Mark 12:28-34

What is the one principle that gives

meaning to life?

A sermon preached by

Dr. William O. (Bud) Reeves

First United Methodist Church

Hot Springs, Arkansas

January 24, 2010

Let’s start with a simple question: What is the meaning of life? Perhaps more importantly, what’s the meaning of your life? Does your existence have a purpose, or is it just a random accumulation of chance occurrences? Is there a mission or a principle that drives your life, that gets you out of bed in the morning, that keeps you focused, and that gives you satisfaction?

Philosophers and theologians have reflected on that question for years. What is the meaning of life? Filmmaker Mel Brooks said, “Hope for the best. Expect the worst. Life is a play; we’re unrehearsed.” The late humorist Lewis Grizzard wrote, “Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.” The physicist Albert Einstein answered, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”[1]

How do we live our lives so that they have some meaning? For centuries the best minds have tried to figure out the one rule of life, the “first principle” that is greater than all other principles, the “categorical imperative”—an ethical mandate that can be applied in any given situation.

In Jesus’ time, the rabbis energetically debated this same issue. One day while he was teaching, a Jewish scribe asked Jesus his opinion on the matter: “Which commandment is the first of all?”[2] In other words, which of the 600-plus commandments in the Law of Moses is the most important to follow? Which one gives life meaning?

Jesus answered with a two-part commandment that we have come to know as the “Great Commandment”: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”[3]

This is the great commandment, the first principle of Jesus, the categorical imperative of the Christ, the meaning of life in a nutshell. But what does it mean, really?

The first part of the Great Commandment is the basic affirmation of faith of the Jewish people. It is called the shema y’Isroel. It can be found in Deuteronomy 6:4. Jesus simply quotes it: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Jesus adds “with all your mind,” but he’s the Son of God; he gets to do that if he wants to. The point is this: there is one God, and only one God, and you need to love him totally and without reservation. As Eugene Peterson says it in The Message, “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy.”[4] Love is the fundamental principle of life.

The love that everybody is looking for is found in a relationship with God. You find that love by loving the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.

Does that sound like fun to you? Or does it just sound exhausting? I don’t know if I can do all that. So here’s the trick: You don’t have to do it on your own. You have help. The One you are supposed to love—the Lord your God—already loves you. It’s not a one-sided relationship. You don’t have to earn his love; he loved you first. He proved that in Jesus Christ. I John 4 explains, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”[5]

When we commit ourselves to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, we find that all our love is actually a response to the God who loved us first, before we were even born. He has been wanting to love us and be loved by us since the beginning of time. Reflect on that, and you may just find your eyes a bit misty.

Several years ago, Edward Farrell of Detroit took his two-week vacation to Ireland to celebrate his favorite uncle's 80th birthday. On the morning of the great day, Ed and his uncle Seamus got up before dawn, dressed in silence, and went for a walk along the shores of Lake Killarney. Just as the sun rose, his uncle stopped and turned and stared straight at the rising orb. Ed stood beside him for 20 minutes with not a single word exchanged. Suddenly the elderly Irishman began to skip along the shoreline, a radiant smile on his face.

After catching up with him, Ed panted, "Uncle Seamus, you look very happy. Do you want to tell me why?"

The 80-year-old birthday boy turned around, and tears were washing down his face. "Yes, lad,” he said. “You see, the Father is fond o’ me. Ah, me Father is so very fond o’ me."[6] Isn’t that great? The Father is so very fond of you and me, so we can love him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength.

We can also love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the second half of the Great Commandment; it’s a quote from the Holiness Code in the Book of Leviticus—Judaism 101. But really it’s just the other side of the same coin of love. We love God, and we love God’s children with the same intensity with which we love ourselves. Most of the time we don’t have any trouble thinking pretty highly of ourselves, do we? But even if we are down on ourselves, all we have to do is think of how highly God esteems us, and then love our neighbor as God loves us. It all works out the same. In fact, the commandment Jesus gave to his disciples on the night before he died was to “love one another as I have loved you.”[7]

It’s all a piece of the same cloth—God loves us; we love God; we love our neighbor; we love God by loving our neighbor.

So who is my neighbor? A neighbor is anyone we have an opportunity to love in any circumstance. A neighbor can be a family member, a friend, a stranger, even an enemy. A neighbor can be as far away as a starving child in a foreign country who is fed by our contributions to a missionary. A neighbor can be Haitian devastated by the earthquake. A neighbor can be as near as the person who sits at our table or shares our bed.

In his book, Sources of Strength, President Jimmy Carter tells about talking with Eloy Cruz, a Cuban pastor who had a great ministry with very poor immigrants from Puerto Rico. Carter asked him for the secret of his success. Pastor Cruz was modest and embarrassed, but he finally said, "Senor Jimmy, we only need to have two loves in our lives. For God, and for the person who happens to be in front of us at any time." [8] That would be your neighbor.

John Roth was attending a conference in the German city of Hamburg and was returning to his hotel late one evening. His subway car was empty, until at one stop, an elderly man dressed in rags got on. He apparently had some sort of mental handicap or disease. Close behind the old man were four teenage boys, dressed in black, sporting tattoos and chains, and obviously up to no good.

Almost immediately they began to taunt the old man, shouting obscenities and making humiliating references to his mental condition. Then one of the teens shook up a half-filled bottle of beer and aimed the foamy spray directly into the old man's face. Without warning they began kicking his legs with their heavy boots and punching him in the arms and face.

John Roth was not trained in martial arts and was not particularly brave, but as a Christian, he could not sit there and watch a neighbor get beat up. So he said a prayer for guidance and stood up. He walked up to the old man and his attackers. In German he called out, "Hans! Hans, how are you? It's been such a long time since we've seen each other!" He slipped between two of the surprised teenagers and helped the old man up. He said, "Come sit with me, Hans. We have so much to catch up on." And John half carried the old man to the back of the subway car.

The teenagers talked briefly among themselves, but they made no move. At the next stop, they got out. At the next stop, the old man got off, mumbling a word of thanks.[9]

Love is kind of scary sometimes. But love is our mission. We’re talking about finding your mission in life. Do you have a mission in life? Do you know why God put you on this planet? Try this: love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Make that your mission in life, and you will find meaning in life.

Victor Frankl was one of the great thinkers of the 20^th century when it came to finding meaning in life. He was a psychiatrist who wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning, based in part on his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp in World War II. He had already been researching and writing about the meaning of life when the Nazis arrested him and stripped him of everything valuable in his world—his home, his family, his possessions. They even destroyed the manuscript of his book, which he had hidden in the lining of his coat. Suddenly Victor Frankl was confronted with the possibility that he would leave this world without a mark, nothing significant to pass on in terms of descendants or contributions. His life might be ultimately meaningless.

A few days after his arrest, the Nazis took Frankl’s clothes and gave him the dirty, worn-out rags of a man who had been sent to the gas chamber. But inside the pocket of the ragged coat, Frankl made a surprising discovery. There was a single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, and on the page was the shema y’Isroel: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength.”

Years later in his book, Frankl reflected, “How should I have interpreted such a 'coincidence' other than as a challenge to ‘live’ my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper? …There is nothing in the world that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. ...He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’."[10]

Love is why we live. Real love, Godly love, is more than an emotion. It’s a mission to live with a commitment to God and the neighbors in our midst. It’s a decision we make and make again and make over every time we fall short throughout our spiritual journey, until we are perfected in love in the presence of our heavenly Father. That’s why God created us—to live a life of love.

There was an article in Fast Company, a business magazine, that told the story of David Kelley. He is the highly successful founder of Ideo, one of the world’s premier design companies. He was also a professor at Stanford University for more than 30 years. He is a creative genius. Unfortunately, at age 56, Kelley discovered a lump on his body, and the doctors told him he had cancer.

For nine months David Kelley went through the physical torture of chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, mouth sores, nausea, the whole bit. His goal in life was to avoid throwing up. The treatment wrecked his taste buds and took his appetite, and he lost 40 pounds.

Kelley is happily married and has one daughter. As he struggled through the difficult emotions that come with this kind of experience, he discovered his reason to live. Kelley said this about his daughter: “At first, you think, ‘I don't want to miss her growing up.’ That's motivating, but not that motivating. It's when you manage to get out of yourself and start thinking of her that you get the resolve to continue. When you think, ‘I don't want her not to have a father’—then you want to stay alive.”[11]

What gave Kelley a reason to endure the suffering of his cancer treatment was not the pleasure he would get out of experiencing life with his daughter, as wonderful as that would be. Kelley realized that what truly motivated him was the benefit he could bring to his daughter. What motivated Kelley at the deepest level was a selfless sacrifice for another—love. That’s what gave him a reason to live, because it would have been easier to die. That’s what gave meaning to his life.

We were made for this—to be a people of love. Jesus calls us to remember the love we had when we first knelt at the foot of the cross and gave our heart to him. Do you remember that? Did you experience that?

Jesus asks us to rekindle the flame that once burned in our hearts for God. Has it become more smoke than fire? He wants us to renew the passion we once felt for our faith, or to make it hotter.

God made us to be a community of compassion and caring for others. Jesus challenges us today to recast the vision of being a community of faith in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that is famous for the way we love God’s people.

Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is the great commandment. This is your mission. This is the meaning of life. Amen!