APRIL 2, 2006 PASTOR SCOTT FULLER
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-12; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
In our O.T. lesson from Jeremiah, God says, about the people of the promise, the days are surely coming…when I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts… Similarly, in the Psalm for today, the author pleads Create in me a clean heart, O God…
Stir in an old Irish benediction that reads: May those that love us, love us. And those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts. And if he doesn’t turn their hearts, may he turn… their ankles, so we’ll know them… by their limping…Add those words by Elizabeth Stone who wrote Making the decision to have a child – is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. And that’s just the beginning!
-A person can wear their heart on their sleeve.
-Sometimes it’s good to have a little heart-to-heart.
-We’ve heard about our military personnel receiving Purple Hearts.
-Often it’s important to get to the heart of the matter.
-We are brokenhearted at the death of a loved one or a relationship.
-And we always pray that our heart is in the right place!
-We all, at times, have a change of heart.
-Brave people are said to be full of heart.
-Some people have a bleeding heart.
-We say about something inspirational that it touches our heart.
-A cruel person is said to have a heart of stone.
-And I’ll never forget a conversation I had with Rick Halvorson, former pastor here at Gloria Dei, my mentor and colleague for almost seven years. One day, close to the end of his fight with cancer, we called to say hi. After a good conversation, he said It does my heart good to hear your voice.
Now if you were to go to the Encyclopedia…or Google(!) this thing called the heart, what would you find? How would a textbook define the heart’s function?...purpose?...role? Quite simply it would say that the heart… pumps…blood. It has no ability to sense or feel or perceive anything to do with love or fear, care or concern…and yet…
When we’re convinced that we’ve met Mr./Ms. Right, we profess with a passion: I love you with all my heart!...Or maybe our zeal is more spiritual. I’m reminded of the disciples, who on Easter evening, meet a stranger while walking home. After recounting for him their pain at Jesus’ death and the rumor of his resurrection, the man begins to teach them, from the beginning of the Bible to end, the truth about Jesus as the Christ. Later, while reporting this event to the rest of Jesus’ followers, the two men said those famous words, Did not our hearts burn within us as he spoke?
So there’s something about our heart that is more than machine, something that has to do with our deepest hopes and dreams… Yet we also know that its ability to access the truth is limited. I mean, if, according to Jeremiah, God plans to write a new law on our hearts, what is the old law there that has to be replaced? Isn’t it true that the world has always taught us to: follow our hearts…regardless of the costs…to let our hearts be our guides… wherever they may lead…that if it feels good in here (heart) then we should do it out here (body) and that’s all that matters.
Chaim Potok is the author of a book entitled, My Name Is Asher Lev. Asher is a boy who has been blessed with the ability to paint – it is a gift from God.
But Asher has also been cursed by being born an Orthodox Jew for whom the making of any image is forbidden. Ultimately he chooses to become an artist, a decision that causes a terrible separation from his parents. Yet that pain is only a foretaste of the bitter feast to come.
For Asher realizes that, to get at the heart of the human struggle, he has to paint Jesus’ crucifixion. No other image, he believes, can better capture our feelings of abandonment, hopelessness or pain. It is, of course, absolutely unacceptable to his good Jewish parents. Yet listen to these quotes from reviewers of the book and note how they follow this old law of the heart.
1. This is the heart of the story, says one.
2. Asher pours his heart into his paintings…says another. And finally says a third,
3. He must forget about everyone else and draw from his heart.
In fact, that’s true, to a degree – Asher is compelled to draw because of that gift from God that consumes him…but, as it turns out, his heart has been guided on this journey, both by God’s Spirit and by good counsel from the Rebbe, the spiritual leader of their Orthodox Jewish community.
Is it always safe to let our heart be our guide? Can that lub-dub in our chest always reveal what is best? The answer, of course, is no…for everyone among us has-been-or-will-be led astray by a heart convinced that it is right. No, the key, I think, to having healthy hearts is to focus on the new law that God promises to write upon this core of our being. According to our lessons for today, this new law says that:
-God is God and we belong to the Lord;
-All shall know God’s gift of forgiveness;
-God alone can create a new heart and renew a right spirit within us; and
-That somehow, in some strange way, the death of Jesus’ beating heart means that ours can now truly live and lead us to God’s truth. Amen.