November 1, 2009 Sermon

“Getting Warm” Mark 12:28-34 Lawrence Jackman

“Love God and do as you please.” I first heard those words from Arthur. Don’t start your memory banks running on Arthur. You are not supposed to know him and he isn’t famous. I went to both college and to seminary with the good reverend. We were in our Middler year at Louisville Seminary and working at a state hospital when five of us were riding home together on a Monday evening and somehow we were talking about “the rules of the faith”.

Arthur put forth the proposition that there were not so many rules as the rest of us thought. He quoted Augustine’s famous line, “Love God and do as you please.” It was understandable that Arthur might say this. He was a 60’s wild child…probably a little before his time. He knew more loopholes in the biblical system than most of us ever dreamed of. Whatever he quoted always seemed to be a bit self serving and could always be a pretext for him doing most anything he wanted. Never mind the of perceived limitations to Christian behavior. It was normal for Arthur Lee. What was disconcerting was that an icon of the Christian faith said it way back in the fourth century. Augustine, after all, was not some wild child. Well…he was pretty much a wild child if the truth were known. But like anyone back there far enough we guarded ourselves from the truth.

As I remember Arthur left seminary with the same deep conviction that he shared with us in the car that day. He went to Alaska to take a church which seemed not to warm to his observation about the rules of the Kingdom. He popped up again in my awareness in coal country in Illinois. There too, curse the luck, people did not seem to understand his brand of Christian life. Last I heard of him, he was working in Arkansas as a therapist in a mental health clinic. He was probably still looking for someone to agree with his fundamental understanding of Christian life. Everyone could listen to the “Love God” part. It was just he “do as you please” that they couldn’t appreciate.

This passage from Mark’s Gospel that we read this morning might give Arthur some solace. My guess is that I have preached this passage someplace between 8 and 15 times over the years. I don’t think I ever realized how very much it was having Jesus say, “Love God, do as you please. And, of course, love your neighbor too.” This is a pretty powerful, if incredibly simple, message.

Jesus is holding a debate sort of conversation with some Sadducees and he was being overheard by a scribe. The scribe eave drops enough to be impressed with Jesus holding his own with the others. He approaches. In sincere curiosity he asks he question. “Teacher, what it the prototypical commandment?”

Just as we do, the scribe lived in a world full of variety for answers to almost anything and particularly for things religious. He sought a prime commandment to cut through the maze of viewpoints. He looked for one answer which would bring order and sense to the rest of religious life. I feel a real kinship with this guy because I am always testing what I would call my “prime metaphor”—the one image or story which is the yardstick with which I measure experience and all other stories which purport to be fact.

So Jesus answers. “Here is the prototype. Measure everything by this. Love the One God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength. And, secondarily, love your neighbor as yourself.”

So, if it is really that simple, then why is it hard?

Maybe it is worth noting two parenthetical points in this narrative. One is that the scribe does not precisely quote back to Jesus what was said to him. He, according to Mark, changes the work for “mind”. Translated to English the word Jesus uses is translated “mind”. The word that the Scribe says back translates to “understanding”. That point, made by some, is pretty insignificant.

The second point that some discuss is the fact that Jesus says to the scribe, “you are close to the Kingdom”. Does that mean he is only part way there? Not really. It is like playing blind man’s bluff when you were a kid. We told the player, “you are getting warm.” “You are getting hot.” It wasn’t that we were trying to say, “you only have it half right.” We were saying, and Jesus was saying, “you are just about to solve this problem”. It is not significant. Jesus is telling the scribe, “You got it.”

It is that simple. Jesus literally calls this two sentence statement the prototype of the commandments. This is the foundation on which a Godly life is based. In the conversations we are having about the “Unbinding the Gospel” have included the notion that in the end we are called to “fall in love with God”.

That is the incredible message of Mark 12. And what is it like to be in love? It is a whole bunch of things that we never actually talk about in religious conversation. It is too human to turn about and apply to our religious lives.

Being “in love” takes a lot of stuff we talk about in church straight out of play. We say we are in church to gain a reward. When we are “in love” rewards are totally secondary and sometimes they are not even present. We sometimes say in church that God must be the best, or the most wonderful, or the most potent. When we are “in love” those are not really meaningful categories.

When we pledge love we say it will be “in sickness, in poorer conditions, and worse conditions.” When we are “in love” we say, you are so much TO ME, and if no one agrees with me, it doesn’t matter. We say, “you need not be the most handsome, the most beautiful, the most graceful, the one that everyone envies, or anything else. We only say, “I love you.”

Strangely enough we seem to say something quite different when we talk of God. We say, implicitly, I love you because you do the most for me, because you have the gifts that I want, because you are the biggest/best/only game in town God that I know. Seems like to me, that God would want at least the unreserved love that we offer to our family, spouses and those close to us. That is the definition of love that Jesus offers. And if someone is falling short of that sort of offering, I have a feeling it is not the scribe.

The only reason that this is hard is because we complicate it. We make it a way more complex message than it is.

We make it way more complicated because the fear of intimacy is great. Beneath every one of life’s requests for intimacy is a demand that we simply put ourselves on the line and accept the vulnerability that is going to be there.

It is easy to love a child when they are young, stay within arm’s length and we will not have to risk much at all about their independent behavior. Now, my older grandchildren are older—they are still wonderfully appealing, but they are now way past arm’s reach. They present the possibility of offering pain every time they take a risk. It is no longer easy to love them as it was when we could keep them safe. Yet, still, it is impossible not to love..

When we are older and seek a partner for life, we know the incredible risk involved. We know that means we will hurt in ways that we can’t even dream of. We know when we make the affirmations of love that they are for better and for worse, in health and in sickness, in prosperity and in want. We know all this and still risk all that for the gift of intimacy.

We are called on today to remember the looses we have. It is All Saints day—a day we are called to remember all the times we bet everything on love. We acknowledge that every time we did that the risk ended in pain and grief.

This day is to remind us also that they is an Ultimate Love which binds us together even in the face of death. The love of our Creator holds us always. The Love of Our Creator continues to beckon and invite us to fall in Love with God. When that happens, nothing else matters.