Sermon: Cut, Slow, Burning Hearts

Texts: Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Luke 24:13-35

Date: May 8, 2011

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

            I was drawn into the scriptures today through the references to the heart, which crop up several times.  After Peter’s sermon, of which we heard just a fragment, the people listening were said to be “cut to the heart.”  When the disguised Christ joins the disciples on the road and hears their woeful tale, he accuses of them of being “slow of heart.”  And when their eyes were opened the same disciples speak of having “hearts burning within us.” 

            It seems as though the heart is where the action is in today’s lessons.  Curious about what the biblical writers might have had in mind when they wrote about the heart, I got some of the really dusty Greek lexicons and theological dictionaries off the shelf and looked it up.  Besides being the seat of physical life, recognizing the heart as the organ that circulates one’s life blood, in ancient Judeo-Christian culture the heart was understood as the center and seat of spiritual life.  It  is the source of all the forces and functions of the soul and spirit.  Kittel’s theological  dictionary spells it out: “In the heart dwell feelings and emotions, desires and passions.  The heart is the seat of understanding, the source of thought and reflection.  The heart is the seat of the will, the source of resolves.”  Therefore, “the heart is supremely the one center in humanity to which God turns, in which the religious life is rooted, which determines moral conduct…[it is] the place in humans at which God bears witness to himself.”

            God meets us at the heart.  God’s entrée into human life is through the heart.  That’s a rather problematical doorway, isn’t it?  Not long ago my book club read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  Perhaps you remember in that story what happens when Alice first falls down the rabbit hole.  She finds herself in a hallway full of doors, and she wanders up and down trying all the doorknobs but finding them all locked.  In Carroll’s words, “Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little door about fifteen inches high: she tried the little golden key in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted!  Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head though the doorway; `and even if my head would go through,' thought poor Alice, `it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only know how to begin.' For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” 

            I wonder if God stands before our hearts towering over them like Alice at the tiny door, scheming about how to shut up like a telescope and wedge Godself in.  Other doors through which God might have entered appear locked--people don’t come to a vibrant relationship with God through the intellect alone, through the force of law, through purely physical sensations or instincts.  It appears as though the door of the heart is the singular threshold for connection with the Holy One.  But our hearts are so small compared to the vast Presence of grace we sense in God.  How in the world does the Lord manage it?  Well, as Alice had begun to notice about the White Rabbit’s world, “very few things indeed [are] really impossible.”   Even the teensy teeter-tottering turncoat of a human heart can be the portal through which the Divine enters our world. 

            Why do you suppose the word used in Acts to describe God’s access to the hearts of those who were listening to Peter testify was “cut?”  They were “cut to the heart” when they heard the testimony Peter gave.  Sounds painful, doesn’t it?  Is that an appropriate metaphor?  Would God trying to enter the door of our hearts ever feel like cutting? 

            I think yes, absolutely.  Sometimes our close encounters with the divine are very appropriately described as cutting.  I am not sure exactly what those listeners were thinking and feeling, but it’s possible that they felt guilty.  Peter has just accused them of being complicit in Jesus’ crucifixion.  Whether or not that was true, I think most of us with a conscience have at some time or another, been cut by a sense of guilt or failure.  We have a sudden insight into our wrongdoing, often in contrast to understanding what righteousness would have looked like in that situation.  Cut to the heart.  Not very pleasant.

            Those of us with a nicey-nice, super affirming vision of God may resist thinking of guilt as a key with which God may try to open our hearts.  Guilt has certainly been done to death in some religious quarters, and we may be right to shy away from extolling it.  Nevertheless, a stabbing of the conscience can be a gift of God; its purpose is to set us on the right path when we have wandered.  Guilt is definitely not supposed to be a permanent state; it’s a key God is trying to use to open our hearts.  Guilt can be a wake-up call to holiness that should not be ignored, muffled or explained away.  Guilt is a signal that an opening and remodeling of the heart is needed.

            When the heart-struck listeners asked Peter what they should do, Peter urged them to repent and be baptized, signifying their forgiveness.  The invitation to repent is at the heart of Christian teaching.  Jeanyne Slettom explains it this way: “There’s a common understanding that repentance means “to turn,” but that barely scratches the surface of its meaning. The Greek word translated as “repentance” is metanoia, which is more accurately translated as “a change of mind.” The implication is that this change takes place as a result of what one has seen or perceived. The “meta” part of the word includes the notion of “beyond,” or “outside of.” In  a theological context, then, metanoia refers to a perception of the world that is so fundamentally different from one’s previous understanding that it results in a complete change of mind—a transformation, a new orientation. When we experience a metanoia, we see ourselves and the world in a profoundly new way.”

            There are other means of being cut to the heart besides a sense of guilt or failure.  We might be cut to the heart by compassion or pity, or by something so beautiful we almost cannot bear it.  Whatever form it takes, this call to change is God’s summons to a transformation, to see ourselves and the world in a new way, to act in a new way.

            I believe God issues these summons continually.  Yet we are very seldom cut to the heart in such a way that we are motivated to change.  Why is that?  Does the key God is trying to use not fit into the keyhole of our hearts?  I don’t think it is so much the wrong key as it is our inclination to defend ourselves from an incursion of the Holy One.  We have installed as many locks on our hearts as a Brooklyn drug dealer on his tenement door in the Projects.  The Lord has to get through an awful lot of security to unlock our hearts, by golly. 

            Which brings us to considering being “slow of heart.”  Even after being cut to the heart by some insight that might lead to a new life we humans are devilishly skilled at slowing down the metanoia process.  I’ve heard of worker’s unions which will stop short of a full-on strike but will plan a work slow-down.  Everyone shows up to work but purposefully does everything very, very slowly.  Being slow of heart is the normal condition for most of us, reluctant as we are to change.  Listen to one description of this by Sufi poet Hafiz: “It was all so clear this morning, / My mind and heart had never felt more convinced: / There is only God, a Great Wild God. / But somehow I got yanked from that annihilating Realization / And can now appear again as this wine-stained Talking / Rag.”  It was all so clear!  But somehow…

            Here’s one “somehow” I have been led to ponder as a result of my Lenten study this year.  I stumbled on a book on self-deception, and had a particularly disturbing sense of self-recognition in the author’s description of procrastination as a classic technique in self-deception.  Soren Kierkegaard long ago observed that we can understand the right thing to do perfectly without acting on it.  There is a “tiny transition from having understood to doing.”  The intelligence (or the heart) gets it, and then the will looks the proposition over.  If the will is reluctant, it doesn’t get going on the opposing thing necessarily; “but the will lets some time pass, there is an interim, that means, "We’ll see about that tomorrow."  Gregg Ten Elshof’s commentary on Kierkegaard’s insight is that beliefs are sometimes demanding.  Often they break in on us unexpectedly and take to ordering us around like uninvited tyrants. One minute we’re sailing happily through life.  The next minute we find ourselves with an uncomfortably demanding belief.  This tyrant takes office and issues an imperative with such compelling force that we’re unable to look him in the eye and say “no.”…While the tyrant will have nothing of direct defiance, though, he can often be appeased by the promise of deferred obedience.  If we promise him obedience later, he’ll often take the bait.  And if we put him off long enough, he might just go away…Often our strongest moral beliefs (beliefs to the effect that we ought to do this or ought not do that) will diminish or even disappear if we procrastinate acting on them…Agree to act on this moral belief..but not now.  Agree with yourself to act upon it later.  Often, procrastination will cause the belief to wane in strength.  And if you put off action long enough, the belief—the conviction that cuts to the heart-- might disappear altogether.

            I felt cut to the heart in terms of my inaction on the moral issue of climate change when I read that description of the technique of procrastination.  But even self-awareness hasn’t prevented me from further procrastination.  I have put calling Re-Power Bainbridge for a home energy assessment on my “to-do list” for many weeks in a row now.  I’m going to act on the belief that God is calling us to do what we can to protect God’s creation from further degradation…tomorrow.  Talk about slow of heart.  And that is just one example of slowing down the work God wants to do in my life. 

            Jesus addressing the disciples on the road to Emmaus doesn’t pull any punches: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets has declared!”  But he doesn’t ditch them in a fit of pique.  He walks with them and patiently teaches them over again, beginning at the beginning, how to understand what has happened in Jerusalem.  How encouraging this story is!  How patient God is with us, and how persistent in attempting to unlock our heart’s doors. 

            The disciples on the road with Jesus haven’t recognized him yet, but they too are faithful, in that they are listening to this stranger try to teach them something.  And at the end of the day, they open their home to the stranger, urging him to stay with them and share their supper.  The moment of bread breaking is the moment their eyes are opened to who has been walking with them.  As quickly as he appears to them, Jesus disappears again.  But they can feel his presence in their hearts.  “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?”  Seems like Christ’s words were blowing on the embers of faith within, sparking a revival of faith that was so thrilling they immediately turned around and went back to rejoin the disciples in Jerusalem to share the good news. 

            I appreciate the hindsight aspect of this story, the way the disciples looked back at what they were experiencing without fully understanding what was going on in their hearts.  Conviction that leads to metanoia—the change of heart and mind—can be a gradual process as well as a sudden “cut to the heart” process.  We might look back at an incident or a time period and realize in retrospect that our hearts were burning within us, a sign of God’s presence not fully understood at the moment.  And this, too, is a way God’s grace enters at the threshold of the heart.  God gives us time for insight and faith to ripen, until it cannot be ignored any longer.           

            Of course, in order to have this experience of our hearts burning within us, we must resolve not to ingest the spiritual equivalent of Prilosec ( a drug taken daily to prevent heartburn).  That is, we resolve not to defend the doorway of the heart from the Holy One so thoroughly that we remain invulnerable to the gradual process of feeling our hearts burn within us as we walk with the Lord.  What, you may ask, is spiritual Prilosec?  There are myriad ways of avoiding the heart burning in passion for God: Keep real busy.  Rev your life up to a constant 90 mile an hour speed.  If you have any time to think, turn on the TV instead.  Avoid your spiritually inclined friends, and if you end up spending time with them, confine the conversation topics to weather and sports.  Stay indoors as much as possible.  Focus on the aspects of church that irritate you.   Lead an unexamined life.  We all could name lots of ways to avoid having our hearts burn within us.

But what if we’re ready to risk it?  We can do what the Emmaus disciples did, remaining open to listening for wisdom from even strange sources.  We can attend to scripture as they did, allowing the sparks that fly from ancient texts to fire our imaginations.  Offering hospitality is also a time-honored way of being open to God’s presence.  We can respond to what we hear and see with a change in direction, no matter how late in the day in might be. 

As disciples who recognize our own inclination to be slow of heart, we can still leave the door open a crack for God to enter.  Perhaps caution urges us to leave that chain lock on.  That’s alright for now.  God is not going to bust it open; our God is into persuasion, not coercion.  If you leave the door to your heart open just that little bit, you’ll hear the music that compels you to get up and dance, you’ll feel the warmth of love shining like summer sun, you’ll see the winding road enticing you to new adventures,  you’ll smell the aroma of the banquet to which you’re invited.  You’ll hear the sound of that chain lock being slid open, and it will be your own hands opening it, trembling with anticipation.

Kittel, Gerhard  Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. III Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965, p. 611-12

Ten Elshof, Gregg  I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life