One of the miracles that happens in the life of a preacher each week is the preparation of the sermon. It never fails to amaze me that, amid the routine of the day, God manages to speak a special word for a particular congregation at a particular point in time. I can never predict when or how God will speak… or what God choose to say… but it always happens and I am always surprised and filled with wonder.
As I read through the four texts that the Revised Common Lectionary provides for this Sunday, I eliminated the passage from Hebrews as being too difficult and the passage from Mark as being too easy. That left me with Psalms and the passage from Ruth. I read close to fifty (50) pages of commentary materials on Ruth, explaining the history of the Jewish people, cultural aspects of marriage, inheritance, and family, and the meaning of the passage itself, but somehow, it did not speak to me. Several days passed with no major insight or inspiration. Then, as I was reading my personal devotions on Tuesday, the words on the pages of that book jumped out at me, slammed into the text from Mark in the lectionary for this Sunday, and cried, “Too easy? You think the Mark passage is too easy? For whom?” So, Mark it is.
Why did I think it was too easy? Well, it is pretty straight forward, don’t you think? Someone in the crowd asks Jesus what the most important commandment is… Jesus answers that it is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength”… and the man agrees with him. How simple can it be? We have all known this for most of our lives: God comes first and we are called to love God with all of our being. How many thousands of sermons have been preached on the need for us to give up the idolatry in our lives and focus our attention on God? What can I say today that is different… or new… or casts a new light on this worn-out passage from the gospel?
This was not even a new insight for the scribe or the disciples. Several Jewish rabbis had summarized all of the Law of Moses in these two commandments, believing that the first commandment… “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” … summed up the first five commandments of the Decalogue… the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, and that the second commandment… “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” … summed up the last five commandments. Jesus was not stating any radical departure from the Jewish faith in his summary. He was merely restating the position of Jewish leaders of his time. So, what is it that we can learn from this passage that will shed further light on Jesus or his ministry? What can we take away from this that we can apply to our own life?
Perhaps a starting point would be to share with you the story that I was studying in my personal devotions when lightning struck. I am currently rereading Carlo Carretto’s book, The God Who Comes, portions of which I have shared with our Session from time to time. It is a wonderful discussion of how God reveals himself to each person individually… how God comes into their lives. The narrative quotes many passages from scripture illustrating the many ways that God comes… and the writing is simple and so powerful. On, Tuesday, I was reading the story of Abraham and how God spoke to Abraham.
It has always amazed me that Abraham obeyed God. After all, who was God? At that time, God was unknown. There were many gods… so why listen to this one? And how did God pick Abraham? When you read Abraham’s story, God seems to have arbitrarily dropped out of the sky into this person’s life… and totally twisted it… sending him miles from home to a new place… and demanding total obedience in all things. And yet, Abraham loved God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his mind, and with all his strength. He loved God so much that he left behind everything and everyone that he knew to venture into the unknown on God’s command. He loved God so much that he was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, at God’s command… the son he had waited over 90 years of his life to conceive. Why would Ruth leave everything she knew to follow Naomi to a strange land? Easy? Who said this was easy? Could I do as much? What does it take to be totally committed to God? And how do we know that we have achieved it… or that we haven’t?
Perhaps you have heard the story of the chicken and the pig who went for a walk in the barnyard one morning. They were talking about commitment and the difference between contributing to something and being totally committed to it. “Let me see if I can help you understand it,” said the pig. “When it comes to providing breakfast to the farmer each morning, you and I have different levels of commitment. For him to have the eggs and bacon that he loves, you contribute, yes… but my contribution is an example of total commitment.”
It’s a humorous story to tell, but it is also a powerful illustration of commitment. What are we willing to sacrifice to put God before everything else in our lives… to love God with all of our heart… and with all of our soul… and with all of our mind… and with all of our strength? How far are we willing to go? Are we willing to venture into the unknown… as Abraham did… as Ruth did? That, I believe, takes faith.
I sometimes wonder how often the disciples got to see their families and friends after they left home to follow Jesus. We know that Jesus passed through some of those towns more than once in his three years of ministry. Did the disciples ever leave temporarily to drop in on Mom and Dad… to visit a friend that was ill… or attend the wedding of a brother or a sister? There was something about Jesus that tied them to him. Perhaps it was hope… hope for the future… hope for the poor… hope for themselves.
Carlo Carretto says that faith, hope and love are not three, but one… that they are all part and parcel of the same thing. “The first proof of love,” he says, “is to believe in the one loved.” So that, when we venture into the unknown, we believe that God is there before us, with all the love in which we were created… providing for our every need… as a lover for the beloved… as a father for a child. To believe that life with God will be… and is… infinitely better than life without God… that is our hope. But, despite all that we believe and all that we know, there is nothing that can replace faith and a willingness to trust in the Invisible… the Incomprehensible… the Incomparable… the Mysterious… the Unknown…God.
In the movie, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” Indiana Jones searches for the Holy Grail… that cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Through the centuries, people have believed that that cup holds special powers. Towards the end of the movie, when Indiana Jones finds the secret cave where the Holy Grail has been kept by the Knights Templar, he must cross a huge chasm to reach his goal. He cannot see there is an invisible bridge across the chasm. It blends into the rock around it so well that it cannot be seen from where Indiana Jones is standing. He must take his first step out into the chasm, not knowing whether he will plunge into the abyss… whether he will live or die. It is only after he takes that first step that he learns that the bridge exists and that he can safely cross the chasm.
We, too, have to take that first step into the unknown, trusting that the God who loves us is there and waits for us. The faith to take that first step is the evidence of our love for the God who first loved us and called us to be followers. It is evidence of the hope that we have in God… the hope that allows us to love God with all of our heart, and with all of our soul, and with all of our mind, and with all of our strength. So, love is born of hope, and hope is born of faith, and faith is born of love… the three are one and inseparable. They are like the twisted strands of the DNA helix that separately provide significant clues to life, but that together form life itself. Each part of the triad of faith, hope and love tells us something about the whole, but the whole is the experience of life with God… God at the core… God in the mix… and God surrounding all of life.
The sad thing is that we can understand this concept standing on the sidelines, as the scribe understood it in our story today. But we can’t experience it unless we are willing to take the plunge… to put our lives totally into God’s hands. You see, the scribe saw the wisdom of Jesus’ teaching and knew that it was a reflection of everything that he knew to be true about God from his own life of study of God’s word. But, in the end, the scribe chose not to leave his home, his family, his friends and all that he knew to follow Jesus. Like the chicken in our humorous story earlier, the scribe understood commitment, but he chose not live it, as the disciples lived it every day with Jesus.
So, how do we find that difference? What makes us willing to put our lives in God’s hands and to love God with all of our heart, and with all of our soul, and with all of our mind, and with all of our strength? According to Carlo Carretto, it is God who makes the first move. The God of the Bible becomes the God of faith when God comes into our lives as a real entity… not a story… not a parable, but a real presence. It is the God of creation who is miraculously revealed to us individually as a loving Father… or a redeeming Son… or a life-giving Spirit. Each person encounters God in his or her own unique way. From that revelation, which can occur in a mountaintop experience… or in the depths of despair… or at any point in between, comes our desire to love and our willingness to trust, and our joyful anticipation of the future.
But, lest we sit back and relax, waiting for God to do it all, we must realize that it is not just God who acts. According to the theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, the mystics of the Middle Ages believed that there was a hunger within every person that could only find fulfillment in God. The infinite God, they claimed, arouses in those who are created in God’s image an infinite passion that destroys everything that is finite and earthly unless and until it finds its rest in God. (Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 199) So, while God comes to us in God’s own time, we are incomplete without God and continually search for God in our lives. When God comes, that sense of completeness arouses in us a host of emotions. That encounter and subsequent life with God has been described by today’s Christians in many different ways. Students at Asbury Seminary interviewed 10,000 Christians about their encounter with God and their life with God. These are the words that they used to describe that experience: “joy, happiness, excitement, peace, contentment, relaxation, relief, release, freedom, acceptance, love, belonging, cleansed, or forgiven.” (Crandall, The Contagious Witness, 99)
So, how do we find this “God Who Comes?” How do we prepare for his coming? Many Christian writers agree that it is not possible to know God through reason alone. It is just not a “thinking” activity… like our scribe today was engaged in. Preparing to meet God is a quest. It is a quest that begins with a hunger deep down inside of us… something that tells us that something is missing from our lives. As we search for the part of us that is missing… that relationship with the One who created us in love and loves us still… we must spend time alone. We must spend time apart from all that would keep us from seeing God and sensing God’s presence. This is why the mystics chose to seclude themselves in monasteries. It was only when they eliminated the clutter from their everyday lives that they could see whether Christ was indeed standing at the door, knocking.
What a perfect time of the year to begin our search! In a month’s time, we begin the celebration of Advent, when the community of Christians comes together to prepare for the Lord’s coming. I want to encourage all of us to find the time this month to be alone… clearing the clutter of everyday life from our private space… searching for the God who is already searching for us. Easy? No, it’s not easy to do that at this time of year… but it is “do-able.” And, after we do it, we can then join the rest of the church in preparing for “The God Who Comes” – the One who is coming… the One who has already come… and the One who will always be coming – preparing to love that One with all of our heart, and with all of our soul, and with all of our mind, and with all of our strength. Amen.
Mark 12:28-34; Ruth 1:1-18