Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Lent 5: April 2, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
From of the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah: “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts: and I will be their God and they will be my people.”
One of the things I used do while walking along stone beaches in Maine was to look for heart-shaped rocks. Heart-shaped rocks are very rare. That’s because it’s unusual for the ocean to wear away a rock in just the right way for it to be flat, to have two lobes at the top separated by a dip in between them, and to come to a point at the bottom—all without breaking in two.
It’s very hard to find a heart-shaped rock while walking along a stone beach in Maine.
However, in my experience, it’s not very hard to find a heart-shaped rock in one’s own chest. What do I mean by this? I mean that many of us have the experience of wanting to be responsive to what is “of God” in ourselves and in others, and many of us find that our ability to respond is, well, stony, weighed down, leaden. And there can be many reasons for this—ranging from the force of habit, to fatigue to some kind of disappointment, or to our own fickleness.
Yes, it’s easy to find a heart-shaped rock in the middle of one’s own chest, to find that we’re just not responsive to what is “of God” in our lives.
The story of the people of God in Hebrew Scriptures is all about this. For if the story of the people of God is anything, it’s the story of God relentlessly seeking after the people in order to give them a good life and their equally relentless inability to respond to and to stick with the good life that God wants to give them.
You and I have been repeating some of the marks of that good life at the opening of our Sunday masses during Lent. Some call them the Ten Commandments. The Hebrew Scriptures refer to them as the “ten words” of God, ten ways of relating to God and to neighbor that make for a life of Shalom, of peace. Our Godly Play program says it best perhaps when it calls them “the ten best ways to live.”
But as we know, just because we know of a good way to live does not mean that we live that way. And so it was with the Jewish people ---even as the ten words were being written on the tablets, the people were already turning away.
By the prophet Jeremiah’s time, this turning away had led to disaster. The kingdom had fallen, and the people had gone into Exile. And so when they returned home, they were desperate to find a way to get back on the right track with God and with neighbor, to live a life that was more responsive to the author of life itself.
And so how, pray tell, were they to do this?
When my son was a teenager, our relationship often got off track. When this happened, the usual way we treated one another along with the household rules went by the wayside. Often as a corrective and as way to try to get things back on track, I would tighten things up, creating more rules for him to live by thinking that this would help to re-knit our relationship. Mostly, I believe, I was trying to reestablish my own control in the face of not knowing what to do with my son.
This was the same approach used by some of the Jewish religious authorities during Jeremiah’s time. They tried to tighten things up to get the people back on track in their relationship with God and one another. And along with this, they created more religious hierarchy to administer and interpret God’s law to the people.
But Jeremiah brought a completely different message to the people. Instead of tightening things up as the way to renew the people’s relationship with God and with neighbor, instead of creating more religious hierarchy to help the people interpret what they were to do and not to do, Jeremiah proclaimed that God would be the one who would renew the relationship; God would be the one to bring a relationship that was more living and direct out of what had grown old; God would be the one to bring a fresh ability to respond out of hearts that were stony and weighed down.
God would take the initiative and would write the law directly on the people’s hearts.
However could this happen? However can this happen? How can God break through and write a new responsiveness to life on our hearts? How does God break through to us?
In one of his songs Leonard Cohen sings: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
The way that God writes on our hearts is through the experience of our hearts being broken open. And sometimes this breaking can happen with a loud crack; other times it can come through a gentle unfolding.
This, for me, is what the revelation of Christ and the renewed covenant is all about: God’s glory showing itself in the crucified one; relationship with God found through the breaking of God’s heart and ours; responsiveness to what is of God being found in the pattern of dying in order to be reborn, of losing life in order to gain it.
Rachel Naomi Remen tells two interrelated stories of hearts being broken open so that a new life-giving word can be written there. Both are about gentle and profound unfoldings.
The first is her own story as a young, third-year medical student examining her very first heart patient. The patient was an older woman, a recent widow with a simple heart condition that could be easily remedied by medication. After prescribing the medicines and seeing woman’s condition improve, Remen noticed that though her physical condition was improving, the woman didn’t seem very excited by it. Remen imagined that this might have to do with the woman’s age—perhaps her life just did not matter as much to her because she was older . At any rate, Remen put her on a maintenance regimen of the medication and told her to come back to see her in 6 months.
Three months later when Remen saw her on her appointment schedule for the day, she was horrified—had she misdiagnosed the woman’s condition? What had she done wrong? When she entered the examination room, there the woman sat, fully clothed. When Remen inquired as to why the woman was there, she took a twist of wax paper out of her purse and placed it in her doctor’s hands. Within it were four small purple flowers. “They are grape hyacinths,” she said, flowers that she and her husband had planted 40 years earlier. Every spring they returned as the first evidence that life was stronger than winter.
And then the woman told Remen what had really been going on. When her health had begun to falter she had thought she was going to die and would never see these or any of her flowers ever again. She had been very afraid—afraid to lose the life that she had discovered was as precious to her as ever, afraid to trust that so young a doctor could really help her.
“Thank you, doctor,” she said, “Thank you for helping me.”
In that moment, Remen realized that though she had known what to proscribe to strengthen a failing heart muscle, she had not understood how one comes to love one’s life anew.
Remen goes on to tell the story of a physicians’ seminar on listening. In it, the physicians were told to take out their stethoscopes and to spend several minutes listening to their own hearts. At first all the physicians anxiously tried to diagnose themselves, but as time went on they moved past this to hearing something steadfast right in the middle of their lives, something that had been there before they had been born. “In that moment,” said Remen “we glimpsed something beyond our habitual way of seeing and hearing.” Afterward there was a silence and one of the cardiologists present began to speak about his work and to wonder aloud how one could be so close to something holy and not know it. It reminded him of a prayer that he heard some time back and, somewhat embarrassed, he began to recite it aloud.
“Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your presence like lightening illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see wherever we gaze that the bush burns unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, ‘How filled with awe is this place and we did know it.’”
As we trace our steps toward the Sunday of the Passion, listen to the beating of your heart, to the places that are baffled, broken and even lost. These are the places where God will be writing new words on your heart.
Works Cited or Consulted
Leonard Cohen’s song entitled “Anthem.” For the complete lyrics, go to:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/anthem.html
Rachel Naomi Remen’s My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging quoted in Volume 13, Issue 3 of the The Bible Workbench
The stories related are a combination of summaries, edits and direct quotes.
