Sermon: Love Ain't That Easy

(This was about twice as long as typical for me, but I think people kept their attention up!)

Love Ain’t That Easy

Texts: Deut. 6:4-7; Lev. 19:13-18; Mark 12:28-34

First Presbyterian Church of Hollidaysburg

Hollidaysburg, PA

The title of today’s sermon sounds a bit like a country song or a blues riff doesn’t it? You can almost hear the twangy rasp of a slide guitar bleeding its melancholy vibrato behind a song about a lost girl, a lost dog, lost wife, or an empty bottle of booze on a hot summer night filling with tears. But that’s about as far from the kind of love to which Jesus refers in his conversation with the scribe in Mark as we can get. So what I want to discuss today is what kind of love Jesus is talking about, and what makes that kind of love hard to do these days.

The scribe here in Mark is different most other interactions with the Scribes and the religious authorities that Jesus had just prior to this passage. Before this point Jesus entered Jerusalem in his triumphant entry on a donkey, told a fig tree to die, overturned the tables in the Temple, and then started to get into heated arguments with all of the religious authorities. After this passage he starts talking about the destruction of the Temple, and begins to foretell the end of things as everyone knows it. He is tested, considered a blasphemer, and at this point pretty much despised so much by the religious authorities that they accuse him of blasphemy.  That leads him right to the cross. But after this little dialogue with the scribe, as the story goes, “no one dared to ask him any question.” One way to look at this could be that they just thought he was nuts and decided not to continue. But the text tells a different story.

Rather, Jesus answers with about the most sane and orthodox response he could have at that point. The first commandment comes straight from Deuteronomy and is what Jews call the Shema. This is essentially a simple confession of the faith that is to be recited day and night every day. It is a declaration of God’s unity, and the obedience that the Jews were to proclaim to God as the Lord. It sets the people of Israel apart from all the other people at the time and acts a as a proclamation of the redemptive grace of God as a basis for obedience. The love expressed in this statement comes from one’s heart, strength, and soul and signifies a total devotion like a child to a parent.

With this specific reference in Mark to the passage in Deuteronomy, the scribe would have recalled the history of Israel, of a nation founded by God that had lost its way.  When Deuteronomy was found, as the story goes, Israel was on the brink of destruction, but because of the penitence of King Josiah, the wrath of God would be stayed.  King Josiah read Deuteronomy and was literally brought to his knees.

2 Kings 23: “[The prophetess Huldah] declared to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Tell the man who sent you to me, Thus says the Lord, I will indeed bring disaster on this place and on its inhabitants—all the words of the book that the king of Judah has read. Because they have abandoned me and have made offerings to other gods, so that they have provoked me to anger with all the work of their hands, therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched. But as to the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of the Lord, thus shall you say to him, … because your heart was penitent, and you humbled yourself before the Lord, when you heard how I spoke against this place, and against its inhabitants, that they should become a desolation and a curse, and because you have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you, says the Lord. Therefore, I will gather you to your ancestors, and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace; your eyes shall not see all the disaster that I will bring on this place.’ They took the message back to the king.”

Josiah then cleansed the Temple, removed idols, got rid of references to other gods, deposed idolatrous priests and so on. Sadly, after Josiah, Israel continued in idolatrous ways and found itself further and further from God by latching on to idols once more.  The parallels to the storyline in the Gospel of Mark are striking and meant to tell us something about Jesus here.  Could it be that Jesus is the new Josiah cleansing the Temple and restoring obedience to God?

Powerful stuff. But Jesus does something more in his response by adding another Commandment. This time he refers to Leviticus. In this series of laws in Leviticus, we have a couple of interesting passages about how to behave with neighbors. Although the reference to neighbor in Mark and in Leviticus is not meant to be for all people everywhere, but for the chosen people of Israel, if we look at this same passage told in Luke, it is followed by the parable of the Good Samaritan. That parable indicates that among our neighbors, our enemies are to be included. As with the command to love God, this follows as a means to reinforce the distinct identity of the community as something rooted in the grace of God.

It’s not about what we do with our outside appearance and flourish, but about how we behave towards God and towards each-other that matters most. As Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

So why is this not easy? Our entire society is rooted in the power of the individual to choose for one’s own self the ends one wants to achieve. Now this alone is not bad. In fact, without a sense of autonomy we would be a rather miserable lot of people. Finding one’s own identity and purpose is as vital to psychological health as drinking water is to physical health. But we live in a culture where this sense of the individual as the center of reality is distorted and used for less than loving ends.

The kind of love for God and neighbor that Jesus is talking about is a love that is accompanied with deeds to one another. It is not a romantic love. Incidentally, neither is the love that Paul talks about in the passage from First Corinthians – ironic since that is so often used in marriage ceremonies. The love that Jesus is talking about is one that is rooted in one’s individuality as a part of a vital community that finds it’s unique identity in service to God. Love of God is expressed in service and the giving of one’s self to one’s neighbor. The message is that both hang together and cannot be separated. The love of God cannot exist without love for all fellow human beings as its content.  And the love for others and one's self is made unique by virtue of its being grounded in this love of God.

Think about advertising for a moment. How much of it is focused on consuming goods to make the world a better place? Sure, we see ads of cars that are supposed to help the environment, we are now taking about our carbon footprint and how to reduce that; turn on the Today Show any time and you are likely to see a slew of products about how to consume more responsibly, etc. But does this stuff really help out a whole lot? Sure it might make you feel better. But for what? Why do we need to feel better about what we consume and how we consume it?  Most importantly, does this kind of consumption activity do what Jesus said we are supposed to do?  It seems that what Jesus would have us do has nothing to do with consumption of goods and everything to do with goods that serve basic human needs as an act of love.

Our culture is about stuff to make the individual feel better, look better, be more desirable, younger. And we are so immersed in this structure the founder of Adbusters, an organization dedicated to exposing how media makes us believe in good that we do not need in order to crave and consume them, calls it "mental toxicity". As psychologist Tim Kasser (2003) argues in a fantastic little book called The High Price of Materialism, the truth is that we divorce more, are more depressed, have worse sleeping patterns, less intense relationships with people, tend to be worse parents, have worse physical health, and work longer hours because the culture of consumerism has filtered so much into our social consciousness that recognizing what it is doing is like asking a fish to describe water.

Josiah and Jesus cleansed their religion of the idols of the time, God from other religions and other nations. If there is one idol that is reigning supreme in the West and in the US, it is the God of consumerism and unmitigated individual freedom. There is nothing more powerful today that acts as a force running exactly counter to the two greatest commandments that Jesus emphasized. What these two commandments do is give us a structure to meet the same needs that Kasser argues are essential for improving our own well being. These values are grounded in experiences that make us feel safe and secure, competent and worthy, connected to others, and authentic and free.

The church, this community of believers, is where we can continue to be a beacon of light to the world of Wal-Mart and Hollister, Dyson vacuum cleaners and Tyson chicken, McDonalds, Disney and Playboy. The church is here to enact the love of God that cuts through the thin veneer of materialism with the message that the Kingdom of God is about people; not about profits or pleasure without restraint. It is about meeting needs and not satiating desires. It is about building each other up rather than puffing ourselves up.

Kasser gives us a few suggestions based on his research that are directions we can go to run counter to the destructive forces of materialism, and consumer culture. I want to close with some of those today.

1. Look at what scares you or gives you anxiety in the world. One of the forces that perpetuates materialism is a fear of not having enough or that we are not secure in our lives for whatever reason. Don’t compensate for anxieties with “stuff”.  One goal of marketers is to generate anxieties and redirect them towards a product.
2. Get off the materialistic treadmill. Once we engage in behaviors where consumerism is part of our value system, it is hard not to associate all of our values with what we own. So examine how many times you ask yourself “If I only had…” or “If I only did…”. Ask yourself how you think that the next purchase you make of something you probably don’t really need, will actually improve your life.
3. Watch less TV. And get your kids away from TV, video games, Internet, etc. Not because of the violent and sexual content; which is not a good thing mind you. But because of the advertising. It’s everywhere and it finds its way into the minds of kids who will beg you even more for that next “thing” whatever it is.  Shopping malls are designed to separate kids from adults in order for kids to have more autonomous buying power.  Look at the cartoons characters on cereals and all of the tows with a little "Try Me!" sticker.  They are all on about the average four year old height level because this is when there is a greater sense of independence and openness where kids begin to identify their desires for goods.
4. If your kids say to you, “But so and so has it!” Join together with other parents in a united front of NO! Marketers use kids to get into parents’ checkbooks, debit cards, and lines of credit. They are relentless at it. Cartoon characters for cereal, soft drinks and whatever else are demanding that you shell out your cash for stuff no one really needs and they are using your kids to do it! I am not being conspiratorial here. It’s literally what marketing is all about and it’s a huge business.
5. Talk, as a family, about advertising and why you need the thing you think you need, but in actuality you probably don’t. If we can’t talk about these things openly, these kinds of materialistic values will continue to contaminate our relationships with each other, with God and eat away at our values of freedom and feeling fulfilled in our lives right now.

It’s hard to love God and each-other if we cannot recognize what’s getting in the way of that. So, I hope that the next time you turn on the TV, surf the Internet, go to a movie, walk through the mall, you will watch it all differently. And then shut it all off.

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