From the Heart

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

September 2, 2012

From the Heart

Mark 7:1-8

Blessed are the strong;

Blessed are the bold;

Blessed are those who strive to excel;

Blessed are those who labor diligently;        

Blessed are those who see to their own needs;

Blessed are those who follow the rules.

Why aren’t the Beatitudes that Jesus spoke

in his Sermon on the Mount more like these?

Don’t these sound better – more to our liking?

Don’t they fit our lifestyles,

the way we were all brought up,

better than what we find in chapter 5 of Matthew’s gospel?

Blessed are the meek.

Aren’t the meek those who never get anything done;

who let others walk all over them?

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Aren’t these the ones who get hit from both sides,

men and women who are unrealistic, idealistic, simplistic?

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Matthew may have been trying to soften

the more difficult statement,

“blessed are the poor”,

which is the way Luke records Jesus’ words,

(Luke 6:20)

because who wants to hear that the poor are blessed?

Blessed are the pure in heart.

Pure in heart – sounds like someone

who has never experienced real life;

someone naïve, young, sheltered,

a person who hasn’t been toughened up by reality.  

We’ve talked the last couple of weeks

about our calling to the Beatitude life,

but once we look a little more closely

at the Beatitudes, the actual words,

it doesn’t look at all like the life

we’ve learned to embrace,

the life we want to embrace.

After all, we are taught to seek a life of success,

hard work,

diligence,

self-reliance,

with a little charity thrown in the mix.

To embrace the Beatitudes as Jesus presents them to us

is to embrace a life that is far more of a challenge

than most of us might be comfortable with.

We might even ask the question

whether Jesus went too far with the Beatitudes,

whether he was using one of his favorite teaching tools,

the art of hyperbole to make his point:

if your hand causes you to sin,

cut it off.

(Matthew 5:30)

                                            

The Beatitudes are not hyperbole, though;

we can’t get away from them or around them.

Whether we like it or not,

the Beatitude life is what Jesus calls us to,

as challenging as it may sound.

        

We have to remember that in calling us to follow him

Jesus isn’t calling us to a simple,

pleasant, sunny life of praise and prayer.

Jesus is calling us to wholly new lives,

wholly transformed lives,

mind, body, heart and soul.

“For those who want to save their life will lose it,

and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

(Matthew 16:25)

For two thousand years followers of Jesus Christ

have struggled to embrace fully

the life to which Jesus calls us.

Our interpretation of that call, what it means,

and how we understand we should live it

comes in more varieties and variations than we can count.

Just look at the hundreds,

the thousands of different denominations

that make up the mosaic we call universal Christianity

and see the hard edges that separate so many of us

as we struggle to discern and learn

how to live faithfully as disciples of Christ,

arguing among ourselves:

“you don’t possess truth, we do!”

And just when we think we understand,

just when we think we are living faithfully,

doing all the right things,

along comes Jesus to turn our thinking upside down.

Our lesson is yet one more example of Jesus

turning accepted practice,

accepted behavior on its head.

Anyone who was a faithful Jew back in Jesus’ day

would have known the importance

of ritual washing before a meal.

This had been established practice since the days of Moses;

ritual purity was scriptural and

had been practiced by the faithful for a thousand years.

And then along come Jesus and his disciples

casting aside the tradition

like so many fishbones after a meal.

It was shocking to the Pharisees:

“why do your disciples not live

according to the tradition of the elders,

but eat with defiled hands?”

The ground-in dirt was painfully obvious

on every disciple’s hands.

Jesus did not even respond courteously.

His scalding, scolding response drips with sarcasm:

“This people honor me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

(citing Isaiah 29:13)

Jesus was not impressed with empty gestures,

meaningless words,

no matter how grand,

how imposing.

Following an empty ritual,

even a practice based on rules written by faithful rabbis,

and built up over the centuries,

did not matter at all to Jesus.

Such rituals did not matter

because they did not come from the heart;

they did not change the heart;

and they did not grow the heart.

Even as he showers God’s grace,

God’s mercy,

and God’s love on us,

Jesus is very demanding of us.  

He expects our transformation,

nothing less.

Going through the motions,

going through rituals –

they don’t impress our Lord.

He teaches us this in so many different ways,

but especially through the Beatitudes,

for they reflect an utterly different view of the world,

a world turned upside down,

a world in which those at the bottom of society

find themselves closest to heaven,

while those currently at the top

find themselves far from the Kingdom.

(Barbara Brown Taylor)

As Luke records Jesus’ Sermon,

we hear our Lord say,

         “Woe to you who are rich,

                  for you have received your consolation.

         Woe to you who are full now,

for you will be hungry…

         Woe to you who are laughing now,

                  for you will mourn and weep.

         Woe to you when all speak well of you,

                  for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

                  (Luke 6:24)

We hear our Lord’s challenging words in the Beatitudes,

and then we struggle to try to figure out what to do,

how to apply them to our own lives.

As Barbara Brown Taylor has observed,

“Each of us hears Jesus’ Beatitudes

through our own filters

we can admire them and walk away;

we can use them as a yardstick

to measure our own blessedness;

or of course we can ignore them.”

But unfiltered, unplugged,

reading them, hearing them as they are,

we realize that they do call us to new life,

a life that is concerned only with matters of the heart.

“Put aside the empty practices and be transformed

in heart and mind” –

that is what our Lord says to each of us.

Establishing rituals and then following them:

that’s easy,

just as washing hands before meals is easy,

unless, of course, you are under the age of 10

and take great pride in a day’s accumulation of dirt.

But opening up our hearts,

working to live the Beatitude life –

that’s not so easy;

in fact, it runs counter to everything

we learn as we grow up,

which is, of course, just the point Jesus is making,

it just what Jesus wants us to understand.  

Jesus wants us to reset our priorities;

in fact, he expects it.

No, he doesn’t want us give up ambition,

or stop using the gifts given each of us

by God through the Holy Spirit,

But what he wants is for us to learn,

and then remember,

that our primary goal in life

is not our success in the business world,

or on the playing field,

or this year, in the political arena,

but our spiritual transformation,

so that with every year

we hunger and thirst more and more

for righteousness;

we understand and accept our call

to be peacemakers;

We embrace humbleness,

seeking God’s glory, rather than our own;

And we work to grow in holiness,

pure in heart.

What we have done is

turned the Beatitudes into proverbs,

words that “sound …sweet and familiar to us –

something to needle-point and hang over the piano….

But the Beatitudes are not quaint, winsome words,

“but gospel,

the language of hope and promise

that the way things are now

is not the way they will always be…”

(B.B. Taylor)

“The last shall be first

and the first shall be last.”

(Matthew 20:16)

The Beatitudes call us to widen our hearts,

to use William Sloane Coffin’s phrase.

The Beatitudes call us to grow our hearts,

lead with our hearts,

live with our hearts.

Jesus was quick to condemn those he considered

to be “hard of heart”.

In the third chapter of Mark’s gospel,

as just one example,

we find Jesus in a synagogue on the Sabbath,

and there he encountered a man

who sought healing for his withered hand.

The Pharisees strictly observed the commandment

to honor the Sabbath,

so they would have considered it wrong

for Jesus to heal the man on the Sabbath,

which was, of course, exactly what our Lord did

because our Lord lived in and with

grace and compassion.

As the story concludes, we read

that as Jesus looked at the Pharisees,

their faces tight with angry glares,

“he was grieved at their hardness of heart.”

(Mark 3:5)

“Do you still not perceive or understand?, Jesus asks us.

Are your hearts hardened?

Do you have eyes, and fail to see?

Do you have ears, and fail to hear?

And do you not remember?”

(Mark 8:17-18)

Jesus would melt our icy hearts,

break apart our stony hearts,

unbind our chained hearts,

soften our hardened hearts

all as part of our call to new life,

Beatitude life,

transformed life.

Yes, it is a call to lose our life.

But the promise is sure

that the life we gain,

the new, transformed life

will be so much fuller, richer, fulfilling

than we can even begin to imagine.

For it will be life grounded in the

unbounded grace,

and the infinite love

God gives us through our Lord,

Jesus Christ.

AMEN