“The Measure of the Faithful Steward - Parables of Jesus for Faithful Stewards, Part 4” by the Rev. Don Wahlig, October 29, 2023, Year A / 22^nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25) – Deuteronomy 34:1-12 and Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17 • Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 and Psalm 1 • 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 • Matthew 22:34-46

THEME:  Love God with our heart, soul, and mind in order to love neighbors better.

How many of you play a sport – golf, tennis, pickleball? How many of you have ever played a sport? That’s a lot of hands. 

Whether you play a sport or just follow a sport, you are probably aware of one of the great trends of the past few decades. That is the fast-growing emphasis on sports psychology. 

Sports psychology is just what it sounds like:  the science of how psychological factors affect athletic performance. Lately, it’s become very popular, but it goes back a surprisingly long time.  It’s been around for well over 100 years. Technically speaking, the goal of the sports psychologist is to foster cognitive processes and personality traits that lead to peak performance. These are things like self-belief, mental toughness, motivation, focus, commitment, and the sheer will to succeed.

The list of athletes who have used sports psychology to succeed is impressive, to say the least. Basketball stars like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Golfers like Nick Faldo, and skiers like Mikaela Shiffrin.  Swimmers like Michael Phelps, and runners like Usain Bolt – and the list goes on. All of them have used worked with sports psychologists to perform at their peak.

It works for teams, too. Few have ever understood that better than Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks. At age 72, Coach Carroll is the oldest active coach in the NFL. But don’t try to tell his players that. He may have the wisdom of 50 years of coaching, but they know he has the energy of a teenager. His pregame team meetings are legendary. To say they are unorthodox is the understatement of the year. Bringing in a basketball hoop to the conference room to have free throw shooting contests. Regularly pranking his players. Making zany videos of what they do at practice, edited to a Hollywood soundtrack.

Crazy, right?  But there is a method behind the madness. The fun is all part of his deep concern for his players and creating a mentality that frees their minds from whatever might prevent them from doing their absolute best. The result is a culture of trust that breeds strong bonds within the staff and the team. They absolutely love Coach Carroll and they give everything they have for him and for each other. As one of his former quarterbacks said, “It was all about how good can we be being the best version of us.” That is what sports psychology comes down to: improving internal thoughts and feelings to improve external performance. Interestingly enough, Jesus is saying the very same thing.  

Once again, Jesus finds himself facing off with his opponents. It’s been a marathon day of verbal jousting and testing. So far, Jesus has passed every test. This morning he passes the final one. This time his adversary is one of the hotshot scribal experts, a lawyer. This lawyer asks Jesus which principle in the Jewish law is the greatest and most important.  It is, of course, a trick question. All of them know that every principle in the law is equally as important as every other. To break one statute is to break the whole law, and to elevate one command above the rest is to demote the others. If Jesus picks just one, he will be discredited as a faithless heretic.

But Jesus has a deeper understanding of the law than even this legal expert. He knows the purpose of the law is to enable God’s people to live closely with him, and with each other. In short, the law is really about love, not legalism.  So, he draws on the sacred Jewish prayer from Deuteronomy.  It commands God’s people to love him with all their heart, soul, and might. This is the heart of Jewish piety, even today.  Jews pray it every morning and every night. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He ties this command to the command in Leviticus to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

He is not saying that these are two different commandments. They form a single law of love that sums up all the commandments of the Jewish law, all the writings of the prophets, and for that matter, all the teachings in our New Testament, too. All these statutes and commandments boil down to one.  Love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.  This is the key to understanding the Bible. If we are reading scripture to mean anything other than this, then we need to read it again. As Augustine of Hippo famously said, whoever thinks he understands the Holy Scriptures, but whose interpretation does not build up this twofold love of God and neighbor, does not yet understand scripture.

The point Jesus and Augustine are both making is that these two commands are not just connected. They are inseparable. We cannot claim to love God if we don’t love our neighbor.  And we won’t love our neighbor very well if we don’t love God. But what does it actually mean to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind? That is what I’ve been wondering about this week.

Let’s start with the heart. As Jesus uses that term, he means not just where our emotions come from.  The heart is the center of our will. It is where we form our desires and our commitments. When we say “our heart is in it” we mean we are truly dedicated to whatever goal or activity we are pursuing. So, to love God with our whole heart is to desire and be committed to God and what God wants above anything and everything else in our lives. But what about our soul? What is it to love God with our soul? The soul is that part of us where the Holy Spirit dwells. It transcends the mind and the body and it will live on when we die. It is a consciousness that animates and enlightens us from within. I know that sounds vague, like some new age gibberish, but the soul is real and you know it when you feel it. 

The best analogy I can give is a tuning fork. When a tuning fork is subjected to a force, it vibrates, sending out a distinct sound.  That is how our souls are. When we are close to God, we feel God’s power and love and our soul responds. Maybe this happens when we worship or when we read scripture or when we have one of those eerie God moments when the hair raises up on our neck. To love God with our whole soul is to seek and embrace those moments, and to treasure them as the gift of God’s presence.  When it comes to loving God with our mind, that’s a bit easier for us to understand. We Presbyterians tend to be wired this way. Alistair McGrath, one of our greatest Biblical scholars, calls this the discipleship of the mind. He says, “We cannot love God without wanting to understand more about him. . . We cannot allow Christ to reign in our hearts if he does not also guide our thinking.” So loving God with our whole mind is to put our intellect to work to understand God and his love, and to understand how and where he wants us to put that love into action.

 Putting those three together – heart, soul, and mind – and orienting all three toward God’s purposes leads to powerful ministry on behalf of our neighbors.  In other words, to do the difficult external work of loving our neighbor well, we have to first do the internal work of loving God with our whole being. That internal preparation – the dedication of heart, the seeking of the soul, and the discipline of the mind – those three are what make possible the external result of loving our neighbor.  That is what Jesus is saying. 

That is what 50 years of coaching and even longer as a Christian has taught Coach Pete Carroll. He doesn’t talk about his faith a whole lot, but he sure does live it. He has tried to replicate that inside-out transformation wherever he has been.  When he joined the Seattle Seahawks he brought along with him a sports psychologist to help him do just that. Together, the two of them changed the culture of the team, from the inside out.  Not only did the players perform better, but they grew closer to one another, as well. They became a strong team built on trusting, caring relationships.

Friends, that is what God wants for us, too.   So, let’s do what Jesus is telling us to do. Let’s work on strengthening our internal relationship with God in order to strengthen our external relationship with our neighbors. That is the measure of our stewardship.

Now I invite you to come forward and join me in bringing our affirmations of commitment to God’s work here at SSPC. Whether you call it time, talent, and treasure, or heart, mind, and soul, it amounts to the same thing:  giving all we are, and all we have in the service of God and neighbor, loving both better. 



May it be so.