The Thoughtful Disciple

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
March 15, 2009
Third Sunday in Lent

The Thoughtful Disciple
Mark 12:28-34

The First Commandment,
the Great Commandment,
that’s what we call Jesus’ teaching,
what he said to the scribe in our lesson:
“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.”

Jesus wasn’t teaching the scribe anything new.
Jesus isn’t teaching us anything new
as we hear him now.
Two thousand years ago this Great Commandment
was already more than a thousand years old.

Moses was the one who taught the children of Israel this lesson.
We find it in Deuteronomy,
the fifth book of the Bible,
that great speech that Moses gave
right before the children of Israel entered the Promised Land
after wandering through the Wilderness for 40 years.

We can picture Moses, his hair white with the years,
his beard a reflection of his powerful wisdom,
his shoulders stooped from the burdens he carried for so long,
his face still radiant, though,
radiant with that glow that came during his time
on the mountain top 39 years earlier
when he received the Ten Commandments
and was face-to-face with God.

Moses and the Israelites, their journey at an end,
camped on the east bank of the Jordan River.
Moses’ voice was still strong
as he instructed the people one last time:
“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.”

“Keep these words I am commanding you today in your heart;
Recite them to your children.
Talk about them at home,
and when you are away,
when you lie down and when you rise…”
(Deuteronomy 6:4ff)

Powerful words, life-giving words:
Jesus is simply reinforcing Moses’ teaching,
reinforcing this powerful lesson
for the scribe
and for you and me.

But Jesus did make a change,
a slight change, a subtle change.
Did you catch it?
He added a fourth line.
He called on the scribe,
and he calls on us,
to love God not only with all our heart,
our souls, and our might,
but with our minds as well.
With our minds.

We are to come before God not only faithfully,
not only obediently,
not only prayerfully and humbly,
but thoughtfully,
thoughtful,
thinking disciples each of us.

Jesus is teaching us that we cannot live our lives
with our minds disconnected,
our minds detached,
powered down,
always in first gear.
We are to come to our faith thinking, reflecting,
reading, studying, observing,
asking questions,
seeking understanding,
so we can grow in faith.
Our minds should be as engaged as our hearts.
In fact, in the ancient Hebrew language
the word for “heart”
was the same as the word for “mind”.
Heart and mind were linked, connected, and balanced.

Listen to the discussions we have on Wednesday morning
in our Bible Study class,
or on Thursday evening,
or Sunday morning in the Year of the Bible classes,
or in any class we offer, for that matter.
What are we doing? We are reading,
studying, learning, asking questions.
Our foundation is, of course, the Bible.
And we read and find passages in the Bible that confuse us,
passages that don’t seem to make sense,
passages that trouble us,
passages that conflict with other passages.
What do we do?
We talk them out, think about them,
seek guidance and illumination from the Holy Spirit.
Our minds are fully engaged.

How we read a passage today
may be different from how we might have read
the same passage just a month ago, or a year ago,
or how our ancestors in faith interpreted the passage
a century ago, two centuries ago.

We read the words of Psalm 96
where the psalmist tells us that,
“The world is firmly established;
it shall never be moved.”
Psalm 93 says the same thing:
“The Lord … has established the world;
it shall never be moved.”
Psalm 104 reinforces the same immovability of the earth:
The Lord, “set the earth on its foundations,
so that it shall never be shaken.”

With those passages as our guide,
we can understand why
for so many centuries it was thought that
the earth stood solid, immovable,
at the center of the universe.
The Sun moved across the sky each day
because the sun did just that:
it moved across the sky,
In Greek mythology the sun god Helios
rode his blazing chariot across the sky.

So how do you suppose church leaders reacted
in the late 15th and early 16th centuries
when astronomers questioned that idea,
and suggested instead
that the earth was moving around the sun?
It was around 1600 when Galileo used an invention
called the telescope to confirm the work
other astronomers had done:
that the earth was not the center of the universe
but instead rotated on an axis,
and revolved around the sun.

Church leaders were aghast:
Scripture was clear!
They accused Galileo of heresy,
and he was convicted at trial.
Galileo was right, of course,
but it would be a long time before the church
would acknowledge that the Bible
is not a scientific textbook.

We’ve been going through a similar struggle
for the past 150 years
with the debate over Creationism versus Evolution.
Ever since Charles Darwin published his
Origin of the Species
there have been those who have been as aghast
as church leaders were in Galileo’s time:
“It’s all right there in the first book of the Bible,”
they cry out,
“We don’t need godless scientists
to tell us how we were created.”

Laws were written to block the teaching of evolution,
and to this day, there is still a vigorous effort
to put laws on the books similar to the law
that caught and convicted a high school science teacher
named Scopes in a small town in Tennessee back in 1925:
“That it shall be unlawful for any teacher …,
to teach any theory
that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man
as taught in the Bible,
and to teach instead that man has descended
from a lower order of animals.”
(Tennessess Statutes, 1925)

Read through the first two chapters of the book of Genesis
and we find, of course, two quite different Creation stories.
The first is the familiar story of God creating the world in 6 days
and resting on the 7th.
In that version, God creates the fish, and the birds,
and the animals, and then
God creates humankind:
“God created them, male and female
in God’s image.” (Gen 1:27)

In the second version of the Creation story,
God creates man first, Adam,
created from the “dust of the ground.”
Only after God has done that does God create animals,
also from the dust of the ground.
Then after creating animals,
God creates woman,
creates her from Adam’s rib.
There’s no mention of timing in the second story,
no mention of the first day and the second day.
Even if there had been,
we have no idea how God measures a day.
There are those who argue stridently
that “day” means “day”: 24 hours.
But the Bible itself takes issue with that notion,
when we read in the Second letter of Peter,
“that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years,
and a thousand years are like one day.” (2 Peter 3:8)

As thoughtful disciples, we realize
that answers can be elusive,
but still we press on with questions:
If God is eternal, why would God measure time?
Why would God define his day by the time it takes
for the planet Earth to complete a rotation?
If God is light, why would he measure time for himself
by the rising and setting of the sun at a point
on the planet Earth?

Science and faith are not mutually exclusive.
Knowledge of any kind, including scientific knowledge
can in fact enhance our faith,
help our faith to grow.
When Darwin’s theory first was published in 1859
many theologians and clergy embraced it
because for them
the power and beauty of evolution
magnified God’s majestic creative power.
I agree.
The more I learn about science,
about things like evolution, and biology
and botany, and astronomy,
the more I see God’s
awesome creative power at work.

God wants us to use our minds.
God wants us to discover his handiwork.
As the theologian John Polkinghorne puts it,
Genesis does not give us a tidy creation story
relieving us of the task of having to discover things
and figure things out for ourselves;
what it gives us is,
“the theological truth that nothing exists
except through the creative will of God.”
(Questions of Truth, 7)

God is the Creator.
God creates.
Only God creates.
How God does it is known only to God.
But acknowledging evolution does not deny faith,
does not deny God’s role as the Creator.

And God is no intelligent designer.
As attractive as that phrase is,
it has a number of weaknesses:
First, it’s come out of the Creationist camp
as a substitute for the term “creationism”,
something more politically palatable.
But second, it is a phrase that puts limits and constraints on God:
God is more than intelligent,
and God is more than a designer.
You and I at our best are intelligent;
You and I can design.
But God is God!
God creates.
Only God creates.
You and I can plant a tree;
we can plant a whole forest of trees,
but only God can create a tree.
“Without him,
not one thing came into being.”
(John 1:3)

Back in the early years of the 20th century,
the African American preacher James Weldon Johnson
put the Creation story so poetically:
“Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
he kneeled him down;
And there the Great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This Great God,
like a [mother] bending over her baby,
kneeled down in the dust
toiling over a lump of clay
till he shaped it in his own image
Then into it he blew the breath of life
and man became a living soul…”
(The Creation, from “God’s Trombones”)

Maybe that’s how God created the first human,
the first Adam.

But what if instead, God put matter in a vast void,
and the matter then exploded
and expanded in every direction,
and great clouds of gases formed from the explosion,
and from those clouds stars were born,
and from the exploding matter planets were formed,
and over billions of years
creatures were formed,
first nothing more than a single-celled bacterium,
but over time, time and a half, and more time,
there walked a creature who stood upright
and walked on his legs –
and God said, “This is what I planned;
this creature will bear my image
because this creature will know me.”
And God then made this creature conscious of God,
not just alive, but aware,
the brain called to do more than govern survival,
but lead the creature to wonder
to seek, to learn,
to look up at the heavens with awe and ask,
“who created this?”

Jesus calls us to use our minds
as we worship the Lord our God.
Paul teaches us that we are to be “transformed,
by the renewing of our minds.” (Romans 12:2)
The lesson Moses taught the children of Israel,
the lesson Jesus taught the scribe,
the lesson Jesus teaches us now
is such a timely lesson for each of us,
in this Lenten season as we take on new disciplines
to renew and refresh our faith.

For we are not only grace-filled disciples,
we are thoughtful disciples,
and thought-filled disciples,
as we love the Lord our God with all our heart,
and with all our soul,
and with all our strength.
and yes, with all our mind.
AMEN