Love God? Why?

 I have too many thoughts about the Bible's commands to love to fit into one sermon, so I'm blogging about them - today, the command to love God "with all our heart, soul, strength and mind."

The children of Israel are commanded to love God at least 6 times in the Hebrew scriptures, along with "fearing him," walking in obedience to him," and serving him, and in connection with keeping his "decrees, laws and commands, always."  See Deut 6:5, 10:12, 11:1, 30:16, 30:20; Joshua 22:5, 23:11.

And of course Jesus, asked to name the greatest commandment, easily repeats this command to love God:  Matt 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27, quoting the Deuteronomy 6 passage as above.

But Jesus quickly adds a second greatest commandment, "love your neighbor as yourself," which comes from Leviticus 19. 

But, is "loving God" really anything like "loving your neighbor"?  

To love my neighbor as we are taught in Leviticus, I need to consider my neighbor's needs and interests as being much like my own, and as valid as my own, and make plans not to violate and even to help fulfill his or her needs and interests as much as it is up to me.  This kind of love is a call into community, to create the kind of community where we can rest knowing our neighbor does not mean to rob or lie to me, and I am also not intending to rob or lie to him/her.  

I'll talk about all this in another blog - but is that kind of love anything like "loving God"?

Does God need me to keep in mind his interests, and to imagine they are anything like my own?

A couple of days I was swimming in a community pool, and there was a young family there - Dad, Mom, a girl about 4 years old and a boy about 15 months old, I'd say.  

The dad was holding the toddler in his arms in the shallow end when the mom took the 4-year-old for a float further into the pool - and this change in distance from mom set the toddler off!  He began to scream for mom.  Clearly, to him, a distance of 20 feet from mom, in this unnatural and strange watery environment, was beyond his comfort zone.

Why?  Well, for that little guy, his mom is his original "secure base."  He has known her since before birth, and has depended on her all that time.  He knows her smell, what she sounds like, what her hands feel like - and he has found her to be the source of many things he needs and can't supply for himself, AND to be TRUSTWORTHY.

He knows he needs her and relies on her, and he trusts her to be the one he needs.  He doesn't yet know the words, but he knows she loves him, and is "for" him.  She loved him first, and he has found that good!

Does he love her?

Do we love God?

In this relationship, "loving" her is "trusting" her.  As their relationship moves forward and he discovers his own will and ability to do what he wants, he will most of the time align his will with hers BECAUSE he trusts her.  His willingness to do that will be a sign of his love.

And if we love God with everything we've got, it means we have come to rely on him and find him trustworthy, and for those reasons we will do what he instructs us to do.

Now the metaphor breaks down because that little toddler boy is meant to grow up and leave his mom behind, to develop a separate will and conscience and even to become somebody else's dad.

But in our relationship with the Father, we are not meant to grow away from him.  We are meant to grow "up" in him, to become mature in the relationship with God for which we are made.  We will learn more and more deeply what it means that God loves us and always has, and we will begin to want what God wants, even for God to have what he wants, so to speak.  

So, when God commands us to "love" him, he is not commanding us to develop warm and fuzzy feelings for him, though they may come!  He is commanding us to examine his relationship with us, to find him dependable, good and trustworthy, and then to intentionally respond with trust through doing what he says to do...living the way he calls us to live.

God shows us his love, we read in the New Testament, in Jesus.  If we want to know what God is like, we read in the Apostle Paul's letter to the Colossians, we should watch Jesus:  he is "the image of the invisible God."  Jesus came to us FROM God's love for us, to show us God's love for us, and to initiate a new relationship for us WITH God, that we would find out how much we are loved by our Father, and become those who truly can love God.

It is not a burdensome commandment; it is the most natural response to being so loved, first.  

Why Did I React That Way?

I struggle with a need to be right - I know this about myself.  

So I have to pay attention when I am getting riled up, trying to prove to someone else how they are wrong, particularly online - particularly when it comes to the many things that are both debated and so destructive in our current context.

I understand that the 'need to be right' is for me an outworking of what the Bible, partcularly the Apostle Paul, calls "the flesh."  

Paul doesn't really mean our bodies.  He is using our body and the world "flesh" as a metaphor for what we'd call our survival instincts and how they influence our egos.  Our amygdalas, that part of our brain interested in keeping us alive (always watching for threats), influences how we perceive some things as life-or-death (when they're not). 

So we can respond in outsized ways to things we perceive as threats our very survival, even if what they are, are threats to our status, our identity, our way of life, the way we think about "our people," etc.

We operate out of "the flesh" all the time, but Paul is teaching us that because we belong to Jesus, we not only shouldn't but don't have to - we now have the Spirit of God within us (see: Pentecost) and we live a new life in the Spirit.  

The trick is, we have to choose to live in the Spirit, and not the flesh.  Read Romans 7 and 8, or Galatians 5, for example.

This week, what Paul says in Romans 7:5-6 is speaking to me about how I react to the folks who won't be vaccinated, won't wear a mask, and will mock those who do, even in the face of rising case counts and increasing deaths from COVID in the US.  To me, these are not different opinions; they are wrong, dangerous, threatening and damaging - this is seen in the very different rates of disease and death from COVID in the states where such attitudes are not just primary but pushed by the authorities.

But, Paul says, to me:

"While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.  But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit." - Romans 7:5-6 NRSV

What bears fruit for death in our lives?  Our "sinful passions" - those emotions that override our desire not to sin.  Why does this happen?  Because we are living in the flesh, that "survival self" mindset where the things that are "life and death" to us are not examined for what they are - we just react to them.  We are enslaved to these things, in the flesh.

But in v 6, Paul says, we are DEAD to what has held us captive (the flesh).  Why?  See Romans 6 - by faith, we are joined to Jesus. We died with him to our old selves, to our flesh; we were raised WITH HIM to a new life.  That life is worked in us by the Holy Spirit who came to dwell in us when we put our faith in Jesus.  This is what baptism represents!

So the Holy Spirit also lives in us - and we can be "dead" to the perspective, demands and imperatives of our survivor-selves, our flesh which lies to us about what is so important, when the threats are not actually life-and-death.

We don't have to respond to the amygdala's alerts that our very selves are in danger  - in my case, just because someone else is wrong (maybe).

We don't have to, because our old selves, that self that thinks it is alone in the world coping to survive, died with Jesus, and a new self has emerged, the new me that Jesus is growing.

That new me?  It doesn't have to be restrained by laws and rules because it is inherently peaceful, inherently whole and harmonious with God and the world.  That new self is life "in the Spirit" and according to Paul in chapter 8, without that new life in the Spirit, we can't please God.  

When we are living according to the flesh, it is as though we are blind and deaf to God and God's long perspective on life and death.  We are ripe for terror, alarm and fury  - because we think it is all up to us.

When we are living according to the Spirit, we have no need to react like that to everything (life and death isn't up to us), and in a more peaceful state we are in a better place to have perspective on the things that trigger us (in my case, on other people "being wrong" and why they might think that way - and even whether *I* might be wrong and have something to learn).  It doesn't mean there aren't things that demand my response - there are.  It does mean that I don't need to respond from fear and fury.

How do we turn away from the alarm of the flesh, to the peace of the Spirit?  Only by intentionally turning our attention to Christ, in his word and in prayer.  The temptation is of course to attend to what is so alarming, to pour our energies into what is such a threat - but by our experience in walking with Jesus we will come to understand that the sense of alarm is the VERY thing that ought to announce to us a need to pray, to go to the scriptures, to worship.  The sense of alarm (unless the house is indeed on fire!) is the key that we are in need of the Spirit's help.

I confess, the reason  we don't need to react with alarm is that in Christ, we already died is, in these days of COVID, ironic...but then again, I suppose the Apostle Paul in his day lived much closer to issues of life and death than most of us do under ordinary circumstances.  Which is to say, he got it, that throwing around the words dead and died are alarming in themselves!

Aleady-having-died, though, is only good news if we also have already-been-resurrected, because we are "hidden in Christ" who has already done all that for us.  It is a perspective change on the whole concept of life, death and time, that by the Spirit we adopt.  

In the Spirit, we may understand better that the person I am arguing with (because they are WRONG) matters more to God (and ought to, to me) than whether they are right or wrong - and that the existential threat their wrongness holds (even if it is actually very dangerous) is well within the power of God to manage.  Jesus told me to love them, even to forgive them, even if they are a literal threat to me.  That is supposed to be my priority because I follow him.  Even if I still need to act on behalf of what is just or right.

It is in my FLESH (my survivor-self) that I want to trounce them.  The Spirit knows better.

So  in these fraught days of COVID, I need to prioritize my perspective-change in the presence of God.  Shalom (mine and others around me) depends on it.  My witness to Jesus depends on it.  My transformation into the who the Spirit is making me to be, depends on it.  

May I have courage to do it.