A sermon by the Rev. Kathryn M. Ryan, Class of 1992, ETSS trustee and rector of the Church of the Ascension in Dallas, Texas, given on November 9, 2006, in Christ Chapel

Some time ago, our son brought home a printed form to explain his math program. Everyday Math integrates math into daily life, the page explained. Worksheets are just a small part of your child’s learning. Look for math applications everyday. While cooking, practice fractions. While traveling, figure distances and gas mileage. Help your child determine the amount of paint needed to repaint a room, or have him measure for the new carpet! Good grief! I thought. Live, breathe and talk math? Our son lives with a priest and a lawyer! Language, history, literature? Those we can dish out, analyze and enjoy! But math? The understanding professional who wrote the parent help sheet knew just how we felt. Start small, she recommended. Talk about math when you rise up, and when you lie down. Figure problems when you go out and when you come in. Explore math with your children. Soon you’ll find algebra written on your heart, and geometry inscribed into your brain. Then things will go well with you.

Embracing math in this way can really change a family. Math, for us, was a thing parents make fourth graders do fifteen minutes a day, like it or not. Then, math stopped being a mental chore. Now, it’s a central thread of the fabric of our lives where we think it, feel it, live it – even enjoy it. And we know we can’t live without it. Committing fully to any primary relationship or truth has the power to remake individuals and groups. When the most important things claim our heart andour brain and become part of our relationships, wholeness and holiness come into life. That holiness is a gift God has always wanted for God’s people. At least as far back as when Moses delivered the commandments, God was inviting God’s people into a holy life.

You know the story. One day the Israelites are slaves controlled by masters. The next they receive a list of laws, with the promise that the life the laws shape offers joy and abundance. So what do they think? How do we go from a lawless, freewheeling band one day, to a community of faithful, monotheistic law observers the next? Because God knows this will be a challenge, he gives them some hints. Start here. Love the Lord with all that you are – heart, soul, strength, mind. Put every part of every one into the act. You’ll have to talk to each other. Consider what it means to love me with everything you are. Teach the commandments and ordinances to the young. Think about them with the old. You might even argue about them! Put up billboards and monuments and refrigerator magnets; wear t-shirts with commandment logos. Wherever you go, whoever you talk to – read, mark, learn, inwardly digest these words. Commit them to your heart. When you feel, they will shape what you do. Write them where everyone will see them. Then you’ll always think about them. If you give them first place in all parts of your life, you will know them. They will shape you. You will live them and you will have life. And things will go well with you and for you.

Moses enjoins wholehearted engagement with the commandments because their promise is a certain relationship with the living God. Wholehearted engagement fosters integration – hearts and minds engaged in the questions of faith, leading to righteous action consistent with right belief. A covenantal community. A kingdom existence. Sounds good. But it didn’t work out so completely, did it? Israel had the recipe for knowing and living their love for God, both as a community of God’s people and as individuals. But what they cooked up didn’t come out whole. Worshiping other gods, maintaining the use of the high places, oppressing the stranger and the widow – all of these represented habits in which God’s people held something out from full commitment to their God. Their beliefs and actions failed to match up.

By the time the gospels were written, the habits of the religious leaders – Pharisees, Sadducees, Chief Priests – created easy targets for caricature. None of the leaders were loving God with heart, mind and strength, and their neighbors as themselves. None. And each group thought it knew what was most essential, what God most wanted. They spent time arguing and pushing their point. They explained why they were right and others were wrong. And sometimes, the very things they advocated they themselves failed to live. It became easy to portray them as hypocrites.

Jesus sees this lack of integrity in the scribes. “Beware the scribes,” Jesus says at Mark 12:38, just five verses after declaring our scribe was not far from the kingdom of God. The behavior Jesus describes there – in the later text -- doesn’t line up with the scriptures the scribes were so fond of teaching. Pious preening and extortion of widows hardly embodies “Love God with all your heart, soul and mind” or “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

So, if this was the way Jesus saw the scribes as a group, was our scribe one exceptional scribe? Was Jesus paying him a back-slapping, congratulatory compliment? The scribe did answer wisely. He knew intellectually that love of God and love of neighbor were the heart of the law. But I don’t hear Jesus’ words as affirmation. I find it more likely that Jesus’ response was tinged with regret. You are not far from the kingdom of God. So close, but not quite there. The scribe had the right words in his mind, but he didn’t have those things written on his heart. If he acted in the same manner as the scribes against whom Jesus warned, his lip service was the limit of his understanding. He could recognize in Jesus’ words the truth of God’s teaching. He could articulately restate that truth. But he couldn’t see and wouldn’t change behavior that violated the truth of the words. Heart and mind, right beliefs and unrighteous action… he kept these separate.

Most of us rely daily on compartmentalization. Like the scribes, we also struggle against integration of heart and mind. We examine our mutual fund records on days when we don’t read An Inconvenient Truth. We order our favorite desserts in restaurants where no nutritional labels confront us. Some of us protect our well-heeled intellectual pursuits from the passionate movement of the Spirit. Others shelter our spiritual convictions from the troubling questions raised by critical study. Either way, we compartmentalize aspects of our selves that God means to serve in tandem. Perhaps you are immune to this aspect of human nature, but I’ve observed that many people… people like me, that is… are most comfortable when we can keep the oil and water parts of our lives entirely separate.

I worked with a seminarian recently (from another seminary, of course!). She said she could no longer pray with scripture. The things she had learned about textual and historical criticism – the habits of thinking she had acquired – interfered with her ability to hear God’s voice and feel God’s presence through the scriptures. She concluded that she should disengage her heart while studying, and her mind while praying and leading worship. She was afraid that by doing too much thinking, she was in danger of losing her faith. Years ago, I knew a nuclear physicist. He spent his days trying to perfect the controls which detonated weapons at the ideal distance from the ground to inflict the maximum destruction. This was complicated work that required the best of his mental abilities. Forty or more hours each week, he wrestled with formulas to improve bombs. On the weekends, he sang kum bay ah with the teenagers. He wouldn’t talk about his faith and his work in the same conversation.

These faithful Christians could easily become caricatures for our day. Not only do we know people like them, we are people like them. Those of us who master the concept of sin as discussed eruditely in theological volumes often get embarrassed if we begin to feel grief over our own sinfulness. Those who feel compassion in their hearts for lost souls can reject as too humanistic the impulse to thoughtfully design programs to alleviate human suffering. Isolating parts of our selves becomes a habit of fear and convenience. We like to live with certainty. We like to be in control. Deliberately engaging heart, mind and strength in our life of faith clouds certainties and unsettles us. Habituating ourselves to thinking and feeling in tandem can create such messes, such unanswerable questions. We act like the contents of our minds and hearts may damage each other, so we best keep them separate. We act like people who think about their faith and people obedient to their faith might create an explosion if they talk to one another. So we avoid each other. In all, as individuals and communities, we avoid full engagement of the sort Moses commended.

And yet, the emotional and intellectual life of an individual, or a community, or a church, are not so fragile, are they? Is our academic work so vulnerable that it will be threatened by devotion? Shall our faith really be damaged if we think deeply and require it to stand under academic inquiry? I hope not. Because, by keeping heart and mind separate, we disintegrate. Disintegrated individuals succumb to addiction, depression, burn-out. In the church, we let some people do the heart work and others do the mind work. We condemn the thinkers for a lack of faith and the devoted for being overly sentimental and self-righteous. Our failure to join the warmest and deepest experience of devotion to Christ with the most rigorous thinking wastes our best resources. And the church disintegrates. We forfeit God’s gift of holiness and wholeness, by which our lives, our communities, our churches are transformed. How close we can be to the kingdom of God and still be so far!

If we could get beyond our fears, if we could invest the energy to engage our minds and hearts fully in our faith, things would go well with us. God transforms individuals and churches when we dedicate our whole selves to God’s purposes. A few years back, a struggling evangelical church vowed to give away any surplus funds they had in the bank at the end of the year. By some miracle, $10,000 remained. Their church’s mission had always focused on the unchurched. Their goal was saving souls. A few of their members thought the funds should only be used in programs that required conversion to Jesus as a prerequisite for help. When the leaders couldn’t immediately agree on a recipient for the money, they pledged to study scriptures about the poor. Soon, someone asked a thinking question: “Who are the widows and orphans in our day?” Though suspicious of any source of guidance other than scripture, the church decided to consult demographics and community studies. The level of human needs in their county surprised them. They began to think and strategize. With the $10,000, the church started a program for the poor to express God’s compassion they found attested to in scripture. 20 years later, the human needs outreach from that church exceeds $1 million per year. They thought through and rejected the conversion requirement. And they have shared the gospel with many wealthy unchurched folk, as well. By bringing together their passionate faith, rooted in and guided unapologetically by Holy Scripture, with their deliberate study of the community, the church witnessed coinciding transformations of church and community.

How close we can be to the kingdom of God! Somewhere in our tradition, I believe, there lies the idea that we must be whole to enter the kingdom. Faithful and thoughtful Christians long ago concluded that the wholeness required by a merciful God could not be physical or mental wholeness. But perhaps the wholeness of an integrated person, or an integrated community. A wholeness that is the gift of God, yet born of a wisely taken risk – the desire to love God with all our heart and mind and strength at once, and our neighbor as ourselves. The Litany of Thanksgiving in the Prayer Book offers the wise phrase: For minds to think, hearts to love, and hands to serve: we thank you, Lord. Courageously, fearlessly, let us engage the best, the wholeness of who we are – until the love of God with all that we are transforms us for the kingdom!