Recalibrating

Mark 12:28-34

Sermon by Dan Schrock

September 5, 2010

²⁸ One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” ²⁹ Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; ³⁰ you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ ³¹ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

 ³² Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; ³³ and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one's neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” ³⁴ When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question. (NRSV)

During the church year that ended last Sunday, our congregation successfully shaped a recalibrated vision. We recognized that for a long time our congregation has done a pretty good job of pursuing intimacy with each other. That doesn’t mean we’ve always done a good job with intimacy; nor does it mean we’ve achieved the level of mature, grounded intimacy with each other that we might wish for. It just means that intimacy with other people receives a lot of focus in our congregational life. Think of our small groups; think of our three fellowship times that happen before worship, between worship and Christian education, and again after Christian education; think of our education classes; our potluck meals; our commission and committee meetings; our networking with other during the week; our emails and phone calls. Hosting IHN guests is very much about human relationships and human need. Each of these activities has its own unique purpose, but all have the effect of strengthening our intimacy with other people.

All of this is good, as far as it goes. It’s vitally important that we cultivate human relationships because the church is a communal organization and human beings are a communal species. But how much of our congregational life directly focuses on God, or on pursuing direct intimacy with God? For instance, if you’re in a small group, how often does your group pray or study scripture, and for what percentage of your meetings? At a fellowship meal, we might pray or sing for fifteen seconds, and then spend the next sixty minutes talking about jobs, family, friends, sports, or politics. At a commission meeting, we might begin with a three-minute devotional followed by a fifteen-second prayer, and then for the next 30-120 minutes talk about the human relationships and programs of church life.

Maybe all this is as it should be. Maybe your small group wants to devote 95-98% of its time together to chat about issues, problems, health concerns, family dynamics, jobs, and so on. We probably want our fellowship meals to be largely about fellowship with each other. We certainly want our commissions and committees to attend to the tasks that the congregation has given them to do.

But where in congregational life are we expressly focusing on developing our intimacy with God? To what extent do our Christian education classes help you to become more intimate with God? In what ways does your small group further your own intimacy with God? When and how is this congregation encouraging you to expand intimacy with God in your own personal Christian life? As a result of participating in this congregation, is your own relationship with the Creator, Redeemer, and Inspirer actually growing? And on a collective level, what is Berkey Avenue Mennonite Fellowship doing to further its corporate intimacy with God?

Well, there’s worship. For at least 4,000 years, worship has been the main way that God’s people have cultivated our relationship with God. In worship we focus on God. We give God our attention, our love, our devotion, our adoration. And during worship God reaches out to us, so that in worship the relationship between us and God is enhanced.

Parts of our worship services in this congregation do focus on God. The clearest places where we focus on God are the offertory prayer and the pastoral prayer. Both of these prayers, and any other prayer that we might sometimes add into our worship, address God directly. The reading of scripture also centers on God because we believe it to be the Word of God addressed to us.

But in some parts of our worship services, it’s debatable where the primary focus lies. During the children’s time, do you focus on listening for a truth about God; or do you focus on something else, such as how cute our children look, or what witty things they say or do? Perhaps you ignore the children’s time and allow your mind to wander off to something completely unrelated to God. When we sing together, what do you concentrate on:  the words, the music, or both; the peculiar sound of your neighbor’s voice or the presence of God in this place? I think sermons belong in this category too. Most sermons, including my own, are not directly focused on worshipping God. They may not even focus primarily on our relationship with God, but more on our relationships with human beings.

However, in some parts of our worship services you’d be hard pressed to say that the focus is on God. Instead the focus is fairly clearly on human relationships. The worship leader addresses the welcome, or call to worship, to the rest of us; and during that welcome, God may or may not be mentioned. During the sharing of joys and concerns, one of us speaks to the rest of us about human issues, most often issues of health and illness. The introduction of guests focuses again on human relationships. Announcements typically have the intention of persuading as many of us as possible to attend some event. In the final benediction, the worship leader addresses the rest of us, and again may or may not mention God.

To sum up this quick survey of congregational life, it seems that most of what we do together focuses mainly on intimacy with other human beings. It also appears that a fair bit of what we call our “worship service” is not really focused on the worship of God, or on intimacy with God, but instead is focused more on human relationships. These numbers could be debated, but in a typical 75-minute worship service, perhaps we spend 5 or 6 minutes focusing mostly on our relationship with God (prayers and scripture reading), 30-40 minutes focusing partly on our relationship with God and partly on our relationship with other human beings (singing, sermon, children’s time, and offering), and at least 10-20 minutes—some Sundays more—focusing on our relationships with other humans (sharing and announcements).

Again, all this may be perfectly fine. Yet if this analysis is anywhere close to the mark, it begs the question of whether we are doing enough to cultivate our intimacy with God, especially since we are doing so much more to cultivate intimacy with other human beings. It was this realization which led the elders to propose that for the next 3-5 years, we refocus on our intimacy with God. During one of those conversations among last year’s group of elders, Evan Bontrager observed (and I’m not quoting him exactly): It’s like when the scribe came to Jesus and wanted to know what the greatest commandment is, and Jesus said, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and the second commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves (from Mark 12:28-34, referring to Deuteronomy 6:4-5). Then to general head-nodding around the table of elders, Evan went on to point out that maybe our congregation is not paying enough attention to our relationship with God.

Marlene Kropf, who teaches worship and spiritual formation at AMBS, likes to say that we can only develop a level of intimacy with other people to the extent that we also develop a level of intimacy with the Triune God. It works the other way too. We can only develop a level of intimacy with God to the extent that we also develop a level of intimacy with at least one other person. In other words, our intimacy with God and others works in tandem.

This truth about intimacy has another interesting corollary which might be especially pertinent for our congregation. If we only seek intimacy with other people, but we do relatively little to seek intimacy with God, then we will come to a point where achieving further intimacy with other people is simply no longer possible. We will be blocked from enjoying more intimacy with other people because our relationship with God isn’t going anywhere. This same dynamic also happens if we seek intimacy with God but neglect intimacy with other people:  the time will soon come when we are prevented from enjoying further intimacy with God, for the simple reason that our relationships with others aren’t going anywhere. This means we really do need both intimacy with God and intimacy with others. If one is neglected, the other will come to a halt. If we want to deepen and develop one type of intimacy, then we will also need to deepen and develop the other intimacy. They are tied together. To use the metaphor that our recalibrated vision uses, these are like the two rails of a train track: we need both to get where we’re going.

I hope our congregation continues the good things we’ve been doing to cultivate intimacy with human beings. Those are important. But I also hope we recalibrate our attention to God. For Jesus in Mark 12, our love for God and our love for others is a package deal. They are like two rails for a train, two peas in a pod, two ingredients in a recipe.

So how do we work at this recalibrated vision? Let me name three initiatives that we are taking in the coming months.

First, this fall most of my sermons will focus on some aspect of prayer. The guest speakers that we have once a month may or may not choose to also speak about prayer—it’s entirely up to them—but I, at least, will be working on prayer, perhaps until the beginning of Advent in late November. Prayer is one of our primary tools for enhancing intimacy with God.

Second, we’ve put into your mailboxes a list of more than 200 spiritual practices. You won’t find guidelines there for how to do each of these practices, because that would require a hefty book. Besides, there are already a number of fine books available that talk about most of these practices in detail—some of which we have in our church library or soon will have. The purpose of this list is to illustrate the huge variety of ways in which we can cultivate intimacy with God. I hope it sparks your passion. You might personally want to begin one or two of these practices. Some of them are well-suited for groups, and so your small group might be interested in covenanting to do one together for a period of time.

Third, during the second hour today I’ll begin offering a class on contemplative gazing. This is a particular spiritual practice—really a prayer practice—that some of you may find particularly useful in furthering intimacy with Christ, with God’s creation, and with God’s people.

God wants intimacy with us. May the Triune God graciously bless us so that we can live that blessing in the world.