Psalm 136:1-9, 23-26 | Matthew 6:19-34 | Matthew 13:22
Jeremy Richards
This morning we’re continuing our sermon series on reimagining and receiving the love of God, on opening ourselves up to encounter the Divine. In other words, we’re talking about the spiritual life and how to cultivate it.
We know from 1 John 4 and other scriptures that to abide in God is to abide in love, so the journey into God is a journey into love. In fact, it’s love all the way through. We begin in love—we’re called by love, the road we travel is love, and our destination is love, because God is love, and God isn’t another being somewhere else, but reality itself. God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. Love is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. As we’ve prayed every Sunday morning since 2021 began, “All things exist in love, because you, eternal God, are love.” As Horacio shared with us last week, love is the fountain and foundation of all life.
But this journey in love and to love isn’t an easy one. The troubles, worries, and temptations of everyday life constantly pull our attention away from this journey, this journey that is the very purpose of our lives, to know and be known by the eternal God of steadfast, unending love. I recently saw an interview with Julie Pennington-Russell, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Washington DC, and she said that our primary calling, above anything else, is to “belong to God.” The problem is that, while this sounds good and while I totally believe her, it’s easier said than realized.
In the parable of the sower, Jesus says that the spiritual journey is fraught, and that the spiritual life is fragile. Like a small plant being overcome by thorns. Or, we could say, like a 1987, maroon, two-door Toyota Tercel flying down a country road with a teenage boy at the wheel.
This may come as a surprise to you, but I wasn’t always the wizened, calm, even-tempered, mature adult that I am. As a teenage boy, I behaved, in some respects, like most teenage boys. One of the ways that I behaved like a typical, American, teenage boy was that I liked to drive fast. Of course, this was a bit of a challenge, since my first car was the previously mentioned 4-cylinder, 1987 Toyota Tercel with over 200,000 miles on it. Being able to get the car up to a speed that might be considered “fast” was hardly a given.
Still, I tried my best every chance I got. Whenever there was a straight stretch, or a downhill section of road, I’d put the pedal to the metal to see how fast I could get it to go, especially if my car was full of other teenage boys encouraging me to do so, or teenage girls I was trying to impress, or some combination of the two.
One night, a group of us were driving to my friend Nate’s house. I think there were 4 of us: me, my friend Josh in the front seat, and Nate and I think someone else — maybe this kid Cody — in the back seat. The road to Nate’s house was perfect for trying to get my Tercel up to a decent speed, it was long and straight and out in the country with not too many people living along the way. On top of that, it was late, probably after 10, so most people were at home for the night.
Well, I did what I could, and I think I got the car up to a little over 70 (the speed limit was probably 35), when Josh, who was right next to me in the passenger seat, sort of jerked and recoiled. I looked over at him and then looked ahead.
The road ahead was full of cows.
Big, adult cows. Cows that probably weighed more individually than my little car did. If we hit one of these cows going 70+ MPH we would die. Period. Some were standing, others were laying, and all of them were quickly, quickly approaching as my little maroon Tercel barreled towards them. Somehow, by the grace of God, I wound my way in and out of the cows littering the road and quickly came to a more cautious speed of about 5 MPH. My friends and I didn’t say anything for a few minutes. We just sat wide-eyed and breathing heavily. Then Nate said, “Sorry, I forgot to tell you that they let the cows out.”
Last week we talked about the importance of having a singular focus, the One we simply call “God,” the Creator and Sustainer of all life, the “ground of being” if we go back to our sermon on God from this summer, the One Julie Pennington-Russell says we belong to, the One 1 John says is love. If we set our eyes on God, if we pursue God and God alone, if we get that right, then everything we say and do will flow out of that.
Lately, during my morning quiet times, I’ve been reading a book called Meister Eckhart’s Book of Secrets, which is essentially some of the key quotes and thoughts of Meister Eckhart, the 13th and 14th century Dominican priest and mystic, put into poetry. Some of the poems are quotes of Eckhart’s taken verbatim. Others are summaries of his thoughts and teachings. Just this week I read the following poem titled “No One Can Stop You”:
No one can stop you,
hinder, or disturb you,
if you are fixed on God alone.
For God is always at work
inside of you. and
what you do and say
will be godly,
so look out.
If you fix your eyes on God, Eckhart says, then your actions will be godly. If you set your heart on love, then your actions will be loving.
But, like I said, keeping our eyes fixed on God alone is no easy task. Meister Eckhart may not be stopped, hindered, or disturbed, but the truth is, we often are. Maybe you’ve had an experience like this before: you just got back from camp as a child, or a retreat as an adult, or you read an inspiring spiritual book, or you had a great quiet time one morning, or maybe (just maybe) your pastor preached an exceptional sermon, and you are so pumped on God. You are on fire. You’re ready to live all out. Your eyes are fixed on God.
But then you get home from the retreat and the house is a disaster, or as soon as your quiet time is over your kid wakes up very much on the wrong side of the bed, or the Sunday sermon was great, but Monday morning rolls around and all the tasks, stress, and interpersonal drama that make up your workday hit you like a ton of bricks, or maybe like a 1987, two-door Toyota Tercel smacking into a full-grown cow at 70 MPH.
That’s how life is. We’ve all been there.
Jesus gets it. Unlike my friend Nate, in our reading this morning Jesus doesn’t want his friends, or us, to be caught unawares. He doesn’t simply say, “Hey, have this one singular focus,” and then fail to tell them about the obstacles that will stand in their way. No, he lets them know the cows aren’t fenced, and they’ll be all over the place, so be on the lookout.
While there are many different things in our lives that threaten to pull us away from our singular pursuit of God, Jesus hits on some of the big ones, the universal ones, the ones we can all relate to in our reading this morning. The main ones he hits on are wealth, greed, fear, worry, and anxiety.
These distractions are as powerful today as they were in Jesus’ day. When it comes to wealth, accumulation, and greed, we live in the richest country in the history of the world. We accumulate things at an astonishing rate. With the advent of Amazon Prime and other online services, we don’t even have to go outside. With the click of a button we can have anything and everything shipped right to us, and we’re angry if it takes more than 2 days.
But our addiction to consumption comes at a cost. Everything from the factories that mass produce our products, to the animals we eat at an unsustainable rate, to the fuels that are extracted from the earth then burned in planes, trains, and automobiles, we are wreaking havoc on our environment. This causes all of us who take science and our Christian responsibility to tend Creation seriously a great deal of existential dread. On top of that we’re dealing with everything that 2020 and 2021 have brought and revealed, from Covid to systemic racism to political extremism to unemployment and economic fallout.
So we’re well acquainted with both consumerism and worry, just as Jesus’ audience was. Jesus knows that these distractions exist, not just in the future but right now, in the present, and that their influence is very strong. Yet, to use the words of 1 John, the One who is within us is stronger than all of that.
Jesus encourages his listeners, and us, to “strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness (which is the same word we looked at last week which is also translated piety, but means justice, equity, and uprightness), and all these things will be given to you as well.”
It’s all about our focus. In vv. 22 and 23, he says “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” Well, turn off your camera and get your Greek book out David, because I’m going to jump into the Greek a bit here. The word that gets translated “healthy” in the line, “So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light,” is the Greek word haplous, a word that isn’t normally associated with eyes or sight. Healthy isn’t a bad translation, it can mean that, as well as sincere, or upright, but the literal meaning, and the more fitting interpretation in this case, is “single” or “simple.”
If your focus is singularly on God, then “your whole body will be filled with light,” but if your loyalty is divided, if you’re distracted by wealth, worry, anxiety, vanity, pride, and the like, then you’ll be caught between two “masters” to use Jesus’ next example. “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other.”
Aside from the things Jesus mentioned, what are the things that specifically distract you? What divides your attention? While there are some big, universal ones that tempt all of us, we all have our own individual struggles and temptations. What gets in the way of your pursuing the Divine? What are the cows blocking the road for you? Which thorns threaten to choke out your faith?
If we know what threatens our spiritual health, we’ll be prepared to encounter obstacles when they come. Instead of flying down the road at 70 MPH (like some idiot teenager) and suddenly coming upon them without any warning, we’ll drive a bit slower and be on the lookout. Still, we don’t want to make the cows the focus. The focus is God and God’s steadfast love. There are churches and pastors and people who focus so much on sin. Sin is not the focus. God is the focus. Shame is not the path. Love is the path.
To quote another poem from Meister Eckhart’s Book of Secrets:
If you think that love is great,
know this: the way God loves
is greater than what you can
ever imagine, and if you want
to find this love you must leap
over all you know and fall
into a love so deep and wide
that nothing else matters.
While this is a beautiful poem, there’s a real challenge to this advice, because we’ve grown attached to the things we know. In fact, our identity is often wrapped up in the very things we need to “leap over.”
Last week we identified the goal and aim of the spiritual life: encounter with God, relationship with the Divine. Now Jesus shines a light on the things we actually prioritize: wealth, accumulation, worry and anxiety, and the like. Jesus says if we really, truly want to pursue God, we must “leap over all we know and fall into a love so deep and wide that nothing else matters.” We must imagine a life that looks radically different, a life shaped by the Gospel, where those distractions no longer hold power over us, because we have a singular focus.
I was struck a couple of weeks ago by Tonia’s comment about about fearing an encounter with God (and Amy kind of echoed that fear). I had said that we’re afraid to open ourselves up to any real experience with the Divine because what if the Divine doesn’t show up, but Tonia said, what if God does show up?! She said something like, “I don’t think our lives would ever be the same.” And she’s absolutely right.
Scripture makes no bones about it. It uses the unsettling, dramatic language of death, and resurrection. Jesus says we must pick up our crosses and die to ourselves and to the world. Paul says we’re dead to sin but alive in Christ.
God is calling us to Godself, to a love that is greater than we could ever imagine. But to fall into it we must leap over everything we’ve ever known, we must reorient ourselves, we must envision a life that looks radically different.
So let your eye be singular. Set your heart upon God, who is life, who is love. Strive for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness.
But here’s your warning: there are cows in the road. So look out…and maybe slow down.
Amen.