Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:1-9 & Mark 12:28-34
Given on 11/04/2018
We humans are curious creatures. And we are curious because we find ourselves constantly bouncing back and forth like a pinball between our better angels and our darkest demons. For, on the one hand we have imagination and creativity, we have the ability to dream dreams and have visions, to picture a world tomorrow different than it is today and then make it happen, to progress beyond where we believe is possible. But we are also an broken group, forever haunted by the spectre of an innocent past to which we may never return. On the one hand, we have the ability to communicate with one another through the use of words. And we can put those words together in ways that express emotions both good and bad, anger and love, fear and calm. We can write Shakespearian sonnets of beauty and love. But we can also use words to cause harm to one another. We can use words that demean communities of people to which we do not belong, we can use words to deny our common humanity, we can use words that make the other feel as if she does not belong here or anywhere. On the one hand, we have the ability to take fertile ground and use it to grow all manner of fruits and vegetables. From crisp sweet corn to tart peaches. From delicious apples to delectable blackberries. But at the same time, we have the ability to horde what we produce for ourselves and deny sustenance to many within humanity, many that we call our brothers and our sisters in Christ. On the one hand, we have the ability to construct habitats to protect us from the hot in summer and the cold in the winter, to keep rain from hitting our head and snow from covering our bodies. To create works both functional and innovative. And they have become modern marvels of the world. Tall skyscrapers that overwhelm the night sky in countless cities throughout the world, pyramids that dot the desert landscape in Egypt, colossus structures in the Greek and Roman world, castles throughout Europe, all in their own way works of art, all in their own way beautiful. But we are still tied to our tribal desires, still tied to the need to protect that which we perceive to be ours. And so in defense of our skyscrapers and pyramids, in defense of our castles and our art, we also use our imagination to create and build tools of destruction, weapons of war, to hold others at bay. And this is perhaps the chief paradox in which humanity finds itself today. On the one hand, beautiful and on the other destructive. On the one hand loving and on the other filled with hatred for each other. On the one hand, broken, stuck in broken systems from which their seems no escape, and on the other, we are redeemed and inspired, with the imagination and desire to see the world in a better light and then work to make it a reality.
And this tension between the light and the dark, between hatred and love, between brokenness and redemption rests at the base of our shared faith tradition. This ongoing struggle between the life that we are created to live and the mess that we often make of it captures the daily human experience. The ongoing battle between the love of God that dwells at the base of creation and within our souls and the selfish and horrific manner in which we so ofter treat each other impacts every relationship in our lives. And it is in our perpetual effort to walk that line between sinner and saint, between brokenness and wholeness, or in traditional language, between good and and some warped and twisted understanding of the good, that the curiosity of the human species shines forth. And throughout history of humankind, learned thinkers have sought a way to speak about this dual reality in which humanity finds itself. One of the earliest ways in which our Jewish ancestors wrestled with this duel reality was by positing the concepts of original sin and what is, in Latin, the imago dei—the image of God. Original sin points to the original fall of humanity from grace, often told through the opening passages of Genesis. God creates humanity in the form of Adam and Eve, tells them all the world in the form of this garden is theirs if they but leave one tree alone and of course, like Seamus when I tell him he cannot touch something, do something, eat something, go some place, not go some place, stand still, move…you get the picture, just like Seamus and his ability to do the exact opposite of whatever I request of him, the first humans, after being told not to, go and they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And immediately their eyes are open to the nakedness of their own bodies and soon thereafter God kicks them out of their perfect relationship with the Divine, Adam to forever till the earth to make it grow and Eve to experience tremendous birth pains. And we as descendants of these first parents continue to feel the brunt of their original action, we continue to live into the sinful condition of those who come before us. But conversely, there is a reality that we also live into called imago dei—the image of God. And that comes from the other creation story at the beginning of Genesis, when God gathers together God’s holy counsel and tells them, let us make humanity in our own image. And so strong is that divine implantation that the earliest thinkers were convinced that nothing we can ever do or not do can cancel out that foundation reality. We are, each of us, male and female, made in the image of God and Our fallenness is never stronger than the divinity that each soul bears. Sinfulness cannot overcome our inherent goodness, like the light can never, ever be overcome by the darkness, but, for us, there is always a tension, always a battle, always a struggle. Our fallenness explains the mess of things that we have made. Our divine imprinting, the goodness from which we were created and to which we shall all return one day.
And yet, we have, too, been redeemed—each one of us. The Apostle Paul captured when he delacred that in Christ we have both been justified and, through the grace of God being sanctified. All of us, on the road between justification and sanctification. And that justification, arises from the reality of our sin and yet the redemption offered by God through the life, death, and new life of Jesus Christ. It is a gift freely given. A gift that we have received having done nothing to earn it, nothing to merit it. Now it does not minimize the effects of brokenness, we are still in a world of sin and our only hope rests in the saving power of Christ and the movement of the Spirit to lead us back to God. But, this means, even at our worst we remain forever and always intimately connected to the love of God through the witness of Jesus and we can always find solace in God’s love for each of us. And so regardless of our sin, God’s grace abounds all the more. But we cannot remain there. It cannot remain that we find ourselves justified in God’s grace, forgiven, but still stuck in the mire. It cannot remain there because just as we are lost in the mire of original sin, so too are we made in the image of God, in the imago dei. Each one you meet bears the same divine imprint, bears the same spark of holiness, is still a vessel in which the Holy Spirit dwells and so even at our most divided, even at our most hateful, even at our most contentious, we are one in the Spirt, just as we are one in God. This awareness leads us to allow the Christ in me to greet the Christ in thee in one great tapestry of love and grace. This is the gift of the power of redemption, that we might continue to work for and live into an increasingly just society and world, so that we continue to loose the bonds that remain shackling some to their place in life, so that we continue to hear that still small voice screaming out over the brokenness of the world. So that we see the face of Jesus in the other. The face of the one that we encounter in our scripture this morning.
One has to wonder if that paradox of holiness and brokenness was on full display for the scribe as he emerged from the crowd of onlookers to query Jesus on that day. For he had just watched his fellow religious leaders speak to Jesus in ways that displayed a cynicism towards the words that he spoke and a desire to trap Jesus in his own teachings. They had tried, in vain, to place Jesus on the wrong side of the Jewish tradition. Perhaps, more dangerously, they had sought to set Jesus in direct opposition with the Roman Empire—an opposition that could and eventually would bring about Jesus’s death. They had been disrespectful and spoken at Jesus with a degree of disdain that testified to the challenge that they found in the words and person of Jesus and in stepping forward, this scribe would surely be thought of, by the crowd and by Jesus, as just being another one of those persons who would seek to silence Jesus, who would seek to divide the followers of Jesus one from another. And yet. And yet, this man, was too aware of the cognitive dissonance that arose from holding brokenness and holiness in tension with one another. He was too aware of his own internal struggles to remain faithful in the midst of the chaotic nature of Judaism in the midst of first century Palestine. He was too aware that the corrupt power held by those religious leaders who cared more about retaining control of the faith was so absolute that it had corrupted them absolutely. So it was that he courageously took that singular step towards the great Rabbi in his midst and asked the question that rested at the foundation of his soul, “Good teacher, what is commandment is the first of all?” And in that moment, the whole of the scene, the whole of the world must have fallen away for that Jewish scribe. Having manage to speak his deepest wonderings into existence, he waited for Jesus to shine light into his darkened world. And because of their shared Judaism, because their collective faith, extended back thousands of years before that moment, because the foundations of the Jewish faith were stronger than this temporary moment of corruption and chaos that had subsumed the faith, he could reach all the way back to Moses, the wandering Hebrew people, and the word that Moses had received from God and shared with the people, “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.” And just like a beam of light first shined from across the expanse of those earliest Hebrew people and to the scribe standing in the midst of Jesus now, it was like a moment of clarity had enveloped the man as he stood in stunned silence and just existed in the moment with no need for anything else for it was as if all of a sudden all the muck and mire that too often covers our hearts and our souls was washed away and the man could see the God he loved completely unencumbered by his sin or the sin of the world. Yes, the totality of the lived experience, when lived properly, was the love and adoration of the God who sits at the base of all of creation and in base of all of our souls. And just when he was about to exit that moment having had his life changed in such a profound way, Jesus is quick to offer a second command that is equal to the first, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And just that in, in an instant, the relationship between the scribe and God, was splayed across the whole of the world. In an instant, the love that he felt for God was extended to each one in his midst—the disciples who were standing around Jesus, the crowds that were pressing in to see and hear Jesus, the Sadducees and Pharisees that had tried to trick Jesus, even the Roman Empire, who omnipresence cast a shadow across the whole of the region—each one of them, he now saw as his neighbor, his brother, his sister, all intimately connected to him and to God, all the children of the most high. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton tells a story about an experience he had walking in downtown Louisville, KY in the old shopping district of town. Merton was a contemplative who spent much of his time in seclusion, living in the peace of his tiny hermitage that sat on the outer reaching of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown, KY, praying to God, meditating on God and creation, and being alone with his own thoughts and so it was that his trips into the big city were few and far between. But it was on one of those trips in which he was walking down Fourth Street one busy day and at the crossing of Fourth and Muhammad Ali Blvd he had an experience that froze him in his tracks in the middle of a busy crossing. What Merton saw was light radiating off of every person in his midst and in that light was a deep and abiding love for all of them, in that light was an intimate connection to each person he could see, in that light was the spirit of God. He later noted that so profound was this love for each individual, that any and all difference between he and they fell away and for that moment, all people were one. In his encounter with Jesus, this scribe had the same experience. All that would divide became wholly unimportant. That which united was all that mattered. In his amazement at the moment, the scribe managed to affirm Jesus’s words, to affirm that all else paled in importance to those two central realities of unity in God and unity in creation and, in turn, Jesus offers a final word of encouragement, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
If we cast our eyes into the darkening past, we see the old order of the world still hold sway over much of the world. We see those who would divide and conquer, those who would deny the common humanity, the image of God, would deny the redemption of all the cosmos in favor of the select few. But then we cast our eyes forward to a different time, a time in which the new order ushered in by Christ has stirred in the hearts of many and begun the difficult work of drawing all of God’s children together into a singular family of faith. It is into that future that the church must propel itself. And in doing so we will look inside ourselves to the light of Christ that burns in all of us. We will touch that part of us that is only God’s, that is always connected to the Divine, and that shows us that we all remain connected to the Divine. We will come together in this place as we live as family live together and we find kinship among our fellow members and we seek relationship with one another. We will be always prepared to confess when we have done wrong and even as we will offer forgiveness when we have been wronged. And we will come together around the table – this table, which has been set by the God; this table in which all are invited and all are welcome – and we will eat as equals in God’s kingdom, with Christ as our brother we eat. Then we leave this place, calling all the children home, and calling all those who want to know God better who want to love God more, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and sinners and we offer them families in which they may find meaning in the midst of meaninglessness, and hope in the midst of hopelessness, and peace in the midst of war, and love. That is the world that we can begin at this moment right now. Let’s get to work. Glory be to God in the highest and on earth, peace, amongst all God’s children. Alleluia, amen.