Scripture Colossians 3:14-17 NRSVUE
Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Sermon
Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. Thou hast given all to me. To Thee, O lord, I return it. All is Thine, dispose of it wholly according to Thy will. Give me Thy love and thy grace, for this is sufficient for me. Amen. ~Ignatius Loyola
I learned this prayer at least 30 years ago, probably in the context of worship. I knew it as a song. In early 2020, when our church went into lockdown—along with the entire nation—this prayer surfaced in my memory, and made itself known again. For many months during that time, this prayer became a part of our online worship. It is a prayer of Ignatius Loyola, a saint of the Catholic tradition, but it transcends the boundaries of denominations. It’s a prayer for everyone who wants to love God with their heart and soul.
So, what is the difference between the heart and the soul? Do they mean the same thing? If they mean the same thing, why would Jesus tell us, in Mark’s gospel, to love God with our heart and our soul? If they mean the same thing, why would Hoagy Carmichael have penned that earworm that many of us learned on the piano as kids,
Heart and soul, I fell in love with you,
Heart and soul, just like a fool would do…
There must be a distinction.
Once again, it’s John Calvin to the rescue. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin reminds us, first, that in order to know God, we must know ourselves (I, 15, i). And so he launches into a description of the most essential part of ourselves: the soul. He writes that the soul is
[humanity’s] immortal, though created, essence, which is [their] nobler part. Sometimes [the soul] is called… spirit. [i]
Our soul, or spirit, is our entire essence. Spiritually speaking. is the energizing force of each human being, breathed into us by God at creation, and it’s where our intellect and our conscience reside. Through the soul we can understand God as an immortal essence, and we can comprehend and treasure things like justice and honesty. Our soul is who we are created to be. Because the soul is immortal, we can trust in life beyond the lifespan of these bodies. [ii]
So what, then, is the heart? The heart and the soul are inextricable from one another. The heart is a part of the soul. The heart is our emotional and moral center. While the soul is entirely God’s, and can influence the heart, the heart is also open to other influences, not from God. Last week I spoke of the questions we may ask of God—the Why questions. These come from the heart, because the heart is open to all experiences and may well wonder why God permits the things that happen in our world.
The commandment to love God, heart and soul, is an invitation to love God with our best selves—the selves we were created to be—as well as with our more emotional, changeable selves—the part of us that responds to the world around us, as well as the challenges we face day by day.
We may love God, but we can also become angry or frustrated with God. We can question God. A pastor friend and I were recently reminiscing about a wonderful saint of the church, dearly-departed, who was inclined to be frustrated with God over the existence of evil in out world. My friend said to the saint, “Well, when we are face to face with God, we can ask those questions,” and the saint said. “Good! Because I have a list.”
Does that mean our dear-departed friend didn’t love God? When you become angry with a child, a friend, a sibling, a parent, does that mean you don’t love them? Of course not. She went to heaven with her list, and it is my hope and prayer that she has had those conversations with God, and now has the enlightenment of the angels. But many people have found such a God incomprehensible in the face of suffering they endured or witnessed, injustice that carried on without being stopped, or true evil being permitted to thrive. And when the idea of a loving and powerful God becomes incomprehensible, it’s just a short distance to that God becoming unbelievable.
Ignatius Loyola—like Jesus and Paul and many other saints before him—saw the solution as simply giving our hearts to God, fully, completely. In the letter to the Colossians, we read,
Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
We talked about clothes and clothing ourselves in Bible Study. Clothes protect our bodies from the elements and protect our modesty. Sturdy weaves and knits keep us warm in winter, and light, airy fabrics help us to stay cool in the summer. Clothes also allow us to express ourselves to the world, whether through color, or cut, or pure simplicity. Clothing ourselves with love does, indeed offer a kind of protection from forgetting that love is intended to be our response in this world in every kind of situation. Clothing ourselves with love also allows us to express who we want to be in this world, in beautiful and pure simplicity. Clothing our hearts with love would mean giving God, who is love, all the space our hearts can allow.
And then, Paul instructs us to
… let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body.
We are called to that peace both as individuals and as a part of the body of Christ, the church. If the heart is emotional and changeable, imagine the power of opening that heart to the peace of Christ. Again, whether as individuals or as a community, without peace… nothing much can get done. Personally, I’m useless if my heart is in turmoil.
Seventeen years ago, my heart was in turmoil because I was living a divided life. I was here, serving this congregation, and had positively fallen in love with all of you, but I was hiding the fullness of myself from you. In May of that year, I sat down with the session after having sent all of you a letter, telling you that I was gay, in a relationship with a woman, and that I hoped to continue in our relationship as pastor and congregation. The love with which you responded was overwhelming, it was grace upon grace.
But before I came out to you, I had to come out to God. Of course, having created me, God knew who I was all along. But I had to reckon with that truth, and learn to understand that, and stop hiding, from God, and from everyone.
For us to love God, heart and soul, mind and strength, we must reckon with who we are, the parts we are proud of and the parts we are not so sure of. We must reckon with our mistakes and with our accomplishments. We must learn that these are never the final word as to how God sees us and loves us. Instead, they are part of the tapestry of who God created us to be. And it is imperative that we love what God loves: that we love ourselves, as we seek to love God with all we are.
We love God with our heart and soul by knowing and loving ourselves. And we love God by loving one another… but that is something we will talk about later in this series.
We also love God through what we are doing right this moment: We love God with our heart and soul by turning to God for nourishment in worship. In worship, we experience prayer in a different way from the prayer we pray in private. (Say that, three times, real fast.) Jesus gives us instructions for that private prayer, but Jesus also shows us what worship looks like. He shares the Good News publicly, and he serves people with manna in the form of bread and fish in the wilderness.
Our passage from Colossians is a view of what a worshiping community might look like. Clothing ourselves in love. Taking the peace of Christ into our hearts—as we do, each week, in our passing of the peace. Expressing our awe and thanksgiving before God, as we did in the psalm we prayed this morning, a psalm Jesus would have known well [Psalm 95:1-7] . Letting the Word of God, the Word of Christ dwell in us richly, as we seek to do in community. And singing! With gratitude, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God, which, to me, is one of our chief joys in worshiping together.
We love God with our heart and soul by knowing and loving ourselves. And we love God with heart and soul by seeking spiritual nourishment through our time of worship in community.
Now, let’s return to that prayer. In this prayer, we turn our hearts over into God’s care. We give our hearts to God, who is our Rock, our Fortress, that center of stability that each of us needs as we go along on this journey through life. Offering ourselves to God, inviting God to take, to receive all that we are is the most powerful way to love God with our heart and our soul.
I invite you to hear, again, this prayer, and if you will, to pray it with me.
Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. Thou hast given all to me. To Thee, O lord, I return it. All is Thine, dispose of it wholly according to Thy will. Give me Thy love and thy grace, for this is sufficient for me.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1845), (I, 15, ii), 58. Tr. Henry Beveridge.
[ii] Ibid.