Sermon: The heart of the world
A number of years
ago when I was on week-long retreat at the Ignatian Centre in Guelph I was especially
struck and touched by a particular religious statue on the grounds.
Every time I come
back I wish I could take you there, for you to see and experience the place as
well. And maybe we’ll do that sometime –
enjoy a spiritual field trip.
A few years ago one
statue In particular caught my attention and stirred something in me. It’s the statue that shows what Roman
Catholics know as the blessed heart of Jesus – a statue of Jesus with his chest
opened and the strong, compassionate heart of God burning and beating within him.
The statue stands
across the road from the main building and overlooks a small plot of land
bounded by a hedge, in which are laid to rest the remains of Jesuit brothers who
have died and been buried there over the years.
I had seen it before and hadn’t thought much of it. Protestants generally don’t focus on the
blessed heart of Jesus. We even tell
jokes about it. I used to call it the statue
of “the Jesus of open-heart surgery.”
This time,
though, it must have been me that needed opening-of-the-heart surgery because
it touched me deeply. And for some
months after coming back home and to work here, when I would be talking with
someone about a struggle they or someone they knew was having, I would suddenly
and pleasantly get an almost sensory experience of the heart of God beating
within my own chest – shaping, informing and enlarging within me a deep and
very particular kind of compassion for the other, and I would recall this image
of Jesus, and give thanks that I could share in God’s life in this way – could
feel the heart of God beating within my own body, my life a vessel of God’s
compassion – big enough, or maybe small enough, to be of use.
This morning we
have read Jeremiah’s vision and promise of God writing the divine law of love
on all our hearts.
Jeremiah lived in
a time when the people are doing all they know how to be good and better than
they have been. They know they have made
a mess of things. As a kingdom they have
wandered far from the good way of being God has shown them, and as a people
they are far from being holy, just, compassionate, and a light to other
nations.
So when they find
the old law books – the Torah of Moses and the laws about how to be a good
kingdom together, they dust them off, confess their waywardness and promise to
follow the old ways again. They clean up
and renovate the Temple, which had become quite a mess. They reform the priesthood and commit
themselves anew to the system of worship, offerings and prayers that had been
their ancestors’ spiritual practice. The
king himself – good, religious king Josiah, spearheads the reform and the
movement back to the basics.
But it doesn’t
work, and Jeremiah sees it. He doesn’t
like what he sees. Even more he hates
being the one to blow the whistle on how it isn’t working, and how the
top-down, back-to-the-good-old days reform is actually only making things
worse.
The people also
hate Jeremiah for it. They don’t like
being told the truth about the way they are headed when they are only doing the
best they knew how.
But Jeremiah sees
what we also know from experience:
· that
the powers of the day never get it right all the time – that even though they
may be well-intentioned and well-informed and even pious, and sometimes do and
enact exactly the good and right thing, as leaders (especially the higher up they are) they are also so bound to
their own need for power, the need to serve the interests of others in power
who support them, and at times simply so caught by their own human blindness and
pride, that inevitably they offer a mixture of both bad and good leadership and
laws
·
that
even when good laws are passed and good directions of compassion, care and love
for what God loves are set by the king and the government, effective education
and enforcement is always another question; people and powers with other
agendas always find a way around them
·
that
even when victories are won, barriers are broken, and good gains are made towards
equality, justice, understanding, compassion, openness and inclusiveness of
care, they always have to be won over and over again, anew in each generation,
because there is something unholy as well at work within us – especially when
we gather in groups and tribes, that resists and undoes the good of all for the
sake of self-interest
The people –
especially the king, hate Jeremiah for bringing all this to their
attention. They abuse him. They arrest him. They deport and exile him. He seems to be the bearer of nothing but bad
news, so they label him treasonous – an under-miner of public confidence and the
security of the state.
Which makes the
reading today all the more remarkable, because it’s a moving and inspiring
piece of good news from Jeremiahg – a vision of a truly better day coming, that
stands in stark contrast to the current reality, and the hopefulness of which
is really seen only when set against a clear understanding of the current
darkness.
“A day is
coming,” Jeremiah says, “when the law of God – the law of loving together what
God has made, will be written not on stone, but on the human heart – not as
laws that are a mixture of good and bad, that we cannot completely enforce, and
that have to be rewritten every generation because we always find ways to undo
their intent – but as a basic knowledge of what is good and right, of what is
loving and just, written on all our hearts and simply, spontaneously beating in
tune with God’s perfect desire in all our living and all our being together.”
Can you imagine
such a day? Jeremiah could.
Can you imagine
such a life? We believe we have seen
one. What makes us Christian is our
shared belief that in Jesus such a promise and such a life has come to be –
that in Jesus the heart of God truly has come to dwell and to beat in human
being and living.
And so what about
us?
We are called to
share in this life – for our own sake, for our own wholeness, and for the sake
of the world and its goodness, because it really is the only way that the heart
of God beats steadily in our world – if people like us of faith, hope and love,
are able to let God’s heart beat in and through us.
We know we can
live that way. Our hearts can be opened
to God and beat in tune with God’s heart, but I think we also know it’s never a
once-for-all-time operation and transformation.
It’s something we have to renew and struggle towards and let ourselves
be opened to time and again, in different ways, depending on where we are in
our journey.
Sometimes and in
some situations – in response to some needs, it’s easy to know the response of
God’s heart, and to act it out.
Other times,
though, and in other situations and issues, we wonder. Things get complicated. There are different sides to an issue that
others may see, that God definitely sees, that are good for us talk about, and
slowly to feel our way together towards the desire of God – or at least what it
may be.
And other times
yet? There are so many times when our
own self-interest is strong, when cultural attitudes are engrained, when pride
and blindness and habit get in the way – times when we really do need a little
opening-of-the-heart surgery.
And a good
question is: how do we do that? How do
we open ourselves to it? How do we share
together in that spiritual process – that spiritual journey of dying and rising
together with Christ to new life?
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