With Heart, Soul, and Mind

Our stewardship theme this year is “Building in the Spirit.”  It is about deepening our relationship to God and understanding the difference between our society’s transaction economy, “rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” and God’s economy, an economy based on the gifts we receive.  We deepen our relationship to God by loving God “with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.”

When a Pharisee, who was a lawyer, asked Jesus, “which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him,  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And the second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  We deepen our relationship to God by loving God and our neighbor.

The commandments, the law of God, are about justice and love.  In the Ten Commandments the first four are about our relationship to God, and the following six commandments are about our relationship to one another, to our neighbor. They express the compassion of God toward us and to all people.  And they should be our passionate responsibility in all we do as ministers and witnesses of the Gospel. 

So, when the Pharisee lawyer questioned Jesus he was aware of his responsibility as an observant Jew to recite every day the two commandments that summarize all the law and the prophets.  This recitation is called the Shema: “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 might.”  In Judaism it is about being faithful to the Torah, a faithfulness that involves a deep commitment to one’s fellow human beings.  The point Jesus made in his response to the Pharisee is that all the laws of the Jewish tradition can be summarized in two:  love of God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love of neighbor as yourself.

The God we worship is a God who hears the cries of those who are abused and oppressed.  For Jesus, one cannot love God apart from loving one’s neighbor.  It is an ethical demand.  We love our neighbor by seeking justice for immigrants, for widows and orphans, and for those who are poor or oppressed because of race, class, or religion.  The justice spoken about in the Bible is not vengeful or punitive; Biblical justice is both economic and social.  There are no outcasts in God’s kingdom, and the work of Jesus’ disciples and all Christians is to further God’s kingdom on earth here and now.  As we pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.”  The commandment is simple and clear, but the problem is how we respond given the complexities of our present-day social, economic, and legal systems.

The Pharisees were a sect set apart from others because of their strict adherence to the law.  Obedience to the law was the way to be obedient to God.  The law was the greatest good; it was supreme and it was the foundation of holiness.  Given this, it was not unreasonable for the Pharisee lawyer, an intelligent and well-educated person, to ask Jesus his question, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

In his response to the Pharisee’s question Jesus pointed out what the law was all about.  It was not the law itself that was important, what we might term the “letter of the law,” but it was the spirit in which the law was to be observed.  The spirit, not the letter of the law gives it meaning. Loving with heart, soul, and mind is the basis for the law; it is a way of looking at God and what God requires.  Loving God instructs us to love other people, and loving other people instructs us to love God.  These two loves are inextricably related.

When we encourage ourselves and others to take an active part in programs like the City Meal Site, gathering and distributing warm clothing and thanksgiving baskets to those in need, reaching out to Crossroads residents and families, supporting the work of Episcopal Relief and Development in West African countries, hosting AA, La Iglesia Luterana, and giving support to music and the arts, we participate in loving God and our neighbor.

To paraphrase what we heard in today’s Epistle to the Thessalonians, we are “gentle among [all to whom we minister], like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.  So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.”

When you and I gather for worship in this sacred space to offer our prayers of thanksgiving and to share in the Sacrament of Holy Communion as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, we are ascribing to God the honor due God’s Name.  In offering ourselves, our time, our talents, our treasure, our financial support, we are offering our hearts, souls, and minds in love.  By all these things we are building in the Spirit.  Amen.