Bible Text: Matthew 22:34-40 | Preacher: Pastor Dorry Newcomer | Series: The Beatitudes | It’s a little surprising that a Pharisee, a lawyer who knew the Jewish law inside and out, asked Jesus, which commandment is most important?  Surely he already knew the Shema:  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul and with all your might.  This is the central affirmation of the Jewish faith.  The Shema is recited at the opening of every Jewish worship service.  It’s the most basic summary of their religion, and it’s taught to very young children the way we might teach, “Jesus loves me” to our kids.  Everyone with Jesus that day knew full well what the most important commandment in the law was.

The Shema is so important in Judaism that when I was in seminary and I took a class in Hebrew, this was the first thing we learned.  The word Shema means “listen” or “hear”, and it sounds like this:  Shema Yitzrael adonia ellahanu, adonia ahad.  One translation of that first line is, “Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone.”  The Shema continues with the line Jesus quoted:  Weh ahavtah et adonia ellohekka vekohl lavavka, ou vekohl nafshaka, ou vekohl mehodecca.  And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and all your strength.

That is the central commandment in the Jewish faith, and Jesus affirms it for us as Christians:  love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might, which is has somehow become changed to mind in many versions.  Heart, soul, mind, might—we get the picture.  Love God with your WHOLE BEING!  That is job #1 for the children of Abraham, Jewish and Christian.

Jesus goes on to say there is a second very important commandment, this one also quoted directly from the Old Testament:  love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus says all of the prophets and the law—in other words, all of scripture, hang on these two commandments:  love God, and love neighbor.  All the other teachings and vision for God’s people are meaningless without their willingness to obey these two commands.

Of course, none of us is perfect.  When Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” he is not saying, “Blessed are those who are perfect, for they will see God.”  We’ve been talking each week how the Beatitudes promise blessings, not for perfect people who don’t exist, but they are for regular people just like us.  Blessed are the poor in spirit—blessed are the people who have limits and problems and need God.  Blessed are those who mourn, including those who mourn their sins.  Blessed are the meek—those who know the pain of being exposed and vulnerable, who know how much it hurts when we sin.  No, being pure in heart cannot mean that we must be perfect.  The beatitudes are all about the blessings that can come from us acknowledging that we aren’t perfect!

Time and time again Jesus spoke out against legalism and self-righteousness.  It seems to me, by pronouncing a blessing upon those who are pure in heart, Jesus is issuing us an invitation to explore more fully what is meant by the two most important commands of our faith.  Maybe Jesus is encouraging us to think about who and what we are before we focus on what we do.  And first and foremost, who and what we are is beloved by God.  The more we can accept and live into that truth, the purer our hearts will be.

I was brainstorming this week, trying to think of an example of purity in our midst.  What kept coming to mind was Ivory soap.  Do you remember them advertising that it is 99.44% pure?  We are all paying a lot more attention to washing our hands, washing ourselves outside so no bad things get inside.  But purity of heart is an inside out job.  So to help us visualize that, I brought in some potting soil.  I think some good old-fashioned dirt is just the thing to help us get a handle on purity.

You’ve probably heard about my track record with plants:  you have to be pretty low maintenance if you want to make it in my house!  I am always excited when my benign neglect approach to plants actually works, and on occasion, I have a plant that does so well it needs to be repotted.  I always get nervous, repotting, because I hate to fix something that isn’t broken.  But take a look at these roots?  There’s a lot of them!  They’re right up against the edge of the pot.  Pretty soon they will get so matted and tangled up, they won’t be able to absorb the water and nutrients the plant needs, and will become what gardeners call root bound.  When that happens, the plant suffers.

Do you remember last week, we talked about being bound, and what God’s antidote to that is?  That’s right!  What this plant needs is some mercy!  The Greek word for mercy is eleison, which is basically the opposite of our word liaison.  Mercy means to take what is connected and bound together, and separate or free it up.  And so we can take this plant out of its little pot, and loosen up its roots, and replant it into a much bigger pot that will give it lots of room to grow.

Repotting a root bound plant is an act of mercy, isn’t it?  It unbinds, it loosens, it frees up the roots so they can absorb what the plant needs to thrive.  I love that word, eleison.  Unbinding.  Loosening.  Freeing up.  Now.  Here’s the thing.  Getting root bound doesn’t just happen to plants.  It happens to people, too.  If you are like me, and you simply don’t have enough love to be able to love other people as well as you’d like to, you are root bound. If you are having trouble loving the annoying people in your life, if you are having trouble loving your enemies, your soul is constricted.  Like this plant, you need a bigger pot.

Lucky for us, through Christ we have access to the biggest pot of love ever.  God’s love is infinite.  There’s a hymn in our hymnal that says God’s love is broad like beach and meadow.  It’s a little hard to sing, but what a great line.  There is no measure to God’s love.  Broad like beach and meadow, God’s love is wider, higher, deeper, richer, fuller than we can imagine.  The disciple John reached the end of his life, looked back over all he experienced and concluded, “God is love.”  God’s love is unlimited.  And God’s love is perfect!  It’s not limited by size or by any kind of impurity.  God is pure and endless love.

So how do we connect with that love?  There are lots of ways.  John Wesley called them the “means of grace”:  attending worship, taking communion, prayer, fellowship, serving others.  Also, baptism.  But for most of us, that was a long time ago.  We have a line in our new member ritual that says, “Remember your baptism and be thankful.”  What we are encouraged to remember is the meaning of our baptism.

I don’t remember my baptism, because I was an infant.  But I can recall what my baptism means.  When we do baptism, we don’t use a person’s last name.  My name used to be Dorry Lynn Kuhn, but when I was baptized, Pastor Lott at the Lutheran Church in Runnemede New Jersey said, “Dorry Lynn, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”.  In baptism, we all get a new last name, Christian.  See, my identity is not based on the two limited pots of love that made my body and gave me the family name of Kuhn.  When Pastor Lott baptized me and poured water on my head, it was if he was taking me out of the teeny tiny pot of love people come with, and repotting me into my true home, the bed of God’s infinite love.

We are all, each of us, grounded in God’s bed of infinite love.  We get our identity from the God who loved us even before our parents loved us.  For some reason, though, we forget where we are really planted and live as if we are stuck in a teeny tiny pot of human love.  But by remembering our baptism, remembering where we are truly planted, now we have access to all the love we will ever need!  By receiving God’s mercy, we get our souls untangled, and we can absorb the love that can heal us and help us heal others.  Our souls are no longer constricted by our teeny tiny pots.  Now our souls are freed up to support all kinds of growth.  Mercy.  Eleison.  Plant yourself in the vast pot of God’s love, and you become pure in heart.

And that is how we get to see God.  When we plant ourselves in God’s bed of love, God’s love pulses through our veins.  God’s love begins to run through us in such a powerful way that we can’t help but have love at the forefront of our minds.  If we are pure in heart, we will have no choice but to see God, because God will be at the center of our focus!  We will see God in every person we meet.  We will see God in the beauty of creation.  We will see God in a hungry child, or a person in prison, or someone who is sick, or our beloved dog or cat.  We will see the image of God in everyone we meet and strive to treat them accordingly.  We will see God everywhere we go, because everywhere we go, God is in us.

Our faith tradition calls us to love God with our whole being, and love our neighbors as ourselves.  Love is not just a feeling.  It is a verb.  It is deliberate action.  The lawyer who questioned Jesus devoted great time and energy to following God’s laws with precision.  But it is not our actions that make us poure in heart.  It’s not what we do.  It’s what we be!  God so loved the world, God sent his son Jesus.  We are that deeply loved by God!  Before we can really DO love, we need to experience BEING loved.

So this week I would like to issue a WHOLE BEING challenge to us all.  Can you find a way to spend ten minutes each day focusing on God’s love?  Maybe you can work in your garden.  Maybe you have a plant that needs to be repotted, too!  If you don’t like gardening, you could just spend ten minutes each day visualizing your roots sinking down further into the soil of God’s love.  Spend some time reflecting on the purity of God’s love, how broad like beach and meadow it is.  Maybe you could even take a field trip to a beach or meadow, at least in your imagination!  Spend ten minutes every day this week, being loved by God.  And then keep your eyes open for a special blessing, of renewed vision and clarity.

When Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” he was issuing an invitation that will change our lives.  Seeing God will result in strength and perseverance and lasting joy!  Colossians 2:7 says, “Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness.”  If you want today to be better than yesterday, I can’t think of anything better than to ground your soul in the soil of Christ.  Let your roots can soak up his perfect goodness, and bring love into your whole being!  Amen.