What is the most important question? Let’s say that you could have five minutes alone with God and you could ask him any question, but only one question, what would it be? Would you ask him how he created the universe? Would you ask him why he made your mother-in-law? Would you ask him why bad things happen to good people? Would you ask him the winning numbers to next week’s lottery? Would you ask him what is the most important question? There are lots of ways to express the most important question, perhaps. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? Is it all going somewhere? Or as the famous song puts it, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”

An expert in the Jewish faith—a scribe—once overheard a heated debate between Jesus and a group of Sadducees, people who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. He was so impressed with Jesus’ obvious knowledge and wisdom in the ways of God that he decided to ask Jesus a question. For the scribe, it was the most important question: “Which commandment is the first of all?” That was a very good question. The scribe, being an expert, knew all of the 613 religious statutes of the Pharisees contained in the oral law. He knew the 365 prohibitions, one for each day of the year. He knew the 248 commandments, all arranged in a neat but complex system of weighty and light categories as well as ritual and ethical classifications. But I don’t think the scribe was simply asking for a clarification about a belief system. In the context within which he had organized his whole life, the scribe was asking this: What is the most important thing in life? What is it all about? What commandment—what word from God—is the most important?

The scribe’s question is not just an academic or intellectual exercise. And neither are the most important questions that we ask. We want answers to all these little questions that add up to the big question because we have a fundamental problem—the human problem. We truly need to know why we are here, what we are supposed to be doing, what it is all about. We need to know the most important thing there is to know about our existence and we know we can find it only in the Creator of Life. When we ask the question, it all boils down to something very personal. We want to know who we are supposed to be and who we are supposed to become. Am I doing the right thing here with my life? Am I missing something or am I on track? Am I ok? The great theologian Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself.” And that is one way, a very good way, to frame the question: God, how can I become the person you created me to be?

Jesus answered the scribe using some very old words in a very new way. And part of his answer wasn’t in words: it was in himself. The old words he took from something that every self-respecting Jew knew by heart, words from Deuteronomy and from Leviticus. The thought from Deuteronomy was not surprising, given that Moses had proclaimed this thought as the most important thought to the whole assembled people of Israel as it was on the verge of finally leaving its wandering in the wilderness and entering the Promised Land of Canaan where it would become a nation. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus was a good Jew, the best, in fact! He knew, as none others knew, the truth and the impact of that simple statement. There is only one God, as opposed to the many gods that most ancient people believed. This God is the God whom they have met and known and who has rescued them from Egyptian slavery. They are to love this God. To love any other God is to love something that does not exist. They are to love him because he first loved them. And they are to love him with everything that is within them, every fiber of their being: heart, soul, mind, strength. It is all about God. Life is all about God, including your life. It is not about you, but about God. The answer to the most important question, whatever that question is, is this: It is all about God.

But there is more.

Jesus answered the scribe with some very old words that everyone expected, and then he added some words that no one had ever put together before. They were old words, too, from Leviticus. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The Pharisees thought they had a great system for loving God, what with all their do’s and don’ts and such. But they had never really included anyone other than God in the business of loving. Jesus said loving neighbors is on a par with loving God. Loving neighbors is on a par with loving yourself! Jesus often chided the Pharisees for neglecting the people around them—even their own families—in order to perform service to God. You must love both, Jesus said. Or, as John would later put it, you cannot love God without loving others, and you cannot love others without also loving God. It is all about God, and it is also all about others.

And there is even more.

The Pharisees had devoted themselves to loving God. You have to give them credit for that. They totally blew it, though, when it came to loving neighbors. And, here is the sad part; they also totally blew it when it came to loving God! How, then, are we to learn how to love God and neighbors? Who can show us the way? Who can model the answers to the questions we have? Where can we find someone who represents in a real human life what it means to love God with the whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love neighbors as yourself? Luke records some brief snippets of conversation that Jesus had with other people, would-be disciples, wannabe Christians, if you will. These are people who sense that Jesus is someone special when it comes to knowing and following God, and they are ready to go with him, to follow him. One of them says that he will go as soon as he has had the opportunity to bury his father. Jesus’ response to him seems to us to be very cold and uncaring. But there is a way to understand it that makes perfect sense. The old Jewish burial custom was to immediately bury a body in a tomb, and it would be left there for a year. After a year, when all that was left was bones, the bones would be taken and reburied in what is called an ossuary. Some of you may recall that several months ago there was a great stir over an ossuary box that was found in Jerusalem which was said to be the ossuary of some of Jesus’ family, or perhaps of Jesus himself, though that contention cannot be proven and most scholars believe is totally false. At any rate, it seems likely that the man who wanted to follow Jesus wanted to wait until after the obligatory 1-year waiting period when his father’s bones would be buried for good. That was the requirement of the Jewish religious code. But Jesus said no. Jesus said that if you are going to follow God, if you are going to proclaim the Kingdom of God, then you must give up the old system and come along with him and learn a new way.

So where are we? The most important commandment, the most important word from God, is that we are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That is the wisdom we receive from the Old Testament, the wisdom that Jesus affirmed and expanded as he put the two thoughts together. And then, in his life, in his words, in his example as we find it in many other places in the gospels, we learn this: to love God and neighbors we must love and follow Jesus. Jesus takes an old thought from Deuteronomy, adds an old thought from Leviticus, and then transforms it into a radical thought as he shows us that he is our guide into the love of God and neighbors.

I’ve been studying a fascinating new book by Scot McKnight called The Jesus Creed that will serve as the framework of our time together this year. McKnight asserts an old and timeless understanding of the nature and person and work of Jesus in these words: “One loves God by following Jesus.” This “is what the spiritual life is all about for Jesus.”i In other words, we might say that the answer to our big question is all wrapped up in Jesus as he leads us into the life of loving God and loving our neighbor. Or, as we put it here at The Village Church, this is “following Jesus for life.”

What we are talking about here is what the faith community has traditionally called spiritual growth or spiritual transformation. Modern theologians like to use the term spiritual formation. All of this means to get at the process of how you and I become who God means us to be, how we discover our purpose in life within the larger framework of meaning that is lodged in the will of God. There are many different and competing views of what human beings are supposed to be and how we are supposed to live and what life is all about. The Christian viewpoint is that life is all about following Jesus in order to learn to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That life-long journey is our home, our purpose, the answer to all our questions. I believe that at the heart of everything you and I dream about, everything we long for, everything we try to accomplish, is a desire to master our lives, a will to squeeze every ounce of meaning and joy and love out of the brief span God gives us in this world. The Master, Jesus Christ, has a message for us about how we can master our lives, and it is all about following him.

Following Jesus and mastering our lives is easier said than done, of course. There is an old story from the Cherokees, about a grandfather and a grandson. The grandfather told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is evil, the other is good. The evil wolf is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The good wolf is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.” The grandson thought a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old man said, “Whichever one you feed.”

The great challenge of the Christian life is feeding: doing those things that allow God to nurture our souls, to make us strong in the ways of the Spirit, to transform our minds and hearts and actions so that we begin to live as Jesus lived. Through Moses, God gave us the fundamental image of what we are to do with ourselves: love God and others exclusively and exhaustively. Through Jesus, God gave us an example of what that kind of love looks like in a human life. And that will be our focus for this year: applying our minds, our hearts, our souls, and our strength, to loving God and loving our neighbors. My vision for this church is that we will continue to become a fellowship where every member knows what it means to follow Jesus, where every member will have a personal plan for growing into spiritual maturity by following Jesus, and where every member will have many opportunities to express their love for God and neighbor through service to others. Last year a new coalition of like-minded Presbyterian churches came together called the Presbyterian Global Fellowship. The motto of this fellowship is that we need to become “inwardly strong and outwardly focused.” That is a great way to express what following Jesus is all about: becoming inwardly strong in the ways of God for the purpose then of having an impact on the world around us.

When I first became infected with a deep love of the game of golf, I began to learn about something called “swing thoughts.” Swing thoughts—for those of you who are not similarly afflicted—are the one or two things that you try to keep uppermost in your mind as you set up to take a swing. They are the key elements that you decide will help you focus and execute a shot. The only problem is this: there are about 8000 possible swing thoughts to choose from. And when you have chosen a couple, you have to be able to put everything else out of your mind and just swing the club. When Jesus answered the scribe about the question of the most important commandment, it was like he was giving us the single “life thought” that all of us need to keep uppermost in our minds. There are many choices. But there is none more important than the ones Jesus chose. Our Master has given us the message that we need in order to master our lives. This year, as a church, we will focus our attention on that message. I am excited and I am eager to get going, to learn all that we can about what this message means for our lives. So today, I invite you to join me in making this message the central spiritual thought we think every day. As the ancient Israelites were instructed to teach this thought to their children and to inscribe this thought on their doorposts and on their hearts, so I invite you to do what I am going to do this year: every day, and very often during the day, as often as I can, I am going to repeat to myself the central organizing thought that God has given in order that I might know him and his power in my life. “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Amen.

ⁱ Scot McKnight, The Jesus Creed, Paraclete Press, Brewster, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 11.