Trinity XVIII
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts, be alway acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
From the Gospel: "...Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy hear, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind."
(Matthew 22:37 KJV)
In the Name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Amen.
Sometimes "stupid questions" are the most challenging.
For example, this week as I began to think through this text, I found myself asking "what does it really mean to love God"?
Or, more generally, what does it mean to love?
I know this is a stupid question.
Everybody knows what love is, I suppose, but try to define it.
It is more difficult than you might think.
I looked in the dictionary and found it not particularly helpful.
First, the definitions in the dictionary had mostly to do with romantic love between a man and a woman, which doesn't seem entirely apt for the love we are to have for God.
Second, the definitions were circular.
The dictionary defined love as affection, but when I looked up affection, it defined affection as love.
At this point, I was about to throw up my hands in despair.
I felt a bit like Mr. Justice Felix Frankfurter when he said of pornography "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it".
This may be okay for pornography, but love is far too important to leave it undefined.
In desperation, I turned to my old friend Francis J. Hall.
Dr. Hall's Dogmatic Theology, in ten volumes, is a classic.
Dr. Hall is also famous for his exhaustive and convoluted definitions.
Imagine my surprise and my joy at finding this little nugget: "love is a desire for and joy in personal fellowship."
Jesus then is telling us to have a desire for and joy in our personal fellowship with God.
Not only that, of course, but that desire and joy should involve all our "heart, soul, and mind".
We remember that the heart, kardia, in Greek, was not so much the seat of emotions as the seat of will.
By the same token, the soul, psyche, is not some metaphysical thing, but more simply, life.
A body without a soul is a corpse.
Mind, nous, means simply the rational faculties.
Thus, we are to desire and enjoy fellowship with God with all of our will, all of our life, and all of our reason.
The desire for and joy in fellowship with our Creator is to be the fixed purpose of our wills, goal of our lives, and object of our thoughts.
That is quite an order, isn't it?
Is it any wonder when we hear the Summary of the Law, we respond with "Lord have mercy"?
On the other hand, it is an entirely reasonable demand.
It was God who gave us our wills, and lives, and minds.
He gave us those things precisely so that we could enjoy fellowship with Himself.
As the Westminster Catechism puts it, "the chief end of man is to know and love God and to enjoy him forever."
It is entirely reasonable, too, to treat this as the first and great commandment.
If we could ever reach such a state of being that our entire wills, lives, and minds were fixed on the loving God, we would find it quite impossible to knowingly do anything which was contrary to His will.
Sin, by definition, is transgressing the known will of God, either by commission or omission.
Sin, is also, by definition, separation from God.
When we are in sin, we cannot fully enjoy fellowship with God.
Mortal sin breaks the fellowship entirely, although, of course, not irretrievably.
But even venial sins reduce our enjoyment of fellowship with God.
We can understand this by analogy to our human loves.
If we have injured our brother or sister, we are not entirely comfortable being with them, until and unless we apologize and receive their forgiveness.
If our desire for and enjoyment of fellowship with God was the fixed purpose of our wills, lives, and minds, we would never intentionally do anything which would break or reduce our enjoyment of that fellowship.
Of course, the simple truth is that we do, in fact, do things which are contrary to God's known will.
We do sin.
We do those things which we ought not to do, and leave undone those things which we ought to do.
This suggests that loving God is not yet the fixed purpose of our wills, lives, and minds.
Enjoying fellowship with God is surely one of the good things we desire, but not yet the first thing.
It is not yet for us, the "pearl of great price" that we are willing to sacrifice all else to obtain.
Unfortunately, I do not believe that any amount of "will power" on our part will suffice to allow us to love God properly.
I do believe that some individuals can, by sheer force of will, or fear of Hell, try very hard.
By sheer force of will and hard work some can lead very "religious" lives, externally.
But if the motivation for all those external actions is anything but a desire for and joy in fellowship with God, they will avail us nothing.
So, then what are we to do? Is our situation hopeless?
No, far from it.
God wants us to be able to love Him.
He made us for that purpose.
While Sin has marred that capacity, God restores that capacity to us.
And so, He makes the capacity to love Him as we should be available to us.
It is instilled in us in Baptism.
It is nurtured by the Blessed Sacrament.
It is restored again by Confession of sin and forgiveness.
We have the capacity. What we lack is motivation.
And here, we must not be too hard on ourselves, our Father in heaven is not.
The motivation for loving God is the joy of fellowship itself.
We cannot love God properly for some abstract philosophical reasons, not even for fear of Hell.
We love Him because we discover fellowship with God is the greatest joy there is.
A joy which far outshines all others, but in fact makes all other joys more enjoyable.
A joy so precious that we are indeed willing to sacrifice all other joys to keep it.
Once we know that joy, then keeping the first commandment will not be difficult or heavy, it will become as natural as breathing.
But how are we to find that joy?
First, we must believe that it is possible to us.
And here, we must look to the deepest recesses of our spirits.
We all know, somehow, in the very core of our being, that there is something missing.
No matter how much security we have, no matter how much "fun" we are having, no matter how fulfilling our earthly lives may be, there is a profound restlessness.
There is a yearning for something inexpressible.
As Augustine put it "my soul shall find no rest till it finds it rest in thee".
We yearn for the joy of fellowship with our creator.
Nothing else in all the physical universe can ever satisfy that desire.
God put that yearning into us for just one reason, to call us into fellowship with Himself.
But second, we must experience some of that joy.
It may be almost too simple minded to say, but we can only experience the joy of fellowship with God through fellowship with God.
Of course, that's why we are here today.
That's why we read the Holy Scriptures.
That's why we pray and meditate.
Experiencing some of the joy of fellowship makes us hungry for more.
It makes us hungry for Heaven.
But what if we aren't getting the joy?
What if we are doing all the right things, going to Church every week, reading Scripture, saying prayers and meditating, every day, and yet there is no joy or but little joy in it?
For far too many Christians this is the case.
If we are not receiving joy, our observances will become perfunctory at best, or may eventually cease altogether.
If we are not getting the joy, we need to do two things.
First of all, we need to look carefully to see if there is anything in our lives, any sin, any unforgiveness towards others, that is blocking joy.
If there is, then for heaven’s sake, confess it, forgive it, and be rid of it.
But, after that, we must ask for it and ask believing that we will receive.
And so, my prayer this day is that each of us, as we approach this Holy Altar, to fellowship with our God, may come asking, believing that he will receive, the joy which makes us want to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and with all our souls, and with all our minds. Amen.