Hilton Head Island, SC – December 22, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Deuteronomy 6:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Sermon Text - Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." - Deuteronomy 6:4 (RSV)
The scriptural verse you have just heard, Deuteronomy 6:4, is known by Jews as the Shema. Without doubt it is the best known biblical verse among Jews everywhere in the world. It is repeated in almost every Jewish service, often more than once. In Hebrew, the words are these: Shema, Yisroel, Adonoy elohenu, Adonoy echod! It is said that in ancient days, when the Jews came to the last word, echod (is One), they shouted it: Adonoy ECHOD! God is one. There are not many gods, as all other ancient peoples thought; there is only one God, and He alone is Yahweh (which is His name); He alone is Adonoy, a word which means "The Lord."
The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates Deut. 6:4 as follows: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone." That suggests a different meaning than the traditional Shema. It seems to say that Jews (or, by inference for that matter, Christians) are to have only God as their God. But the true meaning of Deut. 6:4, I think, is that God is solely, completely, and radically One, that He Alone is God, and that therefore, we are to believe in God alone. We are to have no other gods before God, and in fact, we are to have no other gods: period. That's what the First Commandment says also.
I wonder if Emily Dickinson might have had another deity, for she wrote:
The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.
The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.
The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
Did she whom some of us consider to be the world's greatest poet suggest that our brains or thoughts or spiritual ponderings are the same as God? No, I don't think so. What I think she meant, in her uniquely fanciful and poetic manner, is that we can comprehend God only by means of deep thought, that He cannot be lightly or casually or easily understood.
In all three of the synoptic Gospels, there is an incident in which an expert in the religious law tested Jesus in His knowledge of the Torah, and he asked Jesus what He considered to be the greatest commandment. Jesus quoted the response to the Shema, but curiously, He did not do so exactly as it is written in Deuteronomy. What Jesus said was this: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." That latter phrase is not in the original Shema. It says we are to love God with all our heart, soul, and might.
Well, which is it? As far as I am concerned, we should probably include all four qualifiers in our love of God; we should love Him with our whole heart, soul, might, and mind. But it is a necessity that we love God with our mind, that we think about who He is and how we love Him, that we do not simply affirm Him and His existence without thinking about what that means, especially what it means for how we should live our lives.
Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher who lived earlier in this century, said, "When I stand opposite to God, I am face to face with Him who is unconditionally no 'something,' who in the unconditional sense is pure 'Thou.'" In his classic little book Ich und Du, "I and Thou," he said that God is that fundamentally personal Being from whom all being springs. Thus when we encounter God, or we might more appropriately say, when God encounters us, we come into the presence of what the Christian philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich called "The Ground of Being" or "Being Itself."
William Placher is a professor of philosophy and religion at Wabash College in Indiana. He wrote, "If God lies in mystery beyond our understanding, then our language about God will not come from what our reason can figure out and will not turn God into something we can measure and comprehend. Moreover, if we trust that somehow in that mystery, God is gracious, then we believe that our very ability to talk about God must come from God as a gift" (The Christian Century, March 20-27, 1996, p. 337).
Is all this stuff pretty hard to understand? Good; that is exactly the way I want it to be, because God, the greatest reality in our existence, is also the greatest mystery in our existence. Because He is, we are; still, we might know little or nothing of Him, and yet both He and we continue to exist. He knows us, but do we know Him? That truly is the question: Do we really know God?
I can't speak for you, but I can for me: I know snippets about God, bits and pieces about God. I know that He is One, that there can only be one God. I know -- or at least I believe -- that He is the God who revealed Himself through those who wrote the Bible, particularly through Moses and the prophets, and that uniquely He manifested Himself to the world through the person and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, whom I believe, as I said last week, to be the Messiah and the Son of God. But there is far, far more I don't know about God than I do know, and I suspect that even when I see Him face to face (if such an expression has any validity at all, which I don't know), He shall still be primarily a mystery to me. How can I, or you, or anyone, who is created, fully comprehend the Creator? What kind of human hubris would ever lead any of us to imagine we are capable of completely comprehending the Almighty One of Israel?
It is a huge impertinence to speak authoritatively about God. But on the other hand, it is a huge blasphemy not to speak about Him at all. If we know anything about God (and we all know something, or otherwise we would not be here this morning to worship Him), then our very faith, however limited it is, demands that we share what we believe, even if it is minuscule or faltering or totally wrong. To believe in God and not to proclaim that faith to others is much worse than to remain silent because we know we don't know enough. To insist on silence is to take the name of God in vain, which is what blasphemy really is, because if we know something about God and refuse to tell it because it might be incorrect, we do God a great injustice. It is better to speak incorrectly than to say nothing because then we know we can't be wrong. But it is wrong to say nothing when we believe something, when we know at least that God alone is God, which is what the Shema proclaims!
Let me tell you something fascinating. In Hebrew Deuteronomy 6:4 does not actually say,"Shema, Yisroel, Adonoy elohenu, Adonoy echod;" what it says is this: Shema, Yisroel, Yahweh elohenu, yahweh echod. Thus it literally means, "Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, and Yahweh is ONE!" The Hebrews knew God's name! God told it to Moses at the burning bush! "I am Yahweh, the God of your fathers, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob," He said! We know God's identity; no one can be in a synagogue or church or mosque and not know; and if we know, then our faith, a faith given to us by God, obligates us to share it with one another! To offer one another ignorance is better than to stay silent, and so God moves us to say what we think, because we are to love Him with our whole mind, with whatever cavorts about our cranium: true, false, or ambivalent!
I have been given a number of wonderful gifts over the past few weeks, but one which I shall particularly treasure is a framed statement of the sixth century BCE Greek philosopher Empedocles.
He said, "The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere." What a magnificent, prescient, cogent statement about God! "The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere"! We can think about that forever, and we can never fully plumb its depths! There is a Hebrew statement which is like it, though, and in English it comes out as this: "Hear, O Israel, God is our God, and God is ONE!"
In 1958 at Northampton, Massachusetts, Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr delivered a lecture about Jonathan Edwards upon the bicentennial commemoration of Edwards' death. Speaking about the man whom many consider the greatest American-born theologian of all time (although others think it might be H. Richard Niebuhr or, more likely, his brother Reinhold Niebuhr), Prof. Niebuhr said, "Edwards used to say that the trouble with men was not that they had no ideas of God, but that they had little ideas of God." Then H. Richard Niebuhr went on to say, "We might add that they are ideas about little Gods" (Quoted in The Christian Century, May 1, 1996, p. 485).
There is only God, whose name, presumably, is Yahweh, sort of, or, if you are afraid you might be struck dead for the chutzpah of even speaking His name aloud, you can call Him Adonoy, the Lord, or, if you prefer ordinary and fairly unambivalent English, you will probably just call Him God.
Anybody who doesn't have a bundle of unanswered questions about God doesn't have them simply because he or she hasn't thought nearly hard enough about God. To think about God is the greatest of intellectual endeavors, but also it is bound to be the most frustrating of human undertakings. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is among the giants of Judaism from the time of his namesake Abraham. The mid-twentieth century professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York made this observation about a word very much in vogue at the end of the twentieth century, the word "spiritual." "This is what we mean by the term spiritual: It is the reference to the transcendent in our own existence, the direction of the Here toward the Beyond....When we perceive (the spiritual), it is as if our mind were gliding for a while with an eternal current."
So Miss Dickinson wrote,
I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable --- and then
There interposed a fly.
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed; and then
I could not see to see.
Some day we are all going to know much more about God than we know now. But for now, let's know what we can know, and go forth in faith.
I close with an illustration which comes from the one I call "The Boss," Elam Davies, the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago. No one has influenced me in the ministry as much as he. When I was in seminary, my wife and I listened to him, spellbound, every Sunday. For five years as an assistant minister on that church's staff, we again listened to him, again spellbound. Much of what I have told you through the years I learned from him.
Once, many years ago, Elam Davies, his wife, and a small group of tourists were at a place in Ireland called St. Kevin's Cave. To get to St. Kevin's Cave, it is necessary to go by boat across rough waves to a rocky cliff, and one must climb up a narrow path to reach the cave's opening, far above the rocks and the crashing waves at the base of the precipice. The group made it safely to a particular place, and there it became necessary for the guide to climb down a few feet to take a foothold on the cliff, hang one with one hand, and then put his other hand up as the only possible stepping place for each terrified tourist. Elam Davies was the last in the line, and he watched as each person before him put out a foot, and then disappeared behind a jutting rock, not again to be seen. They had to disappear to enter the cave.
By the time Dr. Davies reached the place, his heart had turned to ice. He could scarcely breathe; his hands seemed to be covered with motor oil, it was as though his feet were sheathed in grease. The guide looked into his apprehensive eyes. "Put your foot into my hand," he said with a quiet authority; "we have never lost anyone yet!"
Elam Davies, the master of sermon illustrations, said that was an expression of the nature and grace and love of God. Put your foot -- or your hand or your faltering spirit or yourself -- into the hand of God. He has never lost anyone yet.