Mark 12:28-34
Well Ordered Lives
and Loves
James Sledge October
31, 2021
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| Love for One's Neighbor, detail
from a choir screen, National Museum of Scotland |
Jesus draws these words from what he called scripture and what we call the Old Testament. They are likely familiar to you. The love your neighbor part appears regularly in totally secular contexts. But familiarity is very different from understanding. What, exactly, does it mean to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength? For that matter, what does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? How are we to define and measure such love?
I recently read an interesting and helpful little book entitled Liturgy of the Ordinary. It’s by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest whose columns on faith appear regularly in The New York Times. The book has chapters on waking, making the bed, brushing teeth, sitting in traffic, and ends with one on sleeping. I’d like to read you something from that last chapter.
The truth is, I’m far more likely to give up sleep for entertainment than I am for prayer. When I turn on Hulu late at night I don’t consciously think, “I value this episode of Parks and Rec more than my family, prayer, and my own body.” But my habits reveal and shape what I love and what I value, whether I care to admit it or not.[1]
Who knew that your sleep patterns could reveal so much about you, about how well ordered or disordered your loves and your life may be, about the idols in which you place your trust. So what do your sleep patterns say about you?
I have known businesspeople who were immensely proud of the fact that they could survive on only a few hours sleep a night, providing much more time to focus on work. I can recall times when I became so completely engrossed in a video game that along with ignoring my family, I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning trying to progress to another level. I did not set out to be a poor husband and father or to leave myself sleep deprived, but that sleep deprivation revealed my disordered loves and values.
I’ve read numerous articles describing an epidemic of sleep deprivation in America. At least 35% of Americans do not get enough sleep, and some studies suggest that they are as dangerous on the road as drunk drivers. What sort of disordered loves are behind that? The situation is even worse with teenagers where around two thirds do not get enough sleep. What sort of disordered loves create this situation? And it may well be that these disordered loves belong to parents or to the society around us.
“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… You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
God, neighbor, self. Presumably we are to aim for some sort of balance here. In Jesus’ words, love of God would seem to come first, but love of neighbor and self are a close second. If our loves are disordered, that balance will be all wrong. Presumably things could go awry in any direction, but I suspect that for many of us, God and neighbor get the short end of the deal, especially if you consider family to be an extension of yourself.
But if we are going to talk about well order or disordered loves, we must deal with the question of whether or not we accept Jesus’ definition of well-ordered loves. I suspect that a lot of people, both inside and outside the church, aren’t completely convinced that God should come first, or that neighbor qualifies for as much love as self. Jesus’ first disciples struggled with this as well, yet they kept following him, and he never gave up on them.
I like to think that most of us are in similar situations. Gone are the days when our culture expected people to belong to a church and people joined because of that expectation, so it seems likely that many of you think that Christian faith has something to offer. Like those first disciples, you may struggle with some of Jesus’ teachings, but you keep trying to follow him. So how are you doing?
The question about what you lose sleep over helps answer that, but I think another question is even better at revealing and shaping how our loves are ordered. How do you spend your money? People spend money on what they love. People who love a certain hobby will spend great deals of money pursuing that hobby. I’m embarrassed to say how much I spend on running shoes, and I know people who spend a lot more on golf clubs or guitars or bicycles and so on.
Most of us spend a great deal of money entertaining ourselves with smartphones, Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, and more. We take vacations and go to plays and concerts and sporting events. We have home theaters with the latest video game consoles.
Many of us have nice homes with nice furniture and fancy new cars and fine clothes, and we buy expensive presents for those we love. And I don’t know that there is anything wrong with any of those in and of themselves. But what does how we spend our money say about our love of God and love of neighbor?
Around 40% of Americans give no money to any sort of charity. Among Protestants, nearly 40% give nothing to their church. The average Protestant gives $17 a week to their church, and only 5% of churchgoers tithe or give 10%, the biblical standard. It would seem that the giving of many Americans, and many American churchgoers, reveals a rather large deficit in loving either God or neighbor.
“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… You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
When Jesus says that these two commandments together constitute the greatest commandment, he is not talking about church budgets or imposing harsh demands on his followers. He is talking about getting our lives properly ordered. He is describing a well-balanced life with well-ordered loves, a life that is truly rich and abundant, a life that is in sync with what it truly means to be human, to be who we are in our inner most self. And when we find that balance, says Jesus, we “…are not far from the kingdom of God.”
[1] Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), 142-143.
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