The Heart of the Matter

The Hebrew and Greek words for “heart” are used 814 times in the Bible to refer to the human heart and 26 times to refer to the heart of God. Five of those uses come up in today’s readings.

In Greek it’s cardio, a root familiar to anybody who has ever had an EKG or been in a Cardiac Care facility or gotten your heart rate up on purpose by doing cardio exercises at the gym. In the world of the Bible, the heart was seen as more than a pump. It was the center of emotions and feelings, of moods and passions. Some of that carries over to today, of course, as we remembered when we celebrated Valentine’s Day earlier this month.

The heart is capable of both joy and grief. In Acts 2:26 we read: “therefore my heart was glad.” In Psalm 13 the poet asks “must I have sorrow in my heart all the day?” The heart can be a source of courage as in II Samuel 17: “the heart of a valiant man that is like the heart of a lion.” Or it can be the source of fear, as when Joseph’s brothers discover their brother is still alive “and their hearts failed them and they turned trembling to one another…” (Genesis 42:28)

But in the Bible the heart is seen as even more than all of this. We tend to think of matters of the “head” and of the “heart” as separate realities with a clear division of labor: the head as the place for matters of intellect and the heart as more emotional. But for ancient peoples the heart was also seen as the center for decision-making, and as the place of devotion and obedience to God. It was the place where discernment happened.

As we begin our 2020 Lenten journey tonight, we hear Jesus saying in today’s gospel reading: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” It’s more than a good stewardship text. If our focus and our energy are on the concerns of this world then that is where our heart is going to be as well. But moth and rust consume all of our stuff, eventually. Even we go back to the dust.

So where is your heart tonight? Jesus says in another place: seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all the rest will fall into place. Our heart is meant for God.

And so we heard the prophet Joel inviting us to “return to the Lord with all your heart.” What would it take for us to give God all of our hearts? What holds us back from that radical a faith? Joel also says: “rend your hearts and not your clothing.” In Biblical times, to show remorse and grief, people tore their clothing. Joel seems to suggest that God desires a torn or broken heart. What might that be about?

In Psalm 51 (which we will come to after the sermon today, as part of our confession) we’ll pray: “create in me a clean heart, O God.” And then there, too, we’ll pray that the heart that is acceptable to God is a broken and contrite heart. Again we might ask: why does God want our hearts to be broken rather than whole?

What is the ‘heart of the matter’ when it comes to keeping a holy Lent? Remember that the forty days of Lent are patterned after the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, following his baptism in the Jordan River. And remember that those forty days were patterned after the forty years that the Israelites spent in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert, after escaping from Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea. In both cases the time in the wilderness is about prayer and learning to trust God, about temptation and spiritual growth. It’s about the journey from slavery toward freedom.

Do you remember how in that Exodus story Pharaoh’s heart was hardened? His government was oppressing these Hebrew slaves yet he refused to change. He refused to let God’s people go. He actually didn’t believe they were God’s people at all, but his slaves. Where his “heart” was, there was his treasure also; namely with those pyramids and all the economic wealth that was being built on the backs of slave labor. And so Pharaoh could not see (or he would not see) the pain that his economic plan was causing those at the bottom rung of the social ladder. His heart was hardened to their plight, and things went downhill from there for him.

The Exodus, seen from the perspective of Pharaoh, was a financial disaster. That’s a reminder to us that perspective matters, and that we need hearts of flesh to rightly perceive God’s presence in our lives and in the world. But the problem with hearts of flesh is, well, that they are fragile. They are, as Ingrid Michaelson puts it, breakable.

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess

We are so fragile
And our cracking bones make noise
And we are just
Breakable, breakable, breakable, girls and boys

Anyone who has ever loved and lost knows this. Too often once it happens we learn to put up shields and protective layers to keep our hearts safe and protected. And so we harden our hearts, thinking that is a way to protect ourselves. But hard hearts are the way of Pharaoh, not God.

The witness of this day suggests that God requires broken hearts. Does that strike any of you as odd? I think to grasp what is at stake here we need to understand first that both the prophet and the poet imagine that God’s heart is a broken heart, torn by what humans do to themselves and to one another. Sometimes people ask “why does God allow suffering in the world?” But while that is a fair enough question for someone in the midst of suffering themselves, I think there is a more important question than the “why” question. Where is God in the midst of human suffering?

We who have just finished celebrating the Incarnation from Advent into Christmas and through this long Epiphany season insist that God is right there in the midst of it all. Emmanuel—God-with-us—means just that. God with us in all of it. Not standing somewhere high above and detached, but right in the thick of it, in both the joys and in the sorrows of whatever life brings. It is hard to imagine, if you accept that reality, that God’s heart could be anything other than a broken heart. To see how people behave and treat one another and even sometimes how we treat ourselves (sometimes even in God’s name) surely breaks God’s heart.

I think that what is being suggested in these texts is that if we mean to approach God we need to allow our hearts to be broken as well. We need to become vulnerable, both to God and with one another. Community and love are not possible without vulnerability. Indeed, that is very much the message when we reach the end of this holy season, in that Upper Room where Jesus gives a maundatum novum: a new commandment to love one another, modeling a way to do that by becoming a vulnerable servant and washing his disciples’ feet. Love is the path to a broken and contrite heart. To pay attention—to be alive—to care about a world beyond our ego-centric realities is almost certainly to have our hearts broken. We are tempted to “harden our hearts” (as Pharaoh did) and call it survival of the fittest. Or we are tempted to give our hearts away to idols—the idol of money, or of security, or of nation.

And so I simply ask, as this Lenten journey begins, where is your heart? And what state is it in?

And perhaps more importantly: where would you like your heart to be in forty days? How might this season be for you as an individual and for St. Matthew’s as a community an invitation to draw closer to the heart of God?

The heart of the matter in Lent is that there are spiritual disciplines, practices of faith, that can help us with our heart’s desire:

• Fasting, or some version of fasting helps us to be disciplined with our bodies;  
• Meditating on God’s Holy Word and studying the Scriptures feeds us with food that really does sustain and nurture us, in body, mind, and spirit;
• Alms-giving insists that we see the poor and the suffering in our midst; 
• Prayer, especially in the form of confession, cleanses and heals us and opens the door to reconciliation with those whom we have hurt. (Remember that you can only confess your own sins – not anyone else’s!)

These ancient practices push us out of ourselves, in order to glimpse the world if only just a little bit from God’s perspective. The heart of the matter in Lent isn’t about shame, which in my experience paralyzes us. It is not about beating ourselves up. Rather, it’s about learning to care, learning to love, learning to hope. It’s about asking God for a heart of flesh, and knowing that unlike a heart of stone, a heart of flesh can easily be torn. A heart of flesh is so breakable.

But that is precisely the kind of heart that God can use.