The Gift goes on 1.11.09

The Scribe, the temple scholar, the keeper of the law says: What is the most important commandment? Jesus gives a good rabbi’s answer – quite a few Rabbis had made similar attempts to summarise the Law. Jesus answer is a strong version of a standard answer, in fact it is almost a quotation from a couple of places in the Old Testament

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength (ie with your whole self)…

That’s the first commandment… Jesus also adds a second one. Both of them make up a summary of the 10 commandments. If you remember the 10 commandments can be divided into two parts. The first part relates to God and the second part relates to human beings. Who can remember the first 4 commandments (1. No other God before me 2. No idols 3. Don’t misuse the name of God 4. Keep the Sabbath holy)

This, says Jesus, amounts to a command to love Yahweh, the God of Israel, with my whole self… I wonder how that feels to us in 21st century NZ… a bit awkward?
I think the temptation we face is to ignore the first commandment and go on to the second one. We in NZ are a practical people. Loving our neighbour seems a practical challenge. We take it for granted that we can obey commandment 2 quite independently of the greatest commandment. And if asked about Christianity we would probably say that Christians are people who believe in God and try to love their neighbours… and because it’s what you do that matters (certainly not what you say). We are inclined to suspect that the gospel could be summed up something like ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. It’s a tragedy really… because the last sentence has nothing to do with Christianity. It might have something to do with social survival … but not Christianity. But more importantly it’s a tragedy because Jesus knows that the first commandment is first for a reason.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength… (I don’t know what else he could have added in there – with all your time, with all your finances, with all your creativity – but all those things are there already, by implication) The point is… all that you are is called upon in this commandment, not some spare resources, not some part of you. All… called to love

Have you ever been effected by God… in such a way that your response is love? I don’t mean have you found God awe-inspiring, mysterious. I mean, what about love?

And if you quickly say yes… what do you mean when you say you love God… do you mean you admire God’s skill in creation (how clever of God to make a world?)… is that love?

Love is that power of attraction… which draws us out of our self to give ourselves to another. Love is not lust (I make this contrast because both are kinds of desires or attractions)… lust (or appetite) is another kind of attraction. It’s being drawn to something because I want it. Love, on the other hand, is drawn to something purely for the sake of the thing itself. Love is the attraction that is also a giving. This is very different from loving God like an insurance policy? (That’s a kind of taking). At a recent funeral I was taking, someone who didn’t attend church offered me their definition of an atheist. “An atheist is a person with no invisible means of support”… I kind of like that because it captures something of the outsider’s (and sometimes the insider’s) view of Christianity – a kind of invisible support system, like insurance.
To love someone is to give myself to that person. It is more like an attraction to beauty. Love is not appetite but delight.
We are drawn together in one of two ways… We can be drawn together by giving… or we can be drawn together by taking.
The art gallery and the shopping mall both work by the power of attraction. We are drawn to what we see… But in different ways. It matters that nothing is for sale in an Art Gallery. Our first thought, if it is good art, is not “how can I acquire that painting?”, but ‘wow’ and ‘who am I?’ and ‘where am I?’ and ‘will I ever be the same again?’ It’s that moment of attraction which draws me out of myself… that is something like love and not appetite… that reminds us of the first commandment.

And the first commandment is so important… because we live in a world of shopping mall, and appetite. Our default setting in a fallen world is appetite. And when God comes to our default setting, into our world of appetite and exchange. It’s like an interruption. Into our usual ‘exchange economy’ comes God’s ‘gift economy’. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying everything about money (or sex or food) is bad (bit of a worry if I was!) or exchange is bad – I’m saying there is a new way of entering into human interactions. The ‘gift economy’ might intersect with any part of our normal lives and our financial lives and our social lives – as a kind of strange interruption…

I am not here this morning to tell you to love God. It is not my job to lay an impossible weight on your shoulders… even if (as Jesus knows) our salvation depends on it…. Even if our ability to truly give ourselves in love to our neighbours depends on an interruption from God – an interruption from God’s love, which comes at us out of left field so that our first response is ‘wow’, and ‘who am I?’ and ‘where am I?’ and ‘will I ever be the same again?’. The death of Jesus is a gift… God’s gift, Jesus gift for you… and unless you have some sense of how it is ‘for you’… the whole thing is lost. It’s not just an evangelical thing in some narrow sense…The first commandment is first for a reason.
Loving God matters above all else, but my role is to tell some good news. In the middle of history God’s gift economy has interrupted us. In the middle of history God has lived a human life (as Jesus of Nazareth) which embodies in all its fullness the First and the Second Commandments. It was a living together (symbiosis) of the God-ward relationship and the human relationship – a life poured out in love towards others. And it happened in a world with another default setting – in a world which subconsciously knew it was under threat. So it closed ranks in the usual manner. And so as Jesus poured his life out, his life was taken from him by the world in which he lived.
We are drawn together by either giving or taking!
We call the 10 commandments the ‘covenant’. Jesus lived out in his flesh a ‘new covenant’. He wrote the covenant in history.
I’m not here to tell anyone to love God. I am here to remind us every week why God is lovely… beyond everything. I am here to bear witness to Jesus as ‘the beautiful life’… (protestants have never been very keen on beauty – Calvinist/Presbyterian churches used to be deliberately austere, void of images)… In fact we are here this morning to have our sense of beauty renewed. We are here to worship God’s beauty in history… brutalized by history. My job is to locate us and our neighbours in the middle of a drama. God’s ‘gift economy’ has interrupted us. It’s our move.
The question is: are we moved? Have you ever been affected by God so that you love God… enough to give your heart and soul and mind and strength?
Or perhaps our own personal economies are so well protected we have managed to avoid being interrupted (and I don’t mean our money I mean our sense of personal strength and identity and place in the pecking order, our ability to maintain a sense of being ok and to enter into the give and take of the world’s exchanges without crumbling in a heap). Are we so well protected that we have managed to avoid being interrupted by grace?
Have we been well trained to love our self as the means to loving our neighbour, rather than to love God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying there is not a sense in which ‘love for self’ is not important… But there is a first commandment, on which all else hinges. Love the Lord your God … completely.
And so we gather again to see the beauty of God’s love and to discover that the fancy clothes with which we dress our sense of self and status and self-worth… are in fact dirty rags. We come to stand on the side of the road with blind Bartimaeus and cry out, and to sit with the woman from Samaria – the town whore – and to know we are out of credit…
We come because we have heard news of a gift economy… which is not some fancy intellectual idea… but a person, whose beauty, (tortured and brutalized and crucified beauty) can invade our whole being – if only we open up a little chink in our armour – in our personal economy – to the grace, the gift that overwhelms all debt… thanks be to God.

Bruce Hamill (Caversham and Green Island 1.11.09)