Confirmation Sermon

Text:  Mark 12:30-31 : Love of God and Love of Neighbour in our discipleship

The gospel reading we’ve just heard is like a calm oasis in the storm of the telling of Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem. Unless we know its context of controversy, we won't appreciate the significance of the gracious conduct of this exchange. A scribe, one of the religious leaders, watches the acrimonious disputes and asks Jesus, "Which commandment is first of all?" He cuts through the details of the law that the others were arguing about - paying taxes to Caesar, or the awkward questions about the resurrection of the dead - to get at the heart of things. And Jesus, who has retaliated on other questions because they are tricks to trap him, doesn't hit back this time but gives a clear answer about what it means to love God. He is gracious and not polemical.

 

We probably hear this phrase as a commandment to love God. Full stop. But it is more specific than that. "Love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And love your neighbour as yourself."

 

In biblical times the heart was not thought of as the seat of the emotions, as we think of it today, but as the centre of the being, what is at the heart of things, the seat of the will. To love God with all my heart is to love God with all my will, it is to express things in action not in feelings. And so I love God with all my heart when I choose to do what I believe God is asking of me, rather than what I want to do if left to my own devices.

 

If we love someone we want to get to know them better. And every Christian should want to learn more about God through the use of our minds. But this is not just by studying theology or doing the Disciple course. If God has given you a mind that is good at engineering, or languages, or fixing things, or teaching children and caring for others, then you can love God with your mind as you study the way God's world and his people work. Many inventions have occurred, many books have been written, and many daily lives have been touched for good because someone has loved God with all their mind. This church has produced such scholars and pastors and skilled technicians over its 100 year history. We fail to love God with our minds if we don't exercise our brains creatively for good.

 

Then,  loving God with all our soul. In the Old Testament the soul carries a meaning of life;  it is vital to physical existence and without a soul we are dead. And so to love God with all our soul is to love God with all our being, giving our lives to Christ. It is what is involved at baptism when the question is asked ‘Do you turn to Christ?' and the candidate answers ‘I turn to Christ'; in biblical terms we are saying we love God with all our soul, questions which we will be reminded of shortly as we confirm Tim and welcome him into membership of the Church.

 

And then, there's loving God with all our strength. The saints and martyrs we celebrated a month ago on All Saints' Day did this, and all the ones who never hit the headlines but just got on with being faithful in life and in death and made an impact on people around them. It takes strength to keep going at times. Discipleship is not always glamorous or spectacular. Love is proved in the day to day faithfulness to little things, the keeping going and being in it for the long haul, not complaining when things get rough.

 

And then Jesus summarises dozens of detailed commandments in the law in the sweeping phrase "you shall love your neighbour as yourself".  He sets out a broad principle which needs to be worked out in detailed application, using the mind and the strength which he assumes are dedicated to God. Sometimes I wonder about how the Church loves its Christian neighbours, let alone those who don't share our faith, because so often we are more concerned - like Jesus' disputants - with disagreeing on proving one another wrong on detailed points of the law than with loving God and loving our neighbour as ourself. We hope that the newly appointed Community Outreach Worker will help us all to engage in new ways of connecting with our neighbourhoods.

 

What of us, today? What does loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and our neighbour as ourself, mean? It's a time of year when we are very aware that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, those  who have loved God and loved their neighbours in exemplary ways. We should expect to be open to love and be loved by God, and we can begin as we celebrate Communion together and then go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

 

Archbishop Rowan Williams writes eloquently on the problem of loving God, the essence of the first part of the double-love command. After all, how can we love someone we have never seen? Only the saints, he writes, are given the grace of that intensity of relationship with God that makes them weep, love and dance for Him. He relates the story of St John of the Cross who, one Christmas, assuming he was not being overlooked, took the figure of the Christ child from the crib, cradled it in his arms, and danced round the crib with his eyes closed for several minutes in silent joy. This gentle movement of the spirit towards God through Christ, has to be worked at, just as any other relationship has to be worked at. Maybe we ought to try to find space in this Advent season to prepare to receive the joy of the Christ-child into our lives again. The discipline of worship and prayer as well as fellowship with other and serving God and others in the wider world – all are part of the working at our relationship as disciples of Christ. God will then not be only for Sundays, but will permeate every aspect of, every moment of, our everyday lives.
And God loves us unconditionally. That is a given. But we have to choose God before we can love Him. As Rowan Williams puts it:
‘..loving God does mean choosing God and wanting God, seeing one’s happiness in God, not just having good thoughts and a reasonably orderly moral disposition. God is what we are for, he is that by which everything in our experience is to be tried and valued: he is himself incomparably worthwhile’.

 

The Wesleys put love of God and Love of Neighbour at the heart of their Christian Education programme. At its centre was the need for discipline in discipleship – a methodical spirituality which gave a unique character to the Methodist movement. That is what it means to be a Methodist today. That’s what Methodist membership is all about.

 

 

Loving God with

My heart       through the discipline of worship

My soul         through the discipline of prayer, fasting and silence

My mind       through the discipline of study

My strength             through the discipline of service and giving

 

Loving my neighbours (to be a shelf is to be a support for them)

Through the disciplines of

Social  Holiness – proclaiming peace and justice

Evangelism – gossiping the gospel

Love and Forgiveness – Pastoral Care

Fellowship – House groups and class meetings

I hope and pray we can all make these a part of our methodical discipleship. It’s model for me, for Tim whom we confirm this morning,  and for all of us.