Listen Up God Has Something to Say

Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on Deuteronomy 6: 4 – 7.  Focus: What does it mean to hear God? What voice is God’s voice out the many in the Bible?  Check out Simona Frenkel and the choir.  Amazing!

I love how the scriptures speak to us: “Hey out there, is anybody listening. Well listen up as God has something to say to us. Say what? “Hear this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” These words, which I command you, shall be on your heart.”

How do you command someone to love? Isn’t love something that you have to be free to do or else it isn’t love? Maybe it’s coercion, or force but love? Really! Why? Is it just because you said so? My father would say that to me when all other explanations got in the way. Like Nike saying: “Just do it!”

Hear what exactly? The Bible is filled with hundred’s of voices all calling out to us from the past into our present. Some of the voices are clear like Mose’s. “Hear O Israel, Hear O Hackensack. The Lord Your God is One God. You shall have no others!” Other’s are reverent and halting like Job, “I had heard of thee things I did not know! But now I see thee face to face.” Or as old man Simeon put it upon seeing the baby Jesus’ face at the Temple gates: “Lord, now let thy servant depart in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation.”

While other voices are filled with utter frustration and disgust with his own people. Think Amos: “I hate and I despise your feasts and your solemn assemblies” or the priests who drone on and on about the dimensions and furniture in the Temple and the scribes spelling it out what you can and cannot eat. Just another version of who’s been naughty and nice. Or the historians – the Chronicler’s voice listing all of the kings, the battles the tragic lessons of Israel’s desire to be like all the other nations. To have and to worship a human king!

And somewhere in the midst of all these voices one particular voice speaks out – a voice that speaks directly to the deepest longings of our heart, the hope we all want to live out of, but because the world is the way it is, causes us to doubt. It comes to those wearied by life, who have felt the heavy burden of trying to figure out what life is all about. Thinking we had to be perfect rather than kind.

But it was in such a wilderness, that the great words of Moses came forth like a trumpet. To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying. Telling us to pick up our pallet and walk. Nevertheless this is the great and first commandment. Even in the wilderness—especially in the wilderness—you shall love God.

And while it’s a command it’s also a promise. A promise that on the fragile human feet of faith and with a footstep forward and a prayer we will come to see that love means having an abundance of life – all the joys, frustrations, sorrows, losses, and the amazing win from time to time. It means being lost and then being found. It means dying before we rise. It means all of these things because God has been there and back.

And the hope of this voice that comes to us in the wilderness is simply this: That God is well aware of our grief because God has been there and by loving God, hopefully and for our sake, and it is for our sake, we will come to love each other too.

“And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”

And rise we shall, out of the wilderness, every last one of us, just like Jesus striding out of his wilderness, out of his encounter with his devil, his nemesis. The one who promised him the world if he would simply fall down and worship something less than God. That is the promise and that’s the point isn’t it? We have to love to experience life, each other and God.

We can debate it, talk about it but in the end we must live out of it if we want to experience an abundance of life! Just as tragedy and comedy are faces on the same Greek coin. So is our life all about the struggle between fear and faith, between doubt and hope, between love and hate. In our dying and in our rising!

In all of this we are being taught to let go of our notions of should’s and oughts. Life is happen in spite of our plans.

This was and is Jesus’ take on our passage from Deuteronomy – Loving God comes from loving our neighbor in equal measure to ourselves. Jesus said, I came that you might have life and have it abundantly. All the absurdity and paradox of it. The laughter in it! The tears becaue of it! There is only our life and our faith, hope, and love that remain. Everything else is passing away. Amen