Preparing the Way: Stay in Love with God

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

  Preparing the Way:  Three Simple Practices

   Rev. Monte Marshall

 

Well, this is the last Sunday of Advent.  It’s hard to believe, but Christmas is only days away!  We’ve spent the last three Sundays preparing the way for fresh encounters with the coming Christ.  We enjoyed a musical interlude last Sunday with a magnificent presentation by our choir.  Today we return to our Advent emphasis on three simple practices that are both rooted in scripture, and in our heritage as United Methodists.  John Wesley, the founder of Methodist movement, embraced these practices as a rule of life and made them a central component of Methodism’s approach to discipleship.  The three simple practices are:  Do no harm.  Do good.  Stay in love with God.  Today’s focus is “stay in love with God.”  Let us pray.  PRAYER.

Laura Jean and I have been married for 38 years.  I can honestly say that I love her more today than I did on the day we were married.  My love for her has grown as we raised two sons and shared life together with all of its ups and downs, its joys and sorrow, its challenges and accomplishments.  My love for her has grown, but this has not been by accident. 

In fact, it’s been my experience that to stay in love with another human being takes work—hard work.  It’s not that staying in love is a chore, but it does require such things as commitment, intentionality, attentiveness, communication, time together, intimacy, vulnerability, trust and yes, even discipline.

Dr. Tony Campolo illustrates the point.  He writes:  “Sometimes in counseling situations, I encounter persons who claim an absence of any kind of affectionate feelings for their mates.  These people say that whatever they once felt has died and that they are left with no alternative but to end their marriage.  Whenever I counsel such people, I always tell them that if they will do faithfully what I tell them to do, within a month the feelings of affection will return….When they ask me if I have some new and secret method to employ, I simply tell them to do the following: 

1. Each day make a list of ten things that you would do for your spouse if you were in love.
2. Then each day, do the ten things that are on that list….It is as simple as that.”[1]

Now frankly, Dr. Campolo’s approach sounds like work to me, but apparently, in many cases, the people who do the work manage to love one another again.  So yes, I guess it is work, but it’s a loving work and a disciplined work that can help us stay in love with another human being. .

Now it seems to me that staying in love with another human being has a thing or two to teach us about staying in love with God.  In both cases, commitment is required; intentionality is required; attentiveness is required, and so on.  And yes, even discipline is required. 

This morning’s text from Deuteronomy points us in this direction.  First of all, the text calls us to love God.  The words are attributed to Moses:  “Hear, O Israel:  Yahweh, our God, Yahweh is One!  You are to love Yahweh, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”  In Judaism, this verse is known as the Shema, which is the Hebrew word translated “Hear,” as in “Hear, O Israel.”

In the New Testament, the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke portray Jesus pointing to this text as the greatest commandment with the addition of one phrase not found in the Hebrew text, “all your mind.”  And, of course, there is the addition of a second commandment taken from Leviticus:  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Now as one commentator notes, the call to love in the Shema “is not just about our emotional feelings toward God.  Love is covenant…language.  It expresses commitment.  Thus, the people are to commit themselves to God with all their ‘heart, soul, and strength.’”[2]  This triad means that there is no part of us that is not focused and centered on our relationship with God.

Another commentator notes that “no rule, no piety, no custom, no culture, no tradition, is more important than loving God completely.”  That commentator then adds:  “Only hard working stubborn love can make the great commandment a complete love of God.”[3]   

So to help us stay in love with God, the Deuteronomy text, while not specifically recommending Tony Compolo’s list-making approach to staying in love, does commend certain other disciplines for God’s people to practice.  The text says:  “Let these words that I command you today, be written in your heart.  Teach them diligently to your children, and repeat them constantly—when you are at home, when you are walking down a road, when you lie down at night and when you get up in the morning.  Tie them on your hand as a reminder; wear them as a circlet on your forehead; write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”   

In the context of the narrative in Deuteronomy, these disciplines are critically important for the Israelites to practice because they’re poised to enter the Promised Land after their long exodus from bondage in Egypt.  But the Promised Land is populated by others who don’t know Yahweh and who worship other gods.  The text is intended to prepare the people so that they’re not seduced away from devotion to Yahweh by the practices of others with different commitments.

And all of these many generations later, we still know what it’s like to be seduced away from devotion to God, don’t we?  We know what it’s like to be lured away and distracted by competing affections and commitments, don’t we?  We know what it’s like to still struggle with staying in love with God, don’t we? 

Well, through the centuries and among the followers of Jesus, other disciplines have developed to help us avoid the seductions and to stay in love with God.  The late United Methodist bishop, Reuben Job, writes about these disciplines from a Wesleyan perspective.  He notes that John Wesley’s rule of life embraced the following disciplines to help us stay in love with God:  the “public worship of God, the Lord’s Supper, private and family prayer, searching the Scriptures, Bible study, and fasting.”

Bishop Job also realizes that “This simple rule will be constructed differently for each of us because each of us is unique.”  But he then writes of how important it is for all of us to “find our way of living and practicing those disciplines that will keep us in love with God—practices that will help keep us positioned in such a way that we may hear and be responsive to God’s slightest whisper of direction and receive God’s promised presence and power every day and in every situation.  It is in these practices that we learn to trust God….It is in these practices that we learn of God’s love for us.  It is where our love for God is nurtured and sustained.  Incorporating these practices in our way of living will keep us in love with God.”[4]

So let me share with you an example of how one woman managed to stay in love with God even through trying circumstances.  Mabel was in a nursing home.  The facility was large, understaffed and overfilled. 

Tom Schmidt met Mabel when she was strapped into a wheelchair and parked near the end of a hallway.  Her face was difficult to look at.  She was eighty-nine years old and, as Tom Schmidt tells it, she had been in this nursing home “bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years.”

On the day that Tom met her, he put a flower in her hand and wished her a happy Mother’s Day.  Mabel said, “’Thank you.  It’s lovely.  But can I give it to someone else?  I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind.’”

Tom pushed her in her wheelchair until he found one of the patients alert enough to receive Mabel’s gift.  When he stopped the chair, “Mabel held out the flower and said, ‘Here, this is from Jesus.’”

Tom and Mabel visited that day and became friends.  He went to see her once or twice a week for three years.  On some days, Tom would read to her from the Bible and it often happened that when he finished a passage, Mabel would go on, reciting even more of the text from memory, “word-for-word.”  On other days he would take a book of old church hymns and songs, and Mabel would know all of the words by heart.   

For awhile, Tom had the sense that he was being a help to her through his regular visits.  But it wasn’t long into their friendship that Tom realized that she was helping him.  It even reached the point where Tom was taking a pen and paper with him on his visits so that he could write down the things that she would say.

And then, Tom experienced a hectic week of final exams.  He writes:  “I was frustrated because my mind seemed to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about.  The question occurred to me, ‘What does Mabel have to think about—hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it’s day or night?’  So I went to her and asked, ‘Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?’

“And she said, ‘I think about…Jesus.’

“I sat there, and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me, of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked, ‘What do you think about Jesus?’  She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote…:

“’I think about how good he’s been to me.  He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know….I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied….Lots of folks wouldn’t care much for what I think.  Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned.  But I don’t care.  I’d rather have Jesus.  He’s all the world to me.’

“And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:  “Jesus is all the world to me, my life, my joy, my all.  He is my strength from day to day….He’s my friend.”

Tom was deeply impressed by the power evident in this woman’s life.  “This is not fiction” he writes.    “Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this.  I know.  I knew her.  How could she do it?”  Tom then answered his own question.  All of her life, Mable had stayed in love with God, even in the most trying of circumstances.  She followed Jesus as best she could.  She was committed, intentional, and attentive.  She communicated with the one she loved.  She gave of herself in a relationship of intimacy and vulnerability.  And yes, she was disciplined.  She spent a lifetime praying, singing the songs of the church, meditating on the scriptures, and for as long as she was able, she gathered with the people of God for worship and fellowship.  Mabel stayed in love with God.[5]

So yes, it’s true:  It’s hard work to stay in love with another being, and it’s hard, stubborn work to stay in love with God.  But now, the question is before us:  As we prepare for Christ’s coming again at Christmas, what hard, stubborn work are we willing to do to stay in love with God?  I give you several moments of silence to ponder your response.             SILENCE 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.