AProp25

Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 1; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22: 34-46

October 26, 2008

Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was. And he responded…

You shall love the Lord your God

with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I remember being on a youth retreat when I was younger  and one of the questions put to us was:

What is the greatest word in the greatest commandment?

And we went at the debate with gusto.

It must be love.

And then, what does love look like coming from your heart, versus your soul versus your mind?

Maybe the most important word was ‘shall’.

No choices here. It IS a commandment.

Maybe the correct answer was that we can love lots of things with heart, soul, and mind,

but God is the central word here.

Well, last week Rae Greene came to speak to us about his pilgrimage from darkness to light.

He began by describing his plummet from a highly successful life

down into a place of black darkness and deep despair.

A place of no hope and no God.

A time in his life when he lost everything.

Except for his wife, he said. “The only thing that kept her from leaving me was that we both love me!”

Anyway, Rae led us through his pilgrimage from darkness to light

by sharing his following of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

From that darkness he came to believe that he was no longer in control of his life and that there was a God who could restore him.

Once he turned to God,

he made a searching and fearless moral inventory of himself, which took him two years to do,

confessed it to another person, and asked God to remove it all from his life.

Makes our weekly corporate confession seem pretty light weight!

He came out feeling like a new creation.

Then, he went and made amends to those he had harmed.

As Rae has moved through these steps he says he has gone from hell on earth to heaven on earth,

from no God to ALL God. 

And in this new life of ALL God, Rae says that he is filled with gratitude for ALL – for all he has, and beyond what he has to what he doesn’t have.

Pure gratitude for ALL.

He even said that the greatest blessing of ALL was that dark place of no God, because it took being in that place for him to leave everything and arrive where he is now.

So, perhaps one little word my youth group overlooked is the greatest –

that little word ALL.

To love God with ALL. To see God in ALL.

That ALL of our heart, soul, and mind belong with God.

Jim Yeary came to speak to us this past week.

For those of you who were not here at the time,

Jim served as the interim priest at Grace-Calvary in 2001-02.

Jim’s pilgrimage was from death to life.

Jim shared his pilgrimage through cancer, which reoccurred while he was serving here.

He said that the reoccurrence was for him worse than the first time.

That he realized that he may have to live with cancer for the rest of his life.

Jim had to end his time at Grace-Calvary early, which he regretted deeply.

He said to the group last Wednesday night that he has never forgotten

the deep care and support that this parish showed him.

From his own journey, Jim found that he has learned to ask this question:

What do I do now with the life I’ve got?

Living this way causes us to see the world and people differently.

Jim says it indeed is a move from death into life.

Jim compared death to life in this way:

The world of death is a place of isolation and competition

where an either/or attitude causes us to fear scarcity and to hoard what we have.

Death is a self-centered existence where a person walks alone.

Life happens when we realize the both/and abundance all around us.

Part of that abundance is that we never walk alone,

that we may be the only one walking a certain path,

but that our walking is a corporate act,

the whole community of life is with you.

And we can expect to find Jesus in our walking –

Even in people and places we don’t like.

Alive, surrounded by the good company of each other and Christ,

We are empowered and we use whatever is present

to bring life and meaning whenever and wherever we can.

We find great joy in seeing what happens when we let go.

Self-centeredness cuts the self off from God and neighbor,

and causes the self to shrink back, to die.

Self-giving enlarges and enriches life.

Jim’s description of what he received from Grace-Calvary

and what he has found to be true in his life is beautifully described by Paul

in his earliest letter – to the Thessalonians.

He is assuring the people of his reason for being among them.

We were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.

[meaning a wet-nurse who after going out to feed and care for other children,

returns home to hold and feed and care for her own.]

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.

And so you might say that Jesus and Paul say this to us in so many words:

That as God gave ALL of God’s self to us in Jesus,

God wants our ALL. God wants our whole self

Because that is the only way we are truly, fully alive.

And God wants life abundant for all of us!

When we get to that place, everything else flows from there.

We can give God a piece of something with the inner desire

that in that giving we are really appeasing some request or obligation

while keeping the self safe and unattached.

Or we can simply let God have all that we are and all that we have.

As Jim said, ‘What joy to see what happens when we let go!’

And to love neighbor as self?

I read that ‘to love our neighbor as ourselves

usually requires two things in our culture:

a pocketbook and a suspension of judgment.

That’s a neat thing about letting God have all of you,

Judgment of others seems to fall by the wayside.

Pilgrims and stewards – to give our ALL is not something we can fully do, most of us.

But, we place ourselves in this community of faith, a place where we can practice letting go.

Well, to end I’ll quote Dick Bunce who summed it all up by saying:

“Don’t be a tight bud. Bloom and grow!”