June 16, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.

Matters of the Heart

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 103
1 Kings 21:1–21a

For when my outward action doth demonstrate
the native act and figure of my heart
in compliment extern, ’tis not long after
but I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
for daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

Iago, in Othello

In the film Braveheart, there is a powerful scene when Robert the Bruce, who has betrayed William Wallace, the Scottish hero of the story, and his father confront one another. Robert the Bruce has just witnessed the deep pain his betrayal has caused William Wallace—“And I took it from him, and I saw it in his eyes.” His father replies, as a way of reassuring him that this was politically best for the sake of Scotland, “All lose heart.”

“I don’t want to lose heart,” he replies. “I want to believe, as he does.” What Wallace believed, of course, was the possibility of an independent Scotland, a dream he shared with others.

To lose heart is to suggest one stops living in some essential way. How can you live without your heart?

In cultures the world over, the heart plays a central role, in both a physical way and in a metaphysical way. In the Torah we read about Moses’ declaration to the people, “You will love the Lord your God with all of your heart, your mind, your soul, and your strength.” This is reiterated by Jesus.

The heart is associated with love, passion, and the place of the deep self, where we experience great joy and great wounds. Indeed, many of our expressions, borrowed from other cultures and languages, use the word heart to speak to this. “Grieved to the heart.” “Arrows in one’s heart, depending on the context, could mean love or a deep wound.” From a famous song from a New Jersey favorite, Bon Jovi sings, “shot through the heart.”

We know this in some deep way. We speak of having a “heavy heart,” our heart feeling “light,” saying we’re invested in something or not, we say, “my heart wasn’t in it.” In fact, I can still recall my soccer coach yelling like the marine sergeant he was trained to be, “You have to play with heart!”

We’re told by biblical scholar Seow that the Psalms have something called poetic parallelism, something common in Hebrew poetry, which is to say the same thing but differently. The psalmist will interchangeably use heart, soul, whole being, all of me. In our Psalter reading today, Psalm 103 states, “Bless the Lord my soul . . . all that is within me.” This is indeed poetic license, calling us to look at the matter further.

One pastor, Tim Lucas, known as the “big hair preacher” (and interesting hair styles are something I might know about), pastors a growing congregation in New Jersey, and he suggests that beyond poetic license the psalmist is speaking to divided hearts or to those living without one. “Love the Lord your God, bless the Lord, my soul, all of me, precisely, all of these words are for us because we can live so divided . . . our outer self does not reflect our inner self.” For many this is precisely the reason why people of faith, and the church in particular, would find themselves sometimes hurting rather than helping. Slavery. Civil Rights. Human rights. From not speaking out against corrupt wars to current issues.

We can believe one thing, somewhere in our heart, and yet outwardly live in contradiction to this. Pastor Lucas continues, “Integrity is what God calls us to, which is when we are whole, when the inner and outer self are cohesive, on the journey of faith and the place where God heals us.”

Today’s biblical story is the story of Naboth’s vineyard and King Ahab. We need only glance at the story, in any language and in any culture, and realize that something unjust has been done, something wrong. There is an integrity issue here. King Ahab, as kings are understood in the Near East, has a connection to the divine and must therefore look for the good of the kingdom. Instead, this is a story about a man who lacks integrity, whose secret dealings that lead to the stoning of Naboth do not represent the public responsibility he claims as king. This is a man whose heart has gone astray.

Instead of being responsible to the community, King Ahab seems only concerned with his own perverted desires. He has plenty of kingly treasure but wants Naboth’s vineyard too, even if it needs to be through corruption, through murder and deceit, through a power grab.

What happened to King Ahab? After all, he is King of Israel, a part of the covenant of God. “Meditate on the law,” was one of the primary reminders that the Torah would make, that the psalms would sing, and the prophets would point to. King Ahab would have been very familiar with the Torah, that certainly forbids coveting a neighbor’s possessions, bearing false testimony, and being a part of a murder plot.

John Eldredge, author of many books describing a kind of masculine spirituality, has centered his theology on a relational God, who is interested in deep relationship, what he calls “The Romance” that is written into our hearts, which has to do with connection, with knowing and being known in some essential way and that our hearts are often wounded by what he calls “The Message of the Arrows,” which could be an experience from our childhood, a hurtful relationship, a failure of some kind, cruel words, etc. What he writes could offer us some perspective on King Ahab:

The sense of being part of some bigger story, a purposeful adventure that is [the journey of faith] begins to drain away. . . . Instead of a love affair with God, your life begins to feel more like a series of repetitive behaviors, like reading the same chapter of a book. . . . ‘Believe and behave accordingly’ is not a sufficient story line to satisfy whatever turmoil and longing our heart is trying to tell us about. Somehow our head and heart are on separate journeys and neither feels like life.

He presses on as to where this could land us and in particular where it landed him.

[Then] we can either deaden our heart or divide our life into two parts, where our outer story becomes the theater of needs, the place where we quench the thirst of our heart with whatever water is available. . . .I found ‘water’ where I could: sexual impropriety, alcohol, the next dinner out, senseless entertainment, gaining more knowledge through religious seminars. . . . We lose heart.

Ahab, either deadening his heart, has lost it and has sought to quench his thirst with a land grab. This is a story that has played itself out in human history time and time again, hasn’t it? The moments in our history when a government, often against the native people of the land that seemed opposed to its vision, were coerced, intimidated, misled, displaced, and even murdered to acquire more lands, more power, more wealth. Some governments even did it through corrupt means, betraying contracts and treaties or falsifying others.

In opposition to this image that of King Ahab is a man named Naboth, murdered for his vineyard. We don’t know much else about him, but maybe this isn’t relevant to the story. The other implication is that this seems to be all Naboth owns, “a small plot of land,” but central to the story is Naboth’s refusal to give up his ancestral inheritance. Two things here: ancestral remembrance and linkage were considered, and are still considered, sacred in some cultures and certainly in the Hebrew culture. Moreover, besides the sacred connection between land, God, and one’s ancestors, is also the Jewish law which reflects this.

King or no king, Naboth stands his ground, so to speak, and refuses. He is faithful to his duty as both citizen and inheritor. In contrast to King Ahab, the man with no titles before his name, stands, nonetheless, as the man with integrity. You don’t have to know much about him to know that he is living from his heart.

There is another man, of whom Naboth reminds me. Reverend Dr. John Boyle, whose life we celebrated last Wednesday, was a man that I didn’t know much about. Yet, like the Naboth story, this wasn’t important when I first met him and encountered him on several occasions.

I didn’t know him well, and yet his warmth, groundedness, pastoral quality, his kindness with generous words, told me this was a man of integrity, a man living from his heart. Each story afterward, from his three-minute message on my voicemail thanking me for a Christmas card to a myriad of stories shared by staff recounting his kind gestures, always ended with, “He was just that kind of guy.” That is, a same kind of man with those on the top and on the bottom of the hierarchy, the same kind of man at work and outside of work, at church and outside of it. The stories of his joining the World War II effort, his experiences there, his life work to understand the human condition of deep pain and sorrow, his life work to address the evil we are capable of, and his hope in forgiveness and reconciliation continued to confirm what I felt the moment I first met him—this man is not a posturing man, a calculating man, but a man living from his heart. That kind of guy.

I had to learn all of these stories from others because John Boyle wasn’t the kind of man to sing his own praises. The Michigan Avenue Forum on the Nuremberg Trials and at a Men’s Group breakfast meeting featuring David Scheffer, who spoke on ethnic cleansing, John Boyle spoke about his struggle to live a faithful life, reflecting on many actions he took and decisions he made and being not fully satisfied with the ethics of it. John Boyle didn’t pretend to be anyone other than the one who, in his prayers, spoke to the human condition and to our hope in God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ. He was that kind of guy that spoke about the truth of his life experience. Serving his duty once on the battlefields of Europe, he served his duty on the battlefields of people’s lives—their pains and wounds and never offered easy answers but God’s gracious promise of forgiveness. He lived from the heart, he did his duty.

And so does Naboth, even at the cost of his life. This is what it means to live with heart—to live with the consequences of what one believes to be true, right, and good. To live with heart means not to succumb to the perverse desires that lead a King Ahab to want yet more land, at the cost of a small plot of land belonging to a man who is killed for it, not to succumb to such little dreams which are no dreams at all, but instead to live into the desires and dreams God has placed in our hearts.

Have we been living with a divided heart? Have we lost heart? Do our inner and outer lives match up? Our text today warns us about the consequences of living without a heart and with one. Living without a heart means our desires become perverted like King Ahab, and even when we have much, we are dissatisfied, or we can choose to live like Naboth, whose story is now told the world over, read over by Christians and Jews alike, as a man of integrity, who even at the cost of his life, refuses the king.

We are called, my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, to live from the heart, not to silence it any longer, not to suffocate it with avoidance, not drown it with busyness, with our to-dos. Instead, listen to your heart. What does your heart say? Is it wounded? Christ offers healing. Is it tired? Jesus invites us to rest. What is its deepest joy? There is your vocation, your life’s calling.

We are called to live from the depths of our heart because in our deepest pains and our deepest joys, God calls us to be our deepest selves. In so doing, we offer the world a gift—the story that in the midst of brokenness, we can be a people of integrity, like Naboth and John Boyle, on the journey of faith towards healing in God. Amen.