Remember - Love God and Neighbour.
Have you ever noticed how life is full of ‘God’ incidences, as one good friend of mine calls them? They are what many would call ‘coincidences,’ only when you are a Christian, you have put on what another friend of mine calls ‘God’s spectacles,’ and suddenly you see things in a very different way – you are suddenly aware of God’s hand in arranging things perfectly – or sometimes NOT so perfectly to our minds, but still with His own perfect purpose for us.
If I were to choose the perfect passage for a baptism, Deuteronomy 6.1-9 would be it, because it says it all. And Jesus thought so too, or he would not have repeated it when asked the question, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’ The choice of passage is one of God’s perfect ‘incidences,’ in that it just happens to be the reading for today.
Here to Remember
And it is Remembrance Sunday, too. We are here to remember. Firstly to remember who God is. To remember that He has made each one of us and loves us, so He alone knows what’s best for each one of us. And that reminds us that we are finite human beings. So secondly, we remember those other finite human beings who have bravely given their lives so that we can be here today, living in the kind of country Great Britain has become in consequence - we have so very much to be grateful for. They were finite human beings, but we believe their lives (some of them very short) had a purpose, or we would not be remembering them with thanks today. It is a good thing to be reminded of our mortality, because while our lives on this earth are temporary, they are significant. They are the years when we choose to really live, following Jesus, who said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ Or we may choose to turn our back on Him and walk away, denying ourselves the fullness of life that God offers in Jesus.
Many of us here today will be remembering Ethel, who died suddenly just over a week ago. She blessed me personally with her lovely smile when she came to the 8am service – in order to have the time to go serve others afterwards. She faithfully washed and ironed the communion linen – quiet service that drew no attention to itself. She was special.
Finally, we remember that we are responsible human beings. God lovingly makes clear to us how we can be truly free human beings. He says, ‘Hear…and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you…’ And then, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.’ There is nothing more wonderful and truly freeing than loving God!
And that is what the promises some of you will be making at Farrel’s baptism are all about – loving God. In Israel, the commands were clearly for the whole community and the family to hold on to together. So God says, ‘These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door-frames of your houses and on your gates.’ There was to be no possibility that people would forget! In the Quechua culture of southern Peru that I have been recently studying, the greatest sin of all is to forget. Memory is very important there because without memory there is no identity. To remember God means that we identify with Him, that our identities are tied up with his. It is to have our minds filled with Him. And so it will be natural for couples, parents, families and friends who are Christians to spend most of their conversation talking about the multitude of ways that God touches their lives:
· Decisions – what does God say about this?
· Praise – wasn’t that wonderful the way God worked all that out perfectly?
· Grieving – wasn’t that sad when those parents could not be reconciled?
These are just a few examples.
In order to remember, we need to listen, and so God repeatedly says, ‘Hear, O Israel…’ We need to listen so that we understand well. This is true of God and of neighbour. We need the revelation of God’s Holy Spirit to understand how much God loves us, for example (and do come to the Holy Spirit day on Saturday if you want some needed spiritual refreshment). Because we are not God, we cannot begin to understand the depth of God’s love for us, even when we know that God became man in Jesus to help us to understand a little. We human beings ascribe wrong motivations to everyone, including God! So God’s Holy Spirit ‘sheds His love abroad in our hearts’ as the Bible says, and only then can we really hear God properly, because we begin to understand Him for who He really is – an amazingly loving God. The same is true of people. Because we are all so different from one another, it takes a lot of carefully listening to really understand another person. People do not do the same things for the same reason that we would necessarily! Love listens well, but most of us tend to see others in our own image.
Just a trivial example – John and I when we first knew each other.
And then God tells the people to make sure that they have visual reminders of his commandments. They are not only to speak of them at all times, in a natural way because it is what is uppermost in their minds, they are also to wear things on their persons that remind them – many of us wear crosses that mean a great deal to us, for example. I know that Tatenda has some of her favourite verses up on the wall in her home, and so Farrel will grow up aware of these precious reminders. We are to constantly remember that God’s presence is with us. And to remember that that is not the only way that we are not alone – we have each other. The love between God’s people is what draws other people in, like a moth is attracted to light. Farrel’s growth in the Christian faith, like that of each one of us, is partly dependent on the many people God has placed around him. And today, that is us!