Preached June 22, 2002, still seems worth saying
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be God’s person and to
love God. I also wanted to be safe and
loved and have friends and power and a lot of other things, too. I’ve spent my whole life working on the
process of getting all these in order, because I know that the most important
of them is loving God. Loving God wholeheartedly is a journey for me, and I
believe someday it will be a resting place.
Jesus identified the two great commandments (Matthew 25): the
greatest is loving God with one’s whole heart, mind, strength and the second is
loving one’s neighbor. This particular sermon is about loving God. We’ll approach this through two stories: Adam and Eve and the rich young ruler, all of
whom failed to love God wholeheartedly.
Genesis
2 and 3 tells the story of the Garden of Eden, a place where God put fruit
trees, a river, the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil. God told Adam that he was free to
enjoy all things in the garden except one; God warned Adam that in the day he
ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would die. God made
animals as companions for Adam, and Eve as his helper and partner; when Adam
saw Eve, he said, “Shazzam!” He recognized that she shared his essential
characteristics. The innocence of Eden
is symbolized in the fact of their unashamed nakedness before each other and
God, who came to visit them in the garden.
It
seems clear that from the beginning what God wanted from humans was—and is—for
them to choose to love God. The Old
Testament and New Testament are full of images for the relationship between God
and humans that emphasize the personal loving intimacy God wants: Husband and wife, mother and infant, father
and son, hen and chicks, friends. Interestingly, however, when God made humans
and called them very good, giving them the earth to care for and enjoy, God
also gave humans freedom. One aspect of
freedom is the ability to imagine things being different from the way they are
and to choose that option over the facts of the present. Another aspect of
freedom is to look at all the evidence of surrounding love and choose something
else.
In
the New Testament, Matthew 19:16-26, we read about the encounter between a rich
young man and Jesus. The young man asked
the question we all have: “What good
deed must I do to have eternal life.” Jesus replied to him, “If you want to
enter into life, keep the commandments.”
Intelligently, the young man asked another question: “Which ones?”
Jesus narrowed the various commandments of the Old Testament down to the
following: “Don’t murder, don’t commit
adultery, don’t steal, don’t say false things; honor your parents, and, last
but not least, love your neighbor as yourself.”
These are all quotations from the Jewish law, the last from Leviticus
19:16. The young man said, “I’ve kept all these; what do I still lack?” Jesus said, “If you want to be perfect, sell
your possessions and give the money to the poor; this means you know your
treasure is in heaven; then come, follow me.”
This
young man has a life marked by innocence and pleasant circumstances.He has done no harm and has also done active
good in his world. But he feels that
something is lacking. He wants to make
sure he has a good life for eternity. Jesus tells him one thing he can do to be
perfect (or complete), which will make sure his eternity is happy.
There
are some obvious differences between these two situations. Adam and Eve were in paradise with only one
prohibition; the rich young man was in an occupied country with diverse social
classes and ethnic groups and had a lot of prohibitions. Adam and Eve’s test was to keep from doing
something; the rich young man’s test was to do something radical.
What
seems similar, however, is important. In both cases, people had so much going for them, so much to be thankful
for, so many advantages. In both cases,
people wanted to make sure they had everything they could possibly want. In both cases, the people were willing to
risk losing their relationship with God because they wanted something else more
than they wanted that relationship. Adam
and Eve decided they wanted to be like God, to be the ones who separate good and evil, even if
that separated them from God.
The rich young man wanted to live a good life and the good life, and was
willing to do one more good thing to ensure a good future life, but he wasn’t
willing to focus his desire on wanting God.
God has seen that for the world to be good, for love to be real, the
option must exist for people to choose something else. Even though God set things up so that humans can
be satisfied only by knowing God intimately, God also embedded in the nature of
the universe the possibility that humans can choose against relationship. The universe has gaps, dangers, prohibitions,
and so on, which make that choice real.
God
challenged Adam and Eve to enjoy everything around them including God except
one thing. Adam and Eve chose the
knowledge of good and evil over knowing God intimately and left the Garden in sorrow.
Jesus challenged the rich young man to risk everything that made him
comfortable and safe on a relationship with Jesus. The young man went away in sorrow, because he
was rich. In some ways the choices are opposite, but at the core all three
faced the question of whether they were willing to trust in God’s love for them and love God unconditionally or whether they needed to take matters into their own hands.
What
does it look like to love God wholeheartedly and unconditionally? St. Paul in I Corinthians 13 gives us a picture
of love that we can try on here. If we
love God, we are patient with God, kind to God (kindness meaning the sort of
generosity and loyalty we feel for family in its root); we aren’t envious of God; we don’t boast to God; we
don’t assume we know more than God, and we don’t treat God like an inferior
with no feelings. If we love God, we don’t insist on our own way; we aren’t
irritable or resentful toward God; we don’t enjoy getting away with doing
wrong, but we rejoice when God tells us the truth and helps us live truly. Our
love for God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures
all things. This love never ends.
All
good gifts around us are sent from heaven above. The world is intricate, homey, grand, and
improbable—all reasons we might want to love the one who made it and put us
here. However, it’s as if the story of Adam and Eve or the rich young man is
reenacted in each human being.
Even
though so much around us is good, we often do not love God wholeheartedly. We want something more than we want to love God. We do not trust in God’s goodness and wholehearted love for
us, and we are therefore open to the temptation to trust ourselves
instead. “What good deed can we do to
have eternal life?”
We
tend to think that if we had their chances we’d make better choices, but the
evidence is against us. Think about all
that we have that we would put in the category of blessings. The fact that our bodies and our cars and
gravity and the general peacefulness of our state and town have allowed us to
be here are things we generally take for granted. When I read in Oliver Sacks’s
book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat about the varieties of ways
the brain can malfunction, I began to sense the enormous blessing it is when so
much in the brain goes right for such long periods of time. When I consider how many distracted people
are driving cars, I am amazed that so few of them run into each other. When I think about how much evil humans can do
and how often they choose to do good instead, I can see that we are surrounded
by evidence of God’s love and can even see its traces in ourselves when we
choose kindness over cruelty or forgiveness over resentment.
St.
Paul said that God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, and
that in him all things hold together.
Why don’t we label all the things that go right as evidence of God’s
love for us? When so much is good, why do we find it difficult to love God
wholeheartedly? Instead, we focus on negatives—what we can’t have, what we
can’t get rid of.
I’m
not talking primarily to those who don’t love God because they have never
wondered, considered, or believed that there is a God.
Some
of us suspect or believe that there is a God, but God is above it all; God
doesn’t want or need our love, and God isn’t paying attention to us. God sees us, if God is looking this way, at
best from a distance. It’s hard to get interested in loving a God like
that. It’s like loving a force
field. I hope that if there is anyone reading this who is like either of these, he or she might be moved to say: “God, if you’re out there somewhere, let me know.”
Even those who believe in a
personal God need to realize that there is a sense in which God transcends our
whole experience of life, the universe, and everything. We can’t pin God to a board and examine every
aspect of the nature of God so that we can predict God’s next move. God remains mysterious, even when we have the
Bible and countless records of people who have experiences they attribute to
God’s activity in their lives.
We
may even prefer to believe that God is distant and uninvolved on a daily basis
because we see that sometimes bad people live well and long while good people
suffer and die young. If the universe
tells us that God is all powerful, and our experience tells us that bad things
happen to good people, it becomes very difficult to want a close relationship
with a God who doesn’t act like a superhero, at least not predictably. It is more difficult to hold together the
idea that God is all powerful with the ideas that God is all good and all
loving than it is to believe only one of the options.
We
may find it hard to love God wholeheartedly because we think God is expecting a
lot from us but doesn’t look out for us very well. We are astonished and feel betrayed when
something goes wrong, especially when we’ve tried to be good. It is little comfort to believe in a
personal, involved God who doesn’t use power and love to prevent all sorrow,
pain, untimely death, destruction, and evil.
Another
barrier to loving God is that we know we’ve done something God won’t like and
therefore God can’t or won’t love us.
When we do something we know in our stomachs is wrong, we become afraid
of being found out, we’re ashamed, and we hide.
Sometimes we hide by creating smokescreens of self-justification;
sometimes we hide in activities that distract us from thinking. There are lots of ways to hide from God, and
while we’re hiding, we’re not loving God wholeheartedly.
We
may find it hard to love God because God allows our own actions and the actions
of others combined with the laws of nature to have consequences that are
terrible. Though I think God works hard
to distract people from doing wrong by attracting them to good things, when
people choose to be abusive, hateful, murderous, or even when they do harm out
of ignorance or carelessness, God permits horrors to occur.
I
want to acknowledge all these difficulties, these barriers in the way of loving
God wholeheartedly. We may see God as
distant, or unfair, or untrustworthy. In
fact, even when our own lives are happy, when we see others suffer, we may
doubt that God is both loving and powerful. At one point in my own life, I was
angry with God to the point of despair.
A friend said, “You know, sometime you’ll just have to forgive
God.” Despite the preposterous sound of
this, I said, “I forgive you, God, for not living up to my expectations.” It
was helpful.
I
want to point out the ends of the stories we started with to suggest why we can
trust in God’s love.
If
the Bible is reliable about God, it’s clear that God wants to get personal: for
instance, God’s idea of paradise is to visit Adam and Eve in person and give
them everything they need, including the freedom to choose something else;
Jesus wants nothing more than for that rich young man to come with him.
Furthermore, after Adam and Eve choose knowledge over God, the response is not
immediate death, though something dies, I think; instead, the evidence of the
story is that God continues to love them: God provides clothing and food and occupation for them, promises them
children, and continues to be available to them in relationship. In fact, Eve acknowledges this when she has
her first child, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” God also brings them into the open and makes them tell what they’ve done. Even though
they blame others for their own fall, being partly honest is better than
hiding, and those who can be honest and take responsibility will find it easier
to believe that God still loves them.
God continues to love them, and that includes allowing them to
experience the consequences of their choice to know good and evil.
Similarly,
Jesus makes clear that God remains committed to the human, even when the human
makes the wrong choice. The gospel of
Mark includes the detail that Jesus loves the rich young man. When the rich
young man hangs his head and walks away, Jesus says, “It will be hard for a
rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle, in fact.” The disciples, astounded, ask, “Who then
can be saved?” Jesus replies, “For
mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” God still
intends to work on or with the rich young man.
The greatest commandment is to love God with our whole
selves—heart, strength, mind. What Jesus
said about the rich young man is true for all of us: with mortals it is
impossible. Our main difficulty in
loving God is our own dividedness. Is
loving God something we really want to do more than anything else? If we do want to love God, we can tell we are
moving in the right direction when patience, kindness, contentment, humility,
courtesy, honesty, and commitment are what we want to share with God. We give
evidence of loving God when we act or refrain from action just because we think
that’s what God wants from us. We can
choose to move toward loving God, and God will take our choices and make them
add up to love. As Jesus concluded, with God all things are possible.
