February 20, 2005
The Heart of Faith
Riley E. Jensen
There is a line from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” that I call to mind at the beginning of every Lenten Season:
“We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.”
Certainly it has happened to you as it has to me that you return to a favorite book, or see an old movie, or make a pilgrimage back to a place of childhood joy, and it is as if you had never had that experience before for all the new things you discover. And for me that is the thrill of the journey of faith; it is familiar yet forever new.
It’s a good thing, too, or you would be riding me out on a rail like that tough group of elders who lost patience with their new young minister. He was the one who preached the same sermon three Sundays in a row. The first time they gave him the benefit of the doubt, the second time they began to get irritated, and the third time they confronted him with their “get-a-new-sermon-or-else” speech. To which the young minister responded with a touch more arrogance than common sense, “When you start doing what I told you in the first sermon, then I will preach a new sermon.”
Yet I suppose those same folks under other circumstances could be found complaining that they didn’t hear the same comforting clichés woven into their sermons week-after-week. It’s tough being a minister, but this isn’t about being a minister, it is about being a Christian and living the Christian life. That’s a big challenge for any of us even during the best of times.
The Season of Lent is that part of the church year when we get our annual spiritual checkup. How are we doing? Is it tougher than we expected? Do we need some help? Have we wandered off the trail? Do we need to get our bearings? Lent is a time to go back where we started and to think again about the basics. I know there are times when we can get bored or impatient reviewing the same material over-and-over again, but I’m banking on the wisdom of Eliot which essentially is that when we return to those basics, those foundational elements of faith, we will glean new insights and be re-energized for the continuing journey.
I also have to acknowledge that a primary source of inspiration for this series of Lenten sermons has been Marcus Borg’s book The Heart of Christianity. Borg has the reputation for being an iconoclastic Christian who tears things down and then tries to put Humpty Dumpty together again. However, during this period of Lent, I commend this book to you as the reflections of a man whose faith has not gotten lost in scholarship but pulsates with a personal relationship with his God.
I. Does Faith Change: The Fear of Uncertainty
Karen Armstrong taught us in her book The Battle for God that the fundamentalist mentality exists in all of the major religions. That is certainly what Jesus is encountering in our Scripture lesson as he takes on the radical right of his own day. Preachers do best with texts, and I find that our scripture is best summarized in Verses 11 and 18: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth that defiles them…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart.”
Like most of you I don’t like conflict but I have also found that sometimes I can’t avoid it. And I have found over the years that sometimes the deepest truth is discovered in the most serious disagreement. Maybe that is why when I turn to scripture and encounter Jesus and his antagonists going at it, my attention is peaked. For this is about more than mere mean spiritedness, this is a legitimate and deep disagreement between representatives of two faith traditions.
Clearly the scribes and Pharisees were threatened by Jesus as they always were by anyone who challenged the ancient and the time-honored ways. Theirs was tough and exhausting work constantly having to be on the lookout for the slightest challenge to their authority. We know these people. They have been convenient foils for Christians down through the centuries but seldom have we appreciated their earnestness. Seldom have we valued the energy and even the intelligence that it took for them to ward off the enemies of all that they held sacred.
That’s partly the nature of generational conflict isn’t it? One generation feels that it is its duty to pass on its faith to the next generation, while the next generation has a constitutional need (almost an obligation) to challenge and question in ways that make the faith its own. I have always been helped by the way in which the president of the small Christian liberal arts college that I attended used to put it in his annual address to the new freshman class: “Our job as a college is to provide for you a framework for rebellion.”
A framework for rebellion! You see, Jesus was no antinomian. He was not a free thinker who was trying to tear down the established system, but rather he was offering a new framework for the understanding of that faith. What is important is not what goes into the mouth -- the faithful and compulsive observance of all of those ritual and dietary laws; what is important is not the external but the internal, not the expression of faith but the heart of faith.
We can understand the anxiety of the scribes and Pharisees because it is the anxiety of the fundamentalist mentality. Many of us have an allergic reaction to change -- of any kind. And some of us even embrace “The Principle of Dangerous Precedent” put forth by the British academic who said, “Nothing should ever be done for the first time.” So fearful is the uncertainty that goes with change that many people suffer from what psychiatrists call “premature closure” -- which is but another version of “don’t confuse me with the facts".
The world is changing and because it is changing we think about our faith in new ways. I have a reading assignment for you that is sure to put you to sleep faster than any sedative. Get a copy (available in the church library) of our Presbyterian Book of Confessions and read it from cover-to-cover. Those Confessions cover how the church has stated its faith over 2000 years of history.
After reading the 11 Confessions contained therein (which is only a sampling), you will ask “why so many"? “Why couldn’t we have just stopped with the Apostles’ Creed and be done with it?” You will certainly find that there is continuity through the Confessions. The essentials remain throughout. However, each Confession represents a new effort to state the meaning of faith against the backdrop of the world of its day.
II. What is at the heart of it? The Unending Conversation
This is but an illustration of what the historian Kenneth Burke calls “the unending conversation”. There has been a conversation going on before we were born and it will continue after we die. Sometimes it is an argument, sometimes it is a discussion, but always it is probing, searching, trying to discern what is at the heart of the matter. Where is that core that gives meaning to our lives?
What is happening in our scripture lesson is that we are hearing part of this unending conversation. Jesus is offering a new insight which for the devout Jew of his day may have been the most startling thing Jesus ever said. He is contradicting their basic understanding of scripture as a legal text to direct their lives. He cancels out all of the food laws of the Old Testament. Some of them might still stand as matters of health and hygiene and common sense. But once-and-for-all Jesus lays it down that what matters is not the state of our ritual observance, but the state of the heart.
I daresay that to take that teaching seriously is startling not only for those of ancient Judaism but also for many of us. It is so much easier to focus on outward expressions than causal factors. Of course, we know that the heart is a metaphor suggesting what is the most central, the core, the animating force without which faith would not live.
For Christians this is what the unending conversation is about, what is it about Christianity that is deeper than any particular set of Christian ideas or beliefs? As we engage the unending conversation we see that there is part of us that does not want to let go of some of that pre-programming that tells us that a true Christian must believe this or that, or act in a particular way. My own children can’t believe that the Christian College I attended required that its faculty members sign a statement of faith, and that its code of conduct forbade dancing and playing cards (though Rook seemed to be acceptable). Perhaps that’s why my daughter when she was searching for a college considered my alma mater a triple safety.
I don’t know how many times I have read this passage and even preached on it, but this time I saw something in it that I had not seen before. In Verse 11 it appears that the disciples themselves are coming to the aid of the Pharisees when they pointed out to Jesus that the aggressiveness of his argument might have offended them. There is a serious debate going on and yet they are worried about hurting the feelings of the other side. When Jesus responds by saying, “Don’t worry about these blind people who are trying to lead the blind!” Peter still doesn’t understand and asks for further explanation.
You see, the disciples were products of the very teaching Jesus is condemning. Just like all of us they were to a certain extent pre-programmed by their previous experience and upbringing. Their new teacher, Jesus, was contradicting their previous teachers so they had a lot of unlearning to do. Does that sound familiar? That is why it is so hard for us to get to the heart of the matter. As one friend of mine said to me not long ago, “My heart knows what is right but my head isn’t there yet.”
III. The Quest for the Flaming Heart: Arriving Where We Started
That, in fact, is a battle that many of us have fought as our faith has grown and developed, and changed over the years -- the battle between the head and the heart. It is what Karen Armstrong calls “mythos” and “logos”. Logos represents the scientific, rational, logical way that most of us have been brought up to think. An example of “logos” was the seminary course I once took designed to prove beyond a-shadow-of-a-doubt the historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Certainly we believe in the historical reality of the resurrection but that belief is not the result of the strict application of the scientific method. This is why some can call the resurrection a myth, not because it isn’t true, not because it didn’t happen, but rather because it is a reality apprehended most directly through the heart of faith.
As has been noted many times from this pulpit, those of us who are rooted in the church of John Calvin are often accused of being the frozen chosen -- a humorous and accurate designation of our penchant to be head people. We read books; we talk about ideas; we form committees. We make sure our ministers have a lot of education so that they can tell the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek words in the Bible. We pride ourselves on not being as driven by emotions as our Pentecostal sisters and brothers. And we tend to blame it all on our forbearer, John Calvin, who was an attorney and theologian, who wrote big books and preached long sermons. This is our tradition we say -- to be head people rather than heart people.
But if you would have entered the city of Geneva in the 16th Century (at the height of Calvin’s influence) you may have been surprised to have seen a little known symbol that was at the very core of Calvin’s spirituality. It was the symbol of a flaming heart represented by a hand holding a heart aflame with love and passion for God.
It may be that we have lost the holistic roots of our own tradition that we need to arrive where we started and see it for the first time. Calvin may have been an intellectual but that intellect was driven into the service of God by a heart that burned with passion because it was fueled by a personal relationship with God.
It was Coach Jimmy Valvano, dying of cancer, who said to a receptive audience of his athletic peers, “When you laugh, cry, and think in the same day -- that is a full day!” Valvano knew how to motivate his players. The x’s and o’s of basketball strategy were important, but what transformed a good team into a great team was the heart -- that driving passion as he said, “To never give up, never give up!”
Sure strategy, theology, doctrine, have their place, but the heart of the matter then transforms us into loving, passionate people with hearts aflame for God is as simple as remembering our baptism, and as straightforward as nurturing a faith that is based upon a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. That’s how it all started and that’s why we need to return to the heart of our faith if we are going to change ourselves and make a difference in the world.
Amen.