. That’s why we come to this table week by week…to connect ourselves to the great story that still goes on and that has a grand ending beyond our present darkness.

Loving God with All Your Soul

Sermon delivered September 26, 2010

Matthew 6:25; 10:37-39; 16:24-27

The Greek word psyche (sookhay, which in English we pronounce sykee) can be translated into English according to context by many different words. Life, soul, and self are three of the possible translations. Jesus tells us that we must love God with all our psyche (our life, our soul, or our self). We need to remember that Jesus is quoting the most famous passage in the Old Testament where the equivalent Hebrew word is nephesh which has a very similar range of meanings. Whether in Greek or Hebrew, this word is not just some little, invisible part of us. In the passages I will read in this sermon, every time you hear life or soul, it means more than we might assume. It means our whole living, breathing, feeling, thinking, loving being.

But this sermon is not an essay on Greek and Hebrew words. It is about what we most love, about what we most trust, about what makes us most anxious, about what costs we are willing to pay, about what burdens we are willing to bear, about what rewards we are likely to receive. Listen closely to the Word of our Lord:

Mark 12:30 “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

What or who do you most love? You are in church, and so you know that the right answer is “God.” But how true is that really?

If you were not in church and it was not a preacher asking you, if instead it was your best friend, the friend with whom you can be totally honest with no fear of judgment, asking you, “What do you most love?,” what would your answer be?

Do you love God more than family, more than country, more than money, sex, or power, more than work, more than your vehicle, more than your latest toy, tool, or techno-gizmo, more than romance, more than your friends, more than entertainment, more than food or drink, more than feeling high, more than the Razorbacks? Uh-oh, there I went to meddling, and on a day when that is a sore subject (after the loss to Alabama).

Let’s be clear. Love is not a feeling. It is a deep commitment to the well-being of what or who is loved. The Bible repeatedly asks us to make that kind of deep, all-out, nothing-held-back commitment to the glory of God, to help the world see how holy, loving, good God is, how worthy of our deepest worship and service God is.

But that is often not the case even for people sitting in worship services. Shawn Wallace, the relatively new pastor of First Christian Church in Rogers, during his first summer was brave enough to serve as a counselor at our regional Chi Rho camp for sixth through eighth graders. He reports what he saw there. A tiny, short sixth grade boy fell head over heels for a tall and sweet 8^th grade girl. Besides the age difference, the height difference, and the maturity difference, there was the fact that the girl’s friends were aghast that she allowed this runt to show his admiration for her, but she was admirably undeterred in her kindness to the smitten young man. Not all was so admirable. Because the odd young couple sat directly in front of him, Shawn unavoidably watched during a worship service through the prayers, the songs, and the sermon that the boy’s entire body was continuously turned sideways toward this girl of his dreams, his love-struck eyes fixed on her every move and action.

He was missing what was far more important and was simply unaware of it. Shawn asks, Do we ever come to worship, sing the songs, pray the prayers, listen to the message, all the while centering our hearts and minds elsewhere…perhaps on someone with whom we think we are in love, but maybe it is our job or our anxieties, maybe it is on who just dared to say, “Amen,” or how we could have stated something better than someone leading worship. Indeed, there is a proper focus for the kind of undivided attention the sixth grade boy was paying to the eighth grade girl. When we worship God, we should be as enamored with God, as focused on Jesus, as the boy was with the young woman of his dreams. Nothing should be able to steal our attention from the One who in Jesus Christ has shown such receptive attention to us beyond all our deserving.

Matthew 10:37 “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Jesus has a knack for posing one sacred item against another. There are people and relationships that we really ought to love and treasure and honor. None are potentially more important than those with whom we are in family covenant. God ordained the marriage covenant to be a firm anchor around which healthy family life can be built and through which we can live out our loyalty to our Creator, and we are to model Christlike love in our relationship to our spouse. We are commanded to honor our parents and to care for them in their old age. We are commanded to nurture our children, training them up to live godly lives with a wise blend of discipline, teaching, and mutual enjoyment. Jesus is not taking any of that back when he asks us to love him even more than we love these cherished family members. Nor is Jesus being egotistical in wanting to be first in our hearts. It is not about him. It is about our need to get our priorities straight. If God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is not first in our hearts, nothing else will work right.

When Judy and I got married, like most of you, we did not have good and mature understanding of how to build a solid Christian marriage. We did a lot of things the wrong way, and scars on our hearts are the cost we paid. But one thing we had right, and without it our marriage would not have survived. We knew that we could not look to each other to fill the holes in our souls, that only God can do that, that we had to put God first. We know that even more clearly today. In our advanced years, we are still learning, but we know a lot more about how to let God fill those holes. We know a lot more about putting God first. The most loving thing we can do for our spouse, our parents, our children, or for anyone, is to love, honor, and obey God first, and then to help them see and experience God’s love coming back through us ever more deeply for themselves. Unless God is our first love, we will not have hisa full love to offer to others.

Matthew 10:38 “And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

There is an initial cost to putting God first. A person who puts God first will often be misunderstood and sometimes punished by the world. Jesus describes that cost as taking up our cross to follow him. He urges us to sit down and to count the cost before we set out on the path of discipleship. The rich young ruler had wealth, social standing, and religious expertise and influence. He had to be willing to junk those in order follow Jesus. He was not ready to pay the cost and walked away sadly. Jesus sadly watched him go. I want to think that he came back later. But we do not know that. Some people who walk away never come back. The things for which we walk away from putting Jesus first never fulfill what we hope from them. They are always disappointing in the end, painfully and bitterly disappointing, but sometimes it takes a lot of living to discover that. It is far better if we simply see from the first how surpassingly more worthwhile Jesus is. So far as I know, the Apostle Paul was never wealthy, but, prior to his awakening to Christ, he had social standing and religious expertise and influence equal to that of the rich young ruler. Yet when he actually met the crucified and risen Christ, he was so deeply impressed with the surpassing worth of Jesus that he junked his entire upwardly mobile life and accepted his calling to become apostle to the Gentiles, of all things the most reprehensible thing he could have imagined before. He put it this way in Philippians 3:7-8: “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” And in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Paul paid a real cost. There was social loss, emotional loss, physical loss to be paid. He was frequently beaten and jailed. In the end he was martyred. In deciding to follow Jesus, he really paid a price. But, after Jesus himself, no human being has more than the Apostle Paul to do with the fact that we Gentiles are gathered here this morning in the name of Jesus. At the end of his life, even as he was being poured out like a drink offering, he could be legitimately proud that he had fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith, and he could delight to know that he was departing to be with Christ in eternity. Oh, that we might share even a portion of his passion for Jesus! Paul, in losing his life for Christ, found his true life, his true soul, his true self.

Matthew 16:26 “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? 27 For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.”

If God is not the center of our life, our soul, our self, then we have sold God out for the pursuit of something that will ultimately disappoint us. If we have sold God out for passing emblems of worldly success, there will come the time when we are called to give account for where we have directed our attentions, energies, and aspirations in life. We will too late want back the one thing we have most needed, but have traded away for nothing that lasts.

Matthew 6:25 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?.... 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

What Jesus is saying is that our true and enduring psyche, our true and enduring life, soul, and self is found only when we surrender it to God’s reign. We give it away and it comes back to us loaded with blessings valuable beyond the measuring of them.

There is a great relief available to us when we put God first and seek first his reigning love, power, and righteousness. When we trust God, we are relieved from constantly worrying about lesser things. But more than that, there is in the end the great reward of a psyche, a life, a soul, a self, that cannot be taken away from us, not even by death.

Trade everything in to God and get back more than everything.

That sounds like a bargain too good to pass up. Go for it!

Perhaps, when yo professed your faith and walked into a baptistery and were immersed—or, if you were baptized in another tradition before you were a believer, but later were confirmed—perhaps you did not recognize that you were supposed to be dying to sin and self and coming alive to God, loving God above all else, loving God with your whole life and soul.

What do you do about that now? You claim the benefit of your baptism by redirecting your life to the total love of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—above all and with all. You say to God, “Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord to Thee…Take my love, my Lord I pour at Thy feet its treasure store; take myself and I will be ever, only, all for Thee.”