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The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people who call upon thee, and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 10)
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The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
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A Sermon by
The Rev. Adam Spencer, Rector, St. Elisabeth’s Episcopal Church, Glencoe, IL
✛
Kardiac
One morning, when I was probably fifteen, my heart started pounding furiously in my chest. I felt suddenly dizzy. I staggered on my feet. I blacked out and I fell over.
When I came to again, I was lying half on my bed and half on the floor of my bedroom. I pulled myself to my feet, feeling weak and confused and called out to my parents. They took me to the hospital where the doctors conducted a whole battery of tests. I’d had, they thought, a sudden decrease in blood pressure that had caused a drop in blood flow to my brain. But they weren’t entirely sure about that. So they sent me home with a monitor attached. To keep an eye, they said, on the condition and behavior of my heart.
In the ancient world, the heart was seen as a spiritual as well as a physical organ of the body. The ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was the seat of the soul. For the second century Roman philosopher and physician Galen the heart was the “hearthstone” of the body, closely related to the soul. And, of course, that belief lingers in our cultural consciousness today as well. Stores are filled in February with candy hearts because in our imagination the heart governs not only blood cells but also emotion and desire.
And while we, in our day, tend to equate the heart with feeling and emotion primarily, the ancient view differs from that. It involved emotion, certainly, but was about more than simply feeling and feelings. In the ancient world the heart was a thinking organ as well. The center of one’s inner life. For the ancients, the state of the heart was intimately tied to the way humans beings lived their lives.
As Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “‘Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles…. (W)hat comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.” “Blessed are the pure in heart,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “for they shall see God.”
The heart comes up over and over in Scripture, especially in the Psalms. In the New Testament, the word for heart is the Greek word kardia from which we get the English medical words for all kinds of heart-related stuff like cardiology, cardiovascular, and cardiac. (In Cleveland, Ohio – where I grew up – the 1980 Browns football team was known as the “Kardiac Kids” because of the heart-stopping finishes to so many of their games.)
The Bauer, Danker, Ardnt and Gingrich Lexicon of New Testament Greek that I was trained with in seminary (Affectionately known as the B-DAG) defines kardia as “the heart as seat of physical, spiritual and mental life… and as center and source of the whole inner life, with its thinking, feeling, and volition.” Which brings us to today’s Gospel reading. Because just as that heart monitor they strapped on me in the hospital served to keep an eye on and understand the condition of my physical kardia, today’s famous parable can serve, I think, as a sort of spiritual cardiac diagnostic tool for our inner life.
I’m sure most of you are very familiar with this parable that Jesus shares here in Matthew’s Gospel.
“Listen!,” Jesus says, “A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”
There are lots of times in our lives when I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt to do a spiritual heart exam. But I can think of one set of occasions where this parable might be particularly helpful. When you’re needing to make a good decision and want to discern where God is at and what God is up to in that decision. Checking in with the fullness of your inner life, your heart could make a real difference there. I believe God is trying to speak, to sow the seed of his word and his grace into our lives all the time. And this particular moment in time feels like one when we as a nation, a city, a church, as families and individuals, are facing a number of difficult and complicated crises and decision points. “God is still speaking,” our United Church of Christ friends say. Still sowing seed.
So let’s take our heart exam. Let’s look at each of seed-sowing scenarios that Jesus gives us one by one.
We’ll begin with the seed sown on the path first – the word of God snatched up and devoured by the birds. Saint Ignatius of Loyola wrote a lot about the various spiritual forces at play in our hearts. He made a helpful distinction between the Good Spirit (or the Spirit of God) and the Evil Spirit operating in all of our lives. One Spirit drawing us closer to God and others and the other spirit luring us into isolation and darkness. Think of that little cartoon devil and angel on someone’s shoulders whispering in their ears. As a faithful Catholic of his day, Saint Ignatius of course believed this very literally. A more secular take on this idea is that the Evil Spirit is our worst self at work in us. But Ignatius said that when we listen, in the depths of ourselves, in our hearts, to the Good Spirit we are built up in our faith, in our ability to hope and love. When we listen to the Evil Spirit, when we let its messages fill up our hearts, we are led into spirals of fear and despair, self-loathing bitterness and resentment towards others. And so the good seed of the grace and word of God is stolen from us, like the seed on the path eaten up by birds. In taking a measure of our hearts, we need to be able to discern where the various voices speaking to our hearts are coming from. We need understanding, Jesus says, so as not to let this good seed get away from us. Principally, we need to understand what the voice of God sounds like. The consistent themes of Christianity. Love, grace, hope, repentance, forgiveness, justice, humility. We need to understand, to know and trust the steady, faithful, merciful, message of Jesus. Not the lies and illusions that seek to “corrupt and destroy the creatures of God”, as the prayer book says.
The rocky ground in Jesus’s parable is a heart that hasn’t deeply engaged the word or grace of God. I’m sure some of you have had “mountaintop experiences” or “epiphany moments” in your lives. Moments of great beauty or power or emotion that turn your heart to God. But then the rest of life happens. Bills to pay and kids to raise, work that piles up. Or worse – a bad diagnosis, a lost job, a friend who suddenly dies, or a global pandemic. And if our faith is tied only to mountaintop experiences or emotional highs, if faith is only about the gift-giver God or the problem-solver God and not the mysterious and sometimes silent God or the God who abides even in great suffering or who calls us into uncomfortable places…faith can wither away like the plant without deep roots. In taking stock of the state of our hearts, in making faithful decisions, we must, I think Jesus says here, have courageous and resilient hearts and not only comfortable ones. Hearts full of faith that can accommodate God’s silence, and our pain, and our struggle. Faith which does not take up residence only in feel-good emotions but which pushes us out into the deep waters. Faith deeply rooted in our heart that challenges us to do and be better than we have been before – as individuals and as a community. And hearts that do not settle for mere comfort or easy answers.
Thirdly, in this parable, we have the thorny ground which is, perhaps, in some ways the easiest for me to understand because, at least for me, it is such a daily thing. Whose heart is not cluttered up with distractions and desires, worries and fears? That feels to me anyway like so much of what human life is. What Jesus calls “the cares of the world.” And yet Jesus rightly diagnoses it as a principal problem in the spiritual life, that chokes out God’s word in our hearts. And Jesus links the “cares of the world” with the “lure of wealth.” He doesn’t mince words there. The lure of wealth is dangerous to our heart. What the thorny ground is all about is attachment to ideas or things that are not God; what Saint Ignatius calls “disordered affection.” Turning thoughts and things into all-consuming idols. So, we ask ourselves, what do we pay attention to? What do we give our lives to, what do we focus our hearts on and what do we fill them up with? Why are we choosing what we’re choosing?
And finally there is the good soil. A heart, a life, that can fully receive the word of God.
Creating good, receptive soil in our hearts is what we are called to by Jesus in this parable. We are called to be intentional about caring for the soil of our hearts – the thoughts, the decisions, the habits of our hearts. Checking in on our hearts and cultivating habits like prayer, silence, attention, self-examination, gratitude, humility and kindness. Habits that till and water the fields of our hearts, to receive the word and the grace of God like rich, dark soil receives the seed sown in it so that we can produce an abundant harvest of goodness in our lives and in the world.
The Puritan writer John Flavel wrote, “The heart of man…is the seat of principles, and the fountain of actions. The eye of God is, and the eye of the Christian ought to be, principally fixed upon it.”
Jesus, in this parable today, is our spiritual cardiologist applying a different sort of heart monitor to each of us to take different sorts of measurements than the one the doctor gave me in high school. So, ask yourself today: Where is my heart, my inner life, rocky or thorny or shallow? Where does it need a good workout in practicing resilient faith or brave compassion, a better diet of thoughts and ideas, freedom from selfishness and attachment, openness to God?
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “The soul must grow and expand, so as to be capable of God.
And its largeness is its love…”
