Heiwa (Mark 12:28-31)

The scribe asked Jesus, “Which is the most important commandment?” And Jesus responded: Shema yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
This is the first - and most important - commandment, a commandment known as the Shema.
How important is it? According to Deuteronomy, these words of the Shema are to be recited day and night, when you rise, and when you go to bed. They are to be taught to your children. You are to bind them as a sign on your hand and a symbol on your forehead. You are to inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.
Did Jews take this literally, the part about reciting these words and binding them on your hand and forehead and writing them on the doorposts of your house?
Some did. Some still do.
Shema yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad.
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
After Jesus gave this answer, he  added that the second most important commandment, very nearly as important as the first, is to love your neighbor as yourself.
In Matthew’s version of this story, Jesus adds that all the other laws, all the other teachings of the prophets, hang on these two commands. And when Jesus says that, I picture a wooden door. Jesus’s father Joseph was a carpenter, and Jesus probably was, too. So Jesus probably built a few doors in his time.
And Jesus knew that doors had to hang from at least two good hinges. You can’t hang a door with just one hinge.
These two hinges, from which the door hangs, are the two commands: love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.
And all the other teachings and laws are written on the door.
Sometimes people like to take one of the other teachings or laws, and make them more important than loving God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself. But those other laws and teachings don’t matter if you neglect the hinges. Those other laws and teachings don’t matter if you neglect love for God and love for your neighbor as yourself.
Without those two hinges, the door won’t balance. It won’t balance, it won’t swing right, it won’t open and close right.
Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.
Remember that, and everything else will stay in balance.

This is what we’ll be talking about on the fifth day of camp at Loch Leven. And the word of the day that goes with it is the Japanese word heiwa.
Now, perhaps you have guessed by now, that all the “words-of-the-day” are related to peace. Aloha. Ubuntu. Shalom. Agape. Heiwa.
Heiwa means peace, but it places an emphasis on harmony and balance.
Which makes it a good word for the fifth day of camp, the day of the two most important commands, the two commands from which everything else hangs. If those two commands are kept in balance, then the rest will hang the way they are supposed to. If those two commands - loving God, and loving your neighbor as yourself - are kept in balance, then you will have a much greater likelihood of following all the commands and all the teachings of the Bible - and doing it correctly, without misinterpreting them.
Heiwa applies to this passage in so many different ways.
The commandment says that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, body, and mind. These things need to be in balance.
How do you love God with all your heart? How do you use your emotions to love God? How do you honor God with your heart?
Maybe the place to start is by noticing that you have emotions. How are you feeling, right now?
I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty good at hiding my emotions. If something is bothering me, I try to ignore it. I search for distractions. I think many of us do.
Disneyland is a great distraction - too bad I don’t have an annual pass. Social media is a great distraction - you can see how many likes your last post got, then hit refresh, and see how many more likes your last post got. Game apps can be a great distraction, if you’re in to playing games. TV can be a great distraction. If your emotions are unsettled, just turn on the TV and forget about them. Drugs and alcohol are great distractions. Porn is a great distraction. Even work can be a distraction.
Distractions work, for a while. But if you don’t address the cause of what’s making you feel the way you feel, then those emotions are going to come back.
This is when it’s helpful for me to remember what Thich Nhat Hanh teaches. When you feel any negative emotion, don’t ignore it. Don’t hide it. That emotion is part of you. It’s your baby. And if your baby is crying, you don’t ignore the crying.
Take that emotion, and imagine holding it as if it were your baby. Speak softly to your emotion. Speak compassionately. You are speaking to yourself, after all, and you deserve compassion from yourself.
Speak to that emotion, and say “I’ve got you. I’m going to take care of you. It’ll be alright.”
Just do that, at first. And then, maybe, that emotion will tell you where it came from, and what can be done to transform it into something more positive. And you can honor God by presenting your whole self before God.
Hey! I just realized: if you love God this way, with all your heart - you end up loving yourself at the same time. You are honoring God with your emotions by taking the time to care for your emotions. You’re loving God and loving yourself, and this will help you be better at loving your neighbor. And everything comes into balance.
Heiwa.
OK, let’s move on. How do you love God with all your soul?
Biblically speaking, your soul refers to your whole being. But we think of the soul as that eternal part of who we are, the part most in tune with God.
Either way, all of this is really soul-work, I think. But loving God with all our soul makes me especially think of the spiritual practices that are so helpful to a life of faith. Things like worship. Daily prayer. Bible study. Service to others. Generosity and giving. And fasting - something that we Protestant Christians generally don’t do very well.
And the others, well, some we do better, and some we do worse.
Worship. Daily prayer. Bible study. Service to others. Generosity and giving. Fasting.
Focus on improving any one of these, and you will grow in your ability to love God with all your soul.
How about loving God with all your body?
Psalm 139 has a wonderful poem about the how amazing the human body is. Part of it goes like this:
“...It was you [God] who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.”
I think it’s impossible to study the human body and not be amazed by how it works. ...How light enters the eyes, gets flipped upside down, and registers an image which then gets translated somehow into a message that the brain understands and interprets as “vision…”
...How oxygen enters our bodies, into our lungs, into our bloodstream, providing life, being transformed and breathed out as carbon dioxide (which plants then breathe in and transform back into oxygen)...
...How babies grow into adults, right before our eyes… how our bodies heal themselves when they are injured...how the t-cells in our blood fight off disease...so incredibly amazing, all of it.
Unfortunately, just as we ignore our emotions, we often ignore our bodies. Or we wish we had different bodies. Or we neglect to take care of our bodies.
But our bodies are amazing gifts from God, and we are commanded to love God with all our body, with all our strength.
And finally, how about loving God with all your mind?
When my grandmother was in her 80s, she said to me once, “Do you think it’s OK that I do my crossword puzzle first thing in the morning, before I say my morning prayers?”
Well, I had heard how crossword puzzles help stimulate the mind, especially in older adults, so I said, “Grandma, I think God appreciates that you do a little mind-exercise and strengthen your mind a bit before you talk to him in prayer.”
God wants us to use our minds. God gave us our minds, our intellect. God wants us to study the universe, to learn about the Big Bang and evolution, to understand what we can, and to ponder the marvelous mystery of the things we can’t understand.
And God wants us to use our minds to understand scripture… to recognize that some things in scripture are just ridiculous if you try to interpret them literally, but metaphorically they become very powerful words of truth. There are many stories in scripture that are meaningful not because they are literally true, but because they help us understand deep truths about God and about ourselves.
I really don’t know how a thinking person can not understand this.
Loving God with one’s mind also means using our minds to try to solve some of the world’s most important, most pressing issues. Issues like climate change. We’ve got to stop ignoring science, not to mention common sense, and use our minds on this issue. The entire planet is terribly out of balance - we’ve drifted far from heiwa - and it’s humanity’s fault, and it’s humanity’s responsibility to restore balance to planet Earth.

It’s interesting to me how all of these ways of
loving God also help us better love ourselves and our neighbors. When we follow God’s commands, things really do come back into balance.

Maybe that’s what the very first words of the Shema mean. Shema yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad.“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
The Lord is one.
We are one in the Lord.
All things are one.
All things are connected.
It’s not even possible to love God without loving your neighbor or yourself.
In 1 John it says: “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”
The Lord our God is one, and we are all one in God. Love makes us one.
We forget this, and I think that’s why we get out of balance. That’s why we lose our heiwa.
We lose our heiwa, and the door doesn’t hang straight, when we forget to love God with all our heart, soul, body, and mind, and when we forget to also love ourselves and our neighbors.
But the word of God is always there, always calling us - calling us back to the Lord our God who is one - calling us back to love - restoring peace and balance to our lives.