With Your Whole Self by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

    “If we don’t come together, then we will be destroyed.” In a movie about a high school being desegregated in 1971, a football coach says these powerful words to a team of black and white football players.

    The story was told in the film Remember the Titans. African American coach Herman Boone is hired to replace the white football coach, Bill Yoast, at the new T. C. Williams High School. Boone has the unenviable task of building a team from a group of white players and black players that don’t really want to play together. They learn that their task is much more than about playing football.

    It is about overcoming hundreds of years of racist patterns in our culture. The work is hard. They have to put their whole selves into the work of transformation. Sure, their bodies are challenged by the physical rigors of the game and the locker room fights that these high school boys are pulled into. But their minds, hearts, and souls, are also twisted and ripped apart. The sins of racism are uncovered for their deep ugliness.  Miraculously they pull it altogether to become a championship team. They become brothers to the core. They put their whole selves into this new way of being, and they are all transformed.

    In the story it’s as if the coach walks up to them and says: are you ready to be all in “with your whole self?”That is what Jesus asks when the religious scholar who asks him a question. The scholar asks: “which is the most important commandment?”

    Jesus answers:  “The first in importance is this one, ‘Listen, Israel: The Lord your God is one; so love the Lord God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy.’ And here is the second: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’Another way we have heard this is to love God with all your heart and soul, mind and strength. But I like this new translation: your passion, prayer, intelligence and energy. It’s very clear – “Love God with your whole self!” And then he goes on to say that the second one follows right along with it, “love your neighbor and yourself too.”

    Love God, love neighbor, and love yourself, WITH YOUR WHOLE SELF. This is the recipe for being right with God. It means, we can’t hold anything back. We can’t try to just love and serve God with part of ourselves, like with our intellect, or with our hearts alone. We can’t segment our faith life to Sunday morning. Jesus says God wants everything from us.

    I want to illustrate that with a little song. I think it’s one you all know.
You put your left foot in, You put your left foot out,
You put your left foot in, You put your left foot out, and you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around, that’s what it’s all about.
·    Both hands
·    Head
·    Whole self in

    You see some of us, when we say yes to Jesus, we really just want to put our left foot, or our left toe in. Maybe we’ll even get our hands dirty now and then, and do a work project. But don’t make me put EVERYTHING IN.  Or maybe we’ll do some study, with our heads, but we hold back our hearts. We don’t let God see what’s really inside. Or maybe I’ll go to a Bible study, use my intellect, but I won’t put my heart into this.  We refuse to put our whole selves in.

    You see, if we love God with our whole selves, then we have to let God see every part of us: the good, the bad, and the ugly. We have to let God see our fears, and our short-comings. Sometimes we even have to let God see our dreams and ask God to help us make them come true.  We would rather hold those back, because God might help us make them come true. 

    And we have to give our WHOLE LIVES to God. We have to give all our choices, all our values, our decisions, EVERYTHING over to God. We have to let God guide every ounce of our lives.

    And if that’s not enough,  then Jesus says, if we have the guts to put our WHOLE SELVES in this relationship with God, THEN God also wants us to love God by loving ALL of God’s people.

    Are you kidding me? We have to love God, and love ourselves enough to love every person on the planet the same way God love them and us. Especially the person that it is most difficult for us to love. That is the person that my people have been feuding with since the beginning of time!   The person you would least like to invite to your table for Thanksgiving.

    That’s what it means to put our WHOLE selves into this Jesus-following God-loving Holy Spirit-living-inside-us living kind of thing. It’s kind of heavy, but it’s kinda of freeing.

    So, I go back to where we were last week: Be careful when you ask Jesus a question because he might just give you an answer. Those religious scholars asked him, what is the most important commandment? He told them and he told us.  If you can’t remember all of them, then take this as your condensed version: love God with your whole self: love God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy.  And then love your neighbor and yourself.  We are a long way to being in God’s presence. 

    In the movie, those young men on the football team become brothers. When the captain of the team, a white boy, becomes best friends with one of the black boys, his girlfriend can’t believe it, but she comes around. One of the racist white team members can’t take it. He ends up getting cut from the team by the captain. But eventually the whole town learns a lesson from this team. The boy’s own mother embraces her son’s new best friend. There is a scene where the black boy is walking in the white part of town to visit his friend. A police car drives up and of course, we think the worst. But the white police officer wants to congratulate him on a good game.


    You see, these boys learn to love one another. And their love spreads across the whole school and the entire city. Love is stronger than hate every time. They learn to let love grow in them.  It shows the power of relationships. 

    This is Jesus’ message to us.  Love is stronger than hate.  The power of love can and will overcome hate. We all have some group of people we find it hard to love. For example, I have trouble with people who hold different political values than me. You may have a family member you are feuding with, or someone at work that you just can’t stand to be around.

    But Jesus says: Don’t hold any part of yourself back from loving God and your neighbor. Love with your whole self. Following Jesus is challenging, isn’t it?  God doesn’t want half-hearted love. God wants all of you.

    Love God with all your passion, your prayer, your intelligence and energy. And love your neighbor as yourself. This is our clear message today.  This is not always easy to do, but it’s our challenge, it’s what we are called to do, because God loves us so powerfully. Let us love, Friends, Les us love each other and Let us love God, with our whole selves. Amen.