Finding the Pitch Again

A sermon for the twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost given at the United Church of Acworth, NH.  

Mark 12:28-34

Last Saturday evening I attended, for a class I'm taking on Christian worship, a service of Vespers at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Claremont. They don't have an organ, they don't have a piano, they just sing. And their singing fills the room with beautiful sound much as the incense pervades the room with its fragrance.

There would be periods where only one person would sing.

They would sing by themselves a psalm or a section of scripture and then after they were done the choir would respond with portions of a hymn or the singing of some refrain.

Every time the choir would begin singing again, just before they began the choir director would take out a tuning fork, strike it, and hold it up to her ear and hum the notes of the chord which would be the tone for their next choral selection.

I loved watching her do that, partly because I could sense after the long chanting by one person that we had certainly drifted in key from where we started and knowing that she would bring us back gave me a sense of assurance and set my musician's ear at ease.

I think it also struck me as beautiful that they were able to sing together on pitch, in key without large musical instruments, with rather only the help of a tiny little metal object, struck, and listened to carefully in silence.

In this morning's scripture, Jesus is being asked a big question.

He had been challenged from the left and from the right, each time giving answers full of wisdom and wit, insight and intelligence.

And noticing this, and how the left and the right had failed to trap him and get him to say something that they could then plaster over headlines on Fox News and CNN,

Noticing this, another scribe came up to him and asked him, ‘Jesus, which commandment is the first of all?’

Jesus, if I'm going to put one commandment above all commandments, which one would it be?

Jesus, what's the most important thing? What's the one thing to keep in my mind above all other things?

It's kind of like the choir looking expectantly at the choir director.

What are the notes that should guide our song?

Augustine of Hippo was a pastor in North Africa in the 4^th and 5^th centuries. He was a pastor and a thinker and moonlighted as a philosopher and theologian, writing an incredible amount of literature which has been some of the most influential writing in Western history, certainly in Western Christianity.

He writes “Supposing then we were exiles in a foreign land, and could only live happily in our own country, and that being unhappy in exile we longed to put an end to our unhappiness and to return to our own country, we would of course need land vehicles or sea-going vessels, whicih we would have to make use of in order to be able to reach our own country, where we could find true enjoyment. And then suppose we were delighted with the pleasures of the journey, and with the very experience of being conveyed in carriages or ships, and that we were converted to enjoying what we ought to have been using, and were unwilling to finish the journey quickly, and that by being perversely captivated by such agreeable experiences we lost interest in our own country, where alone we could find real happiness in its agreeable familiarity.”

This for Augustine happens again and again. We see and enjoy that which is made and we call it beautiful and we experience pleasures of friendship and home and we call it happiness. But true beauty, true happiness, for Augustine is found in the source, the unchanging life behind all life, the unchanging beauty from which all beautiful things come.

As Jonathan Edwards put it in one of his sermons,

These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams, but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean. . . . Why should we labor for, or set our hearts on anything else, but that which is our proper end, and true happiness?”

Is this the human condition, to delight in the drops from the fountain and neglect the fountain itself?

Augustine calls us to rethink where we place our love where we seek our true happiness.

This is no call to neglect the world in some other-worldly asceticism. I think if we were to get the picture here it is not forsaking the world, but enjoying it more truly, enjoying the world for what the world truly is, issuing forth from the fountain of God's eternity.

And the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Jesus, the scribe asks, What's most important? What's the one thing to keep in mind above all other things?

And the choir director hits the tuning fork against the podium and all of us lean in to hear the pitch:

Jesus replies,

‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’

We were made to enjoy beauty, we were made to love – we are hardwired for this so to speak.

And Jesus is saying this is the pitch that we need to continually return to. This is what keeps us on the road home and not stuck in separation by some preoccupation that takes up all our life and love.

Augustine writes elsewhere, “You awake us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.”

And so Augustine continues to reflect on this response of Jesus.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

For Augustine this makes perfect sense. If God is our true home, if God is the source of being, the source of our happiness, then we are to enjoy God in all that God has made, as we turn from the drops of the fountain to the fountain itself.

And so as we see in our neighbor someone who bears the creativity, the intelligence, the feeling that we recognize in ourselves, we long for that neighbor to join us in that journey toward home, in that love of God which is our true happiness.

Martin Luther King, Jr. says in one of his sermons:

It's significant that Jesus does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul.

We don't have to like people, to love people. We don't have to enjoy people to enjoin people to love God.

Loving our neighbor is not a cold command of duty like “be a good person”

Loving our neighbor follows from our love of God, an enjoyment of God as our home and a longing for others to find their home, their rest in God.

This is the heart of the Christian faith. God wants to restore relationship with us that we might restore relationship with all our human brothers and sisters and that all might be one again in God. God's grace giving birth to grace from each one of us extended to each other. Peace from peace.

Well, Joel, if this is really the heart of the Christian faith, why are there pastors burning Q'urans as if that was the point of being Christian?

I think there are many who have lost the pitch. There are many who have gone on for a long time singing a solo, filling up the room with their own words and neglected to listen to the still small voice, to lean in and hear the tuning fork. In their own way, they have stopped on their journey home and made home in a safe place fortified by their own prejudices and hatred, defended with sharp attacks and cutting out words from scripture and leaving behind the spirit.

Jesus might have said of these folks that they have strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel.

I think we should all grieve that a faith which centers in love of God and love of neighbor has become represented in the ways that it has.

I think many who claim to be representing the Christian faith and who claim to be speaking what the scriptures say and mean, should pay close attention to Jesus in Mark 12. What is the greatest commandment?

As Augustine puts it, “if it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not understood them.”

But the change begins with us – we can't change the heart of a Koran-burning pastor in Florida, but we can pray for him. We can't change anyone, but we can be the love of God for all who we meet.

We often get overwhelmed when we think of all the people who need to know God's love. At least I do.

I like Augustine's very pastoral, very practical suggestion:

“As you are unable to take care of all your fellow men, treat it as the luck of the draw when time and circumstance brings some into closer contact with you than others.”

Let us lean in and listen to the pitch that will bring us again to that call for which we were created,

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

All else follows from this. Amen.