Loving God

Sermon

What does it mean to love God?

I was not very far into my study of this text when I hit that question. What does it mean to love God? How can we love God, the infinite mystery, the source of all that is? I understand, more or less, what it means to love my neighbor, real live human beings whom I can see and hear and talk with and touch. I love them by being with them, sharing with them, learning from them, helping them, letting them help me.

But loving God? What does that even mean? My first step toward finding an answer to the question was to go back to the Hebrew scriptures, to the words that Jesus quotes from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy. Israel – the group of people who have trekked through the desert for forty years – are about to enter the promised land, and God, through the voice of Moses, is teaching them how they are to live together once their wandering is over and they’re wading through milk and honey.

Moses tells them that there is one God and they will love that God. Now, that word love – that’s a tricky word. We tend to think of love as an emotion, as a fluttery feeling in the gut or a profound rightness that describes our relationship with another. But those ancient people who followed this God didn’t think of love as an emotion as much as love as attachment to or allegiance.

To love God was to obey God’s law, to give priority to what God required. Loving God meant being on God’s team and no one else’s; loving God meant living according to God’s desires.

Which is kind of crazy, right? As one commentator put it, when human beings love an omnipotent God it might result in “elements of tension and near contradiction… since it is a far from straightforward understanding to show love toward a power that may hurl one swiftly to destruction and may take away everything that one possesses.” (Ronald E. Clement, New Interpreter’s Commentary on the Bible, “Genesis”)

In other words, when we choose to love God, we make ourselves utterly vulnerable to a being that can flick us across the universe the way a schoolkid flicks a spitball at the teacher. But, Jesus says, that is the greatest commandment. All the same, it feels like in loving God, we humans are taking all the risk. God risks nothing by being loved by us. God risks nothing by loving us. We bear all the potential pain.

So why do it? Why love God? Why throw our allegiance to an omnipotent being so extraordinary that to come face to face with God would burn off our skin and melt our eyeballs? Love God because Jesus says so? Isn’t there something more in it for us?

Let me offer this: to love God, to give God our allegiance, to live according to the law of God,

does a few things for us.

Loving God centers us. We have a gauge for our choices, our actions, and our decisions. Do I do this thing? What is my understanding of what God would want me to do? We’re not wandering about in some aimless moral fog; we have clarity.

Loving God humbles us. To love God is to acknowledge that we are not the center of all that is, that there is a power and source beyond us. Folks who’ve been through 12-step programs begin by acknowledging a higher power. In loving God, we do the same.

Loving God uplifts us. To love God is to engage in an act of joy. It’s like sitting outside in a park somewhere on a cool spring or fall day and closing your eyes, tilting your head upward, and basking in the sun. Nothing is accomplished in that, no great deed done. But it is a joyful thing to feel the warmth of the sun; it is a joyful thing to bask in the glow of love with God.

Jesus starts with the old commandment to love God, and he adds to it a second commandment also in the ancient texts. If we understand that the earthly mission of Jesus was to get us connected rightly with God, and to get us connected rightly with each other, the pairing of those two commandments makes sense.

I would go so far as to say that if you really love God—if you really truly give God your allegiance—then you cannot help but love your neighbor.

Perhaps you are thinking to yourself right now, Beth, there are some people who are simply beyond my love. I get that. I really do. But maybe one way to think of that person is to acknowledge that it is hard for you to love them, but God loves them, and that will have to do for now.

We could approach this question backwards. What do we want the world to look like? How do we want society to be? Most of us agree that we would like an absence of war and violence, which often requires just and honest leaders. We want an end to abject poverty requiring people to live on the streets and to endure endless trauma; that requires generosity and an undoing of the way things have been. Most of us want meaningful work with a living wage, not just for ourselves but for all. We want clean air to breathe and clean water to drink and access to food, not just for ourselves. We want joy, and comfort when we grieve. We want a peaceful death on our own terms. We want to be able to have a conversation with someone we disagree with that does not devolve into either a shouting match or cold silence. We want racial equity. Those are the first few things that come to my mind.

From what I know as I read the Bible and study theology and study human psychology and sociology, those things are possible when we love, when we align ourselves and throw our lot in with a way of thinking not just about “me” but about “us.”

So… how do we love God in the 21st century? What does it mean to give our allegiance to God in these days, these days of coronavirus, and a divided nation, and everything? In some ways, the center holds: knowing that our first allegiance is to the ways of God helps us consider how we will act, how we will choose things about spreading a disease and voting. Because living with a virus, and not wanting it to spread, is also about loving our neighbor. Voting for candidates whose platforms address the needs of our most vulnerable citizens is about loving neighbors.

In those verses in Deuteronomy which Jesus quotes, telling us to love God, the people of Israel are also reminded that the love of God, and I would add love of neighbor, is something that has to be taught, and nurtured, and practiced. We don’t learn it once and we’re good. Life throws a lot of challenges to our ability to love God and neighbor—tragedies happen, or the bad guys win, or there seems to be no patterns in the world.

So nurturing love might look like a commitment to daily prayer or reading through a book of the Bible with a dear friend whom you trust to ask hard questions about the reading. Nurturing love might look like giving money to someone or something. It might look like supporting a candidate or writing postcards urging strangers to register to vote. Nurturing love might look like talking with a spiritual director or a therapist.

Friends, I never know what any day will bring, especially now. I do not know if it will be a good day or a bad day with an unexpected death, smoky skies, voter suppression, an uptick in COVID cases, and the feeling that I cannot take it anymore. So practicing my love of God and my love of neighbor gives some shape to my lumpy days; knowing I throw my hat into God’s ring helps clarify what I need to be doing and how I find hope.

I hope that is true for you, that having a center or a foundation in the love of God supports you in these days. Because they are hard, and they are sad, and they are scary. And God is present, and God is patient, and God is not giving up on us. And I love that.