|
Back to Sermon Archives
February 11, 2007
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: Jeremiah 17:5-10, “For Holiness of Heart,” Luke
6:17-26
“For the Love of St. Valentine: Devious Hearts &
Dubious Blessings”
This bulletin cover as proposed called for a color copier! This is what
it would have looked like – all striking red and purple colors of the heart, and
black links of chain across it! So who’s going to get us a copier?
While we’re at it, how about a digital signboard, too?! Seriously, we
wanted to lift up chained hearts of struggle throughout Black History -- as well
as St. Valentine imprisoned.
There are at least three legends of Valentine, all ending in his execution.
First, while in prison he falls in love, perhaps with the jailer’s daughter, to
whom he sends the first love note ever signed, “From Your Valentine.” Second,
Valentine tries to help Christians escape their specially harsh conditions in Roman
prisons.
Third -- and the version that speaks in our time as well to the freedom of
love to be love, and the right of love to be consecrated in marriage -- the
Emperor Claudius II leads Rome into various bloody and unpopular campaigns
against other peoples and states. Sound familiar? It is hard to get
soldiers to join his armies. Sound familiar? Claudius takes that to
mean young men would rather remain with their families and loved ones.
Sound familiar? So he cancels all romantic engagements as well as all
marriages then taking place in Rome.
Valentine is a priest in Rome, and along with priest named Marius, does not
agree with the emperor. He sees what is happening to young men as an issue of
justice for them and their beloved ones. So he defies and resists the
emperor by continuing to perform “underground” secret marriages for young
lovers! Sound familiar?? But it’s hard to keep love secret for long.
So Valentine is arrested. Claudius orders his head cut off on the date we
now know as Valentine’s Day. So who are the martyrs for love today?
For the love of love itself? For love as alternative to war? Love
that leads committed, covenanted adults to want to marry? Even against the
law? Who is unchaining our hearts? Setting love free?
Covenant love always starts with God. It is the unconditional intervention
of God in our personal lives and our corporate histories – particularly in times
and places where we find ourselves most enchained and enslaved – to whatever powers
of sin and death, oppression and exploitation. In such times and places “the
God of Israel” sees our sufferings, hears our cries, “comes down” to offer God’s
power to us, and leads us out of bondage and toward the “freedom land.” In
the process God makes covenant with us – to be our God, to be in relationship, in
partnership with those who will be God’s people – no matter what happens between
us! The first and last word, God promises, will be “love.” God’s kind
of love is the form and function of the love that calls us in all of our covenant-making
and –keeping.
Of course, that kind of love is not easy for us to promise to make or to
keep. It is not even easy for God! The God of scripture repeatedly
shows understandable impatience with us and even intolerance for us in the
limits of our human condition! One way to see Jesus as coming into
our life and history is that God gives up on seeing us as perennial
problem-children only fit to be punished. God sends Jesus instead.
Jesus becomes for us the radical outpouring of God’s own self – embracing us
just as we are – with all our impervious impossibilities!
According to Jeremiah, the heart is a very big part of the problem of being human.
In fact, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse – who can understand
it?” God asks the prophet. Why is there such disconnect between what we humans
want or intend to do -- and what we end up doing? What Paul calls our forever
doing what we would not do, and our failing to do what we would do – often in spite
of ourselves! So Jeremiah says God goes more deeply into our human dilemma.
God tests our minds, searches our hearts. God learns to appreciate all the
“devious” ways we get to the ends, to the fruits, of our lives.
Even as we are all in this dilemma together, each is responsible in the end.
The challenge of our hearts is we can be so easily turned. We are tempted
to trust more in persons than we do in God. We are tempted to make might --
mere physical strength -- the right to lord ourselves over others. We look
at those in our own time and place who seem to trust most in military power, for
instance, and in winning at all costs. Jeremiah says how like a “shrub” (Molly
Ivins’ word for “bush”!) “in the desert” we may become – how isolated, how self-focusing,
self-enforcing we become. We start dismissing out of hand anyone who does
not agree with us -- who does not serve the same narrowly-vested interests we do.
We are left with no sense of where any “relief” might come from -- how there might
be an alternative – even forgiveness and a new way of proceeding!
Stubborn and stony hearts leave us smaller and stingier persons and more
desperately settled and stuck in our ways. How might we become instead not
only “those who trust in the LORD” – but, Jeremiah adds, those “whose trust IS
the LORD”?! So that God becomes not a mere part of our lives – specially
invoked when we are in trouble – but a full partner in the whole of our lives?!
A gift and a hope, to us and all others? How might we rediscover (I think
we are born with it!) the joy of giving in every last part of our lives? Allow
the resources of God to flow fully and freely in us and through us?
As a congregation like Jeremiah’s “tree planted by water” – even the Truckee!
Outreaching, outstretching, out-touching, out-serving our “roots by the stream!”
No longer fearful in times of heat or anxious in times of drought? (Much as
we pray for rain in this season!) We know our essential “greenness,” our fruitfulness,
depends not on us but on God who lives in us – and flows through us for all the
world!
We want to be Christian, more loving, more holy, like Jesus – in our hearts!
Howard Thurman -- initial co-pastor of Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples
in San Francisco, teacher and author on meditation and spiritual direction --
tells us in this prayer that the heart is source of all our desires, birthplace
of all our hopes, springboard of all our spiritual resolutions! Yet our
hearts would not be open and honest, and we would not be fully and freely human,
if we did not see that our fears and hatreds also are passions that come from
the heart!
We are not given to liberal illusion of the absence of sin and death in us.
The good news of our hearts this Valentine’s Day is we do not have to hide them!
We confess we are such mixed blessings! We learn, like God, to test our
own minds and search our own hearts! Our hearts always seem to lead
us in conflicting directions at once. Life for us is a discipleship of
deep discernment! Through it all, Howard Thurman promises, and in the end, our
hearts may come to cherish our loves and honor our deepest hungers and needs to
be just who we are.
We learn from who God is for us in Jesus that nothing human is alien to God!
God is no longer afraid or ashamed of anything deep within us. And since Jesus
is for us the revelation of God we have decided to live with and live out in our
lives, then nothing human is alien to us! We, too, may go far beyond fear
and shame. God can accept and even can love the most unacceptable and unlovable
ones among us. So each one of us can accept and even love those same hard
parts of ourselves! For all parts are parts of the heart! We saw this
week even astronauts – carefully tuned as they are – have to learn how confusing
our hopes and fears, loves and hates, attractions and revulsions can be. We
need not deny or demean anyone’s differences from us. For we know we all come
from one source – within and without. Yet we branch, and bud, and blossom,
and bloom in every last possible way and direction.
So our hearts are “mixed blessings” at best – yet they are our hearts!
Always breaking, always mending – and always so hard to know which is which!
Always vulnerable, always resilient – always between every feeling and no feeling
at all. According to Luke’s version of this “sermon on the mount,” Jesus “comes
down” to us, makes this a “sermon on the plain” – just as God “comes down” in Jesus.
Covenant love is only possible between and among equals – partners of equal standing
and on equal footing. If we are to test one another’s minds, search one another’s
hearts, we have to be able to see one another’s eyes! That, too, has been
challenging for God to learn. What self-respecting – and self-protecting!
– God would not choose to remain so detached and so unapproachable, so distant and
so un-nameable, as never to have to answer or to account to us in any way?
Just see how much trouble we are! Such a multitude of those in need – looking
for healing of diseases and curing of unclean spirits – even as we are welcome to
bring – for healing if not for curing next Sunday! We bless the oils for anointing
and offer ourselves up to God – asking for health and wholeness – in mind, body,
spirit, and relationship. Acknowledging how troubled we may be – to ourselves
and to one another, as well as to God. Yet the God we find in Jesus does not
ask us to withhold anything of ourselves but to reach out and touch the power!
The power that heals and makes whole, that blesses us and sets us free.
What dubious blessings are these! Jesus here calls upon his disciples
and us so to identify with the multitudes in their need that we are no longer
the “poor in spirit” addressed in Matthew’s version of this sermon, but we are
the poor ourselves! We are the hungry! We are the weeping! We
are the hated, excluded, reviled, and defamed because of Jesus! We are
those who not only trust in God among other powers of this world, but we are
those whose trust IS God alone! We trust in the love of God to prevail
over every other power.
Only in this trust do we stand with the prophets who give vision and voice to
a new way of seeing and doing in all the world. Our goal is not to be rich.
Our goal is not to be fully fed. Our goal is not even to laugh and be glad.
Our goal is to love God with our whole hearts, and minds, and bodies, and souls
– and to love our neighbors, all our neighbors, with the love God in Jesus has come
to love us! The love we in Jesus and Jesus in us may even find for ourselves.
And then we may be truly amazed and set free by how little else we find we finally
need.
Our brother John Dodson, retired pastor and recent consultant on fund-raising
and -developing, has offered his services to us through our next capital
campaign. We plan to begin Easter – speaking of freedom days! – to find
the continuing funding to help this wonderful building of ours serve others and
us as fully as it can. John inspires us by the example of his own life and
faith. In the last two years he has passed through serious illness and the
sudden death of his wife Sue. He witnesses to how his losses have led him
to see that now his spiritual purpose in life is to proceed with such gratitude
and generosity as to give away everything – everything! -- before he dies.
John shared with our campaign planning team – we are open to others who want
to help! – his Christmas card of this past year. Talk about the love of St.
Valentine, the love of love itself, love of the leadings of deviant hearts and the
learning of dubious blessings –
“This doesn’t sound like the usual Christmas letter,” John acknowledges, “but
then this is not a usual time or place for me. I want to end this letter with
some things you already know; I thought I did too. They take extraordinary
courage.“
- Go as gently as you can, cease criticism of others, listen more.
- Learn that kindness has the power to heal. Negativity destroys.
- Begin each day by saying, ‘Today is a great day to die.’
[ Live each day as fully and freely as if it were the last! ]
- Always ask forgiveness and give it even when not asked.
Do these things and you will be amazed at the power you generate.
With a heart full of love, [signed] John.” Amen.
top of page
Archives
|
