Heart Surgery
October 12, 2008
Ezekiel 36:22-32; Matthew 13:10-20
When Ed White joined us for worship last month he reflected back on growing up during the Great Depression, noting that while his family was poor, so was everybody else. He spoke of the pulling together in the nation and the bond of common suffering. Over the years, I’ve talked with lots of folks – including my parents – who lived through those days, and most all of them speak about it in the same terms such that you almost wish you were there.
And, well … be careful what you wish for!
Recession. Depression. Financial crisis. Global credit crunch.
Call it what you will, and I certainly do not pretend any insight, expertise or even a decent clue about the current state of the economy or about what’s around the next bend.
Indeed, as I wrote these words in the middle of last week, I did so with only two certainties in mind:
First, what I wrote on Wednesday could be turned completely upside down by Friday, and my words from Thursday could well be irrelevant by Sunday. I did not say that all certainties would be comforting.
But, second, this certainty: Jesus Christ is lord and savior, thus I can be certain that though the wrong be oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
I’ve heard a few folks ask over the past several weeks, “where is God in the midst of all this?”
I can’t help but think of the story of Jesus, asleep in the stern in the midst of the storm at sea. When his disciples, in a panic, wake him up, he simply says, “where’s your faith?”
I like to imagine that he followed that up with, “let me get some sleep now.”
That’s the Jesus who speaks to us right now, in the midst of this storm: where is your faith?
As it was for Jesus’ followers then, it is for his followers today a simple question: where is our faith? In whom do we trust? What is, for us, right now the heart of the matter?
Is it our 401k statements? Is it the front page headlines? “Global Rate Cuts Fail to Contain Crisis,” screamed the Post on Thursday morning. Is it the political news – does our hope rest in John McCain or Barack Obama?
It’s not that those are unimportant, or that there’s no difference, or that the choices – political, economic, social – that face us don’t matter.
It’s rather this: our well being, our wholeness, our shalom rests on something far deeper than the Dow, far more profound than the Post, far more permanent than our politics.
Christian faith has always been about healing and wholeness, and while it has always been personal it has never been private. Thus, as we consider the present moment and the fractured, unsettled, frightened feelings that so many of us share, remember your own baptism this morning.
You and I, we entered into a community of care and concern and compassion when we were baptized, just as we welcomed Benjamin into that community this morning. It is a community formed and shaped around the singular notion that belonging to one another in Christ brings us wholeness, healing and peace.
That was the heart of the Jesus movement from its inception. Everywhere he went, people were touched, restored, healed and made whole. Jesus was, and remains, many things to many people, and there’s precious little agreement about a lot of it. But one thing everyone agrees on is this: Jesus was a healer – of bodies and souls, of individuals and communities. Where he went, shalom followed.
And most of all, where Jesus went, hearts were healed. He was the great surgeon of the heart.
In our culture and language, when we use the heart as metaphor it speaks of feelings and emotions. In Jesus’ culture and language, the heart was more than that – it was used metaphorically much the way we use soul, or perhaps mind when we use that to suggest something including but more than intellect.
Jesus understood that his followers – indeed, his age – needed nothing so much as to get a new mind for a new time, to have their hearts restored.
As I look around right now, I am struck by that same necessity. We must get a new mind for this new time, we must have our hearts restored.
The church has always been, at its best, a place of healing hearts. We find this healing in many ways, but they can be reduced to two: pray and act. We pray and act for justice. We pray and act for peace. We pray and act for wholeness.
I was visiting with Bobbie English last week, and she was giving thanks for our prayers and marveling at the amount of food that members of this community have brought her as her own heart heals. She said, with a typical Bobbie laugh, “I can feel the love.” We pray and act for healing.
That is the heart of the matter.
I fundamentally believe that they best way through our own difficulties, our own brokenness, our own suffering is through the suffering of others. That is to say, if you want to get through this – whatever this is – then join in solidarity with others who are suffering. Compassion – suffering with. Jesus said to his followers, “be compassionate as your father in heaven is compassionate.”
Those words speak to us now. We are called to pray and act on behalf of the suffering of the world even as we ourselves suffer.
Baptism is both the invitation into this suffering and the sign and seal of the promise that we will never suffer alone in this community. Baptism, as such, is the first step into our own redemption and restoration, our own wholeness and communion with God and with one another in this community of compassion.
As God promised the ancient community to whom Ezekiel spoke, “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
So, this morning, remember your own baptism. Feel your own heart restored as you recall those cleansing waters of restoration.
This is a time for healing, a time for seeking wholeness, for the world is surely broken and in need of a bit of heart surgery.
In the midst of writing this last week, I caught author Sarah Vowell on NPR Talk of the Nation, talking about her new book on the Puritans. Her commentary led me to look up John Winthrop's sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," in which he holds the New World up as a city on a hill. His words rung true to both our historical moment and to the question of how we practice the healing as a community, how we perform surgery of the heart.
Winthrop wrote the piece during the 1630 crossing of the Atlantic as the Puritans came to America to found that city on the hill, and lay claim to their share of its promise. The Puritans' vision surely foundered on the shoals of reality and their own excesses -- including Winthrop's -- but Winthrop's advice to those voyagers resonate today as the nation struggles in the rough water of a battered economy and a diminished politics.
"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
May it be so for us today. Amen.
Ezekiel 36:22-32; Matthew 13:10-20
When Ed White joined us for worship last month he reflected back on growing up during the Great Depression, noting that while his family was poor, so was everybody else. He spoke of the pulling together in the nation and the bond of common suffering. Over the years, I’ve talked with lots of folks – including my parents – who lived through those days, and most all of them speak about it in the same terms such that you almost wish you were there.
And, well … be careful what you wish for!
Recession. Depression. Financial crisis. Global credit crunch.
Call it what you will, and I certainly do not pretend any insight, expertise or even a decent clue about the current state of the economy or about what’s around the next bend.
Indeed, as I wrote these words in the middle of last week, I did so with only two certainties in mind:
First, what I wrote on Wednesday could be turned completely upside down by Friday, and my words from Thursday could well be irrelevant by Sunday. I did not say that all certainties would be comforting.
But, second, this certainty: Jesus Christ is lord and savior, thus I can be certain that though the wrong be oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
I’ve heard a few folks ask over the past several weeks, “where is God in the midst of all this?”
I can’t help but think of the story of Jesus, asleep in the stern in the midst of the storm at sea. When his disciples, in a panic, wake him up, he simply says, “where’s your faith?”
I like to imagine that he followed that up with, “let me get some sleep now.”
That’s the Jesus who speaks to us right now, in the midst of this storm: where is your faith?
As it was for Jesus’ followers then, it is for his followers today a simple question: where is our faith? In whom do we trust? What is, for us, right now the heart of the matter?
Is it our 401k statements? Is it the front page headlines? “Global Rate Cuts Fail to Contain Crisis,” screamed the Post on Thursday morning. Is it the political news – does our hope rest in John McCain or Barack Obama?
It’s not that those are unimportant, or that there’s no difference, or that the choices – political, economic, social – that face us don’t matter.
It’s rather this: our well being, our wholeness, our shalom rests on something far deeper than the Dow, far more profound than the Post, far more permanent than our politics.
Christian faith has always been about healing and wholeness, and while it has always been personal it has never been private. Thus, as we consider the present moment and the fractured, unsettled, frightened feelings that so many of us share, remember your own baptism this morning.
You and I, we entered into a community of care and concern and compassion when we were baptized, just as we welcomed Benjamin into that community this morning. It is a community formed and shaped around the singular notion that belonging to one another in Christ brings us wholeness, healing and peace.
That was the heart of the Jesus movement from its inception. Everywhere he went, people were touched, restored, healed and made whole. Jesus was, and remains, many things to many people, and there’s precious little agreement about a lot of it. But one thing everyone agrees on is this: Jesus was a healer – of bodies and souls, of individuals and communities. Where he went, shalom followed.
And most of all, where Jesus went, hearts were healed. He was the great surgeon of the heart.
In our culture and language, when we use the heart as metaphor it speaks of feelings and emotions. In Jesus’ culture and language, the heart was more than that – it was used metaphorically much the way we use soul, or perhaps mind when we use that to suggest something including but more than intellect.
Jesus understood that his followers – indeed, his age – needed nothing so much as to get a new mind for a new time, to have their hearts restored.
As I look around right now, I am struck by that same necessity. We must get a new mind for this new time, we must have our hearts restored.
The church has always been, at its best, a place of healing hearts. We find this healing in many ways, but they can be reduced to two: pray and act. We pray and act for justice. We pray and act for peace. We pray and act for wholeness.
I was visiting with Bobbie English last week, and she was giving thanks for our prayers and marveling at the amount of food that members of this community have brought her as her own heart heals. She said, with a typical Bobbie laugh, “I can feel the love.” We pray and act for healing.
That is the heart of the matter.
I fundamentally believe that they best way through our own difficulties, our own brokenness, our own suffering is through the suffering of others. That is to say, if you want to get through this – whatever this is – then join in solidarity with others who are suffering. Compassion – suffering with. Jesus said to his followers, “be compassionate as your father in heaven is compassionate.”
Those words speak to us now. We are called to pray and act on behalf of the suffering of the world even as we ourselves suffer.
Baptism is both the invitation into this suffering and the sign and seal of the promise that we will never suffer alone in this community. Baptism, as such, is the first step into our own redemption and restoration, our own wholeness and communion with God and with one another in this community of compassion.
As God promised the ancient community to whom Ezekiel spoke, “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
So, this morning, remember your own baptism. Feel your own heart restored as you recall those cleansing waters of restoration.
This is a time for healing, a time for seeking wholeness, for the world is surely broken and in need of a bit of heart surgery.
In the midst of writing this last week, I caught author Sarah Vowell on NPR Talk of the Nation, talking about her new book on the Puritans. Her commentary led me to look up John Winthrop's sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," in which he holds the New World up as a city on a hill. His words rung true to both our historical moment and to the question of how we practice the healing as a community, how we perform surgery of the heart.
Winthrop wrote the piece during the 1630 crossing of the Atlantic as the Puritans came to America to found that city on the hill, and lay claim to their share of its promise. The Puritans' vision surely foundered on the shoals of reality and their own excesses -- including Winthrop's -- but Winthrop's advice to those voyagers resonate today as the nation struggles in the rough water of a battered economy and a diminished politics.
"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
May it be so for us today. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
7:22 AM
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