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In our readings this morning the heart is mentioned twice. The Jerusalem crowd on the day of Pentecost seeing and hearing the promised Holy Spirit being poured out upon the disciples of Jesus realized they had missed the mark and they were cut to the heart by it. Then, the two disciples on Easter afternoon on the Road to Emmaus not realizing they were in the presence of Jesus raised. Their hearts were burning within them as this Beloved Stranger explained the scriptures to them. Spiritually speaking, being cut to the heart and hearts burning are two ways of describing spiritual conditions of the heart…heart conditions, if I may. Let’s have a look at them.
Many of you know that I sport a pacemaker. Though I’m not sure I really needed the thing, the cardiologist who prescribed it certainly did. He says my heart has a condition, a problem with rhythm. I say, “Nothing new there. You should see me try to dance.” Anyway, the thing about a heart condition is that too often you don’t know you have it and what symptoms you do have can be easily explained away. That fluttering and leaping sensation is just a tummy spasm. The lite-headedness is from sitting too long. The lack of energy, well, that’s from getting older. A heart condition can also really affect your drive. You have to push yourself to get things done. You want to do things, but…eh, maybe tomorrow. It’s quite like the motivational problems that arise with depression. Everything requires more effort than it should.
While we’re on the topic of the heart and drive, in the Bible the heart is the chief organ of human life, the centre of vitality. The Hebrews believed that the blood held the life of a person and the heart pumped that life through the body. More metaphorically, the heart is the seat of your drive. Your passion.
Jesus said some things about the heart. He says, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Lk. 12:34).” But wait, treasure sounds like pleasure, or that’s the way the heart’s sin-sick buddy the mind makes it sound and, therefore following your heart is not always the best advice to heed. The heart’s drive for what it treasures can be and so often is deceiving, self-deceiving. The LORD spoke through Jeremiah saying, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Je. 17:9).”
Since the heart can be so misleading, God fortunately promises us a new heart. Through Ezekiel God promised, “I will give you a new heart and put a new Spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh (Ez. 36:26).” Since Pentecost, we have had a taste of that new heart promise fulfilled in us in Christ by the gift of Holy Spirit who works within us changing our hearts (and our minds) to be more like Jesus’s.
But back to the heart being the seat of our drive, our passion. As I said, following the heart can be misleading because the heart can and most often is be wrongly impassioned. Similarly, the heart can lose its passion. You hear this with athletes. They played the game so well for so long. It was their passion. Anytime, anywhere, they’d play. But then, it’s not that something happened. It’s just their hearts aren’t in it anymore. They’ve been on the job too long. They’ll finish the season, but don’t expect them to do more than just show up. Their hearts need to be rekindled with passion.
Congregations can get to the point of where their hearts just aren’t in it and will start to show evidence of a “heart condition”. We show up, but that’s about it. Many Psalms encourage us to “serve the Lord with our whole hearts”, but…I think I’ll just sit here. My heart’s just not in it. Another fundraiser. Another meeting. Another anniversary. Meh.” The passion is just not there anymore and church is a just duty, an obligation among many,…and wouldn’t we just love a break from it. But, that feels too much like quitting on God.
I think the root cause of this heart condition is that passion for the church took the place of passion for the Lord. You see, rightly impassioned hearts, hearts impassioned for the Lord, will be passionate about knowing him and serving him no matter what form of ministry that takes. If we lose our passion with respect to the church, it just may be because Jesus is trying to get our hearts to burn with passion, to be impassioned for him. The end result of hearts turned back to Jesus is usually a new way of being the people of God, a new way of being the church in which our passion is to love God, our neighbours, each other, and ourselves more deeply from the heart; a new way of being the church in this world is, I think, where we are at these days.
Back when I was a kid I watched a TV show called The Land of the Lost. It was about a father, son, and daughter going rafting down this “unexplored river”. But they get go over a waterfall or get sucked into a whirlpool and somehow wind up in this absolutely beautiful place with plant species and animals that have been extinct for millions of years. They think they’ve found Paradise…that is until the T. Rex shows up.
The 80’s and 90’s were the end of the era of when non-churched people got on the raft and came to church because there was a cultural message that impressed upon them that people needed to come to church to find God and “peace”. They came and often found something really special…the presence of the Lord in the midst of good people who cared about them. But, these church people were a people lost in time and it didn’t take long for the T. Rex to show. The vicious carnivore of “the institutional church” bearing the fangs of “what churches are supposed to do” and this is “the way we’ve always done it”. Then dinosaur hounded them and guilted them into doing things they didn’t know how to do and criticized them when they made mistakes. Instead of hearts burning with passion as they felt Jesus speaking to them through the Scriptures these newcomers found themselves being chased into a cave by a dinosaur that would kill and eat their spirits. And so people got “done” with the church to the extent that the box regarding religious affiliation on our national census that is most checked is “None”.
We, those who still come, need to be cut to the heart as our Acts passage says. Cut to the heart…this is what happens when we realize our hearts have been otherwise even wrongly impassioned, burning for the wrong things or not burning at all. The Jerusalem Jews realized how far off the mark they had been about Jesus and what God was doing in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth. God was doing something new in their midst, but they couldn’t see it due to their otherwise impassioned hearts. Their hearts were so otherwise impassioned they tried to kill this new thing. When God came to the people of God with a new revelation of himself, the people of God killed him and persecuted those who followed him.
Yet, because of the work of the Holy Spirit in their midst that day, the people there in Jerusalem realized that Jesus truly was their Lord and Messiah and…they had indeed crucified him. They realized this and they were cut to the heart. They were remorseful, fearing the punishment they knew they deserved. They needed to sit in holy silence before the Lord and feel the sting of how lost they were; feel humbled, indignant with themselves at what they had done. They felt the need to do something to right the wrong that was in them so they asked the Disciples, “Brothers, what can we do?”
Peter’s answer was basically repent and receive the Holy Spirit. The Greek word for “repent” literally means to change your thinking, to change your mindedness – rethink and orient yourself to what God is up to. We need to commit ourselves fully to discovering and getting onboard with what Jesus is doing in our midst and in our communities rather than just doing church according to what we believe churches are supposed to do in the ways we’ve always done them. That’s the T. Rex, remember.
A good way to open our eyes up to what God is doing in and among us and around us to help change our thinking on what the church, our church should be up to is to talk to strangers. The hearts of those two disciples on the road to Emmaus began to burn, to become impassioned as they began to talk to that stranger, that person they didn’t know, that person who was unfamiliar to them. Those two disciples could only see the death of Jesus, the injustice of it, and feel the grief of his loss. They were feeling disillusioned. They had hoped that Jesus was the one who would restore God to God’s people, but the leaders of God’s people kiboshed that. They handed him over to the Romans and killed him…but…some of those “hysterical” women say they saw him raised. Those two disciples were going back home to figure what to do next having seemingly bet and lost everything on Jesus. The Stranger, Jesus in disguise, told them this was the way things had to happen and opened the Scriptures to them. When they had grown friendly enough with this stranger to share a meal, their eyes were opened to who this stranger really was.
It goes to show what might happen if we who are still quite loyal to Jesus but are growing disillusioned with the Church or already are disillusioned what could happen if we talk to strangers, people outside the church, about this Jesus to whom we are loyal and why we are loyal to whom, talk to them about what he means to us personally, and talk about how it is obvious this institution called the church in our culture at present majoratively just does not look and act like Jesus. Out of that conversation, conversation with those quite different than ourselves, those strangers, we just may find Jesus in our midst opening our eyes to what he is doing in the lives of others and in our communities. Who knows? We may just find a new sense of passion when we have so long suffered a lack of energy and enthusiasm for church. Who knows? Amen.
