Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Dear Friends in Christ, God’s grace and peace be with you.  Amen.

Sara Kimm, a member of Gloria Dei, has made it a practice to look for hearts in the world[i]. She posts them on Instagram, and shares them on Facebook, and keeps them on her phone to show to her friends. Sara can find heart shapes anywhere — a stone along a shore, a leaf or flower petal, a potato chip, a crack in the pavement, a footprint left after having walked on a wet sidewalk.

She’s trained her family and her friends to send her pictures of hearts they’ve seen: fried fish in the distinct shape of a heart, grease stains at the bottom of a State Fair food wrapper, hearts shining in a fireworks display.

Even on tough days, or days on which she’s struggling, Sara finds hearts. She shows us that if you’re willing to stop and look for it, the shape of love shows up in daily life, and reminders of the power of goodness are everywhere. (Here are some of Sara’s examples,including one taken in the Gloria Dei parking lot before it was repaved. Follow her Instagram account at #sdkeverydayhearts.)

 

Now, you may not have noticed it, but there are hearts hidden in our gospel text today[ii], signs of love and hope tucked into what could be a rough passage. This reading, like the entire gospel, invites us into the heart of God. Jesus warns us from honoring God with our words, while our hearts stay far away. And just as it always has been, the love and truth of God is a heart thing – sometimes hidden, but always alive even when we miss it.

The people of God in ancient times were taught that by following the commandments, they declared to the whole world that their God was near. Our passage from Deuteronomy tells us that God’s law to us has always been seen as gift, first and center[iii].

It is in this same vein that our reading from Mark’s gospel centers. Jesus scolds those who pretend that religious rituals and traditions which exclude others could be the focus of our spiritual life. He reminds us that our actions reveal the workings of our heart. When we use it to disregard others, we’ve exploited the law.

It can be dangerous in a Christian context, to read passages like these, where Jesus condemns the Pharisees and scribes. It can be a little too convenient for us to say, “See, Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries did all kinds of ridiculous things, but Jesus teaches us to be focused only on love, so we’re much better than they are.”

But be careful. That’s exactly the kind of attitude Jesus is criticizing. When we congratulate ourselves for pleasing God through our own customs or beliefs, when we convince ourselves that our own behaviors, our own political positions, our own habits and ideas somehow please God more than the positions, ideas, and teachings of others, we miss the goodness that comes from God. When we cloud the teachings of God with layers of mandates of our own traditions and habits, we lose the mysterious awareness that God is bigger than we are.

Of course this leads to confusion for us. Couldn’t all religious customs be the kind of human precepts against which Jesus warned us? Why do we study God’s word, then? Why do we have liturgy and confirmation? Why do we read the works of theologians, and sing hymns and take part in the sacraments and preach sermons? What are we supposed to do?

Jesus met the questions of the Jewish leaders the same way he would meet ours. It’s not that all human attempts to explain or understand God’s word are suspect. After all, God’s people have always made known the traditions to their children and their children’s children. As they have for generations of followers, our faith practices, our rituals and theology and worship traditions ground us in a rich and life-giving heritage. Our customs shape us into people with unique and cherished perspective, and they provide us the tools we use to share our faith with others.

But we abuse their message if we pretend God is controlled by them, or if we claim that anyone that doesn’t do things our way is left outside of God’s realm. When we start to teach that unless others think exactly the way we do, when we say that God won’t accept anyone who does things differently than we do, we confuse human precepts with God’s universal power.

Don’t obscure God’s love with any tradition that would claim some people are not worthy of it. The leaders complain and ridicule Jesus for welcoming people whom they found unworthy. Jesus reminds them that God is free to come near anyone, no matter what traditions they follow or adhere to.

Jesus echoes the purpose of God’s Commandments, teaching us to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Listen to his list of the evil intentions that come from the heart, fornication, theft, murder, licentiousness, avarice, deceit, slander. Even if you’re not sure what all of those words mean, just remember, they are precisely what the Ten Commandments instruct us to avoid. Do not kill. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Do not covet. We’re commanded against any action that would destroy health relationships with our neighbor.

If we pretend our faith practices or traditions give us permission (or worse, that they might actually instruct us) to abuse, condemn, hurt, or damage our neighbor’s well-being, we have moved away from the gift of the law. And when we claim that our faith gives us an inside track into the love of God, that as long as we behave in some unique way God prefers us to some others, we lose the treasure altogether.

God’s love is and always has been abundantly generous for the entire world. It comes near to every nation, to every faithful gathering, and even to every simple heart, because God longs to be near. God is, at the heart of it all, a God of love. When we call upon God, when we honor God with our lips, when we make known God’s love for all people to our children’s children, love becomes abundant, God’s love is revealed through us.

It’s never been anything but this simple instruction: Love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Of course, that doesn’t always feel so simple. We sometimes discover that we really aren’t as loving as we wish we were. I’m fine when I’m around people I like. But there are a lot of other people I find it really difficult to love as I love myself. And I suspect that in admitting that, I’m also admitting that it’s not so easy to love God with all my heart and soul and mind, either.

So God plants signs of love to remind me. God offers us the chance to create traditions that remind us of love. Ancestors point the way to us of God’s unconditional gift in sacred texts, in ancient liturgies, in human gatherings.

At their best, that’s what these human traditions do. They remind us of the way God has always worked. They help us remember the promises of old, and share it with new generations in fresh and wonderful ways.

As Sara Kimm has discovered, if you keep looking, you notice that God weaves invitations to see love into every day of our lives, even on tough days, or days on which we’re struggling. When we stop long enough to resist judging those with whom we disagree, when we pause long enough to trust that God includes even irritating people into the party, when we breath slowly enough to discover that God has only ever longed for us to care for each other and be united with one another, we see love hidden even in the most unlikely of places – in traditions that include and unite, in bread and wine, in word and water, in rituals that offer us forgiveness and peace, in echoes of hymns that sing of kindness and compassion.

Sara even finds it in oddly shaped potato chips, or inside pickle slices, or peeking out from the cracks in the sidewalk.

And when we start allowing signs of love to soften our hearts, amazing things can happen.

A few weeks ago, CBS news reported the sweetest story of some kids at Tigers’ Stadium in Detroit. One of the boys, a 10-year-old, had remembered that a few years before, an adult had caught a foul ball at a baseball game, and had given it to him. So when his dad caught a foul ball this summer, he asked if he could give it to a younger child he had seen who was in the stadium. The younger child was equally delighted. So the following night, when he had a new foul ball presented to him, he turned around, and offered it to yet another child.

When interviewed about their selfless joy the kids said that they were creating, “A line of awesomeness,” paying forward a thrill to others, so that more children could enjoy the goodness of the game[iv].  (Watch the video here.)

At our best, this is what Jesus’ followers do—create a line of awesomeness – teaching generosity and kindness, hope and inclusion, peace and goodness to their children’s children, and offering chances for all the nations to glimpse the goodness that lives when the heart of God comes near.

Thanks be to God. Amen

[i] http://www.facebook.com/search/str/%23sdkeverydayhearts/media-social

[ii] Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

[iii] Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9

[iv] Thanks to Paula Hutchinson for sharing this story with me.  See the tape at CBS Evening News, August 18, 2018, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbqW2iEpdwk    m/watch?v=IbqW2iEpdwk