A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — October 18, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts: Deuteronomy 6:4-9;  Mark 12:28-40

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,

and with all your strength.” — Mark 12:30

After a great deal of argument and controversy between various religious authorities and Jesus, one scribe asks him, “Which commandment is the first of all?”  Wonder of wonders, Jesus gives a real answer—no question back, no story, no dispute.  “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 Shema from Deuteronomy 6—then Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

A great part of life involves us in searching for meaning, generally by asking questions.  What’s important?  How am I to live?  What’s it all about?  What’s it all mean?  These can be global questions… or deal with the specifics of the moment, right now.  When things fall apart, we want to know “Why?” and “What does this mean?”  When all is going well, our questions might be less insistent, but they’re still there.  Life involves us in seeking answers to questions.  And when people find more-or-less good answers for the big questions, these get preserved as a kind of communal wisdom.  The more valuable answers tend to be hallowed, to be treated more and more as absolute truths, until they become dogmas.

Now, the good thing about dogmas is that they do offer useful answers gleaned from human experience.  The bad thing is that no answer, no matter how good, can really be absolute.  That is to say, no answer specific enough to be useful can apply equally to every person in every situation.  To use a familiar phrase, no dogma can always offer “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”  As the “Mother Goose and Grim” comic on this morning’s bulletin cover suggests, we might want to “Beware of dogma,” especially when it is imposed on others.

In the first panel we see a despondent dog named Grimmy tied to a “Beware of dog” sign.  Then a clergy-type walks up with the answer to Grimmy’s problem.  “My child,” he says, “if you repent, then people might start to like you.”  I’m reminded of various church teachings (i.e., dogmas) about needing to repent to be acceptable to God and get to go to heaven as a reward for good behavior (and not go to the “other place”).   Certainly the answer Grimmy is given has some amount of truth in it.  We’re all more apt to like people who are nice than people who are mean.  Right or wrong, we as a church are more likely to accept and welcome people who have “cleaned up their act.”  There’s a measure of truth here.  But beware.  What about “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”?

Well, that’s another matter.  Repenting and changing your ways might not get people to like you.  When I stopped drinking and got sober more than 25 years ago, there were still people who didn’t like me, who probably never would like me.  And besides… isn’t there something not quite right if people will like you only if you’ll change?  Or God loving you only after you repent?  It lays everything on you—all the blame and all the responsibility to shape up.  Author Anthony de Mello offers the following story in his book, The Song of the Bird.  We overhear the voice of some unknown person speaking—

I was a neurotic for years.  I was anxious and depressed and selfish.  Everyone kept telling me to change.  I resented them, and I agreed with them, and I wanted to change, but simply couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.  What hurt most was that, like the others, my best friend kept insisting that I change.  So I felt powerless and trapped.  Then one day he said to me, “Don’t change.  I love you just as you are.”

Those words were music to my ears:  “don’t change.  Don’t change.  Don’t change… I love you as you are.”

I relaxed.  I came alive.  And suddenly I changed!

Now I know that I couldn’t really change until I found someone who would love me whether I changed or not.   [pp. 67-68]

At the close of the story, de Mello wonders, “Is this how you love me, God?”

The Good News we have in Jesus Christ is that the answer to de Mello’s question is a resounding “YES!”  We don’t have to do anything first in order for God to love us—not even those things Jesus says about loving God and neighbor.  Still, the answer suggested in de Mello’s story falls short in the sense that, although it calls for a response from us, it does not tell us precisely how we might go about changing.  So we still find ourselves seeking the meaning of life.

The main problem with dogmas is that they all fail as answers, sooner or later.  Then what?  How are we to find meaning in life when the traditional answers fail?  Theologians and religious thinkers found themselves faced with this very question after WWII in the wake of the holocaust.  The dogmas and beliefs, the treasured answers of both Judaism and Christianity—such as the ideas of a chosen people and of a loving and all-powerful God—were found to be wanting in light of the reality of the slaughter of six million Jews and millions of others in Nazi concentration camps.  That is to say, the old answers no longer conveyed a vital and sustaining meaning as “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”  There was desperate need for new visions and new answers.

One of those new visions came from Victor Frankl, a psychologist who survived three years in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.  Based on his observations of other survivors and of himself, he argued in a famous book titled Man’s Search for Meaning that meaning was not so much something we can search for and find in answers out of the past as it is something we must make for ourselves as we go through life.  We make meaning, says Frankl, and we do so primarily in three ways:  (1) by creating a work or doing a deed, (2) by experiencing a value in relation with others, and (3) by the attitude we adopt toward unavoidable suffering.  I am struck by how these three ways of making meaning—by doing, by relating, and by adopting an attitude—connect with three of the aspects of loving God with heart, soul, and mind and with love of neighbor.

In ancient Hebrew thought the heart was not the center of the emotions but the center of the will.  You did not feel things with “all your heart,” but rather you did thing “with all your heart.”  Frankl says that, first of all, meaning lies in what we do with the full force of our will (that is, all our heart).  Answers are found not so much in study as in right action.  Loving God and loving neighbor are not feelings but rather things we will to do and then proceed to do.  James offers the admonition to “be doers of the word, not merely hearers.”  Matthew tells of Jesus saying “Just as you did [these things] unto one of the least of these… you did it unto me.”  Philosophers and theologians as well as practical engineers and scientists insist that we only really know something when we do it.  So the first way we create meaning for our lives is by what we do.  If things seem pointless or meaningless, reach out in concrete ways to someone who is in need, love your neighbor as yourself, and meaning comes through such action—loving God with all your heart (that is, with your will).

But beware.  This is not the bottom line.  In our busy lives, doing is not the only way for making meaning.  Frankl says that another way is by experiencing something or encountering someone else.  Meaning arises not just in what we do, but in who we are in our being and in our relations with others.  The command to love God with all your soul means that we are to love God out of the fullness of our being.  After all, many meaningful times in life do not involve doing.  We don’t do quiet, for instance.  We experience it.  We don’t do wonder.  We simply marvel at the unfolding of nature.  “Wait on the Lord,” says the Psalmist.  God says, “Be still and know that I am God.”  In modern life, this may seem like a complete waste of time—“Hey!  I’ve got too much to do!”  Yet we don’t do joy.  We don’t do peace.  We experience them—alone sometimes, but more often with others—and meaning comes as joy and peace become part of our very being.

Then, at an even deeper level, we create meaning by opening ourselves to the unfolding of other human beings.  In genuine encounter with another person, whether a friend or a stranger—in being present to them and being aware of their presence, in giving and receiving, in helping and being helped, in speaking and listening—we give birth to meaning as we discover possibilities in the other and in ourselves.  In Christian terms, we encounter and are encountered by the Christ within—the Christ within the other and within ourselves—as we love the other as we love ourselves.

Finally, Frankl says that we can make meaning in our lives by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.  We are called to love God with all our mind, and attitudes are certainly attributes of the mind.

First off, we need to reject the common notion that suffering itself has intrinsic meaning.  It is dogma for some that God wills particular suffering in order to teach important lessons.  However this idea can easily lead to the conclusion that God is some kind of monster of cruelty—especially in light of such massive, undeserved suffering as in the holocaust.  Now, certainly it is possible to learn and grow in and through suffering.  Many people—some here in this room—are living proof of this.  But learning is not the purpose of suffering.  Suffering is not meaningful or purposeful in and of itself.  Many kinds of suffering can never be anything but meaningless.  Yet meaning can sometimes be created in how we chose to respond suffering.  The suffering of the abused and the oppressed sometimes is transformed into solidarity.  The experience of a great loss can give rise to the capacity for a new compassion.  The possibilities are almost without limit.  In the midst of suffering new meaning can take the form of new perceptions, new visions, new answers—the very things needed to go on living.  For we cannot live without some kind of meaning in our lives.

Of course, the risk then is that one of these new answers will become dogma, to be imposed on others as an absolute truth.  Frankl gives the example of an elderly gentleman who came to him experiencing severe depression after the death of his wife.  Now, Frankl offered the man no answers, but instead asked him a question:  “What would have happened, Sir, if you had died first, and your wife had had to go on without you?”  The man replied that it would have been terrible, that she’d have suffered far more than he was.  Whereupon Frankl pointed out how the man’s wife had been spared such suffering, but at the price that he must now survive and mourn her.  According to Frankl, the gentleman said no word, but shook his hand and calmly left his office.  He’d found new meaning for himself in a new way of perceiving his situation, in a new attitude toward his suffering.

Yet just think of the problems if such an answer were to be made absolute.  Imagine some well-meaning counselor saying to a grieving widow, “You’re suffering because you’re the strong one.  Your husband died first because God knew you could take it.”  A meaningful answer that the gentleman in Frankl’s story had formed for himself, ends up a kind of spiritual abuse applied to another.  Yet it happens.  I’ve witnessed people offer such false comfort, saying things like, “God loved your child so much that He reached out and took her”—as if the parents didn’t love their child every bit as much as God did!  What truth there may be in such an “explanation” is by no means the truth for others in a similar situation.  Meaning is not so much something to be handed out all worked out in advance as it is something we make for ourselves in the course of living.

In making meaning by creating a work or doing a deed for others or ourselves, we connect with loving God with all our heart. In making meaning by experiencing a value in relation to others, we connect with loving God with all our soul.  And in making meaning by the attitude we adopt toward unavoidable suffering, we connect with loving God with all our mind.  And always in these we connect with loving others as ourselves.  What I like most about all this is that it isn’t a pat answer that offer’s someone else’s meaning.  Rather here are ways we might go about the process making meaning for ourselves.  May we know the grace of God in all we do, in all we are, and in all we think.  Amen and amen.