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February 12, 2006
How Can I Love a Sinner Like Me?
Leviticus 19: 17-18 / Luke 10: 25-28
Heidelberg Catechism, Q & A 4
February 12th, 2006
Perhaps the most popular religious song of all is “Amazing Grace.” We all know it well. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” Bagpipes play this around the world when a religious song is called for. It’s a second Scottish national anthem, written by an Englishman, adopted everywhere.
John Newton may have meant it when he wrote these words. But if you went up to anyone who’d just sung this song and agreed with them: “You’re a wretch,” you’d better be wearing a safety helmet.
I suspect this song is beloved because it has us sing of grace. It’s so good to sing about God’s grace. A person in prison for the most violent crime, a truly wretched person, can sing it knowing it is true. Any of us who think of God’s unmerited favor is grateful.
But nowhere in the Bible do I know of anything that says we are to think of ourselves as wretches. It is true that we have all sinned. It is true that if we do not acknowledge we have sinned we deceive ourselves. But it is not at the foundation of our faith to think of ourselves as wretches. “God don’t make no junk,” the bumper sticker rightly tells us. You are not junk. It is not a virtue to think of yourself as of no value. Jesus asked, “What can a person give in exchange for his soul?” Your soul is you; it is precious to you.
But just before this Jesus asked, “What profit is there if a person gains the whole world and loses his soul?” The way to gain my soul is not to gain the world. The feeling of wretchedness comes as the residue of trying to gain the whole world as the means of loving yourself and it doesn’t work.
I picture the sad last days of Howard Hughes in 1976. His world was reduced to himself and his craving for drugs. Broken needles were found in his arm after he died. How many far less wealthy people have died in the same way? Self-indulgence may not always lead to such a tragic end I know. But the presupposition of every ad on TV and in the newspapers that urges you that you “deserve” this or that presumes self-indulgence is the irresistible response of self-love. This turns out to be a very bad way to treat yourself.
Let’s back up and see what Jesus taught us about how to think of this business of self-love. We just read of a lawyer who tested Jesus’ outlook on what is most important. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replied with a question, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” The man replied summarizing two passages from his Bible: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
Actually this lawyer added to what is written in the Old Testament. Moses did not write to love the Lord your God with all your mind, just with all your heart, soul, and strength. But in a day when the religious lawyers were thinking perhaps a bit too much about the law it was in the spirit of the Lord’s command to add, “love Him with all your mind” too. Jesus did not disagree with this addition to Moses’ teaching. He said, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.”
Before moving on to the part of God’s law that involves loving ourselves and our neighbor let’s note what is unique about our love for God. The standard by which we are to love God is not the same as the standard by which we are to love ourselves or our neighbor. The foundation for self-love and love for neighbor is loving God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength, and all our minds. How is it possible to do this if your job is to be a teacher, or a doctor, or a businessperson, or a homemaker, or a student?
Sometimes the Bible puts before us something huge and says, “Here’s the job, figure out how to do it.” And it is in the figuring things out that we do it. Because there is a way of being a student in which you realize that loving God with everything you have makes an impact on the way you are a student. There is a way of being a doctor governed by loving God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. There is a way of being a nurse, a teacher, a merchant, a homemaker, a husband, a girlfriend, a whatever—governed by loving God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.
Jesus taught us that we are not alone in this task. He has given us the Holy Spirit to be inside us. What the Apostle Paul calls “walking in the Spirit” is daily keeping alive our desire to love God in this way and then the Spirit takes over and moves us along.
Here then is the basis for loving ourselves. Because I love God who loves me, I have value. As I love God with all I am I find a peace inside that somehow overcomes the ordinary stresses of life. You and I have various weaknesses that plague us. We are tempted every day with laziness, greed, inappropriate fascination with that instinct that drives the generations—sex, with anxiety, fear, doubt, and much else. But if we have set our face, set our feet in the way of loving God no matter what, God the Holy Spirit leads us along.
Joseph Ratzinger reminded me recently of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “If you will not hold firm to the Lord then you will have no foothold.” I have the strong hunch that what ails some of us in the task of loving God with all we have is simply giving up in moments when we feel weak. If you and I don’t keep our foothold when we feel weak we will be washed away by the torrent. Keep your finger in the hole of the dike when you feel you’re about to be washed away. These times pass.
How well I remember the earnest singing of a Gospel song in an African American congregation in the south side of Chicago many years ago. It was a part of town ravaged with the evils often accompanying poverty. The walls shook as the people sang to each other, “Yield not to temptation for yielding is sin; each victory will help you some other to win.” Hold firm in times when you are tempted to quit, to give in. Each time we keep our feet firm when we are tested we come hold on to loving God more securely. The best kind of self-love comes to us from over-coming when we are tempted to quit. When we let our love for God move us past these moments, He infuses something into us that helps us love ourselves.
The whole tenor of the Old Testament, the Bible of the ancient Hebrews was to help people think well of themselves. The Bible tells us how to live--how to treat others, how to do our work, how to love our wives and husbands, how to rear our children, how to respond to our parents—and so much more.
When we follow these ways we love ourselves because we act loveably. Acting loveably overflows into love of others. The result in us of loving ourselves, having loved God wholly, is to love others. Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus told a man who asked him to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot, “Love your neighbor as yourself. All the rest is commentary.”
Jesus didn’t teach us that we are to love our neighbor with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind; only as we love ourselves.
This is something we need to look at a bit more closely. I would be troubled if you all left here thinking I’d said the Bible tells us to think of ourselves first. I didn’t. Neither does the Bible teach us to love ourselves first. Loving ourselves is simply natural.
When we see situations of the lack of self-love it is because a person has been abused as a child or lived under criticism. One of my convictions about the role of Christians in community is that we are to overwhelm such people with our love so that we are an antidote to a painful past.
There is in all of us an instinct for self-preservation, which is not the same thing as self-LOVE. Self-preservation often leads to self-indulgence, which is very different from self-love. Self-indulgence may be very self-destructive. You and I have watched some pretty self-destructive behavior by people who indulged themselves. Indeed, we can hardly imagine worse ways to treat themselves than self-indulgence leads them to do.
We see on the TV so many tragic stories taken from the courtroom. I am intrigued with the investigative reports that follow the trail of crime as people steal, lie, and kill to attain their desires. As each step is uncovered by the detectives, the foolishness of the self-indulgent person is laid bare. How often it is the love of money that prompts a crime. How often jealousy, anger, a bitter spirit that makes people sink deeper and deeper until they are destroyed.
I can’t remember how often I’ve heard someone tell me in the County Jail that they were glad they were caught. It came to be the turning point in their lives. In jail they turned to their Bible, discovered its call to love God with everything in them, and they started to have a good feeling about themselves. And guess what direction these people start to move—in the direction of caring for others. How wonderful it sometimes is on a Tuesday evening at our Bible study to listen to participants in the Work Release Program care for each other. How beautiful to see how the love for God transforms the heart so that it can love itself, a love that then turns outward to love others.
But it’s not just people who end up on the other side of the law that need to catch on to this truth. Our churches are filled with people whose lives consist in the abundance of things they own.
We buy and buy, more and more, thinking this is how to love ourselves. But it is impossible to be satisfied. I remember one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales my mother read to me one summer when I was a little boy. It was of the fisherman who caught a flounder that was a prince in disguise. It spoke to him, “I am an enchanted prince. How will it help you to kill me. I would not taste good to you. Put me back into the water and let me swim.” So he put the talking flounder back into the sea. He went back to the filthy little shack where he and his wife lived.
She asked him, “Did you catch anything today?” He told her about the talking flounder that was an enchanted prince. She asked him, “Did you ask for anything before you put it back into the water?” When he said no, she sent him back to call the flounder and ask that he give them a nice little cottage to live in. The flounder said, “Go home, your wife already has a nice cottage. It has a little front yard, and a garden with vegetables, fruit and some chickens and ducks. It had a beautiful little parlor and a bedroom, kitchen, and dining room. Everything is beautifully furnished.”
Well, the fisherman’s wife was happy for a little while with her cottage. But then she grew tired and asked her husband to go back and ask for a palace. So he went back and asked for a palace. The flounder gave them a palace. But then she wanted to be a queen, and then an empress, and then she wanted to be pope. But after she was the pope she felt bad she couldn’t tell the sun and the moon when to rise and set. So she demanded her husband to ask the flounder to make her like God. The flounder said, "Go home. She is sitting in her filthy shack again."
And they are sitting there even today.
Don’t we give ourselves a better feeling in our hearts if we have been generous with others than when we have lavished on ourselves the next thing we want? So that if you and I want to love ourselves, we will probably give away more than we spend on ourselves. And we’ll be happy for it as we see hungry people able to eat, and homeless people find shelter, and oppressed people find relief. We’ll realize that we were able to make a difference for good—and to give oneself this joy is a very kind thing to give ourselves.
The foundation of loving ourselves is not in loving others first. I doubt this is possible unless we first love God with all we are.
But I am troubled as I say this because I think we have heard this often enough that we like the sound of it but few of us have let it sink in that this must be a way of life to have any effect. I despair at the words of some of the songs that we sing that express love for God because we are tempted to think that singing these fine words is what is expected. Sing it in church and then go live as everyone else lives. When we sing this often enough without governing our lives to do as we sing we are immunized against the inclination to love God.
And so Christians may be guilty of the worst kind of selfishness, a kind that takes place while singing generously, “Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to thee; take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold; take my moments and my days, let them flow in endless praise.”
It is no wonder that very often Christians aren’t very happy people. Their hearts are heavy with the burden we have put on themselves; habits of living at cross purposes with how we say they believe. It is odd to say it, I suppose, but what we need is to accept that there is wisdom in living as we say we believe. Our faith is not a matter of talking, of singing, of praying, or even saying we believe; but of living the faith we profess.
When we talk about love how confused we can get. We know that "me first" is bad ideology, but when you come down to it, we're pretty much at the center, between our eyes, just behind our noses. Our idealism gets misty eyed and we put on our license plates "Kids' first." But what about former kids, now grown, now very old and not as cuddly as little kids. We feel honorable to say, "Family first." But then what about other peoples' families? Are my kids more precious than theirs? We sing with tears in our eyes the "Star Spangled Banner." Country first sounds so noble. "Breathes there the soul so foul that never to himself has said, 'This is my native land?" But what of those who live in other countries?
It's God first, to love with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength, and with all our minds, and then to realize His great love for us, indeed for the whole world, and then we bask to know we are included in the beloved. Knowing God loves us without condition, we turn His love in our hearts to others. Then we are happy. Then--how can I begin to express "the then?" This is the will of God for you and me.
Let us pray: Heavenly Father grant that we may love as you love us. In Jesus’ name. Amen
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at February 12, 2006 09:30 AM