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September 3, 2006Where is the center of a person? Where can we find the operational command center of an individual? In the Hebrew mind the center of the person was the heart. It was the seat of the affections, the source of motivation, and the place of moral decision making. We can see that this is true in the way they talk about their devotion to God in the words of the Shema: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength from Deuteronomy 6:5. It is the heart that matters above all else – the rest of you follows its lead.
We’ve all had people tell us to follow our heart, and I don’t think I’ve ever really heard someone say follow your liver, or just trust your pancreas and you can’t go wrong. The assumption is that our hearts are at the center of us, and that our hearts cannot be easily deceived or co-opted. The heart remains true even when things get complicated. The trick I suppose is being able to listen to what our hearts have to tell us.
Our language seems to confirm that we still look to the heart as the center of the person. The Hebrew understanding of the essence of a person still holds true today. We hear things like: What does your heart tell you? That guy sure has a lot of heart. Those words were so heartfelt they made me cry. Put your heart and soul into it. Or, when we receive good news or needed comfort we are heartened, lifted up somehow.
In fact, some months ago someone reminded me that they came to church to be touched in the heart and not just the head. Religion is an activity of the heart it seems and we find Jesus making the same point in the Gospel of Mark.
Quoting Isaiah Jesus rebukes the Pharisees, religious leaders of the day with which Jesus had a great deal in common, for reducing worship to something external, mechanical, and otherwise out of touch with its true intent.
This people honors me with their lips,
But their hearts are far from me;
In vain do they worship me,
Teaching human precepts as doctrines.
This may not sound like it, but this is a stinging rebuke. These words of Jesus cut deep if you fancy yourself a religious person. It’s kind of like saying hey the Book of Common Prayer doesn’t matter its what is inside of you that matters. I want to transform the center of who you are, what makes you tick. I want to be number one in your heart not just have a few nice words said about me or a few interesting rituals performed in my honor. I want all of you not just some comfortable part or partial access. Give me your heart, because if I have that, the rest of you will follow.
God is not fooled by our words. No, God wants to relate to us at a depth at the center of who we are and that means our hearts. God will not settle for less, he’s a jealous lover in this respect and he knows when we are holding out on Him, keeping him at arm's length. The truth be told, we know ourselves when we are holding back from God. In those quiet moments of thought, the voices of anxiety, they all tell us what is at the center of our hearts and most of us are human enough and honest enough to admit that it is not always God. The famous western theologian St. Augustine, said it eloquently, “Inside every human heart is a God shaped space and our hearts our restless until they find their rest in God.
God desires our hearts but the readings today make it quite clear that this is contested ground. There is, according to the writer of Ephesians, a kind of battle going on in the spiritual realm for our hearts, for our very lives and the lives of others.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6: 10)
Jesus himself sees the human heart as a deeply troubled reality. He describes the human heart as a conflicted place full of a great deal of, shall we say, troublesome stuff.
For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride and folly. All of these things come from within and they defile a person. (Mark 7:23)
This is not a comforting or encouraging list. It’s beginning to look a bit like the easy advice to “follow your heart” could be a rather problematic suggestion. Our hearts, it seems, need a great deal of care, attention, even healing, if we are to be able to truly follow them.
But how do we train our hearts? How do we heal them, how do we open them up to the transforming power of God in our lives? In a real way the spiritual life is about heart care, not the low-cholesterol-you-really-need-to-exercise-kind – although that may be true. No, we need heart care that opens the center of our lives up to God’s transforming presence. One could understand the Church as a kind of heart hospital. We come each week for our heart check-up, tuning into the sacred stories of our tradition, singing the hymns of our faith, saying our prayers, and feasting around the Holy Table in an effort to keep our hearts healthy, tender and sensitive to God’s ways and leadings, knowing that it is easy to deceive ourselves, easy to get lazy, too easy to allow the toxins that Jesus was talking about to take over. To mix metaphors, the heart is like a spiritual garden that needs tending, nurturing, and weeding. And if your back yard is anything like my backyard at the moment, you know how important and necessary weeding can be and this is especially true of our hearts. We need to be vigilant to eradicate the puncture vine, the bindweed, the Bermuda grass, and a whole host of other weeds from the spiritual gardens of our hearts.
One of the best ways to the human heart has been through story. Sacred Story has a way of getting the ways of God into our lives and close to the center of who we are. We live by stories, it seems, and the stories we choose to value and accept have a huge impact upon the shape of our lives and the health of our spiritual life. It is why we are concerned and vigilant about what our children watch on television or read. It is why when we gather for worship each week one of the things we do each week without fail is to read from our sacred story, to remind us of who we are, to be convicted and challenged, and to allow the ways of God into our lives through the stories about how God has loved and revealed himself to a people throughout history, struggling with us toward health and wholeness. This is what the writer of Deuteronomy was getting at in his instructions concerning keeping the commandments of God.
“But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.” (Deuteronomy 4:9)
Tell the story to your children and your children’s children. That is how you inculcate the values that are important to you, by telling your children stories, the stories of our faith, the stories of your successes and your failures. The stories that you believe will animate their hearts and lives, their religious imaginations in ways that will shape them into the soulful friends of God you desire them to be. This is why we are so dedicated to our Godly Play program for children. We desire for them to know the stories of our faith, to make them their own through wondering and play and beauty. We know that we are narrative creatures and that we need the stories of God’s loving purposes within us to keep our hopes alive, and to arm us for the battle for our hearts and minds that is constantly raging around us and within us.
It is not only the stories of the Bible that we need to hear in our quest to care for our hearts. We also need to hear each other’s stories, our moments of insight and growth, our need for forgiveness, our realization of error, our brokenness, our experience of God’s transformation in our lives. We need to listen to each other’s lives to hear how they reflect and shine the story of God into our hearts and lives. We need to learn and grow from each other rather than worry about whether the disciples are washing their hands enough or whether someone crossed themselves during the Nicene Creed. It is not just our children that need Godly Play. We adults need to make time to listen and share our faith stories as we reflect together upon scripture too.
What is the story of your heart? What story animates your life from the inside out? What story of God captures the imagination of your heart?
If you will allow me to be vulnerable for a moment in the pulpit I will tell you something about the story of my heart for many have asked me to share it this past week. It has been just over one year since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast of Mississippi and Louisiana, forever changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. On this Sunday last year there were no Sunday services at St. George’s, New Orleans, where I was then the rector. My wife Maren and our children had evacuated to a friend's home, where we wandered around in a daze of disbelief that our lives as we knew them would never be the same. Our house was under water, our congregation was scattered, our city was devastated, uncertainty and confusion ran wild in our hearts. The very shape of our existence seemed unfathomable.
Eventually we returned to New Orleans, living in the various homes of parishioners whose jobs and lives had moved to different cities. We worked hard to restore a community, care for our three children, gather our parishioners, providing assistance where we could, and endeavored to rebuild and restore our place of worship that had sustained over $1,000,000 in damage. I won’t even try to tell you what managing that restoration project was like, for it still is not complete. It was a truly exhausting year. Looking back upon it, I’m not sure how we got through it all. My life and my family’s life was in crisis as was everyone’s life around us. At least 1/3 of our members where scattered across the country, couples and families separated by jobs moving to different cities. There was a certain thrill to being survivors, pioneers and the strong bond of community forged through adversity. Yet the demands and struggle were overwhelming and several months into the crisis Maren and I realized that we were not going to make it as a family forever in New Orleans.
For us the struggle could not be a marathon. We would never finish that kind of race. For us we would have to change our metaphor to that of a relay race and run our leg of the relay as well and hard as we could, handing it off to others to continue. The health and well-being of our family had to be our priority. Our leg lasted 10 months. We said our tearful goodbyes to a community that we loved and to which we had become so integral. It was the most difficult thing I have ever done. We said our farewell to a truly amazing American city that still struggled to get the kind of help it needed to recover.
And we crossed over to safety here in Albuquerque and into this community of St. Michael and All Angels. In all honesty the story of my heart is a difficult one to tell. At times I am wracked by guilt and loss and grief too much for words while at the same time I am so grateful to be here, to have a home, to be safe, to not be in the mess that is still New Orleans. There is the deep joy that fills me as I stand in our backyard pushing Talia in the swing in the cool of the evening, surrounded by weeds though I may be. The story of my heart tells me that I cannot forget the wonderful people of St. George’s who selflessly in the midst of their struggles began a feeding program on Thursday and Friday nights for anyone needing a meal. Since December of 2005 they have been feeding more than 300 people a week. As Paul said in his letter, “keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.” (Ephesians 6). My heart tells me not to forget and to come to the aid of an Episcopal congregation that still is not back in their worship space after over a year. My heart reminds me that God is faithful even when I fear that I have not been. It is in telling the story of our hearts to each other that we can in fact care for our souls.
As I told this story to someone recently they turned to me and said, “Do you believe in the saving power of Jesus Christ?” I stammered, “ Well, yes.” They looked at me with a twinkle in their eye and said, “Good, that means that St. George’s already has a Messiah and that will help you to sort out what your ministry there was about and what your new one at St. Michael’s will be.”
One of my hopes for this community of faith is that we will work to establish more ways where our faith lives can be shared with each other. Places where we can be strengthened and grown in our faith through our study, and care and listening to one another. We need places to listen to our hearts in ways that allow God to speak words of healing and transformation into them. For what we know from our defining story is that God desires this for each of us.
I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you’re a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 3:26. Amen
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church