Do you know what God expects of you?  Do you feel like you’ve ever been able to give him all he expected?  Or, do you walk around with a nagging guilt that, no matter how hard you’ve tried, you still can’t quite meet his expectations?  Sometimes, I wish God would just spell it out.  Like my high school drama teacher.  She gave us a script to memorize and told us exactly how to act.  Have you ever wished God would do the same?  Just give us a blueprint, an outline, anything that would tell us exactly what he expects of us, take the mystery out of it?  How much of our time, our money, our effort?  Tell us when, where and how to do everything?  Have you ever felt that way?

That’s all this guy wanted to know from Jesus.  OK, maybe he was trying to set Jesus up with a trick question.  But, it was still a good one.  “‘Which commandment is the first of all?’”  What is first and foremost in God’s mind?  Exactly how much and what does God really expect?  What’s the minimum or the most?  Haven’t you ever wanted to know that?

Frankly, Jesus stumps me with his answer.  “‘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.  The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  That answer doesn’t exactly make things any easier.  It’s all consuming, so absolute.  Love God with everything we are and have and our neighbor, too?  How do we do that? 

I know how to love my dog.  I know how to love my wife and children.  I’m not perfect.  But, I think I know something about what they need and how to give it.  What’s more, I can see them, touch them.  When I talk to them, they talk back.  I can say, “I love you,” and hear them say it back.  But, God?  How do you love someone completely whom you’ve never seen or touch or experienced with any of the human senses that get us through this life?  For that matter, I’ve never even seen Jesus.  I’ve heard about him.  I believe he walked on earth, died for our sins, was raised from the dead and I even believe that someday, just as he promised, he’s coming back.  I believe I will see him someday.  But, I haven’t seen him, yet.  How do I love God or Jesus, his son, neither of whom I’ve ever seen?

I’d rather Jesus had just given us a list of rules, a blueprint, a script to memorize.  To just say, “‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,’” leaves too much burden on me to figure out.  When will I know, how will I know, when I’ve fulfilled that commandment?  How will I know if I’ve ever passed the test?

It suddenly occurred to me this week that the clue is in the word, love.  It’s the same word the scriptures use to describe how God felt about and acted toward us.  Do you remember?  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3:16).”  He loved so much he gave.  He gave himself away.  He gave himself totally and completely away to us.  He gave himself to the world that would crucify him.  He surrendered his very life into our hands, to do with as we pleased.  He even said it again.  “‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:12-13).’”  That’s how much God loved us.  And, that’s what he asks in return.  That we give ourselves away, surrender ourselves, let go, lay down our lives.  That’s what it means to love.  It’s not a list of rules or a script.  It’s a risk.  It’s a relationship.  It’s a journey of faith, to just let go of all that we are to all that we do know of God. 

Maybe you are like me in this.  I’ve always been afraid of failing more than anything else.  Whatever I do, I want, I need to be successful.  Even though I’m trying to grow away from this, too much of what I believe about myself is tied up in what I do, which is a very dangerous way to live.  If we are what we do and we fail at what we do, then there isn’t much left is there?  Yet, within Jesus’ words is freedom.  If loving God means letting go, surrendering, all that we are right now, just the way we are, to all that we know of God, then we can’t fail.  We don’t have to get ourselves cleaned up, improved, dressed up or well rehearsed.  We can love God just like we are.

One night Nancy was trying on an outfit and she asked me that question that every husband dreads, “Does this look O.K.?”  Men, have you ever discovered that there is hardly any way to answer that question safely?  Well, this particular night, I really blew it.  I was really trying.  But, when Nancy asked, “Does this look O.K?” I said, “Sure, especially since we’re just going to be with family.”  After things settled down, I explained to Nancy that what I was trying to say was that, because we’re going to be with people we love, they’ll love you any way you come dressed.  That’s not what she heard.  But, that’s what I meant.  When you’re going to be with someone who loves you, truly loves you, do you have to be dressed just right to be acceptable?

Too many people have stayed away from God because they thought they would never be good enough for him.  They’ve stayed away from church because they thought weren’t good enough.  They thought their divorce, or an abortion, or some self-destructive habit, or a bad attitude, or just the fact that they’d never cared about God before, any number of things, made them less acceptable to God.  They thought that what God demanded was more than they had to give.  All God wants us to do is come as we are and give him all that we are, just let go, just surrender all that we know of ourselves in this moment to all that we know of him in this moment.  That’s what it means to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength.  At least that’s where loving God begins.

That’s all God wants from you and from me.  Jesus verified that to the same man who asked him that question that day.  After Jesus answered his question, the man said, “‘You are right, Teacher; you have truly said . . . to love (God) with all the heart, and

with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, - this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.’”  When Jesus heard the man say this, he answered back, “‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’”  Did you hear Jesus?  The people who realize that they have nothing but themselves to offer God are the people closest to God.  Even if all they have to offer is broken and bruised and ruined.  The people who are closest to God are those who have accepted that loving God is not about playing a religious game or keeping all the rules.  It’s about something you do with your heart, first, or not at all.

In our church services the last few Sundays we’ve been talking about living from the inside out.  Have you ever known what it’s like to live from the outside in?  Like in high school, at the same time I was experimenting with drama, I played football because that’s what you had to do to gain social acceptance.  In my West Texas high school, being good on the stage didn’t carry any social weight at all.  So, I did drama because I enjoyed it but I played football, even though I wasn’t any good at it, because that’s what I had to do to gain social acceptance, I thought.  I embarrassed myself more than anything when I tried to play.  Every week I suited up and took the hits because I thought that’s what I had to do for everyone to like me.  I was living from the outside in.  I was hiding inside the uniform I thought everyone expected me to wear.  I’ve had that experience in other places before.  In some jobs I’ve had, some social games I’ve played, even at church, where for years I learned to speak a holy language I thought others expected me to speak that wasn’t truly mine but that I thought I had to speak so everyone would think I was holy and I’d get their blessing. 

Only in these last few years have I come to discover that I don’t have to put on any uniform or speak any language or make offerings and sacrifices others expect of me in order to love God.  All I have to do let go, surrender who I am, what I am, wherever I am to God.  When I give myself to him, in faith, then I’m loving God with all that I have.

Anne Lamott tells her life story in a remarkable little book, Traveling Mercies.  Lamott has lived a very rough and difficult life.  She had absolutely rejected every notion of God and church.  She lost most of her youth to drugs and alcohol and in sleeping with more men than she cared to count.  After getting pregnant in one of those encounters, she had an abortion and tried to wash away her grief with alcohol.  Several days went by and one night she went to bed, feeling terribly alone.  Then, she says, “after a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone.  The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there – of course, there wasn’t.  But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus.  I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby . . ..  And I was appalled.  I thought about my life and brilliant and hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen.  I turned to the wall and said out loud, ‘I would rather be dead.’  I felt him sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn’t help because that’s not what I was seeing him with.  Finally I fell asleep, and in the morning, he was gone.  This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze . . ..  But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in.  But I knew that would not happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever.  So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my . . . door when I entered or left.”  Shortly after this experience, Lamott went to church one Sunday and absolutely hated the experience.  She writes, “I left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, (as) I walked under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my (house), and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, ‘I quit.’  I took a long deep breath and said out loud, ‘All right.  You can come in (Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, Pantheon, 1999).’”

That’s how Anne Lamott describes her conversion, her birth of faith in God.  It was that simple.  At the very lowest, the very worst moment of her life, when she had absolutely nothing to offer God but a wasted life, she just let go, she quit, she let him in. 

That’s all God wants from you and me.  That’s what it means to love God.  Just to let go, surrender, turn loose, let ourselves off the hook and drop into his arms right where we stand, or fall.  That’s all God wants.