Sermons

“A Word for a New Year”

Psalm 85:8-13; Mark 12:28-34 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – November 18, 2018

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might make a fresh start with your love guiding everything we do.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

Happy New Year’s Eve!  Well, sort of anyway.  Next Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent, which is the beginning of liturgical year, which sort of makes today liturgical New Year’s Eve.  (If New Year’s Eve were a liturgical holiday, that is, which it isn’t!  But let’s pretend.). Since we have this extra Sunday this year, between Thanksgiving and Advent, I thought we could use the time for some reflection about starting a new year.  There is a practice aimed at encouraging us to live more intentionally; perhaps you’ve heard of it.  Basically, you spend some time considering different concepts and then choose a word that will be your guide all year.  Now, personally, I have not yet cultivated the kind of attention span that would enable me to focus on one word for a whole year.  But it seemed like a good idea to consider, at least for the time span of one sermon.

So I submit to you, for the liturgical year that will mostly be in 2019, our focus word:  Love.  Solid choice, eh?  Even I might be able to keep this one in mind most of the time!  But seriously, if we’re looking for guidance about how to live our lives, as we cast our intentions into the future, where better to look than Jesus’ teaching about the greatest commandment?

Now, of course, Jesus never lets us bring up the first commandment without including the second one as well.  I believe this is because Jesus wants us to understand that loving our neighbors as we love ourselves is part of loving God.  So for our purposes today, we’re going to combine the two together.  But what I really want to focus on are those four measures with which Jesus asks us to love God: “With all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”  Just saying that we’re going to choose the word “Love” to guide us for a year is a little abstract for many of us.  But when we apply these facets of love to the situation, we can bring it into sharper focus and find real help for learning how to live more faithfully.

So what would it mean to enter into 2019 with Love as our guide?  What could it mean to love in 2019, with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our mind, and all our strength?  So often, love is trivialized into a sentiment – a mere feeling – but we know it is so much more than that.  Applying these measures can help us understand that more concretely.  I’m going to take them out of order, because my reflections build upon each other more easily that way.  So let’s start with strength.  What does it mean to love God (and our neighbors) with all our strength?  It certainly isn’t about power or domination.  This isn’t about forcing our love on anyone.  Perhaps a more helpful word would be “capacity”.  To love with all our strength is to love with all our capacity, all our resources, being ready to offer anything and everything we have for the sake of love.

Starting out a new year with an inventory of our resources is never a bad idea.  This isn’t just about our money, but it definitely includes that.  When is the last time you reviewed your household budget?  Have you ever done it with an eye toward how it expresses your love for God and your neighbors?  Has your financial life been a source of stress?  Or pride?  Or joy?  What would it take to bring your spending and saving and giving habits into congruence with your values, if they aren’t already?  A new year is a good time to consider these important questions.  It’s a good time to reflect on your understanding of tithing, your emotional relationship to debt and other traps, and your sense of self-worth independent of your bank balance.

But of course, loving with all your strength is about so much more than money.  If you have a home, what sort of hospitality do you offer there?  As we observe the calamities of our times, it is clear the world is desperate for more hospitality.  What skills would it do your heart good to share more frequently with others?  Learning from one another is one of the best gifts any of us can receive.  What about your time?  Time is the resource we all have an equal amount of; how much of yours are you using to express your love for God?  How would you like to do that differently in the coming year?  Considering how to love with all our strength, all our capacity, draws us into a very concrete analysis of how we live.

The next measure I want us to consider is the one Jesus added in himself.  This question the scribe asked him about which commandment is first was not a new question, and Jesus gave a pretty standard answer, quoting Deuteronomy.  But in Deuteronomy there are only three aspects of this love for God listed: heart, soul, and might.  Was it the Greek influence on the gospels that has Jesus adding in “with all your mind”?  We can’t really know, but we can usefully apply the addition to our preparation for a new year.  Indeed, this may be particularly important in a year like 2019.  To love God, and consequently our neighbors, with all our mind means to let God’s love shape our thoughts.  It means seeking to have the gospel shape our opinions and beliefs and perspectives.  It means striving to ensure our words and especially the rhetoric we use to share our thoughts express love first and foremost, rather than disdain or disrespect.  We don’t always give proper weight to how our words shape our thoughts, rather than the other way around.

So often, we use our words to diminish or de-humanize those we disagree with.  Are there particular words you want to stop using in 2019?  Words that you’ve used in the past without fully admitting how they do violence to God’s creation?  It could be that letting the word “Love” shape the new year requires removing other words from our vocabularies.  Loving God with all our mind means trying to see the world the way God sees it, which is why it pushes us in the direction of loving our neighbors, even if we think they’re misguided or delusional or just plain wrong.  This may be the hardest one of the four, but it may be the one 2019 needs most desperately.

Let’s look at the heart next.  This may be the one that seems the most obvious, but only if we don’t dig in.  I mentioned earlier that we too often sentimentalize love as a syrupy emotion.  Loving God with all your heart is not about making goo-goo eyes at a painting of Jesus.  As anyone who’s been married for a while will tell you, love isn’t just an emotion; it’s a daily, moment-by-moment choice.  And that’s what it means in this instance as well.  Loving God with all our hearts is about our choices.  In the Bible, the “heart” refers to the center of our will, the place deep inside from whence our behavior emanates.  To love God with all our heart is to freely and joyfully choose to declare, “not my will, but thine be done.”  Our minds may help us discern the will of God, but it is our hearts that help us do it.

If we apply this to preparing to start a new year, it’s not just about the day-to-day choices, but about the bigger decisions that shape the very structure of our lives.  It’s about how we make our money, and where we spend our free time, and whether or not we have children, and what kinds of risks we’re willing to take.  The coming year may not have a decision that big looming in your life, but we can all benefit from taking stock and seeing where we’ve allowed our hearts to stray from seeking God’s will.  Whether it’s the big decisions or the smaller, daily ones, loving God with all our hearts means bringing those choices into line with our understanding of the gospel, as best we are able.  Reflecting on how we’ve done with that can help us chart a clearer course toward where we want to be in 2019.

Finally, let’s talk about our souls.  I saved this one for last, because it seems the most abstract and because it prods us toward the broadest perspective.  The line between our hearts and our souls is fuzzy, but here’s one possible way of defining it.  If our hearts are the center of our will, we can consider our souls more like the essence of our being.  It’s sort of like character, but deeper and more spiritual.  One question that gets at it is whether, once you’re gone, people will remember that being around you reminded them of the love of God.  People say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we can apply that to trying to love God with all our souls.  Can we shape our souls to imitate God?  Can we follow Jesus faithfully enough so that others recognize Christ in our lives?  In some sense, it’s a matter of legacy.  And this is why it pushes us into 2019 and far beyond.  One way to think about how to shape the next year of your life is to skip to the end and imagine how you want to look back on it.  What do you want to be remembered for?  Who do you want people to say that you were?  What is the essence you’re hoping will last?  That is your soul.  So how can you give that over to loving God and loving your neighbors?  This may have gotten way too deep for some of us, but remember we’re just trying to think about 2019.  You don’t have to know what’s going to happen, just who you want to be in the midst of whatever comes.

I hope I’ve given us all some things to think about, as the liturgical year begins next week, and soon after, the new calendar year.  To be shaped by love in all things is the main goal of all Christian practice.  Breaking it down into more concrete aspects of our lives can help us look ahead with hope and intention, rejoicing in each new day God has given us and working to follow Jesus in the way of love.  Alleluia and Amen!