Blessings All,
Sunday's (January 3) sermon was about using our minds to love God. Jesus, in each of the three synoptic Gospels (that's Matthew, Mark and Luke) amends the Shema, one of the central prayers of Judaism (Deuteronomy 6:4-9), by including the mind as one of the faculties we are called to use to love God.
So, beloved, how should we use our minds to love God? I want to suggest a way and see what you think. Wherever you are, wherever you are reading this, stop for just a moment and look around the room. What do you see? What catches your eye? Now, what does that thing you just saw say to you about God?
Everything speaks to us of the one who created all that is. But we, with our schedules of hurry and rush often miss the small ways God speaks to us and invites us to use our minds to think of God.
If this is hard for you, let me tell you what my eye fell on in my office, a shelf full of rocks. Ah, but these are not just any rocks. They are river stones. Each one has been polished and rub smooth by the action of the water that in their past surrounded them. They are easy to pick up and comforting to hold. What they say to me about God is that God can use the things that wash up, or rub up, against us to smooth away jagged edges, to polish us and make us easy to be next to and a comfort to hold. So when the waters rush over me, I must think, I am being smoothed and polished. And, to be honest sometimes that's easier thought than believed!
OK, now you try again. On what did your eye fall? Maybe a mirror, maybe something broken, maybe a glass that' empty. What do these say about God. The mirror speaks to you that you, beautiful one, were made in the very image and likeness of God. The broken thing reminds us that God most often meets us in our broken places. And the empty glass is waiting - indeed ready - to be filled by the good things of heaven. What do you see and how does it invite you to use your mind to see God in a new way?
Jesus says, “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 mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:28-31). You and your mind are invited into this wonderful mysterious dance with God.
I look forward to hearing how you use your mind to love God.
Be well and know that you are at the center of the heart of God.
Pastor Zina
My belief is that God wants us to use our minds to think for ourselves, to question, to learn, and therefore to understand more fully.
ReplyDeleteIn looking around my room, my eye fell on the ruby glass collection that I inherited from my father - who undoubtedly is the one who influenced me to think for myself.