Matthew 22:34-39
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
October 25, 2026
Greek mythology tells many a made-up tale that illustrates real-life truth.
According to Greek mythology, sailors who passed through one treacherous strait risked being seduced by beautiful sirens who with mesmerizing voices sang exquisite music that lured the sailors toward shore and over submerged rocks that ripped holes in their ships’ hulls, causing them to sink and the crew to drown. Only two legendary Greeks safely sailed past the sirens.
One was Odysseus, who stopped up the ears of his crew with wax and then had those momentarily deaf sailors tie him to the ship’s mast. That way they’d not be drawn to their death by the siren’s enchantment, and he’d hear the sirens’ gorgeous music without harm.
The other was Orpheus. As his ship came within the sound of the sirens’ deadly voices, he took out his lyre and began to sing an even more enthralling melody that captured the sailors’ attention and hearts, and made them impervious to the sirens’ fatal allurement.
Today’s culture is singing to us murderous music that sounds beautiful but kills the best part of us. The music delights our egocentricity, delusions of entitlement and prideful resistance to authority – and draws us into unrighteousness, dishonesty and cold indifference to the needy. It thereby deadens our deepest potential.
How can we avoid being beguiled by the falsehoods that our culture sings and celebrates? We could try to resist their seductive power by the strength of self-discipline and self-restraint, like Odysseus tied to the mast, like Christians holding themselves back from engagement with the larger culture; or we could try by employing clever strategies to evade the temptations, like sailors with ears stuffed with wax, like Christians refusing to listening to challenging ideas.
But we would do better to fight fire with fire – or, in this instance, to fight music with music, as Orpheus did. We can choose to focus upon, and attend to, taking in the melodies of God’s truth and grace that can be heard from the harmonies the Spirit plays for us in scripture, prayer and service to others.
Higher music puts lower music in its proper place; deeper passion does the same with shallower passion; stronger love does the same with lesser love.
In today’s scripture Jesus says that the chief business of life is to love God most of all, fulfill His “greatest and first” commandment and love Him with all our heart and soul and mind – a commandment which, Jesus adds, is inextricably intertwined with a second that is “like it”: that we love our neighbor as ourselves.
But how do we change into people who love like that? By listening to the music of God’s love for us with rapt attention and unrestrained relishing of it. The music itself evokes out of us deep appreciation of God’s grace, admiration of His magnificence and, dare I say it, affection for God due to His companionship. Taking in the reality of God’s love for us makes us fall in love with Him and keeps its fire burning bright.
Our loving God as He wants does not then arise so much out of a sense of duty as out of an awed gratitude for His loving us apart from our doing a thing. We love God as we recognize and remember how He loves us!
That is to say, we do the most important thing in life, not primarily by willpower and determined resolve, or by strenuous effort and perseverance, but by becoming all ears for the music of love and letting it change who we are and what we do.
I think of what Wayne Cordeiro, former pastor of New Hope Church in Honolulu, says about his courtship of Anna, the woman who eventually became his wife. One of the things that initially drew Wayne to Anna was her love of sports. Wayne loves sports of all kinds. But there were two sports he didn’t like. The first was bowling. I now quote Wayne: “I don’t get it. You pick up this cannonball and throw it on this beautiful, tilted maple floor. It rolls down to the end and then disappears, thank God. But then, all of a sudden, it comes back again and you’re supposed to throw it away once more. All night you’re trying to get rid of the darn thing. I thought it was the dumbest sport ever. The second sport I didn’t like was roller skating: four wheels, none able to turn, and you’re supposed to go around in circles!”
Wayne swears the following really happened: “On our first date, I knocked on Anna’s door, as excited as could be. I blurted out, ‘Where would you like to go tonight?’, and she cried out ‘Do you like bowling?’ and lifted up her bowling ball bag. She had her own bag! Now, I was in love. So, when she asked if I liked bowling, I lied through my teeth and exclaimed, ‘I love bowling!’ And we bowled all night and had a blast.
“The next week I knocked on her door and asked, ‘Where would you like to go this week?’ This time she lifted up her skates and cried out, ‘Do you like skating?’ I said in response, ‘For months I’ve been hoping to find someone to go skating with. I love skating!’ And we skated all night and had the time of our life” – and often did for years thereafter.
What made it easy for Wayne to change? He had no need to work up any determination to change his activities and feelings about bowling and skating because his feelings about Anna made him want to feel and be different in those activities! Because she wanted to do them, he wanted to do them – for no other reason than that he couldn’t think of anything nicer than enjoying the company of this beautiful person and deepening the relationship they’d just begun.
Our capacity to change in our spiritual and ethical life and increase our love for God and neighbor is predicated upon our wanting to enjoy the company of this beautiful God and to deepen the relationship with Him we’ve begun.
It’s hard to want to do many things that God wants us to do. One of them is to listen less to our culture’s music of “Me first”, “I deserve the best” and “Don’t ask too much of me” and instead listen more to God’s music of losing our life to gain it, and of denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Jesus’ example of self-sacrificial love. It, however, becomes relatively easy to deal with the difficulty if we give enough time and attention to take in the gorgeous music of God’s love for us, and allow it to inspire in us deeper appreciation of His grace, admiration of His magnificence and affection for God due to His companionship.
We change into greater lovers because God first loves us, and we’ve let the music of His love catch our ear, capture our heart and cause us to be caught up in His Spirit who compels us to keep all His commandments in discipleship to Christ. Let us be loved, and love as never before!
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