Don't follow your heart: A meditation on Mark 7

The number of pop-psychologists, TV personalities, and personal “life coaches” who advise people to follow their heart are astounding.  From popular culture movies to books, this oft repeated phrase shines through, with the implied conclusion that whatever your heart desires will make you happy.  And, at least on a superficial level, this can be true.

Do you want money?  Being without it might make you think you’d be happier with it (as the contemporary country song croons that money might not buy happiness, “but it can buy me a boat.”)   Do you want power and prestige?  How about sex?  Do you want a faster or cooler car?  Do you want your own private island off the coast of Baja Mexico?  Do you want a castle in northern Scotland?  Do you want to be a woman or a man, fly like a bird or run like a lion?  Perhaps you want softer things, like love and warmth and safety.  Maybe you want books stacked from floor to ceiling, or a world without war and famine.  Maybe you want a Church that is pristine and a government that is honest.  Whatever it is that you want, shouldn’t chasing it down and capturing it for yourself be the path to happiness?

Unfortunately, as repeatedly demonstrated in both history and Scripture, the pursuit of one’s heart’s desires does not often end well.  The problem isn’t with wealth, or power, or sex, or islands, or castles.  Plenty of people have been happy with or without all these things… and plenty of people have been miserable with or without them, too.  The problem isn’t with the things as they are encountered in their proper created order, but with our own heart.

God teaches us that our hearts are deceptive beyond all things, and Jesus brings this point home in our Gospel lesson for this week.  After our fall into sin, we are tempted to think that it is things that enter into us or surround us that either make us holy or unholy, clean or unclean, happy or unhappy.  The food we eat, the ceremonies we observe, the habits of our cultural time and place—all these things cloud our vision about what makes a person good or evil.  Instead, Jesus directs us to look deeper into ourselves, and examine the seat of our own intellect and emotions.  There at the base of our existence, at the very root of our being, we find the corruption that actually defiles us.  Theologians have called this concupiscence, which is our inclination and desire toward evil.  We weren’t originally made with corrupt desires, but after the fall, no human being has been able to escape the twisted contortions of their own heart.  Like a fouled fountain that pollutes all the streams it flows into, our fallen and sinful heart leads us to seek good things in evil ways.  We seek power and money and sex and everything else under the sun, not according to the good order and use for which God made it, but for selfish ambition and prideful gratification.  Our heart’s desire toward endless satisfaction will build hatred of those who have what we covet; slander and murder of those who stand in our way; theft, sorceries, adulteries, treacheries, fornications, and every other evil under the sun.  Our heart is corrupted by sin, deceives us into thinking we and our intentions are pure, then drives us into the most heinous acts of evil.  Our heart tells us lies we want to believe, and borrows the devil’s lexicon to lead us into hell.  Indeed, out of our heart comes all the things which defile us, revealing that we are twisted and corrupted at our very core.

While we may have a hard time accepting the painful Word of Law which reveals us for what we truly are, our Creator has known us from the beginning—the beginning of creation, the beginning of the fall, and the beginning of our own individual lives.  He knows the lies the devil planted in our hearts, and He knows how powerless we are to rip them out.  He knows that without His mercy and grace, there is no hope for any person whose heart will inexorably lead them into eternal death and despair.  And so, into a world of sinners who’s hearts reverberate like hammered strings in the devil’s harpsichord, the Son of God descended to make satisfaction for our sinful hearts and all the evil they produce.  Jesus Christ, there at our beginnings, is also there at the Cross, that He might take our hellish ending upon Himself.  Our Creator has become our Redeemer, the sacrifice for our sins and our own sinful nature, that we might also be forgiven and free from the hell our diseased  hearts yearn for.

But more than this, He does something to the human heart no one other than the Creator and Redeemer could do:  He gives us His life and His nature, even as He drowns that old nature in the waters of our Baptism.  He puts His Holy Spirit into our spirit, His heart into our heart, His life into our life.  Now, born from above by His Water and Spirit, He raises us up unto a new life in Himself—a life that can never die, and is never motivated by wickedness or pride.  This new life is one of purity, sanctity, holiness, love, and compassion.  This new life we have given to us by grace through faith in Christ alone is a sanctified and holy life, making us His holy saints.

Our God who is our Creator and Redeemer, has also become for us our Sanctifier.  Through His Holy and Eternal Word, our God comes to us and restores us to fellowship with Him.  He puts His divine name upon us:  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God now and forever.  He puts His life into us by His Word, and leaves His Spirit both with and within us to guide us by His Word.

Put away the self inflated voices of popular culture that tell you to listen to that deceptive heart of yours.  Hear instead the Word of the Lord which calls to you, raises you up, and gives you a life fulfilled for eternity in your Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.  Turn away from the words of death the devil wrote in your fallen flesh, which fallen people write into every human medium of their own creation. Hear instead the Word of Life, which always gives what it promises.  Amen.

Traditions and Doctrines: A Meditation on Mark 7

In the opening verses of Mark’s seventh chapter, and engagement begins between Christ and the Pharisees.  Attempting to accuse Jesus and His disciples, the Pharisees (acting in their vocational office as teachers of the Law) challenge them as to why they eat without washing their hands.  Such ceremonial washing was a common tradition among the Jewish people, and the Pharisees accused Jesus and His disciples of erring against the traditions and the elders.

Of course we should remember, that ancient peoples like the Jews and Romans had no concept of what modern medicine would eventually identify as bacteria, viruses, and pathogens.  The Jews were not washing because they thought it would bring health benefits, but because it was a way of separating themselves from the pagan or worldly activities going on around them.  When Jesus addresses the befouled hearts of the Pharisees, He is not telling folks to stop washing their hands, nor is He ignorant of the creation which He spoke into existence as the incarnate Word of God.  What Jesus will respond to is a problem of the Pharisees which is also common in our day:  confusing man made traditions with God’s inspired Word.

Jesus pointed out how rightly Isaiah had prophesied of this generation, in their outwardly looking very pious, but inwardly being far from God.  To make His point even more brutally, He exposed one of their traditions which specifically violated the Word of God regarding the care of mother and father—a tradition where a person could claim that all their worldly goods would be given, upon their death, to the religious authorities, and thereby was no longer to be used to care for an ailing father or mother.  Not only had the Pharisees misused their tradition of hand washing to accuse Him and His disciples of doing something evil (i.e., that their tradition was equal to a divine requirement,) but they had built traditions which expressly contradicted divine commands.  Lest the Pharisees and the crowd be left in the darkness of thinking their humanly contrived traditions were equal to or greater than the Law of God, Jesus took this opportunity to teach them how vain and empty it was to attempt to worship or serve God through the constructs of men.

This is something we need to keep straight, too.  Human traditions are not bad in and of themselves—they are simply human, and as such, are subject to human flaws and sin.  You may have a family tradition regarding who carves the turkey when you celebrate Thanksgiving, and this tradition may be good and useful.  We may have community traditions about how to conduct a festival or parade in our home towns.  We may have national traditions around when to stand and how to hold one’s hands during the playing of the national anthem.  Good though they be, they are merely human constructs, and as such are not equivalent to the Word of God.  Because a human tradition is born of sinful and short sighted men, such traditions will always be earthly, temporal, and prone to change when situations require it.  No matter how grand or beautiful they may appear, man’s word of tradition cannot rise above the common condition of men.

But the Word of God is another thing entirely.  Unlike human traditions, the Word of God begins and ends with God, who is the same forever.  When God speaks, He reveals something about Himself which is immutable and eternal, untainted by sin or avarice, or the shortsightedness of temporal beings.  Therefore when God says to Moses and the people of Israel in the Ten Commandments, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” these words endure forever as a reflection of God’s own holiness and character.  We are not free to create traditions like the Pharisees did which contradict or obfuscate the Word of God.  We are responsible and accountable to God through His Word, not the other way around.

Of course, mankind is always prone to do exactly this.  If I can use a human tradition to avoid God’s Word, my own sinful flesh is greatly tempted to embrace the word of men over the Word of God.  I am also tempted to create my own traditions, and toss out those of our wise forefathers, because my love of self often exceeds my love of neighbor.  As a sinful human being I am prone not only to avoiding the Word of God through evil traditions which obscure it, but I am also tempted to destroy good traditions which highlight and accentuate God’s Word.  Both errors are equally wicked, and reveal the rebellious heart which beats within in my own chest—a heart poisoned with sin, deserving nothing but the death and hell prepared for all those who despise the only true and holy God.

Thanks be to God, that our Savior has not left us to die in our wicked rebellion against His Word.  As Christ taught the Pharisees, so He teaches us today, that man cannot be saved by the word of man, but only by the Word of God.  All men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and so no man is able to save himself, let alone his neighbor.  From the traditions of Rome to the traditions of England, France, Spain, Ireland, China, Japan, or any other nation on earth, none are able to save, because all are born of sinful men.  But the Word of God which speaks the holiness of the Law to us, also becomes flesh and walks among us, so that He might become through His Cross a Word of saving Gospel to all mankind.  That Word of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection; of grace and peace; of repentance and the forgiveness of sins; of reconciliation between a holy God and unholy men:  this is the Word of God which seeks and saves sinners such as us.  This is the Word which begins and ends in God Himself, and which no human tradition can rise unto, nor outshine in its majesty.  This Word of God’s Gospel, this Word of Salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone, is the Word to which we cling regardless of the shifting and corrupted traditions of men.  This Word of Christ is eternal life, for all who will repent and believe.

As we move through the season of Pentecost, it is good, right, and salutary that we examine ourselves and our traditions in the light of God’s eternal Law and Gospel.  Where our hearts rebel against good traditions which point to Christ and Him crucified for the sins of the world, we must repent of our desire to hide God’s Word by destroying such good and wholesome traditions.  Where our hearts rebel against God’s Word by holding sinful traditions equal to or greater than our Lord’s Word, we must repent and tear them down, so that God’s Word shines most clearly not only into our sinful hearts, but into the darkened hearts of the whole world.  For we know that no word of man—no tradition born of sinful men—can save either ourselves or the fallen world through which we sojourn.  But the Word of God, sent by the Father in the power of His Spirit, is the Word of Jesus Christ which saves all who will receive it by faith.  To this Word alone may the whole world hearken, that repentance and the forgiveness of sins for Jesus’ sake be proclaimed to every darkened soul in every corner of creation, and the eternal Light of Christ’s grace fill all the world.  Amen.

Wisdom Calls: A Meditation on Proverbs 9

As I think back across the decades of my adult life, I have difficulty remembering how often any regular conversation has touched upon the subject of wisdom.  Outside churchly circles, the subjects of knowledge, study, facts and data often emerge in the course of discussing any number of things, but wisdom is almost never discussed.  While knowledge can be tied to understanding or knowing specific things (mathematics, engineering, elements of a data set, the temperature at sunrise, the biological systems in a pond, etc.,) wisdom infers the principles which assign value to those things which are known.  For example, it is one thing to discuss how to perform genetic modifications to corn plants, though the methods may be complex—but it is an entirely different thing to discuss why we should or should not genetically modify corn in any given time or place.  Knowledge speaks to the data and the processes, while wisdom speaks to the moral value or character of what we do with those data or processes.  Just as a person may have knowledge how to kill his neighbor, wisdom informs him of the moral consequences of doing so.

Given that distinction, it’s no wonder that wisdom is little discussed in our time and place.  We live in a culture that has embraced moral ambiguity for the express intent of living with very few boundaries.  Hence our schools teach “Sex Education” to elementary through college students, in greater or lesser detail explaining the “what” and “how” of sexual expresion, with very little to say about the moral value of the act.  Our businesses teach “Ethics” courses that describe various actions or processes as either acceptable or unacceptable, but are largely incapable of discussing why one action is ethically superior to another.  The evening news can describe how Planned Parenthood manipulates abortions so as to harvest the most marketable body parts of infants for bio-medical research, but cannot speak to the moral value of such grisly business.  Journalists and activists can describe the event of a police officer firing on a criminal, but cannot seem to find rational basis for moral judgment of the participants.  From business to politics to education, and countless areas in between, wisdom has been displaced by an emaciated form of knowledge, resulting in (or from) a public aversion to declarations of moral value.

Into this morass of knowledge without value, we have poured all our excuses for the sins we wish to remain unchallenged.  If we wish to live hedonistically, pridefully, selfishly, lavishly, greedily, violently, perversely, or simply to follow our own heart’s desires, we find plenty of room and license in a world without wisdom.  I can study the science of money and wealth, without pondering the moral imperatives of caring for the poor; I can study a dizzying array of sexual expression, without contemplating the moral imperatives of natural law in the created order; I can study Machiavellian processes of politics and power, without being troubled by the moral imperative to care for my fellow man; I can study physics, chemistry, and medicine without regard for the moral imperatives to help the world rather than harm it; I can study ways to make myself better, without any consideration of the moral imperative to love my neighbor as myself; I can study to aggregate more titles, honors, and peacockery to myself, while forgetting any moral imperative to humility and service before self.  These, and a countless myriad of variations, show why we naturally flee from wisdom.  We enjoy the vacuum created by its absence, so that we might fill it with our own sinful lusts.

To us, the willfully ignorant and the self absorbed, Wisdom continues to call:

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out

her seven pillars: She hath killed her beasts; she hath

mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table.

She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest

places of the city:  Whoso is simple, let him turn in

hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to

him, Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine

which I have mingled.  Forsake the foolish, and live;

and go in the way of understanding.

He that reproveth

a scorner getteth to himself shame: and he that rebuketh a

wicked man getteth himself a blot. Reprove not a

scorner, lest he hate thee: rebuke a wise man, and he will

love thee.  Give instruction to a wise man, and he

will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in

learning.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of

wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.

For by me thy days shall be multiplied, and the years

of thy life shall be increased.  If thou be wise, thou

shalt be wise for thyself: but if thou scornest, thou alone

shalt bear it.

He who is all Wisdom and Knowledge, calls to the darkest and hardest human heart.  He urges us to turn from the ways of death and destruction, and lodge where He has prepared a place for us in His boundless mercy.  Through His Only Begotten Son, His very Word and Wisdom made flesh, He has paid the penalty for our ways of death through His death upon the Cross, and thereby restored the path of unity between God and man.  Through this Vicarious Atonement, Jesus has built His House which is His Holy Church, in which He daily and freely gives forgiveness, life, and salvation to all who will repent and believe this good news.

But like a divine law of nature written into the fabric of all existence, Wisdom still speaks of the two great paths open to all mankind, and the inexorable ends of each.  He sends His Word into all the world, calling all people to faith and repentance, and shining forth the brilliant light of Wisdom’s Law and Gospel into the comfortable darkness of our hearts.  To each and every soul He calls, urging all to receive His free gift of forgiveness and eternal life, and to turn away from the path of death.  Though He desires all men to be saved, He bears witness that rejecting Him and returning to the ways of death, can only result in death and hell forever.

And so, He calls to you today.  Wisdom has built her house of salvation by the shed blood of the Son of God, with Jesus Himself as the Chief Corner Stone.  Hear Wisdom’s Word of love and grace to you, o dearly beloved sinner, that you may turn from death to life.  Come, enter Wisdom’s house by faith, where meaning and truth and value are restored to your life, that you may abide by His grace in house of the Lord forever.  Amen.

I Alone Am Left: A Meditation on 1st Kings 19, for the 11th Sunday after Pentecost

As the Church passes through the long season of Pentecost, questions of endurance and perseverance easily arise.  The Summer is hot, the labors are difficult, and there seems such a long time since the Holy Spirit moved us on Easter Sunday, or until we shall celebrate the joys of the Incarnation at Christmas.  This little time that we spend throughout the Church year is analogous to the much longer history in which we reside—where we the Church labor in the Law and Gospel of Jesus Christ, having been sent forth in the power of His Spirit at Pentecost nearly 2000 years ago, and yet awaiting the Second Coming of our Lord and the resurrection of the dead at the end of time.  Many generations have passed since the Apostles went forth by the power of the Holy Spirit, preaching repentance and the forgiveness of sins in Jesus’ Name, and we who have entered into their labors are not given to know how many generations may come after us, taking up the mantle of the Prophets and Apostles we have carried, so as to carry it forth until the end.  In reality, the people of God have been laboring ever since the Fall of our first parents, waiting thousands of years in faith and repentance for the first coming of Our Lord, even as the Church has labored for thousands of years in faith and repentance awaiting His final return.  Given the context of our labors and our waiting, it is good to pause and remember the virtues of patience and endurance, and from when they come.

In 1^st Kings 19, the great prophet Elijah is ready to give up.  Despite the great victory he has witnessed on Mount Carmel as the fire of the living God came down at his command, turning the hearts of the people away from Baal and back to their Savior, Elijah hears of the queen’s desire to kill him, and flees into the wilderness.  He despairs of his life, asking God to kill him, and lamenting that he alone is left faithful in the whole house of Israel. 

His is a sentiment the people of God often share.  Particularly in our own time, when business and information flow at the speed of light all around the globe, it is easy to think that the long labors of the Church are futile, or that there simply aren’t enough faithful people left for anything to make a difference.  Our government persecutes faithful Christians, even as the general electorate becomes ever more hostile to the Word of God.  Though Baal may not be commonly known in 21^st century America, the false gods of Darwin and Hawking are household names.  The people are easily swayed into believing that scientists and academics, with their political actors, will deliver them from the evils of poverty, pestilence, war, and even death.  These false gods are firmly rooted in the people’s popular culture, their schools, and their media, proclaiming a false gospel of hedonistic evolution.  The people have become willing prey for the demonic lies that they are simply animals striving to satisfy their animal lusts, where good and evil are really just relative experiences of pleasure or pain, convenience or inconvenience.  In such a mess as this, it is tempting for the people of God to abandon His Eternal Word, or to flee into the deserts despairing of their labors in so great a wicked maelstrom.

But to us, as to Elijah, the Lord comes through His ever present yet still and small voice.  The Holy Scriptures do not scream themselves from their pages, but rather work through the feeble eloquence of simple servants of that Word.  The Lord’s normal means are not shattering the mountains with His ferocious wind, nor burning the world with His consuming fire.  The Lord our God, King of the Universe, chooses to come to us gently, wooing us through the love and compassion of His Son.  Though He has all power and authority in heaven and on earth, our Lord comes as a servant of all, suffering patiently in His labors for the salvation of all mankind.  Not only was our Lord Jesus Christ working during the thirty three years of His Incarnation through Resurrection, but from the beginning of time to its end, He has made Himself the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  Our Lord Jesus, though He has a voice that brought all things into existence, sustains all things in His providence, and shall judge all things at their end, labors patiently, endures the pain of rejection and scorn, speaking in His still, small voice the Word of forgiveness, life, and salvation for all who will repent and believe in Him.

It is not Jesus who enters into the labors of His Church, but rather it is the Church who Jesus calls to enter into His labors, as He works for the reconciliation of all souls.  The labor of Jesus is sacrificial and selfless, patient and enduring, driven by love divine.  He does not tire nor despair.  He who is the Word of the Father, knows the power of His Word to bring life to the dying, hope to the despairing, peace to the anxious, joy to the sorrowful.  He knows full well, and beyond the measure of any man’s pondering, just how great and enduring are the Words:  your sins be forgiven.

As the Church continues in the labors of her Lord, she does not find her strength and motivation by looking to herself, or the example of the convoluted world around her.  She does not work the harder by thrashing herself under the Law, which points out to her the failings of her duties.  That holy Law which shows the greatness of God’s glory and the unflagging faithfulness of her Lord in all things, is not what gives her strength to follow in her Savior’s footsteps, for no terror or brilliance of the Law can bring forth the true divine love which alone satisfies the Law.  What gives the people of God their strength to endure, their patience in the face of all evils, their constancy in the rise and fall of civilizations, is the love of God in Jesus Christ which says to them:  Your sins be forgiven.  This Gospel of grace for the sake of Jesus’ suffering and death on our behalf is what calls forth the people of God unto faith and repentance, leading them into and sustaining them within the labors of Jesus as He speaks His still, small Word of redemption to the world.

Dear Christian, do you feel as Elijah did, that your labors are useless?  Does your patience wane and your endurance dry up in the heat of the noonday sun?  Do you wonder if you alone are left to bear the Word of the Lord?  Take heart, and hear once again:  Your sins be forgiven.  Your labors, weak and beggarly though they be, are worked by the hands of Christ.  Your patience and endurance, fragile and temperamental though they be, are sustained by the love of Christ.  Your bearing of the Word of God, piecemeal and ignorant though it be, is bound up in and sent forth by Spirit of Christ.  For it is not you who have chosen Jesus so as to strengthen your labors, but Jesus who has chosen you to enter into His—and it is Jesus who will give you all you need to accomplish what He has called you to do and to be, by the immeasurable sufficiency of His Eternal Word.

Be of good cheer, dear Christian.  Repent of your despair, your timidity, and your sloth.  Return once again to the still, small voice of your God, who speaks to you through his Eternal Son the Word which gives life unto us all, and endurance until the work of Christ is complete:  Your sins be forgiven. 

Amen.