Sermons
July 11, 1999 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.
John Wilkinson
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church
Psalm 119:105–112
Matthew 13:1–17
“For this people’s heart has grown dull. . .”
Mathew 13:15
“I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end.”
Psalm 119:112
Prayers of the People by John Buchanan
Nostalgia is in full bloom this summer, and so distant memories surface from 25 or even 30 years ago.
After baseball season and before the start of school, my siblings and I would each get a week in Akron, Ohio, with our grandparents. It was a glorious time, not much of a parental break, what with two children still at home, but a grand adventure for us nonetheless. We packed our individual little suitcases, and then, overnight, my mother would re-pack everything. We would get in the car and meet my grandparents in Mansfield, Ohio, at the intersection of Route 30 and Interstate 70. I am sure you know it well. While I was always a little curious what my younger brother and sister did back at home while I was gone—terrorizing my stuff, no doubt—I always had a wonderful time. The week was filled with bus trips to the mall, late nights with my Grandpa watching Johnny Carson, the best caramel cake ever, root beer floats with Hires Root Beer, maybe even a trip to the All-American Soap Box Derby at the Akron Rubber Bowl.
This is more than nostalgia, of course. It is the grateful memories of grandparents who loved me, unconditionally, whose hearts were big and gracious. And even later when those hearts began to wear out physically, they were still filled with pride and joy and hospitality.
My grandmother, Janet Tennent Wilkinson, never preached a sermon, never took a seminary class. But her ability to pronounce a benediction surpassed the most distinguished preacher. Such a benediction, such a blessing, happened whenever we would fall and skin a knee, when our team lost or we had a cavity filled, when a sister or brother would commit a grievous infraction. And it would happen. “Bless your heart,“ she would say. Bless your heart, and the love in her voice and the tenderness in her embrace would make tangible the very blessing she articulated. Bless your heart.
Each Sunday as we gather, we open the story and encounter great themes—faith, love, peace, grace, call. These themes play themselves out on many stages, in many stories, with personalities and conflicts. But they also play themselves out on the stage of the heart. The heart—the human heart, the very arena where God’s word takes root, where God’s activity takes hold.
And while you may leave today shaking your head and saying, “I don’t really know what he preached about, something concerning heart, I think,” and while that in itself would be OK, I would want us to know this—that the heart, our own hearts, the hearts of our communities, is where God’s story unfolds. And I would want us to know that if, in fact, we are created in God’s image, as we affirm with such hope, then the terrain of our own hearts would tell us something profound about God’s heart, the heart of God, from whom all blessings flow.
It is so present in our common language, seeming to predate our understandings about the human mind and the human personality. The heart is the location for everything. Soft heart, hard heart, cold heart, warm heart, bleeding heart, brave heart, lonely heart, broken heart. The short-hand phrases describe, provoke.
And so it should be no surprise that such language, such understanding about the human condition, such theology, even, reflects itself in the full spectrum of the biblical story. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind,” the book of Deuteronomy tells us, and Jesus claims those words to tell his followers the very essence of the faith. Heart, soul and mind.
Theology, while wrestled out in the head, is, at the beginning and at the end, a matter of the heart. The heart is the province of emotions, of thought, of courage, the seat of understanding, of grief and imagination, wisdom and fear. And the heart is the crossroads of our decisions, our obedience and devotion. Within the heart, we meet God’s word, and the heart is the location where the conversation with God takes place. (See Harper Bible Dictionary)
At the birth of Jesus, the story tells us, a lovely, chaotic picture emerges of animals and angels and shepherds and kings from the east and general mayhem. And Mary, watching it all, says nothing, tending to the baby, “treasuring the words and pondering them in her heart.”
The Apostle Paul tells us that the Spirit of God searches the heart, and we are comforted by that, somehow, and also scared to death, if we’re honest, because we know what’s in there and what God might find.
The hearts of two figures are pivot points for the story. The Lord informs Moses, “Pharoah’s heart is hardened, he refuses to let the people go,” thus beginning that most extraordinary journey to exodus and freedom and deliverance. And later, the devil puts it in Judas’ heart to betray his friend and brother, thus catalyzing the events that will lead us to our bleakest moment and our redemption’s hope.
And the stories we encounter this morning, the words which generated this conversation in the first place.
If you want something interesting to do while you’re on the beach this summer, learn Hebrew and tackle Psalm 119. The biblical scholars are not in love with Psalm 119; to them it seems artificially composed and a little uncreative. It is long, very, very long. It is a Hebrew acrostic, each eight line stanza beginning with the succeeding Hebrew letter, losing, of course, something in the English translation.
Psalm 119 is essentially a discourse on the themes of God’s law, God’s ordinances, God’s statutes. In well known words our portion begins today—“Your word is a lamp to my path and a light to my feet.” And then it gets to the heart of the matter, the turning point for the way we encounter God, for the place God encounters us. We would expect a nice, rational, heady discourse on the positive attributes of all of this, of God’s law. Rather, we get—“Your decrees are my heritage forever; they are the joy of my heart. I will incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end.” Bless our hearts.
It is what we sense, what we intuit, even as we spend time and energy, shed blood and divide ourselves to the contrary; that the our theology is simply a map to the heart, the heart that is the window to God’s own heart. Bless our hearts.
Jesus lived that with crystal clarity. People would come to him with every type of rationalization—rich young men seeking to enter the kingdom, women seeking to avoid the truth of their own existence. Their words would offer the ultimate disconnect with their lives, and Jesus would see into the deepest places of their hearts and know the truth, just as he sees into the deepest places of our own hearts and knows the truth about us.
One time he told an extraordinary story to the people gathered around him, agrarian people, a story about seeds and earth and growth. And the disciples, pretending to understand, later ask him why he teaches in parables, these good stories. And he quotes back to them from the prophet Isaiah: “For the people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn—and I would heal them.” Bless our hearts.
And so the challenge of discipleship, it would seem, is not to develop a finely tuned cognitive understanding of theological constructs and paradigms. It is, rather, to understand with the heart, to incline the heart, to open the heart to that most compelling story, and to know that God’s heart is open to you, to us, to bless your heart, my heart, our hearts together.
Our hearts are dull, perhaps, or something other than what God would have them to be. And God issues and re-issues and re-issues the invitation, and we respond, haltingly, hesitantly, by inclining, by leaning our hearts into the invitation. As simple as that. As awesome as that. To be alive to God’s project.
God’s project: the transformation of hearts, the softening of hearts, that the confounding dynamics of late twentieth century life not allow us to check out of the program through cynicism or individualism or any of the other problematic “isms” that plague us.
God’s project: the mending of broken hearts, that we might know wholeness and recovery, as we face crisis or illness or death or painful transition or addiction, we know that there is a heart open to our journey.
God’s project: the fulfillment of lonely hearts, not in some Hallmark way, but through the very gift of community that welcomes us home, through sisters and brothers and fellow travelers who walk with us and tend to our hearts when we can’t.
God’s project: the satisfaction of hungry hearts, the hungry hearts we all harbor, to live into a new vision of our authentic selves, to claim the journey, to make the big decision, to hear the voice and follow.
God’s project: the blessing of hearts, God’s heart inclined to us, always and forever, so that at the moment when our hearts are ready to be inclined to God, blessing happens, and even when we are not ready, God still and always is.
God’s project: the making of brave hearts and whole hearts and tender hearts, and never for their own sakes.
Our tendency is to think about all of this in an isolated way, as if the relationship with God were a private thing, guarded tightly from any outside interference. The story would tell us otherwise, that this is about community and connection.
Such a lesson came home to us this past week, as we witnessed the horrors of Benjamin Smith play out like some surreal, unfathomable nightmare.
Our home is a few blocks, a stone’s throw, from the place where Benjamin Smith shot six Orthodox Jews as they were returning home from synagogue. We stroll past those houses with our children, innocently, playfully, and we, like every resident in West Rogers Park, including Holocaust survivors, assumed we were safe and sheltered. And now a combination of easy and illegal access to guns and hate masquerading as religion and the strange end of the millennium dynamics of internet and fringe membership have taught us otherwise.
And God’s project is suddenly more complex, but never more clear.
This young, hard-hearted one also killed a good man, one who carried that best title, “coach.” At First Presbyterian Church in Evanston Wednesday night, Mrs. Sheralynn Byrdsong said that this was a crisis of the heart, even as Jew and Gentile and black and white gathered to celebrate the heart of this good man.
And God’s project is suddenly more complex, but never more clear. And the heart of God aches.
The hearts of young children need restoring. The hearts of communities need repairing. The hearts of those who hate need transforming, and we wonder how it will happen and what we will do. But we know we must step to the plate and do something, say something, be something, something that reflects the very heart of God, whose project it is to love and never hate.
Annie Dillard, who writes about faith and life as evocatively as anyone, has written a new book, For the Time Being. It is wandering and impressionistic, weaving strands together to offer strong images, including those from a hospital obstetrics ward. “Outside the viewing window, a black woman in her fifties is waving, and with her a white woman in her twenties is jumping up and down. They are trying to attract the attention of what looks to be a baked potato, but is in fact a baby wrapped in aluminum foil. The baked potato weighs three pounds, a nurse tells me; his body is a compressed handful. The aluminum foil is ’to keep the heat in.’ Intravenous feeding lines, a ventilator tube, and two heart monitor wires extend into the aluminum foil. He is doing well.” (p. 42.)
Hearts that will nurture our own hearts until we are ready to nurture others; community that gathers us and disperses us to share the story; doing well.
We know in our hearts that this is good. The psalmist is compelled by the word because it is right, right for you, right for me, right for our communities. But there is more, always more. Truth is in order to goodness. There is joy, indescribable joy. And hope.
Frederick Buechner writes: “The words ’you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and might’ become in the end less a command than a promise. And the promise is that, yes, on the weary feet of faith and the fragile wings of hope, we will come to love him at last as from the fist he has loved us—loved us even in the wilderness, especially in the wilderness, because he has been in the wilderness with us. We has been in the wilderness for us.” (A Room Called Remember, p. 45)
So might we incline our hearts when the story is told to us, whether by a grandmother or poet or a basketball coach or a nurse or even by a peasant rabbi, whose love will take him to the cross and whose heart no grave could contain.
O to grace how great a debtor,
daily I’m constrained to be.
Let that grace now, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
Amen.
Prayers of the People
By John M. Buchanan
Almighty and merciful God, we give you thanks for your goodness and your love and for all the blessings of our life. We thank you for this bright, beautiful day—for your creative care and the wonder and mystery of the world; for life-giving sun, for sparkling lake and vibrant city, for families enjoying, and playing and eating and being together. We thank you, O God, for the human spirit which reflects your spirit and your image; for the capacity to create and enjoy beauty in art and music; for the capacity you have created in us to laugh and smile and enjoy whimsical cows on our city’s sidewalks; for the striving for excellence on the soccer field; for the capacity you have created in us to care for one another and provide for one another and be a community together. We thank you for all those whose lives are given to the common good, police and physicians, teachers and attorneys, mothers and fathers, firefighters and sanitation workers. Gracious God—we thank you for all the blessings of our life.
And because you so love the world you have created we bring our petitions and intercessions before you: We pray for people near and fare who need you; for those who are sick and afraid and anxious; for those facing surgery; for those who are encountering the final mystery of death; for those who grieve. Merciful God, keep in your loving care members of this congregation who serve you today in Guatemala, and Honduras and Albania, and be with our young people as they work and travel in Arizona.
O God you have created all of us and each of us to live together as your children—in peace and prosperity and love. With heavy hearts we acknowledge the brokenness of the human family and we ask for your healing. Difficult as it is, we pray for those who work to break down and not build up; those who hate; those who speak violence and incite violence and do violence to your precious creation; those who deny you and their own identity as your children in racist thought and act. O God be with families that have lost husbands and fathers and sons—create within each of us the determination to honor you by honoring your image in all people; give us impatience with remnants of racism which emerge in our life together; in discriminatory act or racial slur even in polite society; and raise up with us a new love and new commitment to reflect your will and your love in our church and our city—our nation.
O God, bless us each as we live this day and the days ahead. Give us the gifts we need to serve you faithfully; and give us grace never to forget your presence, your love which waits for us at the end of every day.
Hear our prayers.
Hear our prayers that remain unspoken in our hearts.
And hear us now as we pray together the prayer our Lord taught his disciples saying:
Our Father. . .
Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church
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