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The Fifth 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 Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
✛
The Holy Spirit in Your Heart
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Saint Paul makes some extravagant claims in today’s reading from Romans about what it means to have the Holy Spirit dwelling in you. That’s (first) just the definition of a Christian: one who has the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, within. Therefore, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus: the category of condemnation simply doesn’t apply, because to be condemned is the same thing as not having God’s Spirit, and conversely, having the Spirit just means living with God and thus without condemnation. But we Christians are beings of both body and spirit, and while God’s Holy Spirit presently abides within us, still our bodies are oriented towards death, the old enemy and the old sign of condemnation. But, Paul says, remember that God’s Spirit raised Jesus from the dead. That same Spirit, who is now within you, will give life to your mortal bodies also.
A bit later in this 8th chapter of Romans, Paul says God searches the hearts of men (8.27). And we know Jesus spoke of the heart as the locus of both the human problem and the solution to the human problem. He said that it is from the heart that real badness comes (evil thoughts, wicked deeds); he also pronounced blessed the pure in heart; they shall see God (Matt. 5:8).
To get at the heart we need to get out of the way an error made by many people who think of themselves as smart. People of biblical times associated the heart with thinking. In our sophistication, we reckon them wrong, because we know it is the brain and not the heart that controls thinking. But here lies a foolish mistake, if we equate the brain and the mind. Your mind is not your brain. Your mind, your soul, your spirit—all of that about you, which is entailed in understanding and freedom and authentic personal action—all that cannot be nothing but your brain. I speak, as some of you know, as one whose wife had a brain disease. Her brain got sicker and sicker over several years, yet while she was losing her brain, she was not losing her mind. If we fail to hang on to this distinction—if we collapse together mind and brain—then we reduce human beings to the matter of their bodies, and we have to say that we are nothing but machines, really interesting, highly intricate machines but at the end of the day nothing more, and thus of course unfree. If human freedom is real, then your mind is not your brain.
It is this human truth that the Bible gets at by speaking of the heart. The heart is the place of understanding, and it includes all sorts of thinking and it does not exclude feeling. The heart is that with which you understand, or perhaps better, the heart is you as you are understanding. To speak of your heart is to speak of you as a person.
The prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah gave us the diagnosis: the human problem is that we have hard hearts. Yet God gave a promise through those prophets that a new day would come. Ezekiel 36:26: A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And Jeremiah 24:7: I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.
This promise is fulfilled in Jesus. The famous parable of the sower who strewed the seed on many different kinds of soil is about just this, God in Jesus putting his Spirit into our hearts. It is a parable, not a puzzle, not a cryptogram where we need to figure out the code to decipher it. Every parable is a word that comes from the mouth of the Word who comes from the heart of God to plant something new, his Spirit, in our heart.
Look at the explanation Jesus gives for this parable. There are four kinds of soil. The first (on the footpath) is the case of someone who hears the word but doesn’t understand. The word was sown in his heart but was lost, snatched away, because he lacked understanding. The second (on rocky ground) is the case of hearing with joy but without persistence. The third (among thistles) is about hearing without silencing the many other voices and cares which end up smothering the word. The fourth (good soil) is about hearing with understanding.
Notice that the first and the fourth are set up as opposites: hearing without understanding, then hearing with understanding. The two middle cases are variations given to help us grasp the point, but the emphasis is on the contrast. Jesus is saying: to receive his word is for the Spirit to come into our heart which is to hear Jesus with understanding.
Understanding is what happens in the heart. The way we understand Jesus, the person, or indeed the way we understand anything that comes from God, is by God himself, the Holy Spirit, who within our hearts gives us understanding.
You only receive God’s Word, you can only take Jesus into your heart, you can only have a heart of flesh rather than a heart of stone—all this is the case only if the Holy Spirit is there in your heart.
May I speak once more personally? I am a Christian because my parents took me to church as a boy. They presented me for baptism when I was about two years old. They took me to Sunday school, where lovely ladies gave me cookies and taught me Bible stories. I am a Christian also because I had teenage friends who were Christians and they helped me grow in prayer. I also had a neighbor who had an interesting illustrated Bible that she let me read. When I went to college I spent a year trying to figure all this out, trying to see why I was a Christian, trying to think myself to God; and then one late spring evening, walking alone on campus following dinner, there in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the sun low in the New Mexican sky behind me, I felt the tap on my shoulder. While I had been trying to get my mind to God, God had snuck up on me. I knew I was a Christian without ever deciding to be one.
And I suspect that many of you here today (more than you might think) have this same story. The particulars will be unique to you. But one day you just, as it were, woke up and realized that you were a Christian. When Jesus tells this story about the sower and the seed and the different kinds of soil, he’s just showing us something that’s always true about God—and about us! The soil, of course, doesn’t choose to be on the footpath or not, it just is what it is. We didn’t choose to have a softened heart, a heart of flesh, a heart receptive to the Holy Spirit—it’s just who we are. I’m not saying that what we do doesn’t matter, that God does everything and so we don’t have to do anything. That’s also a philosophical fallacy by the way! And it matters infinitely that my parents and my teachers and my neighbors and my friends were good and honest and sacrificial for me.
But grasp this (it’s the final point and the main point): when Jesus tells the parable of the sower, he is telling us what’s always true about God, and at the same time he is doing it. God is always sowing seed, and as Jesus speaks, Jesus is the seed being sown. God is always ahead of us, behind us, around us; God has put his Holy Spirit into our hearts; that’s always true; yet also, when I tell you about it right now, it is happening.
And that, I think, is understanding. There is a sort of awareness that we can cultivate, a mindfulness of the Holy Spirit as a presence already planted in our hearts. A heart of flesh, that receptive soil, knows that it was once a hard heart; it is thus a grateful and thankful heart. And it seeks always to understand better. In such wise does God bring forth in us the harvest of understanding: thirty-fold . . . sixty-fold . . . a hundredfold.
