Hidden
Gems
5.
“Beloving God”
Matthew
22:34-40
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
July
24, 2011
Sacrament
of Holy Communion
Return to the Sermon Archives Page
The
“hidden gem” I want to hold up to the light today is not so much the
scripture passage itself that we just have read, for it is one of the most
familiar in the Bible. The hidden
gem is what we experience in our lives when we do what it says:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and
with all your mind…And love your neighbor as yourself.”
Many
times when people are asked what makes one a Christian, they respond by talking
about what they believe. Believing
the right things about God and Jesus is what makes a person a “good
Christian,” they say. Thus the
incessant internecine warfare between Christians as groups within the fold
assert the superiority of their theological convictions.
(Thank goodness that I and we never engage in such!)
Quite literally, many see “right beliefs” as a matter of eternal life
and death.
In
a helpful discussion in his book entitled Speaking
Christian, Marcus Borg says that prior to the 1600s and the onset of the
Reformation with its theological turbulence and then subsequently the
Enlightenment and its leap into rationality, in English the verb “to
believe” always had a person as its direct object, not a statement.
It had nothing to do with believing that a particular claim was true or
not, but more the sense of what we mean when we say to someone, “I believe in you.”
The
preposition “in” is significant. To
believe in someone is not the same as believing him or her.
Believing someone is to claim that what someone says is true.
But to say “I believe in you” is to have confidence in that person,
to trust that person. In a Christian
context, believing meant having confidence in God and Jesus, trusting God and
Jesus.
The
word “believe” comes from the Old English be
loef which means “to hold dear.” From
the Old English it is not a far jump to see the similarity to our word “belove.”
To believe in someone meant not only being confident in that person and
trusting that person, but also holding that person dear, to belove him or her.
For most of the years of our Christian faith, believing
and beloving have been synonyms.
So
until the 1600s, to believe in God meant to belove God.
Think of the difference this makes. To
believe in God does not mean believing that certain statements and claims about
God are true, but to belove God. To
believe in Jesus does not mean to believe that a set of statements or claims
about Jesus are true, but to belove Jesus.
We
can see in the Apostles’ Creed, for instance, how this meaning was regnant in
formative Christianity. The Latin
roots of the word credo with which the
creed begins and which is translated “I believe in…” (and from which we
get the word “creed”) meant, “I give my heart to…”
So, the creed that begins, “I believe in God the Father Almighty…”
meant, in reality, “I give my heart to
God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and I give my heart to Jesus
Christ his only Son our Lord…” And
later in the creed, “I give my heart to
the Holy Ghost…”
Giving
one’s heart was not simply a matter of emotions or feelings.
Giving one’s heart referred then and does now to the self at its
deepest level. To whom do you give
your heart? To whom do you commit
yourself? Whom do you belove?
To believe in someone meant to belove someone.
For much of Christian history, to believe in God meant to belove God.
Thus,
our hidden gem this week is to be found in the actual practice of our gospel
text. When Jesus spoke about the
great commandment, he did not give us a list of theological statements to be
believed as true. Rather, “You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all
your mind…and your neighbor as yourself.”
This text is a direct quotation from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy
and thus, both for Christians and our Jewish forbears, believing is beloving,
loving, God.
So
we can see that what we often mean today by “believing” is a distortion of
ancient and original Christian and biblical meanings.
It is the difference between believing that
certain statements about God and Jesus are true and beloving God.
The sorry thing is that many contemporary Christians think that believing
the right things about God and Jesus is what “saves” us.
In truth, Christians have been fighting about belief statements for
centuries with little transformative or life-giving effect.
But beloving God transforms everything.
So
how do we belove God?
First,
by spending time with God. That is
what we do with people we love. God
is not a person, but Spirit, and that is to our advantage for Spirit is
everywhere present. Spending time
with God is attending to God. What
good does it do to affirm theological truth statements about God if we do not
spend time with God?
Do
you spend time in the scripture, asking God the Spirit to meet you there?
Do you spend time in prayer, not afraid of the silence in which you may
come to “hear” God speaking to you? Are
you regular in your worship of God so that you are opened to the ways and means
of God and thus do not miss the revelations of God as they come to you in your
life? Do you spend time with other
people who spend time with God?
How
do we belove God?
By
caring for what and whom God cares about. When
we love someone and he or she cares passionately about something, do we not try
to learn something about it ourselves and appreciate it and perhaps participate?
Jesus gives us a really clear picture of what and whom God cares about.
God cares passionately about God’s children, all of them, and justice
and mercy and generosity and hospitality. Here
is one of scripture’s most haunting sentences:
In 1 John, we read, “Those who
say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars, for those
who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom
they have not seen.”
In
the climactic conclusion of the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus said to those
whom he called righteous, “I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me
something to drink; I was a stranger and you welcomed me; I was naked and you
gave me clothing; I was sick and you took care of me; I was in prison and you
visited me.” And these humble
people said, “When? When did we do
those things?” To which Jesus
replied, “When you did it to one of the
least of these who also are members of my family, you did it to me.”
Administering
our church’s Samaritan Fund is sometimes a troubling experience for me.
When the “least of these” come off the street – and least, by the
way, in the extent to which they are materially blessed, not in their value to
God – it is in my heart to treat each person with equanimity and grace and
respect. But, to my dismay and
embarrassment, I would not be telling the truth if I said I always succeeded.
I have my less elegant moments and there are times when someone rubs me
the wrong way or is too presumptuous for my liking or obviously is telling me a
story that is not true and I hold back on the gift.
I hardly ever send anyone away without something, but there are times
when I am miserly in what I give. There
are times when I give someone something of a workover.
And then they leave and I go back to my desk and I am so chagrined with
myself. There I am working on a
sermon on love or grace and I hassled someone who gets hassled all the time in
life. I gave someone a hard time
whose life is comprised of hard times. And
I realize again in those moments that loving God has little to do with believing
or proclaiming the right dogma and everything with loving my neighbors whom God
loves.
How
do we belove God?
By
accepting God’s love for us into our lives.
For some of us, this might be the hardest of all.
Consciously or subconsciously, we do not feel as though we are worthy of
God’s love. But God makes us so.
What can make us more worthy than that the God of heaven and earth
chooses to love us?
Moses
was a murderer, David and adulterer, Paul a persecutor, and Peter a betrayer.
And still God loved each of them and used them mightily in the unfolding
of God’s kingdom.
It
reminds me of the story, surely you’ve heard it, of the man who had twelve
children and one day a friend of his asked him, “Joe, do you have a favorite?
Do you love any of your children the most?”
Joe immediately said, “No, of course not. I
love all of my children.” But then
he paused and said, “Well, Linda is addicted to drugs and it is ruining her
life and she cannot seem to stop. I
cry at night about Linda. I think I
love her most of all.” But then he
said, “Scott was born with something wrong with his spine and when his friends
are out playing ball, he cannot play with him, much as he wants to.
It breaks my heart to see that. I
think I love Scott most of all.” “No,
maybe it is Debbie. Her marriage is
falling apart and she’s sad about it and she weeps a lot.
I think I love Debbie the most.” “But,
wait, John really struggles in school. It
is not for want of effort but he just cannot seem to get it.
I know he feels bad about it, inferior somehow to his brothers and
sisters and his friends, all of whom seem smarter than he.
I think I love John most of all.” Joe
went on to name all twelve of his children, always loving each one in his or her
need.
The
same with God. There are no
disqualifiers with God. God loves us
especially in our need and in our broken places.
Especially there. Beloving
God means accepting God’s love for us and then letting it flow through us into
other’s lives. Loving
your neighbor as yourself means first of all loving yourself.
If only we could see ourselves as God sees us.
The
Lord’s Table is one of the ways in which we are invited to see ourselves as
God sees. The welcome table.
The belonging table. The love
table. Beloving God is accepting
God’s invitation in Christ to this supper, to this life with God, to the
community of belovers.
Are
you a believer? You are if you are a
belover!
Amen.
Borg,
Marcus, Speaking Christian.