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Ps.90:1-2 / Deut.34:1-12 / Matt.22:34-46
 Maybe when you were young and in love you said to somebody, “I love you with all my heart.” At that stage of infatuation, we will do anything to be with our beloved: drive long distances, quit our job and move to another city, risk being disowned by our parents. They’re still married today, but when we were in college, two of my best friends, Mindy and Fred, wanted desperately to spend the night together without anyone knowing, so they rolled out their sleeping bags in a secret place in Fred’s dormitory. The next morning, they slept too late and the janitor discovered them in the broom closet and they almost got expelled. But nothing else matters when we love somebody with all our heart.
Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart.
My first sense of God––not my first “definition” of God, but my first “sense” of God––was the feeling I got as a four-year-old on the swing in our backyard before I went to kindergarten and got socialized. I am the oldest child, so it was just me, and I used to love to swing by myself. Looking back, swinging was my first experience of transcen-dental meditation, and the movement itself was my mantra. The world around me would blur into swirling shapes and colors, but on the inside I was still me, and I felt the flow of the Spirit, both within me and beyond me: a Spirit that I would later learn to call God.
“But wait,” someone here may be thinking, “this sounds like paganism. He’s not saying that he first met God on the day that he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal lord and savior.” That’s right. I’m not. But don’t get me wrong. I grew up in the kind of family and town in which Jesus Christ was talked about all the time. I don’t know if the first song I learned as a toddler was Jesus Loves Me or Row, Row, Row Your Boat, but Jesus was certainly integrated into me right from the start of my life. And I do think that, liberal or conservative, “Jesus-talk” is a language we learn to describe something real that happens in us, with us, and through us...a constant happening that we call “God.”
Psalm 8 puts it this way:
O YHW/H, our God, the moon and the stars are the works of your fingers!
Out of the mouths of babes and infants come your praises.
What the psalmist is saying is that the enormity of the universe and the majesty of the power behind it are so beyond our ability to describe with mere words and religious concepts that the murmuring of a baby is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the reality of God. The Message translation puts Psalm 8 this way:
YHW/H, brilliant God,
nursing infants gurgle choruses about you;
kids shouting on the playground are songs of praise.
I look up in the night, dark and enormous, and see your
sky-jewelry twinkling, and I wonder...
So it is important to remind ourselves that talking about God is not God. Our doctrines and dogmas––including “born again” and “accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior”––those words and phrases are not God. They are human constructs that serve no purpose unless they point beyond themselves toward a God that is beyond our comprehension and ability to describe. If certain words and phrases become sacred cows that are unquestionable, they become religious idols, and we would be better off gurgling like babies than repeating those clichés because gurgling is a truer, purer form of worship. It was the idolatry of intellectualism that drove people away from mainline Protestant churches 30 years ago because it leaves people with a deep spiritual hunger for something real, something personal, something heart-felt. What we call spirituality.
I have a friend named Ruth who is now a pastor with an extraordinary gift for music. When people ask Ruth how she became a pastor, she talks about growing up in a small town with two alcoholic parents. Every night the drinking would start at the dinner table and descend into drunken yelling and fighting. Ruth’s parents did not know God, so they never took her to church. But there was a little white wooden church down the street and Ruth, who was an only child, would escape the chaos and violence in her house by running to that church and sitting in its welcoming peaceful silence alone.
One day after school, the pastor found her there, poking at the keys of the grand piano. He knew what went on at her house, so, even though she was only 10, he gave her a key to the church. Ruth would come alone almost every evening, light the candles in the sanctuary, and let the silent peace of the church embrace her. (This peace beyond words is “spirituality.”) Over time, she taught herself to play the piano. Eventually she started going to the church on Sunday mornings on her own. She says that her parents would have forbidden her to go had they known—they were bitter people who said that church is nothing but a con-job trying to get your money. But on Sunday mornings, her parents were always hung-over and passed-out on the sofa and sometimes the floor. So she would quietly sneak out and go to church. There she found an alternative home that lovingly nurtured in her a sense of self and a sense of God that shaped who she became. And now when she is asked how she became a pastor, she always begins by talking about the sanctuary, the refuge that she found in that little white wooden church in her small town where she found the peace and spiritual security that she came to know as God.
Moses also found sanctuary in his love for God and God’s love for him. All summer we have followed the life of Moses, from his birth beside the Nile, to the burning bush in which he heard God’s call to liberate his people, to leading the Hebrews through the wilderness and all their complaining. Today’s Hebrew lesson is the final story from Moses’ life, as he climbs Mount Nebo and dies. Although he cannot make it across the Jordan River, he is able to see his promised land, from north to south all the way to the sea. I think this story is the Spirit’s way of putting the concept of a “promised land” into perspective. It teaches us that our spiritual home is not a place. Our spiritual home is God. Moses had always found sanctuary in his love relationship with God, and now he dies into God as well. The moral of the story is that our true home is transportable, so that, whether we move from one place to another or even die, God is still our home. Psalm 90 puts it this way:
YHW/H, it seems you have been our home forever––
long before the mountains were born,
long before you brought earth itself to birth––
from “once upon a time” to “kingdom come”––you are God.
For those of us who are Christian, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ provides our primary revelation of who God is. Notice I said “primary” revelation, not the only revelation. Mainline Christianity has always taught that God is revealed to us in many ways (in nature and art, in family and community, and, yes, in other religions) but that, for us, the primary revelation of “who God is” comes through Jesus Christ.
And so it is that our gospel lesson today is Jesus teaching us that the greatest commandment is that each of us should love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul. Most of us are so familiar with those words that we don’t hear them anymore, so I like The Message translation, just to jar us to attention: “Love YHW/H your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.” We’re used to hearing “love God with all your mind,” so it helps to hear that we are to love God with all our intelligence.
I sometimes shock people by saying that the reason I committed to being a Christian was because Christianity has such a strong history of intellectual study and self-critique. That shows my age. When I was young and went to the Christian section of a bookstore, I would see books by the intellectual giants of Western Civilization: Saint Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Joan Chittister. Today, since Evangelicalism has become the dominant religion in America, when I go to a “Christian bookstore,” all I can find are books with titles like Dieting for Jesus, How the Christian Woman Can Make Her Man Happy by Submitting in All Things, and It Takes a Family by that great theologian, Rick Santorum. But when I was growing up and going to school, we learned to love God with the intellectual rigor of our minds.
That started for me as a youngster in Confirmation, which was two years of Wednesday classes after school during 8th and 9th grade. In fact, this story about Moses dying on Mount Nebo has a special place in my heart in terms of learning to love God with all my mind, because it was while studying this story in confirmation class that I first learned to approach the Bible critically. That day my youth pastor—who was a cool young intern from the local seminary—asked us, “If tradition says that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, how could he have written this story about his own death?” I still remember that moment because a little light bulb turned on above my head. Far from destroying my faith, I became more curious about our faith as I realized that things were a lot more interesting and complex than so-called “biblical literalism.” Learning an intelligent approach to the Bible made me love God all the more. Today I continue to read books about our faith as I continue to grow in loving God with all my intelligence.
Jesus also said that we should love God with all our hearts, which The Message translates as “all our passion.” I suppose the two things that people get most passionate about are religion and politics, which may be why they are so easily confused…and can so easily lead us into idolatry if our politics become our god. Sometimes newcomers to the UCC don’t understand our long tradition of gospel activism, such as working for the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, gay rights and solidarity with the poor. So I want to take a moment to try to clarify our UCC tradition and my own personal faith.
My mom and dad were strong Republicans…and very loving parents…so I know that Republicans can be loving. That’s why I don’t care if you identify as Republican or Democratic. What I do care about is gay kids committing suicide because of what they hear from evangelicals, and straight kids becoming bullies because of what they hear from politicians. I care about voting rights being taken away from Americans-of-color through the new voter ID laws and about the Colorado Secretary of State taking away absentee ballots from Colorado soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. I care about the pro-posed federal law that will define “personhood” as beginning at conception, which will outlaw birth control pills and make women who miscarry liable for murder prosecution. I care about the environment and climate change. I care that when I was a kid in 1980, the top 1% had 9% of the income in our country and now that 1% has 43% of our country’s wealth. I care about the relentless effort to privatize social security, which will transfer our country’s retirement savings from the US Treasury to the Wall Street bankers.
I care about these issues—passionately—because I believe that God cares about them. That’s what I learn from Jesus Christ. So I don’t care if you call yourself a Republican or a Democrat. What I do care about is what your vote does to children in poverty; to women, people of color, and people serving overseas; to marriage equality, economic fairness, and the quality of life for our seniors. Life is about more than how much money we can grab for ourselves. It’s about building community by loving our neighbors as well as we love ourselves. That’s not preaching politics. It’s preaching Jesus Christ who taught us to love God (and our neighbors) with all our passion.
But passionate as we can become about the “organized ethics” called politics, we must be careful not to let our political ideology turn into an idol, something we worship. Important as they may be, politics are transient, temporary and limited. That’s the lesson of Mount Nebo. We may see the vision of a perfect society, of a promised land, but we are never going to get their personally. There will always be more to do, and all we can do is to play our part in the span of one lifetime. Much as we love this life, our own life-stories will not end peacefully unless we realize that our real home is God.
Sometimes I make mistakes or get distracted or may sound too much like an Old Testament prophet, but I do love God with all my heart. God includes but is more than politics, nature, or religion. We may come from a loving family and realized God for the first time while swinging in the backyard, or we may come from a dysfunctional family and meet God playing the piano in the candlelight of a neighborhood church. But how-ever we first meet God, Jesus calls us to love God with all our soul, which The Message translates as loving God “with all our prayer.” I believe that the spirituality called prayer can be a baby gurgling, or a kid swinging or playing the piano, or a grownup gardening or building something in our workshop. Prayer can also be…praying! However we do it, prayer is the expression of our soul, our whole self, as we reach out from inside ourselves to that which is beyond us, our true home. Here’s a good prayer:
YHW/H, it seems you’ve been our home forever––
long before the mountains were born,
long before you brought earth itself to birth––
from “once upon a time” to “kingdom come”––you are God.
Pastor Dan Geslin
6th Avenue UCC
25 Ordinary 11 |
