The First Commandment - The Second Commandment

by Gordon Cosby
October 19, 2003

One of our people got a call from a friend in Houston Texas, who said that things were so difficult and there was so much despair in the world that he felt that we ought to has a day just to be together to talk with one another about how we were able to maintain HOPE in our lives and he would wants to come to such a time, such a day, to just talk about hope.

Our Old Testament scripture is one that I have gone back to many times, which I'd like to read. Habakkuk second Chapter: "I will stand on my post, keeping my position on the watch tower to learn what He - God - will say to me. How He responds to my complaint." (And I've often times wondered how God would respond to my complaint. I got a lot of them). "And the Lord gives me this answer. Write down the vision. Describe it clearly on tablets so that it may be read at a glance, so that a person will see if you are running by it. There is still a vision for the appointed time. It will testify to the destined hour and will not prove false. Though it delays wait for it, for it will surely come before too long. The wretched will lack an assured future while the righteous will live by being faithful."

And a New Testament scripture is in Mark. Jesus had been working with the Pharisees who didn't believe in the resurrection, and what He said to them was "How far you are from the truth. God is the God of the living - Abraham, Jacob, Moses. This is the God of the living - not the God of the dead." And he ended his statement with the Saducees, "You are very far from the truth. " And I think that's what He would say to most of us - you are very far from the truth.

"But then one of the scribes that had been listening in to these discussions and had observed how well Jesus answered came forward and asked him. "Which is the first of all the commandments?" And He answered. "The first is, 'Hear Oh Israel, the Lord our God is the one God. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength." And the second is this, "You must love your neighbor as yourself. No other commandment is greater than these."

The scribe said to him, "Well said teacher. Good answer. You are right in saying that God is the one God and that beside Him there is no other. And to love him with all your heart, all your understanding, all of your strength and your neighbor as yourself.. That means far more than any whole offerings and sacrifices." And when Jesus saw how thoughtfully he answered he said to him "You are not far from the Kingdom of God." And after that no one dared put any more questions to him."

Last week we talked about learning to pray all the time and bringing all of our life and not just part of life into the presence of God. We said that we are not to develop a strong prayer life, that all of life is to become a conversation with God." Every dimension of life is to be lived in the presence. We are, as Paul said, to pray without ceasing-pray continually. And we mentioned the ways, and disciplines of doing that for a number of people in the 14th century was what was called "the Jesus prayer", "the pilgrim's prayer." And this was used hundreds of times - often thousands of times - a day. And Henri Nouwen seeks to help us with the modern equivalent of the Jesus prayer. He suggests we are already thinking without ceasing. That's the reason the prayer of silence is so difficult, we're always thinking. And he says we're already doing that, and he talks about turning thinking into prayer. And if this is to happen, we need a clear discipline. The process is extremely difficult. Few of us are willing to seriously begin the journey of praying without ceasing.

There are many ways of working with our set time of prayer. And there are six exercises that Elizabeth O'Connor shares with us in her book The Search for Silence. But there also must be a discipline for the remaining 23 hours, if we have decided to set aside one hour. Many of us are in such shape that one hour is not adequate in order to balance the culture. It's really not. But if we do an hour, what is the discipline for the remaining 23 hours? The set aside time is absolutely crucial. The quality of that time will flow into the other 23 hours. But the discipline of the 23 hours will greatly affect the set-aside time of prayer that we have adopted as a discipline.

It makes all of life different, not a part of life. So the word is that all of life is to be lived within the presence. So we are talking really about what Jesus called - and the Jewish people had long known - The First Commandment: Hear Of Israel, and how do we live with the keeping of that First Commandment?

When Dallis Willard was here a few months ago, we asked him to write a piece for us, which described how it is that we universally loose the vision. Every institution tends to lose it, and almost every institution looses their vision. And we asked him if he would write a piece on that so as to male us conscious of that process and he did and we have that little booklet - it came this week. And its called "Living With God's Vision" and that will be available if you want to pick it up. But I want to just read one little section of it, which he calls "the joyful aim of life" "At the center of care for the heart" he says "is the love of God.

He who in love, his thoughts are forever on the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported by concentration on God. God is the treasure and where the treasure is, there is God. King David gave us the secret of his life. King David said 'I've set the Lord continually before me. Because God is continually at my right hand I will not be shaken." And then Dallis Willard says, "That vision of God secures humility. Seeing God for whom God is enables us for seeing us for whom we are. This makes us bold. For we see clearly what great good and what great evil are at issue and we that it is not up to us to accomplish it but up to God who is more than able. We are delivered from pretending, being presumptions about ourselves, and from pushing as if the outcome depended upon us. We persist without frustration and we practice calm and joyful noncompliance with evil of any kind. God looks to those who are humble and contrite of spirit, and who tremble when God speaks. (Isaiah 60:62) Who tremble when God speaks. God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. (I Peter 5:5) Remember, grace means that God is acting in our lives. So the humble who are dependent on God, not on ourselves. We humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God. That is we depend on Good to act. We abandon outcomes entirely to God. We cast all anxieties on God because God cares for us. The result is the assurance that the mission and the ministry will be accomplished in God's time and in God's way. We don't need to be the vision and the goals we set are God's business, not ours. We do the very best we know. We work hard and even self-sacrificially but we do not carry the load. And our ego is not involved in any way, with the mission and the ministry. With Our love of Jesus and his Father we truly have abandoned our life to God. Our life is not an object of deep concern" (End Willard)

Now what we are saying is that God is the vision and all visions with a small "v" emerge from and are sustained by the Vision with a capital V. We tend to loose and slip away from "THE VISION". VISION OF GOD. BEING IN LOVE WITH GOD. Totally focused on God. Every good comes as a fruit of GOD, THE VISION. The generosity of God.

To not have the discipline of a set time of prayer. To not have a discipline for the 23 remaining hours is to loose the centrality, that which is central to all of life, and is to be central to our own personal lives if we are to know riches and fulfillment. So are we savoring this inloveness? If we are deeply in love with a person and if we are in love with a person everything gravitates to that person. We wonder what they are doing. We keep up with their schedules. We wonder where they are. We remember their needs. It just grows with the inloveness. Are we sensing this inloveness, which is the first commandment?

Just as we draw life from those that we love and who love us - and we want to be close to some people because we draw life from them - we feel their being in us - do we sense the very essence of being, that which is supreme, that which is total, do we sense that flowing into us as we constantly seek to remain open and aware of the cosmic lover who longs to give God's self to me and to every living creature?

So our task, you see, although we must talk about it, is not to develop a good set time of prayer. Our task is not to develop a helpful discipline for the remaining 23 hours. These disciplines are to keep us open and focused on the heart that beats passionately for us, and can hardly wait until our hearts beat passionately in return. So the end of it all is inloveness. That is what discipline is for. And the minute you take the discipline and turn it into an end for itself, it very quickly creates hypocrites.

So the discipline is to help us arrive at that state of inloveness. The VISION is God's. Many visions will flow out of that VISION. But when any of the derived visions has our primary attention, then we are in trouble. When any of the visions attract our primary attention we are in serious trouble.

So let me just mention two very compelling reasons why I think this first commandment is the first commandment. And I want to try to give it to you straight. This is not a spiritual aspiration just to go church and listen to some good stuff. And maybe a few people can do it. I remember so well a soldier during one of the battles in Normandy and I dropped into his foxhole about 2 o'clock in the morning. And he looks up and saw the cross on my helmet and he looked up and said "Chaplain, I'm glad you are here." He said "I have that intuition which is very strong and I really know that I'm going to die tonight and I want you to talk to me about what's going to happen when I die." And I always remember his comment; he said, "I don't want you to give me any of the usual spiritual crab." And that said a lot to me about how people will hear this stuff. They think that it is just something nice to hear - maybe on a Sunday morning, maybe more but they don't believe that it is really true.

Let me give you two compelling reasons why we must do what we are talking about this morning.

---The first compelling reason is this. Not to let ones life flow into God as its integrating LOVE CENTER is to remain forever divided, to be segmented, compartmentalized, fragmented, to be our many selves and to have no chair person in charge of this internal civil war, no chair person of the committee. It is to live with this internal screaming mob all our lives and to die in midst of this internal chaos, not knowing whether we want to go or not. It's unity or division. And the only one I know to integrate the many selves around is this GOD we've been talking about.

---The second compelling reason, so this is not just spiritual stuff. None of the exciting visions with a small v can be sustained accept in and through the big VISION. The visions we are given are the structures and the instruments and the wine skins for keeping the Second Commandment. That's what the visions are, the structures and wineskins for keeping the Second commandment: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." And how many of us have tried to keep that commandment? And you know every once in a while I'll be kind to somebody, I'll be talking to someone I meet out there. And that's really not what Jesus meant by the Second Commandment. "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

The Second Commandment flows out of the first, and always flows out of the first. If I'm keeping the first commandment, I'll always be given imagination and vision, a way of seeing things through God's eyes, how I am to love my neighbor. That vision will come, if I'm living the VISION. And it will come, not in a general haphazard way, but a vision for my city, for my nation, for my world, and the way I am to live out that vision -- that vision will be given. It will come.

But it's crucial never to refuse the order of the Commandments: The First Commandment is first and the Second Commandment is second. The point is this: no worthy vision with a little "v" can be sustained and held without THE VISION.

From our perspective, every worthy vision is delayed. From our perspective, every worthy vision is delayed. And the question then is, how live with a delayed vision? It almost never happens as it is given to us. If I had time, I could give you fifty illustrations just from my own memory. But this week I have gone to two thirty-year anniversary celebrations - thirty-year anniversary celebrations.

---- On Tuesday night some of us went to be with Marian Wright Edelman's Children Defense Fund celebrating thirty years of this amazing woman, who was the first women lawyer to get her degree for the State of Mississippi. The giving her life to her ministry and brought into life the Children's Defense Fund marvelous occasion. And what has happened during the period of thirty years is unbelievable. And when I remembered her vision and I looked at it thirty years later - a pathetic gap. What she's talking about is eliminating all child poverty in this country by the year 2010. And we're just several months from 2004, and since that vision was slated, we've had a mudslide in the wrong direction in this country. What is this? It's a deferred vision.

----Then on Friday I went to the Festival Center to celebrate the original vision of Jubilee Housing, and the vision, which is now being joined by the Good Shepherds Ministries. And looking at the past thirty years and hoping to renew that vision and they could be God's vision for the next years. And as I think about the little group that gathered thirty years ago, and the dreams that we had that no family would be living in poverty in Washington and that we would start doing our little part, and so I was remembering the young man who was a resident of the Ritz and he had been there and he collected rent on behalf of Mr. Gore who owned this hotel across the street and we would ask him to come and help us to raise money and he would sing "The Impossible Dream" and we thought that was a very appropriate song to sing. But it was an important dream, the worthy dream. And then on Friday night, as I remembered those days of that dream, which we thought was God's dream, the situations worse now in Washington than it was thirty years ago.

...And just for fun I started counting up in my own mind how much money all of us have but into these visions of ours. And I added it up to about 150 Million dollars as a minimum of what has flowed into the vision that God has given just to us on these many missions and we have continually lost ground…. And our neighborhood is much more tragic. A third of the children in Washington living in poverty.

And Sherry gave me an article I should not have read. You have to watch any article that Sherry gives you. This was an article which was in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday: And the caption is: "There's a killer hunting America's inner cities, not drugs, not handguns, by stress. And the author, Helen Epstein, calls it New Ghetto-Miasma. And talking about what happens to people, she describes just the stress of living in our ghettoes.

So I looked at the dream and I read the article. I can keep on this for a long time. I talked to the chair person of FLOC and I remembered the dream that some of us had when we came back from Selma on what was going to happen to children in this area. That was 38 years ago. And they're still working with their issues and their problems. And of course we have with us today people who were part of what we called Dunemus and all of the derivative visions that have spread out from Dunemus.

Then I thought about all the new missions, which are coming into being and how difficult it is for them to come into being. But I thought about some of the young people in our midst starting off with this new dreams. There's Randy Buckley and trying to get enough money together for her new mission. And I thought "What is her mission going to look like 50 years from now!

You've got to work with your vision and also what it will look like in the future - and whether you can sustain it. And I say no vision, which is worthy, can be sustained unless it's rooted in THE VISION, which is to Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, your mind, and your strength.

Once again from Habakkuk "But still the vision awaits its time. It hastens to the end. It will not lie." The little visions will lie. The VISION will not lie. It will surely come. It will not delay.

Then I love this quote by Gertrude Nelson. "The recovery of hope can only accomplished when we have had the courage to stop and wait and engage fully in the winter of our dark longing, the winter of our dark longing."

And Reinhold Niebuhr "Nothing is worth doing that can be achieved in a lifetime. Therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing, which is true, or beautiful or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history. Therefore we must be saved by faith. And nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore we are saved by love."

So I leave you with the first commandment that the Jewish people have given us over the centuries, and Jesus reiterated as the First Commandment. And I think He meant for us to really do it, this state of "inloveness" with God. Let's pray.

Dear God, for your heart to be longing for our hearts. To be open, and to respond, and to give you the persons that you long for. So we don't see this just as a commandment, just an order, something we ought to do, but we just fall into you, into your being, your love, your caring, your passionately beating heart for us. Until our hearts really begin to passionately beat for you. Thank You. Thank You!

In Christ's name we pray, Amen.