There's an old story about a young preacher's wife who would blow her husband a kiss every Sunday as he began his sermon. Most of the congregation assumed this was just a sweet romantic gesture of support on the wife's part. But one day a curious church member asked her directly about it. And she replied, "When I send my husband a kiss, I'm reminding him what KISS stands for: 'Keep It Simple, Stupid.'"

At times, we humans can get caught up in making things more complicated than they need to be, and I know that can include preachers trying to expound on religious truth. We don't need simplistic answers to complex life situations, but we need to be able to grasp simply and clearly the truths that will throw light on the challenges of life we face. And the good news is that the Jesus who is at the center of our faith is a master at saying things simply and directly. So when one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the greatest commandment, the heart of all Jewish religious understanding, was, he was ready with an answer: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind-and your neighbor as yourself. Everything else in your faith hangs on this."

Jesus' statement is simple and concise. It's a formulation many of us know from memory, and one we hold onto as a core statement of our faith. But that doesn't make it an easy commandment to live up to. In fact, it's hard for me to think of anything more challenging than loving God-a God who is not present to us in personal form-a God whose ways and understanding so transcend our own-a God whose way of living in the world so often seems at odds with our own desires-a God who sometimes allows bad things to happen to good people.

Loving God implies building a meaningful relationship with a Being who may seem absent to us, and One whose care for our well-being has to be taken on faith. That's not the basis on which any of us would attempt to build a meaningful human relationship. Yet, Jesus assures us that learning to connect with our Maker in love with all our heart, soul, and mind is the core relationship for which we were created. And if we learn to keep that commandment, we may also find the grace to keep the second commandment of loving our neighbor as ourselves.

So how do we build the love of God into our lives? It seems clear that build is the appropriate term here. It doesn't happen apart from a growing understanding of who God is to us-not who God is to other people or what the theology of the church says God is. What does God mean to me personally? For me, is God the supreme intelligence and truth that should guide my life? Is God the One I know to be the Giver of all that I have, including life itself? Do I really trust God's love and care for me-even when I can't appreciate the way that love and care are being expressed? Am I learning to trust God with my life? That's the foundation for a love of God that really means something and that truly helps to anchor our lives in God.

Jesus tells us we are to love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. I find that a helpful outline for thinking about our love of God, though I would propose to change the order slightly and start with "loving God with our minds." You see, there is nothing mindless about loving God. We don't take our minds out of the equation just because our relationship with God ultimately rests on faith. It's true our minds will never be able to fully comprehend God and God's truth, but, by the same token, our minds are valuable instruments for discerning and understanding God's nature and purposes. We are given minds to reach out for God, and there's a major disconnect if our perception of God has nothing to do with the highest use of our intellect.

Albert Einstein, who had one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th Century, once wrote these words:

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

For me, Einstein models what it means to love God with our minds. It means using our best mental faculties to make sense of God and figure out what God means to us. This, in turn, leads to discerning what God wants for us in the specifics of our lives so we may know how to respond faithfully. When we love God with our minds, then, we work at defining God in a way that has meaning for us, and then we sort out what following such a God will mean as we decide how to live.

But, at the same time, we are called to love God with all our heart as well as our mind. The heart has to do with desire and yearning, so we are talking here about yearning for a connectedness with God-a longing to come closer. St. Augustine wrote that God has made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. To love God with our hearts is to be open to the spiritual hunger within us, and to reach out to God as the One who can satisfy it.

The writer Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that a good definition of prayer is bothering God with what's on our hearts. She was inspired to this insight by her six-year-old granddaughter, who asked her, "Why do we keep on asking God for things when we don't always get what we want?" Barbara Taylor's response was: "Why do you keep pestering your mother for things you want? Isn't it because you know she loves you and she cares about what's good for you? So, you keep loving her and pestering her even when you don't get what you want. It's the same way with God. When we bother God with our prayers, it's because we know God loves us and cares for us, and we care about keeping in touch with him." For us as adults, bothering God is a way of expressing our hunger for what only God can give, and I'm sure God likes nothing better than to be able to bother us back in shared love and mutuality.

Finally, what does it mean to love God with all our soul? For me, soul has to do with one's whole inner being. It embraces all that I am as a caring, valuing, hoping person. So, to love God with all my soul is to reach out to God with all that I hope my life to be. It is to invite God to fill me with all the meaning and purpose and richness that are mine to have so that I find my life's fullness in God.

It's widely perceived that spiritual emptiness is one of the hallmarks of our time. Many people are hungry for more meaning and substance in their lives, yet find it elusive. Donald Trump is reported to have said on one occasion, "There seems to be something missing in my life, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is." I think Jesus would have a thought to pass on to Donald and the millions who share his malaise: your anxious efforts to grasp meaning and joy on your own terms is not going to deliver for you. All the things and experiences and "fun" you try to build into your life cannot do it by themselves. The abundance of life that counts is God's gift to you, and it comes when you open your soul-those parts of your inner being that matter most-to being shaped by God's spirit. To love God with all one's soul is to trust that this is true and to risk one's life on it. Denise Levertov once expressed it this way:

As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them,
As hawks rest upon air and air sustains them,
So would I learn to attain freefall, and float into Creator Spirit's deep embrace,
Knowing no effort earns that all-surrounding grace.

So, this commandment of love that Jesus commends to us is no small thing. To love God with all our mind, and all our heart, and all our soul, will engage our whole being. But our hope is that not only will God rejoice in our love, as surely God will, but that we will come to find joy in our loving as well, and in turn will be shaped more in the image of a loving God. And so we will be helped to live out the second part of Jesus' commandment-loving our neighbor as ourselves. That's the bottom line of our Christianity as we live it in the world. And to live by it we need all the connectedness with God's empowering spirit that we can have!