I would like to do some theology with you in this sermon. Some thinking about God. I want to dust and perhaps rearrange some of the furniture in our minds. It is about what I have been saying to you for the past nine years and I see no reason to stop now because the message is not mine – it is God’s. Remember when Jesus was asked about the most important law? He responded with the bedrock of our understanding in the Summary of the Law: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” If we understood this better we would be a very different church at all levels.
The first commandment is to love God. But God is not loved in the way we love potato chips, or the flag, or another person. The Bible is abundantly clear that to love God is to obey God. Uh-Oh. Jesus once said, “If you love me, obey my commandments.” The witness of the Old Testament is the same. It is not a case of having good feelings, or a desire, or even the exchange of gifts. It is simply obedience. It is the Gospel according to Nike, “Just Do It!” This is true because ours is an applied faith. Christianity is not a philosophy, an idea, or a creed. It is something we “do.” It is a way people live. And as the second most important law indicates, we live for the benefit of others. We are to be a “serving people.”
Our service, our obedience to God, is not just about going through the motions; it must be done with the art and soul and mind. It is the focusing of the will, the spirit, and our convictions, on the actions that we take in obedience to God. One of Jesus’ angriest moments was when he called the Pharisees “white-washed tombs,” telling them that they were all white and shiny on the outside but inside full of dead bones. That is, they lacked interior integrity for the good works that they were doing.
This does not mean waiting around until we feel like doing something. That is not the definition of interior integrity. It is our era that has made “feeling like it” so very important. The Summary of the Law refers to conviction, a sense of confidence in the rightness of what we do, having our motivation in line with our actions. That is what the Summary of the Law says. One can stop there and call it a complete statement of the Summary. The faith of many people does, in fact, stop there with the understanding that we must obey God.
My problem is that when I stop there, I soon become very uncomfortable because I realize that I am not very good at this. I sometimes do what is right, but my reasons for it are not always the best. Sometimes I am absolutely convinced of what is right to do, but my actions do not always follow through on those convictions. And on those occasions when I do get the convictions of my heart and the actions of my body lined up, my spirit tends to wander off in various fantasies of pride about what a swell person I am for having matched my motivations to my actions so nicely. I find that I have very little experience in loving God with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind. The Summary of the Law is a hard thing to be left with.
What Jesus said to the Pharisees does indeed sum up the law. But the fact is that it does not sum up our relationship with God. There is another major factor to consider.
For reasons that are quite difficult to understand, God loves us, and not in the cold contractual way implied by law. God loves us intimately, eagerly, and uniquely. The words of Scripture, the wisdom of the saints, the experience of the ordinary, and the legacy of life itself all affirm it. We are
given the image of the Creator fashioning life and calling it good, and then calling it very good, and then calling it very, very, good. Life is something that God deeply loves. We have the image of the father of the Prodigal Son taking his coffee by the door, looking down the road, keeping his vigil so that he might catch the first glimpse of our homecoming. We have the insights of the psalmist who knows that God knows our thoughts long before we do, who knows our sitting down and our getting up. This is the God who is waiting for us whenever we choose to go. There is a rich warmness to the love of God. It spreads inside of one like hot cocoa on a bitterly cold day. Sometimes it wraps around us like armor and other times it is more like party clothes. It is the kind of joy that dances inside of us, the kind of light we can read by or sleep under. It is what scholars call grace, but the rest of us know that it is the reason people smile. And it is good, wonderfully good. The love of God is so good!
Here is where we get to the theology part. Here is where we begin to think about the way we think about God. A lot of people have a need or see an opportunity to choose between the demand of obedience and the comfort of grace, to choose between the expectations of God and the love of God. Unfortunately, those who choose only grace end up with a toothless faith, no cutting edge, something full of sentiment but without substance. And those who choose only obedience get a relationship with God that is all teeth. It leaves us feeling guilty. Our image of God begins to evolve into something of a bully whose demands are made new every morning.
The fact is that our relationship with God is a combination of the two, both law and grace. The expectation is there, and it is very real. We are accountable for our lives. Our interior convictions and exterior actions matter. It matters in what we do and what we do not do. It matters to us, to others, and to God. And indeed in the midst of it all, we are loved with a love that dwarfs our efforts, our actions, and even our inactions.
Many years ago someone gave me a description that has helped me make some sense out of this. Remember what it is like when a small child makes a picture? The picture is not ordinarily great art. The parental phrase is, “Won’t you tell me about that, dear?” rather than taking the chance of saying, “Oh, what a nice horse,” when, in fact, it is a picture of a house. A child’s picture is normally not great art. But when a child comes and offers it saying, “I drew this picture for you” it is offered in love. And it is received in such love that the picture is made perfect. It is made so perfect that it finds its way to the refrigerator to be proudly displayed before everyone. It is made so perfect that many of us whose children are long grown and gone still have envelopes and boxes of those perfect pictures.
We live before God that way. Every day of our lives we make a picture of what life is about. All of us together are making a picture of what a Christian community is about. We do the very best we can. Some of our pictures look pretty good. Others are not very good at all. But we offer them all to God because we want to and because be asks us to. We offer them in love and they are received in love. I want somehow for God to put the picture I make up on his refrigerator. When he does, the Summary of the Law is fulfilled by the grace of God. Amen