josephholubsermons


 

The Last Sundy After the Epiphany
February 14, 2010
Ezekiel 36:22-27
Luke  6:17-26

Have A Heart – the Heart of Jesus

“A new heart I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”    (Ezekiel 36:36)

Our children and young people have designated this Sunday as “Have a Heart Sunday.”  Their bake sale today is ear-marked for Haiti.  I want to take this formal opportunity to recognize and thank so many of you for generously supporting our January “second offering” for Haiti to the tune of almost $17,000.  Thank you for having a heart in such a way for the people of Haiti. These funds will go toward providing shelter and support through the Shelter Box organization, as well as to provide support for our ongoing commitment to the Senior Center in Jeremie, Haiti.   

The Good News of God has a great deal to do with heart – with having a heart.  The word “heart” appears over 1000 times in the Bible in various contexts.  It’s meaning covers much more that what we usually mean by heart in contemporary English.  Today, Valentine Day, is a day of hearts where we recognize and celebrate mostly our love and affection for  our closest loved ones.  But in the Bible, the “heart” goes far beyond merely our love for those  closest to us.  “Heart” is a metaphor for the inner self as a whole, one’s whole being.  “A new heart” is a metaphor for the transformed person whose love breaches the narrow boundaries of our usual ways of loving – and more closely resembles the love embodied in the life of Jesus.

In today’s OT reading, we hear Ezekiel describing a kind of heart transplant procedure that God was going to perform.  God, speaking through Ezekiel - sounding like a cardiac surgeon says, “A new heart I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”  Ezekiel was speaking to his own people who were languishing in exile in Babylon.  In 587 BCE, the Babylonian army under Nebuchadnezzar attacked and destroyed Jerusalem, the temple and much of the city, deporting many of its inhabitants to Babylon.  Deportation and exile was a strategy employed by a conqueror to disempower an adversary.  The goal was to not only defeat the adversaries’ army, but dilute the adversaries’ culture and religion by absorbing them into their culture.  The goal was to make your adversary “lose heart.”  

In the second half of the book of Ezekiel, we hear him speak words of hope and restoration to those  exiles.  Speaking as a surrogate for God’s voice, Ezekiel declared to his people,  “I will… bring you into your own land.”  (36:24)  In other words, Ezekiel clearly declared God’s promise to the people that a day was coming when they would return home. 

But he also was clear about something else, and that is, when they got home things were not going to be the same as they were before the exile.  It was not going to be a return to the status quo; a return to life as it was; a return to the  “same-ole-same-ole”.  Things were going to be different!  The exiles were going home, yes,  but they would go home with a heart transplant, a “heart of flesh.”  The phrase “heart of flesh” is a Hebrew idiom for a receptive and open heart – open and receptive to God and open and receptive to the needs of one another. 

I wasn’t exiled, but I left home in 1973.  I experienced something fascinating every time I returned home to visit.  My experience was that I would feel the pressure to regress to former patterns of behavior and  attitudes of a previous time in my life.  I cannot explain exactly what it was.  Maybe it was reconnecting with old friends that knew me in that former time; or old memories and habits that resurfaced and reclaimed me.  Maybe it was all of them working together and much more, I don’t know.  But I do know, I felt the pressure and temptation to regress to old ways and old attitudes that I thought I left behind.

Ezekiel knew that when the people got home and settled in, they would feel the pressure to return to business as usual; to go back to the old ways of community life.  He was saying to them that was not acceptable,  and to combat that pressure and temptation, God would give them the gift of a new heart, a heart of flesh; a heart open and receptive to God and to the things of God; a heart open and receptive to each other’s needs. 

As Jesus people, the Christian life has less to do with believing a set of beliefs and propositions, and more to do with nurturing a relationship with God.   The new heart is the result of a relational and transformational vision of the Christian life.  In our relationship with God, Jesus is the one who mentors us as we heed his call and follow him.   To follow is to respond to Jesus’ call and to name him as the primary mentor of our lives.  To name Jesus as Lord, for me, is to name him as my mentor with a capital “M.”  A mentoring relationship is a relationship of trust and guidance, and in that relationship I find myself transformed and even living with new heart – the heart of Jesus.

Our confirmation youth are making a banner entitled “Jesus Mentors Us” that will be revealed at their confirmation in May.  The banner is divided into squares, each square identifying one thing in which Jesus mentors us.   Each square is uniquely designed and artfully expresses an aspect of Jesus’ mentoring.  We’ve identified nine things in which Jesus mentors us (by no means an exhaustive list)  – hence, the banner is nine squares:  compassion, trust, not-fearing, loving-enemies, social-justice, prayer, dignity, humility and inclusivity. 

It’s been my experience that living with the heart of Jesus is not something that happens in my life all at once, but it’s a life-long process.  It’s a process that involves many things: listening, dialog, prayer, discernment, understanding, learning, wisdom, dialog with others and many more. 

For me, it unfolds something like this.  First, something happens.  I am faced with a situation or a circumstance that challenges or confronts me.  It could be anything:  I am presented with the need of another; or I am offended; or I become aware of an injustice, or someone asks me for help; or I am faced with a social issue; or am involved in a conflict; or someone does something that gets under my skin, whatever, something happens that challenges and confronts me.  One could simply say, “Life happens!” 

The second thing is a question I ask, “How does my relationship with Jesus inform me in this situation?  How does the heart of Jesus enlighten and empower me?”   If I don’t know, that’s a clear signal for me to go deeper into that relationship.      

The third thing is to risk and act, informed and empowered by the heart of Jesus that I perceive – risk and act always with humility, knowing my perceptions are never perfect.  It’s not as easy as it sounds.  I have frequently experienced that to risk and act with the heart of Jesus may require a change of attitude, a change of mind or change of heart on my part.  It may mean letting go of attitudes I have been hanging onto for a very long time.  It may mean resisting the temptation to regress, and it always means the commitment to move my feet and my life in the direction that Jesus, my mentor, is leading and guiding me.   

This is a process that constantly runs in my life – it never shuts off – repeating over and over again.  It’s a fluid spirituality of living with the heart of Jesus.  Do I always do it faithfully? – of course not – but grace is the energy that brings me back into the process to begin again and continue. 

I see something like that going on in the gospel for today from Luke.  These verses are Luke’s version of what Matthew presents as the beatitudes in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  There are a several significant differences in Luke version from Matthew’s.  FIRST, Luke only includes  four of Mathew’s eight beatitudes.  SECOND,  where Matthew has Jesus saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,”  Luke’s Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.”   Where Matthew’s Jesus says, “Blessed are those hunger and thirst for righteousness,”  Luke’s Jesus says “Blessed are the hungry.”  THIRD, Luke also includes four “woes” that are absent in Matthew’s gospel that are poignant warnings to the wealthy and comfortable.    

Biblical scholars tell us that Luke’s gospel was written in the mid to late 80’s of the first century CE.  Each gospel is the unique product of a distinct Christian community, hence the Jesus portrayed in each gospel is unique and distinct. 

Many of those early Christian communities that formed around Jesus were becoming diverse, inclusive of  both Jews and Gentiles, wealthy elites and poor peasants and numerous others – people who perhaps had never been in such close proximity ever before-and certainly not in community.  Conflicts and disputes abounded in those early Jesus communities.  One of the biggest conflicts was the conflict between the wealthy elites and poor peasants.  The disparity between them that existed outside the community of faith they carried into the community of  faith.  The Letter of James, for example,  indicates that some of the wealthy had acquired their wealth by unjustly exploiting the poor, and now both sides found themselves members of the same community of faith, hence intense conflicts and divisions arose.  (James 5:1-6)  

My sense is that the same was true in Luke’s community, so Luke presents the message of Jesus in such a way to confront the many problems the disparity of wealth, power, and privilege brought into his community.  By shaping his gospel the way he does, Luke Jesus challenges especially the wealthy to use their wealth not for privilege and advantage but to empower the poor and the faith community as whole – in other words, to live with the heart of Jesus when it came to the issue of the disparity between the wealthy elites and poor peasants.

God is in the heart transplant business!  When we make the Christian faith propositional and mostly about beliefs and doctrines, we can easily by-pass the heart, and the heart can easily turn to stone and become rigid and inflexible, dogmatic and dictatorial – become very un-Christ-like.  In Greek the word for a heart of stone is sklerocardia – sklerosis of the heart.

“A new heart I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”   For me, it’s ultimately an invitation into a fluid spirituality of living with the heart of Jesus who crossed boundaries that religion had erected between people to affirm those on the other side; who frequently trumped law with love, especially when law dehumanized and marginalized;  who saw the intrinsic value of every face he looked into.

A spirituality of living with the heart of Jesus is paying attention to and nurturing this relationship that will not leave us content to remain where we are, but always moving us beyond into new frontiers, new vistas and new expressions God’s astounding and limitless love.  Amen.