This homily was delivered in Christ Episcopal Church, Yankton, South Dakota on March 18, 2018 on the Fifth Sunday in Lent.
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Almighty
God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of
sinners: Grant your people grace to love
what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied
changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are
to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen
(The Collect for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, The Book of Common Prayer, The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979, pg. 219)
(The Collect for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, The Book of Common Prayer, The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979, pg. 219)
Walking through the doors of this church or any
church on any day; particularly, on day of worship like today is, in essence, an
act of public confession. We are saying, “I am a sinner in need of redemption.”
At the beginning of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, I
presented a homily in which I said sin could be defined by one word: selfish. I said that “Any term that can be suffixed
with ‘ish’ is an indication that it’s not the real thing but rather an
approximation that is less than real or presented as being more than what it is;
therefore, sin is anything that approximates us; lessens who we truly are, or
tries to make us look more than who we truly are.” We have all, in some way or another and at
some point or another, acted selfishly. As
the Apostle Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, “All have sinned and fallen
short of the Glory of God.” [1]
In our collect for today, we acknowledge, that despite
our selfishness God’s influence is pervasive; that God “alone can bring into order our unruly
wills and affections. What this prayer indicates is that sin/selfishness does
not nor cannot keep God at bay. God is always in search of the lost, and God
comes running to meet the contrite in heart as Jesus taught in his parable of
the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son.
In other words, God
goes where we go to get us to the place where God is.
In this prayer, we ask for grace, the unmerited gift
of God to love what God commanded, and what is it that God has commanded? It is what Jesus summed up as the greatest
commandant – to love that which God’s loves; to love our neighbors as ourselves,
to love our enemies; in short, it is to love all that is in order to fully love
God with all our hearts, souls, and minds.[2]
In this prayer, we ask for grace to desire what God
has promised, and what is it that God promised? God’s promise is the restoration of creation
and the redemption of humanity to the goodness in which and for which it was
made. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is
depicted as putting the promise of God in these terms, “I came that they (all) may
have life, and have it abundantly.”[3] Several Sundays ago in a homily on a
baptismal prayer we examined this sense of abundance in terms of finding the gift of joy and wonder in all of God’s works.[4]
In this prayer, we ask for grace that amidst the
swift and varied changes of the world; our hearts are fixed; are anchored where
true joys are to be found. Each age, in
which this prayer has been said; including our own, finds itself caught in the riptides
and whirlpools of current events that are ever in flux.
It is easy while walking on the troubled waters of
the present to be caught up in its turmoil and like Peter to lose faith, to
lose hope, and start caving inward, sinking into a deluded sense of self. It is
so easy in such an environment to drown in a vision of a faithless, hopeless,
and unloving world, to put on a truly dark lens that hides the reality of God’s
love for the world we live in and that prevents us from seeing ourselves for who
we truly are.
So where is true joy to be found?
Since I begin this series of homilies, I find so
many of our collects and prayers mentioning the heart. To the modern ear, all this talk about the
heart may seem archaic, if not sentimental.
Why not talk about the mind?
Isn’t the “heart” only a metaphor for what we now
call the mind, our thoughts and our emotions? After all, isn’t it what we think,
what we perceive as good and evil that gets us into trouble or keeps it out of
it?
Undoubtedly, there is a connection between our
thoughts and our troubles and joys. We know, scientifically, that there link
between what we perceive, think, and feel. Scripture acknowledges this
connection as noted in the commandment to love God with all one’s heart and all
one’s mind.
The heart and the mind are closely linked, but
function differently. Physically
speaking, the heart feels and the mind perceives.
Take the broad field of science, for example. As an
engine of science, the mind perceives that it is limited to and by what
questions it can answer as empirical fact.
It can answer when questions, where questions, what questions, and how
questions, but the question that all the empirical sciences struggle with are
the pure why questions; especially, the question why we exist – “Why anything?”
It’s at that point empirical science hits a wall, begins
to unravel, and becomes vacuous. Any attempt to answer the why of existence
causes the mind to enter the realm of speculation, philosophy, ontology, and
theology. Having said that, however, one
thing both theologians and scientists can and most do agree on is that there is
no scientific proof or disproof for the existence of God or why we exist, and
this, I believe, is where the heart comes in.
Our minds recognize another way of knowing that
comes by way of experience or feeling. To
know God is to feel God in some manner or another and that is why scripture and
our prayers talk in terms of the heart. We know God, not because we know what
God is, know how God is, or know where God is. We know God because we feel God
and the feeling by which we know God is called love.
Scripture
tells us God is love,[5]
and that feeling of love is centered in the core of our being, our soul, what
we call the heart where our made-in-the-image-of-God-self resides. Almost every personal encounter with God in
scripture is conveyed through an experience which conveys the feeling of God’s
presence. Read the Psalms, and consider the terms the apostle Paul uses to
describe our relationship to God: faith,
hope, and love. They are all feeling
terms, and they are found in one form or another in every letter Paul wrote.
Joy is a feeling.
The mind doesn’t feel. The mind processes feelings;
gives them a name, tells us where, what, and how we feel, but frequently can’t
tell us why we feel the way we do. We
can think happy thoughts that lead to happy feelings or we can think bad
thoughts that lead to bad feelings.
It is a scientific fact that our visceral feelings
can affect the physical heart’s health. Scripture intuitively gets the
importance of paying attention to what we feel as a matter of the heart more
than the head. Scriptures gets it right when obeying the greatest commandment
begins with the heart then moves through the totality of being to the mind, the
agency by which we perceive and comprehend the joy and wonder of creation as an
expression of God’s love.
As followers
of Jesus, we have come to understand that our true joy is experienced in the immense
parental love of God for all creation, a love we see in Jesus, a love we share
with Jesus and with all God’s children. It is that love; that feeling of joy
which anchors us against the tug of the
swift and varied changes of the world.
When our hearts are fixed on the
source of our true joy, God’s love for us and all creation, we can say with
Paul:
“For I am convinced that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things
to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[6]
When we came into this house of worship this morning,
we made a confession that we are sinful and in need of redemption. When we leave this place, by God’s grace, may we feel sent into the world professing that faith
and that hope which is fixed on our true Joy, the love of God we experience and
feel in Christ Jesus.
Amen.
[1]
Romans 3:23
[2]
Deuteronomy 6:5
[3]
John 10:10
[4] “The
Book of Common Prayer,” The Church
Hymnal Corporation, New York, 1979, pg. 308
[5] 1
John 4:8
[6]
Romans 8:38 & 39
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