22^nd November 2009

THE MOST IMPORTANT COMMANDMENT (Sunday 8 November 2009)

Preached by Rev Clive Skewes Assistant Minister at St John's UCA Mt
Waverley Victoria Australia

Lesson -- Mark 12:28-34

As the bushfire season looms fire plans are on most people's minds.
Amongst other things, we are being advised to sort out what we will take
if we need to evacuate our homes. What would you grab if your house were
under threat? It's a call to make some important choices. It's also an
invitation to find where your most important priorities lie.

The lawyer's question to Jesus was like that. There were 613 commandments
in Mosaic Law, summarised in what we call The Ten Commandments or The
Decalogue. Which one really matters? In a moment of crisis, which one will
you really grab hold of? What's the significance of your choice? And what
does that say about the other commandments?

The Jewish law begins with worship, with the love of God. Since we are
made in the image of God then surely we will find our fullest meaning, our
true selves, the more we learn to love and worship the One we are designed
to reflect. No half-measures: heart (desires), soul, mind, strength --
every aspect of human life is to be poured out gladly in worship of the
one true God. Whatever we do, we do for him. This is to experience God's
Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. And Jesus obviously thinks this
commandment is now within our reach because God's Kingdom has drawn near
in him. So the commandment can also be read as promise: 'You shall love
the Lord your God . . . .'

When will this happen? It begins to happen when you draw near to the
Father through Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life, and experience his
grace in the forgiveness of sin and the love of God poured into your heart
through the Holy Spirit, resulting in your living a life of gratitude. And
it will happen perfectly in the life of the Age to Come.

But it doesn't stop there. Jesus goes on and says loving God also means
loving your neighbour as yourself: showing people the same respect and
care you show for yourself, putting yourself out and making sacrifices for
them as you would for yourself and those closest to you. Our Lord really
expects us to live out these two commandments to the hilt because his
Father in heaven is now fulfilling his ancient promise to renew his
people's hearts and obedience.

But there was another implication of this first and greatest commandment.
It's found in the accompanying words, 'You shall have no other gods beside
me,' to which the lawyer alludes in his expansion 'and him alone you shall
worship'. When this command was first given to Israel there were plenty of
other gods she was tempted to serve. There was the multi-layered pantheon
of Egyptian gods, from whose bondage and pernicious influence Israel had
escaped. The plagues sent on the Egyptians were an assault on their gods
over whom the Lord God was shown to be finally victorious in the
destruction of Pharaoh's army at the Red Sea. Further, ahead of Israel
were the temptations from the colourful, seductive gods of Canaan and the
surrounding nations. 'Love the Lord your God' and 'You shall have no
other gods' was a call to arms against all competitors for people's
worship and service. The battles between Israel and her oppressors are to
be understood in the light of a cosmic conflict between God and the powers
represented by the idols of Israel's enemies. Significantly, in many
instances Israel was commanded to make preparations for battle, but at the
last moment, instead of fighting these wars, to stand and see the victory
of the Lord. The fight was his, not theirs.

We of course receive this command through our Lord Jesus Christ, and it
still is a call to arms -- not to physical warfare, but to spiritual
warfare. In the New Testament we get intimations of a great cosmic
conflict between our Lord Jesus Christ and Satan together with the
principalities and powers in high places, which the Gospel encountered as
it moved into the Gentile world with its prevailing idolatry and thousands
of gods.

Accordingly in the early Church, when a pagan Gentile convert to Christian
Faith stood naked at the baptistry on Easter Eve, before descending into
the water, he turned to the West and renounced the devil and all his
servants. In this act he was rejecting and reviling the gods in whose
bondage he had languished all his life. When he turned to the East to
confess Christ he was entrusting himself to the invincible Son of God, who
in his death had plundered the grave of all its captives, subdued the
powers of the air, and been raised the Lord of history. Baptism was a
victory celebration.

For the early Church these words, 'Love the Lord your God' and 'No other
gods beside me', were a constant reminder that life was a spiritual
warfare.

No baptised Christian could doubt what a transformation of the self and
the world was set in motion when he or she was baptised and consented to
serve no other God than him whom Christ revealed. Nor could Christians
doubt their part in the spiritual warfare waged by the whole Church
through preaching and teaching the Word, prayer and witnessing.

We are still at war of course and will be until Christ returns. But our
situation has greatly altered. So what burden does the first and greatest
commandment lay on us -- we who are thoroughly modern people?

Imagine if Mark's legal expert had put his question to one of the gurus,
say a media guru, of our day? What answer might he have got?

The lawyer would have been told the important thing is not the actual
choice you make from among the commandments: the most important thing is
that whatever choice you make is your choice. For by overwhelming
consensus the chief moral value of our modern society is the absolute
liberty of personal choice. That is the power of each of us to choose what
we believe, want, need or must possess. Our highest good today is the
free, spontaneous will. And we vigorously protect our highest good by
branding as unreal any value higher than choice and condemning any
supposed word from a transcendent God that might order our desires toward
a higher end. Desire must be free to propose, seize, accept or reject,
want or not want -- but not to obey. The outcome is that the liberties
that allow us to buy lavender bed-sheets, become a Progressive in religion
or ethics, gaze at pornography, market popular presentations of brutal and
sadistic violence, change one's gender, euthanise one's terminally ill
spouse, or destroy one's unborn child, are all intrinsically good because
all are expressions of our inalienable freedom of choice.

How has this come about? It's because we moderns and post-moderns believe
in nothing. It's not that we don't believe in anything. We believe in the
nothing, nothingness as such. It is in this that we place our trust,
venture our souls and upon which we project the values by which we measure
the nothingness of our lives. The name given to this belief in nothing is
nihilism. The religion of us moderns is a comfortable nihilism.

That's not to say we can't invoke religious and moral constraints on our
actions. A man may refuse to buy a certain kind of vehicle, a woman may
refuse to wear certain fabrics or families may refuse a certain lifestyle
because they like to think of themselves as environmentalists. A woman may
decide against aborting a fetus mid-way through her second trimester, not
because that would be morally wrong, but because 'it' seems to her too
perfectly formed and she now feels 'uncomfortable' about terminating 'it'.
Such examples do not show how moral we still are, but show we take it as
our right to obey or disobey the moral law and to choose which moral
standards we shall adopt and which values to uphold.

Accompanying this we have our custom-fitted spiritualities in which we
decide which fashions of piety to wear and with what accessories. We can
collect from anywhere our modern 'gods of the boutique', found not in
glades or grottoes but in gift shops, from native North American religion,
the Indian sub-continent, Aboriginal dreaming, Tibetan Buddhism, some pre-
Raphaelite grove shrouded in Celtic twilight, cunning purveyors of
otherwise worthless quartz, pages drawn at random from Carl Jung, Aldous
Huxley, Robert Graves, laced for some with the scepticism of John Selby
Spong.

This is not a reversion to the polytheism faced by the Israelites or early
Christians. Our modern, burlesque gods do not command reverence,
discipline, nor lifelong commitment, nor dread, nor love, nor belief. They
are simply a diversion from the mundane dreariness of lives which have no
transcendent reference point. They are a sort of bric-a-brac reflecting
our dreamier side, represented by religious ornaments decorating our homes
or gardens. They are masks of the one unrivalled demiurge that rules our
age and alone bids its spirits come and go -- the spontaneity of the will
which is all that remains when you believe in nothing. Hence the primacy
we give to the power of choice.

So how do we take up arms against that? The old pagan gods had some form
and shape, some visible, organised cult. When you opposed them it was
quite clear what your were resisting, and when you abandoned them it was
clear what you were rejecting. But how do we fight the prevailing nihilism
of our day -- especially since Christianity itself has had a hand in being
its midwife? This is not because Christianity is nihilistic but because
the embrace of the Christian faith is too powerful for the survival of all
other rivals.

In the West the old gods, with their sacrifices and false glories, have
been so routed that as our culture has retreated from Christianity, it has
found there is nowhere else to go. In Dostoyevsky's The Brothers
Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor laments that although he wants to flee
from the liberty of the sons of God, that he regards as too weak and
craven, where can people go? For, as he puts it, everything is Christ's.

The Gospel of God found in broken human flesh, humility and measureless
love has defeated all the old lies, rendered the ancient order visibly
insufficient and absurd and instilled in us a longing for transcendent
love so deep that -- once yielded to -- will never grant us rest anywhere
but in Christ.

This commandment is hard discipline. It destroys in order to bind. Like a
cautery it wounds in order to heal. And today, in order to heal the damage
it has in part inflicted it must be applied again. Our present situation
is not a sign we should retreat but advance more thoughtfully and more
faithfully into the public square.

* First, as in all circumstances of our lives, we should follow the
priorities of the first commandment. To love God first and most of all
reminds us whose we are and where we find our fullest meaning in a world
that can do little to give meaning to humans. If we truly grab this
commandment we will seek to live lives that are worship-driven, seizing
every opportunity to worship and endeavouring to make our whole life one
of constant worship. Especially we will want to regularly and frequently
provision ourselves with the food and drink of our pilgrimage, the Lord's
Supper. The Christians of Acts 2 met constantly to hear the apostles
teach, to share the common life, to break bread and to pray. John Wesley
exhorted his people to engage in constant communion. He himself took part
in the Lord's Supper every two or three days.

* Second, this question of how we battle our age's belief in nothing is
what we should be talking about after church. This is the question we
should be raising in all our meetings and among ourselves. It is the
question behind many of the burning questions of our age. Frank Furedi,
Professor of Sociology at Kent University, writing in Saturday's The
Australian (Older Generation of Bad Faith), points out how Western
education is in trouble because it finds it difficult to give meaning to
human experience. How can it when it believes at the heart of existence is
an empty core?

* Third, church members should seek understanding. We should carefully
seek out faithful, well-instructed ministers and lay leaders and beseech
them to help us understand this phenomenon that has put the Western Church
and Western society in a totally new situation. We should be asking for
sound books, those that take seriously the Bible and the Church and
history. We should be begging ministers to lead us in studies of the
teaching (theology) of the Bible and the Church's great tradition, to
remind us again what we have been entrusted with, and give us a thoroughly
informed perspective on what we are up against and what are our resources.

* Fourth, we should prepare for a very long haul. When change comes it
usually happens very quickly but to get to that point takes decades of
prayer, work and discipline.

* Fifth, to have no god but the God of our Lord Jesus Christ means we
recognise that whilst our circumstances may seem easier than those of the
first Christians the burden this commandment lays on us may perhaps be
heavier. We therefore need to resist the bland solace, the inane charms,
brute viciousness and brute passivity of post-Christian culture that
tempts us to adorn and adore ourselves. And we should not be distracted
from the real problems we face by the propaganda and entrepreneurial
programs of much of the Uniting Church. To have no god but God lays on us
the discipline of self-denial, of being sometimes contrary, being willing
to welcome but when necessary to condemn, and refusing easy, quick-fix
solutions and secularism itself as fiercely as our ancestors in the faith
refused to burn incense to the genius of the emperor.

To have no god but God means to bear witness that all things have been
made subject to Christ, all thrones and dominions of the high places have
been put under his feet until the very end of the world, and simply to say
to our society: Your belief in nothingness demonstrates what we say --
There is no other God.

(The analysis and description of nihilism draws extensively on Eastern
orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart's paper, God or Nothingness, in I
am the Lord Your God edited by Carl Braaten and Christopher Seitz.)

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