Reformation Sunday, October 27, 2019 | 8:00 a.m.

A Thinking Faith

Part of the sermon series:
“Remembering Our Past, Inspiring Our Future”

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 84:1–7
Mark 12:28–36

Humility is the beginning of true intelligence.

John Calvin

We are commissioning our new seminary intern, Lois, later this morning, so I’d like to begin my sermon with a seminary story.

During my first year of seminary I worked Friday nights at an Evangelical Free Church on Staten Island in New York. My future brother-in-law was the pastor. Because Meredith was working at a hospital in Newark, we often spent the weekend in the city and worshiped at that church on Sunday morning.

One week after service I was approached by one of the church members. Holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in one hand and a donut hole in the other, he asked me, “You’re in seminary, right?” I answered that, yes, I was in my first semester at Princeton Theological Seminary, and waited for him to be impressed. He wasn’t.

He continued, “You know all the translations of the Bible?”

“Yes.” I waited for the rest of the question and my opportunity to show off some of that first-semester expertise. But I wasn’t quite prepared for what came next.

“Which one of them is right?”

Right?

Which translation is oldest, maybe. Perhaps even “Which one is best?” But right? I didn’t know how to answer that. The question was so obvious, and it came from such an earnest place that it shot straight past all the categories I had for relating to the Bible.

He was a person of deep faith. He believed the Bible, and he wanted to understand it rightly. He couldn’t abide the possibility that a “wrong” translation of it would lead him astray. More than information, he was seeking understanding.

Faith seeks understanding. This is the famous formulation attributed to the eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury: “faith seeking understanding.”

That’s a good place to start for this, our fifth installment in our fall sermon series “Remembering Our Past, Inspiring Our Future,” focused as we are today on our historic commitment to seeking understanding in our faith here. You see that commitment everywhere just walking through the building. Signs pointing you this morning to Academy for Faith and Life classes at 9:30 and 11:00 in the Gratz Center (I’m teaching one of those in about an hour), as well as literature in the racks in the Commons describing the Center for Life and Learning and its programs.

You don’t even have to be in the building to see it. At the risk of belaboring the point, if you click the “Education/Discipleship” menu on the left side of our website’s home page, you’ll see a menu that includes the Academy for Faith and Life and the Center for Life and Learning, sure, but also Bible Studies, Book Groups, Confirmation, the Day School, Devotions, Michigan Avenue Forums, Mission Trips (like the one to Washington, D.C., that left yesterday), Sunday School, Tutoring, and, my personal favorite, Youth Programs.

And that’s just under the page labeled “Education.” Pretty much every area of our church’s ministry has an educational component. Consistent with our Reformed and Presbyterian heritage, which we are commemorating today as Reformation Sunday, our worship depends heavily on an educational purpose.

It’s why we read scripture the way we do and put academic robes on our preachers, who are urged to lead the church, in the words of our Confession of 1967, to “approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding.” I suppose it’s also why we print the text of the anthems the choir sings and practically every other word spoken in worship: we want worshipers to read along for the sake of full understanding.

Understanding is what the scribe in our story from Mark’s Gospel is after. He’s been listening to Jesus debate Sadducees and Pharisees in the temple, and he’s impressed at the way Jesus is answering them. So he dares to offer up his own question to Jesus, not as a trap but, it seems, as an earnest inquiry driving at understanding. “Which commandment is the first of all?”

Good thing for the scribe, Jesus is a teacher. He’s a teacher of Judaism, a rabbi. The sign on the front lawn of a Lutheran church in my neighborhood says, “Jesus was a teacher too. Support our teachers.”

Fair enough.

And like any reliable teacher, if you come to Jesus with a sincere question and a desire to understand, you’re going to get a sincere answer.

“The first is . . .” Jesus begins to answer. It’s not a list; this is not number 1 of the 613 commands in the Hebrew scriptures. In fact what comes first of all isn’t a commandment at all. “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” It’s Deuteronomy 6:4, commonly referred to as the Shema, because that’s what the Hebrew verb hear sounds like: “shema.” It’s something every pious Jew, like this scribe, would know intimately, reciting it at least twice every day.

So first of all, Jesus teaches the seeking scribe something about God, not the commandments, and it’s something the scribe knows well. It’s not an idea but a fundamental conviction this scribe has mouthed thousands of times, embedding the truth of it in the muscles of his face.

Then, first of all, is the commandment to love, both God and our neighbor. Again, Jesus is not breaking new pedagogical ground here. The precise linking of Deuteronomy 6:4 with the command to love your neighbor as yourself from Leviticus chapter 19 feels unique to him, but the sentiment would have been widely accepted by Jesus’ audience there in the temple, as in fact it is by the scribe.

It’s the rule of love. First of all, love God. First of all, love your neighbor. One of the first of the Protestant Reformers, John Calvin, said that “the love of God was the beginning of religion.” In loving God you love your neighbor, and in loving your neighbor you love God. First of all, love.

First of all, Jesus teaches love, and the church has had a couple thousand years to try that love commandment out in the world. The story of the church, the story of this church, glistens with moments where the love commandment carried the day. I think of the Boys’ Club and Young Women’s Club started in the 1910s by members of the Men’s Club and Women’s Club, respectively. Each week, dozens, sometimes hundreds of children from the surrounding streets were welcomed into this very space for fellowship and learning.

First of all, Jesus’ teaching is to love. Everybody knows that.

And yet here’s what we maybe don’t know. Jesus adds something here to what the scribe has grown up hearing. “Hear O Israel, . . . you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your [strength].” That’s Deuteronomy 6:4 verbatim. But that’s not quite what Jesus said, is it? He added something. “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.”

He adds “and with all your mind.” Jesus wants us to love God with all our mind.

Our way of being Christian here in this community and as part of the Reformed and Presbyterian traditions fully engages the mind. Over and over again, in Europe and then in America, Presbyterians have affirmed the importance of intellect and of study to faith, over against a Christianity that feeds mostly on emotional zealotry, on one hand, or ritual and traditional observance, on the other. We have established Sunday Schools and tutoring programs, written curriculum, and insisted that our leaders pursue academic credentials.

Yet Jesus’ words to the scribe are not “study God with all your mind” but “love God with all your mind.” Just as much as emotionalism or ritualism distort faith, so does intellectualism, a kind of reduction of God to a subject to be studied, pinned down, and mastered.

Loving God with all our mind seeks understanding but in the way that is less like a scientist analyzing data than it is like someone studying a letter from a friend or like a scribe asking a rabbi which is the first commandment.

And our scribe loves this. He’s practically elated. Jesus has barely finished reciting his rendition of the love commandment before the scribe starts to sputter his breathless agreement: “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; 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.”

Right . . . the scribe is a teacher too. His enthusiasm for Jesus’ teaching deepens our understanding of Jesus and the story Mark’s Gospel is telling about Jesus. This is the rare occasion—in fact the only occasion in Mark—where a scribe agrees with Jesus. The scribes think Jesus is possessed. Earlier in the temple the scribes were so bothered by Jesus’ teaching that they started plotting to kill him.

Animosity isn’t the whole story, though, because where we have been primed to expect this scribe to stalk away in righteous indignation, we instead get a high five. “Yes!” he says. “You’re right!” And then he just repeats everything Jesus just said. And then he adds, “It’s much more important than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.”

First of all, keep your voice down. We’re in the temple here. You can’t go denigrating the offering and sacrifice complex out in the open like that.

Why not? The prophets did. This scribe has something to teach about the love of God too.

“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings.

That’s the prophet Hosea.

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says the Lord.”

That’s the prophet Isaiah.

“Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor are your sacrifices pleasing to me.”

Jeremiah.

This is the scribe’s contribution to our understanding, even to Jesus’ understanding.

And that is why I think Jesus calls the scribe’s answer “wise” and why he encourages him that he’s not far from the kingdom of God. Maybe the two of them, in this exchange, are approaching the kingdom of God. Their exchange is so unique among all the gospel stories; no scribe ever told Jesus he was right before, and Jesus doesn’t tell any other person except this scribe that they are “not far from the kingdom [or the dominion] of God.”

People we otherwise know as adversaries sharing wisdom and learning. People whose communities are at odds praising one another’s insight. People whose faith commitments differ in the details connecting over the love that is first of all for both. Friends, we are not far from the dominion of God here.

Maybe this is what the dominion of God looks like in our midst: a teacher and an administrator sharing what one another knows; encouraging each other in their shared love, the thing they’re both passionate about; celebrating what is right and wise in one another’s commitments, until something emerges between them that neither of them have seen before.

Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be a little bit like this exchange between Jesus and the scribe? Wouldn’t that be a little heaven on earth?

May it be so.

Amen.