From the Heart

 

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

August 29, 2021

 

            Since I decided to give my sermon the title, “From the Heart,” I thought it would be a good idea for me to do a little review work on the actual human heart. It’s been a few years since my 10^th grade biology class, and I didn’t pay as much attention in that class as I should have, so I knew I needed to brush up on the actual structure of the human heart.

            The most fundamental fact about the heart as I understand it is that the heart is a muscle. That is why cardio exercise is essential for heart health. It’s probably also why it’s called cardio. Cardio exercise raises our heart rate. It works and strengthens the heart muscle.

            Every person’s heart is about the size of his or her fist. It beats approximately 60 to 80 times per minute, and it beats about 100,000 times each day. The heart is a pump. It has four chambers, two ventricles, and two atria. There are arteries and valves and while the process is complicated and beyond my ability to understand, the simple point of the heart is to keep our blood pumping and circulating. When the heart stops pumping, everything else stops as well.

            Now that I am firmly entrenched in middle age, learning, and relearning these basics about the human heart, has made me recommit myself to taking better care of my heart for as long as I can.

            The human heart is the primary muscle that keeps us alive, but often when we talk about the heart, we endow it with much greater meaning than its physiological importance. The heart is not only the vital muscle in our chest, it is also the center of our being. Scientifically speaking, our emotions are neurological responses in our brains, but we understand them, we see them as being centered here in our hearts rather than here in our heads.

            Think about how many songs you hear on an average day that has to do with the heart. There are songs about heartbreaks, heartaches, hearts down and out for the count, hearts filled with love, hearts rising above. At one time I found a list of 124 songs that have heart in the title. These were from both pop and country, which means there is no way this an exhaustive list because there are so many genres of music, and every genre has songs about the heart. From hip hop to opera, the heart is a major theme in our music and in our culture.

            My heart could keep going for another 40 years, but no matter how much longer I live I’ll never forget the first time I fell in love and my heart soared. I’ll also never forget the first time my heart was really broken. My actual heart was not broken, obviously, but that metaphysical heart at the center of our being was. That metaphysical heart of mine was beaten up and tossed aside.

Our heart features in our understanding of God and faith. As I have said in other sermons, a vivid memory from my earliest days in Sunday School is the picture of Jesus standing outside a door and knocking. That was Jesus at the door of our hearts, knocking, waiting, wanting, hoping to be let in. We invest the human heart with a much larger meaning and purpose than the center of our circulatory system.

            Because of our complex understanding of the heart, I chose to look most carefully at the last of Jesus’ words to the Pharisees in this passage from Mark’s gospel.

            “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

            This passage begins with certain Pharisees challenging Jesus about his disciples’ flaunting of tradition. They did not do the ritual cleansing of their hands or their cookware before they ate. This practice was not so much about hygiene or sanitary practices as it was tradition. It was a ritual of spiritual cleanliness, and it was a tradition of the elders. To eat something with unclean hands or that was not prepared in properly cleaned pots was to be physically and spiritually defiled. It made them impure before God. But Jesus and the disciples turn this tradition on its head, so the Pharisees and the Scribes question Jesus. They confront him with what seems to be an obvious and flagrant breaking of the Law.

            Whenever Jesus was challenged, he was not afraid to challenge back. In our passage he quoted scripture, specifically the prophet Isaiah.

            “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

            In other words, Jesus told the Pharisees and the Scribes that their tradition had become empty ritual. He did not say that tradition was wrong or that it had no purpose, but he challenged them on their motivation for keeping the tradition. If they were supposedly doing it to honor God, then they were honoring God in name only. Their hearts were not in it. And in the part of the story, we are focusing on today, Jesus debunked their understanding of the tradition in the first place. It is not what goes into us that defiles. No food that we eat, no washing ritual that we undergo will make us clean or unclean. The source of defilement is not outside of ourselves. It is within us. It is within our hearts.

            Matt Skinner, professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a primary contributor to WorkingPreacher.org, said that this is the most straightforward part of this passage. Jesus tells those questioning him and us, succinctly, where evil comes from. That is the good news. The bad news is that it comes from us. It comes from the people I don’t much care for, which I have no problem whatsoever believing. But it also comes from the people I love, which is a lot harder to bear. Hardest of all to accept, it comes from me. It comes from the heart.

            Whether we choose to believe that our hearts breed avarice and murder and hatred, etc. or not, one point is dramatically driven home. Jesus calls for self-examination. We must look inside ourselves for the source of what is bad and wrong in our lives and in our world. No matter how much I would like to believe the opposite, all that is bad and wrong with our world does not just come from out there somewhere. It is not all separate from myself.

            It may sound as though Jesus was condemning the human heart to total depravity, but I do not believe he was implying that nothing good comes from the heart. Our greatest and most powerful impulses for goodness, for kindness, for love, come from our hearts. But Jesus was making clear to the Pharisees that they had invested more in tradition than they had in the actual word of God. They used tradition as a shield against what they saw as outside evil forces. They used their tradition as a weapon against others, against outsiders. It seems to me that it was tradition and their understanding of it, their using of it, that closed their hearts to God and to God’s people.

            As I said earlier, there is no indication that Jesus believed all tradition was bad. There is no reason for us not to believe that Jesus also adhered to traditional dietary laws. But following the Law never stood in Jesus’ way when it came to love – loving God and loving neighbor. The Law never stood in Jesus’ way from calling on everyone who would listen to examine their own hearts, to consider how what was in their own hearts differed from what was spoken from their lips, how what was in their hearts differed from their actions, from how they sought to live.

            Jesus stood in the tradition of the prophets, who called the people of God to give God their hearts. That’s what God wants – more than anything – is our hearts. And it seems to me that this what Jesus is trying to make the religious leaders, and any who would listen, understand. It is about our hearts. And it is from our hearts that what is good and what is bad flows. So, we need to consider, we need to examine our hearts.

            Every aspect of our worship should make us examine what is in our hearts, but there is one part in our worship service where we are called to do that specifically, and that is in our corporate prayer of confession. In the midst of all that happens in our worship service, it is easy to read the words of this prayer but not use them to think honestly about what lies in our own hearts. So, I thought it might be helpful if I read a well—known prayer of confession now. It is not the one we read earlier. And while I read it, let the words of the prayer not only reach your minds, let it touch your hearts, let it call forth for all of us what comes from our hearts.

            Merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart and mind and strength. We have not loved our neighbor as ourselves. In your mercy, forgive what we have been, help us amend what we are, and direct what we shall be, that we may delight in your ways to the glory of your holy name.

            What comes from our hearts? What do we hold there? Is it love, compassion, kindness, faithfulness, hopefulness? Or does anger, envy, and bitterness come from our hearts? What comes from our hearts not only this morning but every day? What comes from our hearts? Trust that God knows our hearts, all that is good in them and all that is not. Trust that God is working on us, day by day, forgiven what we have been, amending what we are, and directing what we shall be. And that is the good news. That is the good news.

            Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

            Amen.