“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your strength.’ . . . ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Mark 12:30-31 (NRSV)

* * *

Open our hearts and minds, O Lord, by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the scriptures are read and your word is proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you would say to us today, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

There is a picture on the wall of a cave in the area of the world that is now Spain. The prehistoric cave drawing from 10,000 years before the birth of Christ is a great woolly mammoth, a lumbering creature, now extinct, that bore a striking resemblance to the elephant. What is so fascinating about the drawing is that right at the place on the drawing where the animal’s heart would have been in his body, there is a red, heart-shaped spot that looks exactly like a valentine. Keep in mind that this drawing is 12,000 years old or more and that the first commercial valentine was created in 1844, and it becomes quite remarkable to realize how ancient and engrained is the notion of the heart as a seed of life force, of being itself.1

Fast forward seven or eight thousand years to the world of the ancient Hebrews and to the first references to the heart in the Bible. They are found in the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis, interestingly, in the story of Noah and the ark. Because we love the thought of the rabbits and raccoons waltzing two by two up the gangplank of the ark and the idea of the rainbow at the end of the flood, we sometimes forget that this is a very sobering saga about God’s deep disappointment with the human race: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:5-6).

Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, both God and humans are understood to have hearts. The human heart is sometimes the seat of human wisdom and the locus of compassion, but it also is the place from which the most feckless of human schemes can emerge, with the most self-righteous of justifications behind those schemes. In God’s heart, there never is any sign of fecklessness or mean-spiritedness, but God’s heart does become filled with disappointment and grief, anger as well as gladness. God’s heart is subject to being softened by compassion.2 In story after story, God does have a change of heart. With regard to the Ninevites, for example, God had originally decided to send calamity upon them but then chose to show mercy to them, much to the dismay of Jonah (Jonah 3:10).

In the Bible, God most certainly changes human hearts. That is the powerful promise of the passage from Ezekiel that was read a few moments ago. As it had been in the days preceding the flood, the people of God, the covenant community, had erred and strayed, had, in fact, been taken into exile as a consequence of their faithlessness. But Ezekiel, who usually delivered messages of doom and gloom, had an extraordinary message of hope and restoration to share.3 Thus says the Lord: “A new heart I will give you. I will remove that piece of flint that you call a heart, and I will give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).

As he went on, crusty old Ezekiel began to sound downright valentine-like as he passed along the Lord’s promise: “You shall be my people, and I will be your God” (Ezekiel 36:28). You will be mine, and I will be yours again.

Not long ago, a young man came to see me. He was frustrated with his life and the way he was living it. “Do you think I will ever change?” he asked.

All I could answer was, “I believe that God changes people all the time.” I believe it because the Bible says so, over and over again, whether through the story of Paul’s being struck down on the road to Damascus and having a dramatic, instant transformation or through the story of King David (to whom the Fifty-First Psalm is attributed) after his sordid affair with Bathsheba, when he had reached the absolute nadir of human experience. Having despaired of himself, David turned to God, and asked, “Would you create in me a clean heart and put a new and right spirit within me?” And so it came to pass.

When I think about what should be at the heart of the mission of Fourth Presbyterian Church, I think about transformation, the kind that only God can bring into being. When we walk into this majestic sanctuary and are captured by its beauty and peace and holiness, our human spirit becomes expanded. Our hearts are lifted up. “Lift up your hearts; we lift them to the Lord,” we say. It is almost impossible to be small-minded or hard-hearted in this place. How can you hold onto self-absorbed schemes in a holy, sacred place like this?

It was in the temple in Jerusalem that the scribe asked Jesus what Jesus thought was most important in the matter of faith. Jesus answered by reciting words that had defined the peculiar identity of the covenant community for thousands of years: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one.” Then, Jesus spoke of the need for whole-hearted devotion to God and for love of neighbor equal to love for one’s self. You could say that for the community that is called together and constituted by the love of God, faithfulness is love. Jesus, by his life and teaching, by his death on Calvary’s hill, and by his resurrection, shows us what love actually is.

Someone has said that there are really three kinds of love. There is “because love”: I love you because you have been good, or I love you because you please me. There is “if love”: I will love you if you look good, or behave yourself, or do what I want you to do. There is “if love” and there is “because love,” but the kind of love that is most like God’s love that was revealed in Jesus Christ is a different quality of love altogether. One might call it “anyhow love”: no matter what, I love you. This love, God-like love, sets no requirements and never counts the cost.4

No wonder we are commanded to do it. God-like love does not necessarily come to us naturally. In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion or a feeling, though I like emotion and feeling, and hearts, flowers, and candy, and I hope I will get some this week. Love in the Christian sense is a matter of will and commitment. Frederick Buechner says that when “Jesus tells us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being as much as we care about our own well-being,” he is leading us close to the heart of the kingdom of God.5 Buechner says something else that is a great relief to me: “We can love our neighbors without necessarily having to like them.”

“You shall love God fully and completely.” How do you do that? The second part of the commandment suggests one of the ways we put the first part into practice.6 “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Note this is not “instead of yourself.” Many people get in a mess at this very point and decide that they ought to be doormats, or self-neglectful, even self-hateful, but that is the antithesis of what we are called to do. How can one love another if one cannot love one’s self? The scriptures are also very clear that we can never say that we love God while we are at the same time full of hatred and animosity toward others. It is all of a piece.

I know many of you do not keep up with goings on in our beloved Presbyterian denomination, but if you do, you cannot avoid the fact that our national church community is marked by a particularly troublesome spirit of acrimony and distrust these days. It never ceases to amaze me that so many people’s hearts can be filled with hatred and judgment of other people with whom they share Christian communion. They believe that they are doing it for Christ’s sake. There is much mean-spiritedness around the issue of ordaining gay and lesbian people and over the interpretation of scripture. We are having trials in our church in which people’s sex lives are being discussed out loud and in public. The people who are pushing for these kinds of things believe that they are serving Christ by doing so. That 12,000-year-old woolly mammoth may have had a heart, but these days it is hard to find much heart in the PCUSA.

What does love look like in church policies? It looks like justice for all people. It looks like never putting people into categories and saying, “You are better because you are this way, and you are worse because you are that way.” Whether it is sexual orientation, race, economics, or gender, love looks like justice, inclusion, and humility. At the very least, it never looks like meanness.

In the larger society in which we live, the capacity to feel compassion for those who are left out, for the poor, the excluded, and the mentally ill seems to be shrinking at an alarming rate. What does love look like in the broader realms of society? Love looks like justice and advocacy for policies in which all people are lifted up, not just a privileged few. Love looks like the opposite of indifference.

Elie Wiesel, profound interpreter of the Holocaust, has said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it is indifference. The opposite of peace is not war, it is indifference.” If war with Iraq does come, and I pray it does not, I will then pray that we will not succumb to indifference toward the suffering and death that war will create on all sides. I hope we will be cognizant always that people who live on the other side of the world are our neighbors too. They and we are members of the divinely created, richly diverse family of God. God loves the American people, but we must never conclude that God loves the American people more than God loves the other people with whom we share this earth.

I recently reread Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered after four bloody years of Civil War. Here is a line we must take with us into the months and years ahead: “With malice toward none and with charity [that is, love] for all.” This is the American way.

Not long before she died, Mother Teresa spoke to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. She was introduced to that gathering as “the greatest woman in the world.” She dismissed that introduction by saying that if she were the greatest woman in the world, you would think that God would have made her tall enough to see over the podium behind which she was standing. But she went on to say, “I am nothing close to being the greatest woman in the world, but I will tell you the greatest thing about my life. I have been able to be a tiny pencil in the hand of God, someone through whom God writes love letters to the world.”7

What a glad thought that you and I might be God’s valentine, a means by which God’s love is lived out in this broken and often hateful and hard-edged world. Through us, God might say today, “Be mine. Be mine again. Be my people, and I will be your God.”
You have the whole world in your hands, almighty God. The little babies, the great nations. The past, the present, and the future, all wrapped up forever in your gracious and eternal love. For that, we give you thanks, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Benediction
Martin Luther King Jr. once said that in the dramatic scene of Calvary’s hill, three people were crucified for the same crime: the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality; the other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love.

Go out into the world to live in the extreme love of Jesus Christ. Let his extreme love live through you, and may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rest and abide with you, now and forever. Amen.

Notes
1. Gail Godwin, Heart (Harper Collins, 2001), pp. 19-20.
2. Ibid, p. 34.
3. Ibid, p. 41.
4. W. W. Williamson Jr., First Presbyterian Church, Helena, Arkansas. 23 April 1989.
5. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking (Harper & Row, 1973), p. 54.
6. Walter Bruggemann, et. al., Texts for Preaching (Westminster/John Knox, 1993),
p. 574.
7. As told by Dr. Thomas K. Tewell, Senior Pastor, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City, in the 1998 Annual Report to the Congregation.