In the first of our two scripture passages this morning a lawyer tries to trap Jesus by asking what is the greatest commandment—the source of eternal life. Jesus asks him for his view. He says, "Loving God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself." They both know that this comes from the Schema, the heart prayer of our Judeo Christian tradition: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is One Lord: (schema yisrael adonai elohenu adonai echad)

According to rabbinical tradition, the Shema originally consisted only of verse 4 but was later expanded to include verses 5-9; 11:13-21; and Num. 15:37-41. According to verse 7, it was to be recited morning and night.

When the lawyer makes this reference, about "loving the Lord (the One)—the great I AM--with all you heart", Jesus says, "You are correct. Do this and you will live." Love the One who created you, the Lord and giver of life (your life, your neighbor’s life) and the many graces we experience daily.

Love the One who inhabits all things, in whom we live and move and have our being—whom you encounter in nature, in the deepest recesses of your being, in the person next to you. This I AM is the essence of who we are—so much greater and more wonderful than our images and thoughts of who we are, our thoughts, our egoistic notions of self.

We’re only a day beyond Valentine’s Day, to remind us of the transforming power of love. Look at the face of anyone who is talking about something they love, or who is feeling love. We’re built to love; it is our heart’s desire. Cynicism is disappointed love.

Jesus suggests that loving and growing into the One, the I AM—what Tillich called the Ground of our Being--is the project, the work of our lives. It is the source of our deepest, most natural joys and highs. "Do this and you will live." Peace within, a sense of security in your deepest being, the sense of a love that will not let you go. Surrendering to this Lord is a constant source of creative renewal.

In our second scripture, Paul picks up on this theme. After talking about God’s action in Christ, Paul says, "I plead with you, brothers and sisters, let yourselves be transformed by the renewing of your minds (and bodies). The Greek word for transform is metamorphoo, the root of our word metamorphosis—to change into another form in terms of what is inward, essential and intrinsic. The word renewal—anakainosis in Greek—means a renovation, a change for the better, via a continuous process through which we work together with God to become more fully Christ like. None of this seems to be an act of will as Paul talks about it; more likely it’s our inner spirit’s response to grace.

To respond to God, to know Christ and be touched by him, is to be set on the way of transformation. It is an ongoing call and invitation to you and to me to change how we think and how we behave; making ourselves what Paul calls a "living offering." Being progressively transformed in response to a love that will not let you or me go. And a love that, from us in return, changes us in the deepest level of our being.

A personal comment at this point: I’m an awkward one to talk on this subject, because I’m an example for no one. I’ve done plenty of things to regret, and at any time may be anything but transformed (like when I’m having a quarrel with my wife at Target and bump into a congregation member). I understand Paul, when earlier in Romans he says, "The good which I would do I do not." Nonetheless in my spirit, my heart and mind, I know the truth of transformation and renewal: this is what the Spirit deep in me wants. It is what I want. I believe you know that too, for yourself. I’m a follower of the Way, who’s a good ways from arriving.

Come to think of it, why are we not all transformed? How come you and I conform so much to this world? How come I and probably many of us would say we’re not there yet? Despite our awareness of God’s love. Despite our hearts desire for fundamental security and peace and confidence and understanding the mystery of life and creation? How come so many of us can say, "the good that I would do I do not?"

Several answers come to mind. First, our culture and society do not support it. In fact, we swim in strong currents that go the other way. : The world today is no friendlier than its ever been to transformation. We’ve gone from Roman Idols to American Idols, who often aspire to be bad examples. The world is noisy and distracting. Eckhard Tolle says in his book Stillness Speaks, "When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I AM that is deeper than name and form."

A second answer, which Paul suggests when he talks about service or sacrifice, is our investment in what some call the "self with a small s", the egotistical self. We have to make an investment in that self to become a person. Then, spiritual teachers say, we have to go beyond it. Yet in our daily reality that small self often trumps what spiritual teachers call the "self with a large S," the deep Self, in which we glimpse the Ground of Being that is infinite, far beyond our magnified small selves. As one introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita says, what we often have is "the I, I, I, which has not yet become the Thou, Thou, Thou." The loss of one’s ego can inspire fear: "What will I be if I lose who I am?"

A third answer is that personal renewal and transformation often happen in an instant, yet these are life-long processes. New Age gurus Michael Murphy and George Leonard, who founded Esalen, the experimental capital of peak experiences, now say in their book The Life We Are Given that real transformation is incremental: lots of small steps building slowly. They ought to know. If you have a peak experience and don’t build on it in very ordinary ways, it usually fades.

Then there are personal idiosyncrasies. I’ve always had this charming thought: when I got my life completely together then I could move on to big things like transformation. After I finished my studies, gotten a job, got married, got another job, was successful, had enough money, a nice house, nice car, the right number of friends, the children were grown, everybody was healthy, America was in good shape--then I could worry about transformation. A charming and quite persistent idea, despite the accumulating evidence. You may have your little idiosyncrasy, too.

So we know some of the reasons that transformation and renewal may proceed slowly. How do we pursue transformation, though?

The reality is that Life itself is a transforming and renewing experience. Our circumstances, our bodies, our perspectives, our abilities, our knowledge, our thoughts, our health, our geography, our sense of what’s important, aspects of our faith, our loved ones, all change. The underlying reality of life is continuous change.

Spiritual transformation has an ongoing opportunity to occur with each change.

Anne Lamott the writer would wake up yet another day hung over in a Sausalito houseboat. Persistently, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a figure in the corner. She knew who it was—Jesus. And she began to shift her life by degrees towards staying sober.

My brother John experiences his near death from aggressive cancer last summer as a transformative event. He found himself nearly stripped of everything and in tears about that loss. But he also experienced a sense of the Spirit with him, augmented by his knowledge of many prayers on his behalf, some coming from this church.

A woman named Byron Katie, who battled depression for years, began to ask the question "is this true?" when she had another crippling thought. That one question began to transform negative convictions to positive possibilities. Today she has a book and is popular on the lecture circuit. She changed her internal dialogue, not an easy thing to do. It set her on a path of renewal.

Robert Listou had a moment after he was hit by a car. He was urged to sue. But he was only bruised and scratched. So he decided to ask just for cab fare home and a contribution to his church from the other driver of "whatever his conscience suggested." (Parenthetically, he was a Presbyterian elder and his church in D.C. was called Westminster. I’m not suggesting this as a fund raising tool for our elders, by the way!)

Marie Jobling in San Francisco noticed that disabled, poor seniors have difficulty getting health benefits that are theirs by law. A deeply ethical person, this troubled her spirit. She started an agency, Planning for Elders that offers empowering information and assistance about medical and other benefits.

An unnamed man sits in another violent movie and suddenly feels "I’m not enjoying this." That awareness awakens a desire for connection with people and actions that feel affirmative and positive. It leads him to value kindness and caring, meditation and prayer.

Things began to change for Oscar, an immigrant from Peru, when after a long period of anxiety and dissatisfaction he said he got a glimpse of the true nature of things, of the Divine. In that moment, he said, he was no longer afraid, and things were OK just as they were.

A senior manager goes through another day bringing his or her personal ethics and a desire to do the right thing to complex corporate tasks that often have no clear ethical answers. Every so often there goes out a little prayer for guidance.

Things happened for Jackie, who says she talks to God a lot. When she was making sandwiches for the homeless one day, God spoke to her and said, "You want to know where I am? Look at your hands."

And so on.

If you or I allow either the positive or negative experiences of life to be a path towards renewal, we can’t be easily defeated. We can grow. What seems like defeat can be the prologue to renewal, new grace. Especially if we remain open to the One, the Essence, who is there for us, always.

The kind of progressive transformation about which our teaching today speaks gives us our deepest desire—below all the desires of our egos and the surface messages of our culture and time, beneath all the changes of life—which is union with the Ground of our being and existence, the Spirit in which we and all things live and move. This Ground, the Spirit, can never be taken from us. Christ shows us the Way, and is with us. Everything else can be lost or changed. Not this Essence. To know this Essence is to have fundamental security, to find a place of peace and calm beyond self, possessions and everything else—all those thing on which we spend so much energy yet which do not guarantee happiness. Never changing, always there.

Whatever journey you are on, our teaching today invites you and me to continue on the Way of renewal, so that we can know more fully God’s grace and love and so that this same grace and love can be expressed through us—us individually, us as partners with others--to help renew our world. Amen