Today, we continue our deep dive into Parkwood’s Mission Statement, looking at where it came from, how it shapes who we are as a church community and what we do.
It goes like this:
Rooted in Christ’s love, Parkwood Presbyterian Church seeks to grow in love for God and neighbor.
This love is the work of our hearts, to care and be cared for;
of our souls, to know and be known;
of our minds, to learn and to teach;
and our strength, to do justice and sow hope.
Today, we’re going to zero in on growing in love for God. What does that look like?
Scripture: Mark 12:28-34
One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?’ Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ Then the scribe said to him, ‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that “he is one, and besides him there is no other”; and “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and “to love one’s neighbour as oneself”,—this is much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.’ When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ After that no one dared to ask him any question.
The first reading that Lee read for us was from the book of Deuteronomy, in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy was specifically written to lay out the what, where, how, and why of the laws of ancient Judaism. But in terms of the whole biblical story, the moment we just heard comes directly after the Exodus from Egypt. The group has received what we know as the Ten Commandments, and now God commands Moses to gather all the people in one place, and tell them this:
Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God and the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your strength.
Then he commands the people to recite these words daily – multiple times a day – to write them on their doorposts and their gates, to bind them to their forehead and their arms, to teach them to their children, to talk about them at home and everywhere they go.
To this day, several thousand years later, many Jews recite this passage at least twice a day: very first thing in the morning, and the very last thing before sleeping at night. In Jesus’ time, it would’ve been the first thing every Jewish child learned to recite once they could speak.
So it makes sense that when Jesus is asked what the first, or greatest, commandment is, these words flow out.
But aside from being perhaps the most well-known bit of the Law, this is also the commandment that encompasses and upholds every other one – because this commandment demands not just part of who you are, or a specific set of actions, but a whole life.
To love God with everything you have, everything you are and will be, everything you carry, everything you do – that’s not something we can pick up and put down at will, like woodworking or crocheting.
It’s also not an instantaneous thing for most of us. We don’t just wake up one day and say “huh, I love God with all that I am, all that I have, all that I do.” Check!
It’s more like a muscle – it takes time and effort to build up that kind of love. That’s why our statement of call says that this love is the work of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength.
So how do we do that? How do we grow that kind of all-encompassing love for God?
As a child, I was taught that loving God was a list of don’ts: don’t do this, don’t do that, definitely never ever do this, avoid these five things, and absolutely do not get too involved with anything or anyone outside of the church.
There are some important ‘don’ts’ in there, like ‘don’t kill each other.’
But we are called to love God not just by avoiding things,
but by living our lives fully and completely, as beloved children of God.
We love God with our souls, in knowing and being known.
In order to truly and fully love someone, you have to know them – otherwise, you’re just loving your idea of them, who you think they should be. This requires a two-way relationship, which means they get to know you, too.
How many of us have an actor or actress that we really enjoy seeing on-screen? Whether it’s movies or TV shows, someone you recognize comes on and you say “oh, it’s Chris Evans! I love him!”
When you say “I love this actor!” what you’re really saying is you’ve thoroughly enjoyed their work and perhaps even their public persona via interviews or documentaries or whatever.
But that’s an entirely one-sided relationship. Because unless one of you has been holding out on me and you’re related to or really close friends with a celebrity, they don’t know you from Adam.
And a one-sided relationship like that is not love – it’s infatuation. It’s admiration. It may even be a crush. But it’s not a loving relationship, because love is mutual.
The deepest and best kind of love is both giving and receiving, knowing and being known.
Theologian Dr. Yolanda Pierce wrote a book a few years ago called ‘In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories we inherit.’
In it, she tells of her grandmother’s faith and the ways she learned faith and faithfulness from generations of women before her. These women had no degrees, and their faith wasn’t just an intellectual belief in certain doctrine. Dr. Pierce writes:
“For my grandmother, Jesus was the lover of her soul. Jesus was the burden-bearer. Jesus was the heart fixer and the mind regulator. Jesus was the subject of her songs when she baked biscuits on Sunday morning. Jesus was the love on her lips when she pressed my hair in the kitchen on Saturday night. Jesus would show up when my grandmother had coffee with Mother Johnson. Jesus would stop by when the missionary circle met in our house. The six-year-old me would not have hesitated to run and borrow a cup of sugar or two cups of flour from our neighbor Jesus, like I would from Ms. Tina down the hall, because that is how real he was to my grandmother. My grandmother called on the name of Jesus because for her, there was power just in the name.”[1]
To love God, we have to get to know God – just as God knows and loves us. That’s what we come here to do.
There will always be some parts of God we cannot fully understand. I’m not asking y’all to go get PhDs in theology.
But we can experience God’s presence and get to know who God is in so many ways: in prayer, in the beauty and revelation of the world God created, in loving the people God created (we’ll talk about that next week), in Scripture and worship, in the quiet moments when nothing else but the presence of God will do.
This, too, is how we love God with our minds: by learning and teaching. In seeking deeper knowledge of the world, of ourselves, of how things work and why they do that weird thing and why there are lightning bugs – in exercising our curiosity, we can come to know and love God more deeply.
Our study of history, writing, language, science, art, business, design…these things are not distractions from our faith – because God created and cares for us, because God created the world itself, almost any discipline or craft can tell us something about God.
When we pass on what we know, we not only learn those things in a deeper way, but we give others the opportunity to grow, too.
To love God with our hearts is to practice that delight. The delight of knowledge, of relationship, of eternal hope and present beauty and comfort for today and safe harbor in the storms.
To be cared for is to believe that you, too, are worthy of delighting in. That God really, truly delights in you like a proud, beloved parent.
To love God with our strength – in our doing, in our working, in our relationships and families and homes and friendships – this is perhaps the hardest.
Because the rest of this love-work is internal. It’s head, heart, soul. It can be done on your own, in a cabin in the woods with a stack of books and a crackling fire. It can be done in the comfort and safety of your own bed.
But to love God with all of your strength – that is infinitely more complicated, because it involves other people. It involves complicated people, and people who are difficult to love. It involves the complex, intertwined, and utterly broken systems that those same complicated people create.
Economies. How do we love God in this economy?
Neighborhoods. How do we love God in this neighborhood?
Nations. How do we love God in this country, right now?
School districts. Workplaces. Churches. Families.
To do justice is to love God in this world, exactly as it is – and at the same time, to work for a better world. Something just a little closer to what the kingdom of God would look like. In this way, justice and hope are inextricably intertwined, and cannot be separated.
If you’re starting from scratch with this life of faith, or even if you’ve been at it for a while, it can be tempting to see this work of love as an endless to-do list. A mountain summit you can never reach. A list of things we will all fail at and do imperfectly at some point.
But like we heard last week, this work is not ours alone. We are called and empowered by the Holy Spirit to grow in this love for God together, side by side, holding one another up and learning and loving together, until we are finally called home to God’s perfect love.
Rooted in love, and growing in love. This is who we are and what we do, and I’m so grateful to be part of it. Amen.
[1] Yolanda N. Piece, In My Grandmother’s House, p. 10.
