God has given us human loves to show us what loving him looks like.
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
March 7, 2010
Loving Linda
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). What does that mean? I do not think I fully know. The closest I can come is to ask myself what it means that I love Linda, my wife of almost thirty-two years.
Loving Linda means a permanent and exclusive loyalty. Everything else in my life comes and goes. Even the children we brought into the world eventually leave us (although sometimes they come back). She and I are together until death parts us.
Loving Linda means I enjoy her presence. I want to be with her. Hers is the last voice I want to hear at night and the first face I want to see in the morning. I want her head next to mine on the pillow. I want to connect with her during our busy days. We want to set aside special times just to focus on being together.
Loving Linda means I want her to be pleased with me. If she wants me to do something, it’s automatically at the top of my priority list. I don’t want the rest of you who hear me preach to take this wrong, but her feedback matters more than all the rest of you combined. I sometimes fail Linda, but she knows and trusts my heart.
Loving Linda means there is a personal and intimate bond between us that no one else is privy to. We have a private connection of heart, soul, mind, and body that is our unseen world and that we treasure and nurture.
Loving Linda means that I wear on my finger a visible symbol of our bond and commitment, evidence that my heart and all I am are hers.
According to Deuteronomy 6, loving God is something like that.
Second law
As most of you know, we are encouraging the congregation this year to read through the Bible. If you are new to the church or haven’t started yet, you may certainly join us at any time and just continue your reading at the beginning of next year.
Our sermons are not following exactly the Bible reading schedule, but we are trying to stay generally in the part of the Bible that is on the schedule. This week we come to the book of Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy means “second law.” God gave the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai shortly after the children of Israel left their slavery in Egypt. Because of their lack of faith and rebellion, God sentenced them to wait forty years in the desert before taking possession of Canaan, their promised land.
At the end of that forty years, Moses, now 120 years old, gathered the people for a series of three speeches in which he rehearsed their history and restated God’s laws for a new generation. Those three speeches make up most of Deuteronomy.
It’s important to put this book of the Bible in the context of the people getting ready for their conquest. Let’s say that another way. They are preparing for war, for an invasion. Blood will be shed. Victory has been promised by God, but there is a very human element involved here. Some of the men will lose their lives. Some of the women will become widows and their children fatherless or orphans.
It is interesting, though, that Moses doesn’t see the loss of life or the risk of it as their greatest corporate challenge. Their looming and most imposing threat is the possibility that they will forget Who brought them out of Egypt and what he has told them. That they will neglect their identity. That they will forsake their God.
In Deuteronomy 6, Moses seeks to counteract this greatest threat by urging his people to love God.
Listen up!
The centerpiece of chapter 5 was a restating of what we call the Ten Commandments. Jewish law includes hundreds of rules and regulations, as Bible readers fully realize. But ten of those laws are foundational to all the others, and Moses repeats them for a new generation.
In the first paragraph of chapter 6, Moses refers back to those laws in saying, “The LORD your God directed me to teach you” these laws “so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your god as long as you live.”
Verse 3 includes a promise, “that it may go well with you,” if they keep God’s laws. They will multiply and they will experience “the good life” – his way of saying that is “a land flowing with milk and honey,” a description of agricultural abundance.
Then Moses gives a word that is so profound, memorable, and central to the identity of his people that it becomes their creed. 3500 years later, Jewish people recite Deuteronomy 6:4-5 twice a day, when they rise and when they go to bed.
It’s called the Shema, because that is the first word in Hebrew: “Shema, y’israel, adonai elohenu, adonai echad.”
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” And it continues in verse 5, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Notice that Moses does not declare an absolute monotheism in this text. He doesn’t say Yahweh is the only God. He says that Yahweh is our God, and he is One.
The biblical witness as it develops, of course, increasingly emphasizes that there is only one God. But at this point the only point Moses is making is that you can’t serve or love more than one God. You make sure Yahweh is your God.
I try to follow this model when people ask me from time to time if there isn’t some validity to other religions. I’m not sure I can answer that question to their satisfaction, but God will meet them where they are. So at least at the beginning, my answer is, “Let’s not focus on others at the moment. Is your trust in the God of the Bible and in his Son Jesus Christ?”
Moses then tells them to love God with all their heart, soul, and strength. Although some of have tried, there is no need to try to distinguish among heart, soul, and strength. “Heart” and “soul” are used interchangeably for the inner part of you. “Strength” is just what it says – it’s your effort, your passion, your “muchness” – exceedingly, abundantly.
Moses is just saying to love God with all you’ve got. When Jesus quotes this commandment on at least two occasions in the gospel, he adds “mind,” probably to connect with his Greek culture. Americans should add “body,” because we place such high value on longevity, on pleasure, on health. We should probably add “pocketbook” to the list. With every part of you and all you have, love God.
The rest of this text is a description of the outward actions and symbols of loving God. Not only are God’s commands to be “on your hearts” (v. 6), you are to “impress them on your children” (v. 7) and make them part of daily conversation at home and in public, at night and in the morning” (v. 7). “Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads” (v. 8). “Write them on the doorframes of y our houses and on your gates” (v. 9).
Since the time of Moses, there has been debate about how literally one should take these particular points. This passage is coupled with some others, including Numbers 15:37-41, to establish three kinds of ritual clothing for Jewish people.
The first is the talit (prayer shawl), to which are attached the tzitziot (tassles). The Bible itself refers only to the tassles, but you need clothing to which you can attach the tassles.
The second is the tefila. Phylacteries are leather boxes containing the commandments tied to leather strings that wrap around the head or the arm – a literal response to Deuteronomy 6:8.
The third is the mezuzah, a small parchment from the Bible rolled up, inserted in a case, and attached to the doorpost. That also comes from Deuteronomy 6:8.
Did the children of Israel in the desert literally use these physical symbols of loving God and obeying his commands? I don’t know. But there is something about oral conversations and tangible reminders that help keep us centered.
Do you have rituals in your life or your family that keep your attention on loving God? Mealtime prayers would be an example. Bedtime prayers another. Personal devotions and Bible reading at appointed times. Symbols of your faith on the front door or sitting on your desk or framed on the walls of your home. What reminds you and those who enter your home or intersect with your life that your highest priority is loving God and seeking to please him?
Levels of loving
Today’s sermon title is borrowed from a book title written by St. Bernard. Not the dog. The canine breed, St. Bernard, comes from the Swiss Alps. St. Bernard’s Pass is the oldest road through the western Alps, and it is named for a legendary figure in church history – Bernard of Clairvaux. His followers established a monastery and hospice, and hundreds of years after his death bred a large dog to assist with mountain rescues in the Alps.
Bernard is described in Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church as “the most imposing figure of his time, and one of the best men of all the Christian centuries. He possessed a magnetic personality, a lively imagination, a rich culture, and heart glowing with love for God and man.” Wouldn’t you like someone be writing that about you seven centuries after you’re dead? Martin Luther said of him, “Bernard loved Jesus as much as anyone can.”
Bernard’s entire age was one of seeking ways worthy of loving Jesus. The early church had established martyrdom as the noblest act for Christ. He died for us. We should suffer and die – physically and literally – for him. But when the church married the Roman empire, martyrdom became rare. How then would one express love for Christ?
One answer was in the monastery. Renounce money, marriage, and motivation, except the drive to be fully devoted to Christ. Bernard did not invent the monastery, but he is credited with reviving its disciplines.
Bernard was not without his faults. The blight on the Christian record for his entire generation was the repeated attempt to engage in military struggle against the Muslims in the Holy Land (the Crusades), and Bernard was a passionate preacher of the Crusades. It was said when he preached in a town to recruit soldiers, the whole town would be emptied of its able-bodied men who went off to war.
On a more personal level, Bernard began his adult life and ministry believing that he should virtually starve himself in his devotion to God and attention to prayer. This caused extreme health problems, including gastrointestinal issues and feet so swollen he could hardly stand. Later in life he renounced this “self-mortification.”
But his most memorable and enduring essay (more like a book) was titled, “On Loving God.” This is what he said.
We all love. It is intrinsic for our human nature. But there are degrees of love, and we should seek to climb higher through these degrees.
In the first degree of love, we love ourselves for our own sake. This is our sinful nature. I love myself, and no higher thought is given to anything or anyone else except what can make me happier and more fulfilled. This is where unbelievers live out their lives.
The second degree of love is when we love God for our own benefit. The soul is awakened to the fact that God is there. We offer him our worship, our prayer, even our money and obedience, but we see God as means to add to our personal happiness.
Most religious faith, even Christian faith, is mired in this second degree. Although this is a common if not necessary step in spiritual growth, those whose spiritual growth is stunted at this degree are destined for disappointment. When you get cancer or your loved one dies or you lose your job or get jilted by a lover, you say, “Why did this happen to me? Where is God?” What lies behind that question is that I have loved God with the expectation that he will in return use his power for my good.
The third degree of love is when we love God for God’s sake. We learn to say with Job, “The Lord gives and takes away; I will still praise him” (Job 1:21, paraphrase). We become aware that God doesn’t owe us anything. He deserves to be loved, obeyed, and trusted, because he is God, period. He first loved us, John writes (1 John 4:9-10), and that is enough reason to love him.
But there is one more degree of love in Bernard’s sermon.
The fourth degree of love is when we love ourselves for God’s sake. Bernard describes this as “to lose yourself, as if you no longer existed, to cease completely to experience yourself, to reduce yourself as nothing.” It is like a drop of water that disappears in a large vat of wine. Not many find this level, and those who do often experience it only “for the space of a moment.” It is our destiny in glory.
We strive for it, even though it always seems out of our reach. Bernard quotes the Shema and says our highest goal is to love God “until the heart does not have to think of the body and the soul no longer has to give it life.” Body, soul, mind, and strength all belong to God.
Not in this life
What does it look like to have a life fully devoted to loving God? As I said at the beginning, I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone knows. No one except Jesus himself has done it. So one obvious answer is to look at Jesus.
We won’t make it there in this life. But there are many worthy goals in life that are worth striving for even if you won’t achieve them. We will never solve poverty. But we have to try. We will never find a perfect organizational structure for the church. But we need to work at it. We will never have every member of the church connected in exactly the right balance – no one doing too much but everyone pulling equal weight. But we need to keep striving. We will never understand and know God fully. But we don’t give up.
I wonder if God hasn’t given us our human loves to help us experience a little of what loving him looks like. For me, loving God looks something like loving Linda.
It looks like a permanent and exclusive loyalty. We are his alone and always.
It looks like enjoying God’s presence – consciously at the beginning and end of every day and at times all through the day.
It looks like wanting to please him. It’s not about “What can I get by with and still slip into heaven?” No, what is my next step toward fully delighting him? I know I fail him – so did St. Bernard and every other person. But I never give up trying.
It looks like a personal and intimate bond that others may not understand or even see. But we, he and I, know it’s there.
And it looks like wearing or showing or sharing some symbol of that loyalty and love.
Amen.