Deuteronomy 30:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
Psalm 119:1-8
Preached on February 12, 2017 at the Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield, NJ

Happy are they who seek the Lord with all their hearts.[1]

As I was meditating on today’s scriptures and their common thread of upholding the law, I noticed that this is not the only thing they have in common; in today’s scripture passages, we hear a lot about minding our hearts. Now, I’m not talking about minding our hearts in the Valentine’s Day sense, although all of this heart talk is seasonally appropriate. I’m talking about not getting stuck in our heads  – on reason alone – when we’re trying to think through something in a world that requires a focus on something greater. Interestingly enough, it’s the scripture passage that doesn’t use the word “heart” that captures this best.

The only reading today in which the word “heart” doesn’t appear is the reading from 1^st Corinthians. Typical, that Paul would be difficult. I guess that’s how we know that the Holy Spirit is there though, isn’t it? 1 Corinthians best PR [2] is the passage about love that people read for weddings or write in Valentine’s, but this letter – and the rest of the New Testament letters – are about so much more. The letters from Paul that we read in scripture are the story of the early church being formed. The leaders who are persecuted in Acts are persecuted because they dared travel from city to city in the early world and proclaim the gospel and convert people to way of Jesus Christ. Our church’s bold commitment to being counter-culture is in our deepest roots.  The city of Corinth, the destination of the letter we’re reading from today, was a key city in Greece, but for all of Paul’s evangelism, he couldn’t stay there forever. That just wasn’t his call. Nevertheless, he writes to the people of Corinth as his brothers and sisters in Christ to help them mend their hearts. In the first half of today’s New Testament reading, we hear that there is division among the people of the Church in Corinth. Paul cautions us against a way of life focused only on “human inclinations” – followed our own individual agendas to best take care of ourselves as individuals. In order to avoid jealousy, quarrelling, and other things that cause us to sin by dividing us from our neighbors, we need to focus on God’s agenda. As Paul writes to the people of Corinth in today’s passage, for all of the good work of humans to found the church and share the fellowship, it is always God who makes our faith grow and who calls us to live and love more richly by following Christ [319]

We are each given minds that work in different and beautiful ways, as developmental psychologist Howard Gardner addressed in his brilliant work on the eight-to-ten different kinds of intelligences he believes we all possess in different quantities, but in addition to our ability to reason in whatever type of intelligence God has given us, we must also be careful stewards of our hearts. After all, in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, what keeps the Israelites from hearing God and living into God’s commandments isn’t their ears or their mind’s ability to process the words.[3] What the Israelites are told to do is to keep their hearts turned to God above all. Our hearts know whether we are keeping God’s commandments because they can feel whether what we’re doing is good and is bringing us closer to God or whether what we’re doing is sin and is causing division.

In a few days it will be Valentine’s Day, the pressures of which can be challenging. Couples can enjoy hearts-and-candy bliss, if they can rise above the pressures of perfection. Those of us not part of a couple can enjoy a day spent with beloved family or friends, celebrating other kinds of love, but for anyone who is struggling with loneliness or recovering for a particularly potent heartbreak, the day can be filled with sadness or misery, accentuating feelings of loneliness , invisibility, or simply being “not good enough.”

Loneliness is also common at Christmas time, a fact that is easy to forget in spite of hearing stories like “A Christmas Carol” or “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. The Grinch, whose bitterness from one bad day, one bad turn, one rough morning commute, one time he encountered a problem before his morning tea turned into a bitter, grumpy, grinchy-ness with so much unprocessed grief and anger that his heart turned away from God  – that’s how, over time, a heart can shrink down to two sizes too small. Clearly, the Grinch didn’t come to church and listen to sermons that called him to be Christmas everyday; after all, he could hardly stand the one.

The Grinch had deep-seated wounds.  Though we do not know what the cause of these wounds are they are wounds that kept him from being in community. They were wounds that kept him from accepting what good about him.  They were wounds that convinced him that others did not accept him for who he was, so he lived alone with his dog, max.  The Grinch’s insecurity around these wounds gave him the kind of bitter thoughts that Matthew cautions us against in today’s gospel passage – the kind that poison our hearts.[4]

All of this poison in his heart made him steal Christmas from every Who in Whoville, but what makes this story so beautiful is how it backfired. For all of the things that the Grinch stole, he couldn’t steal what irked him most about Christmas: the part where every Who gathered together and held hands and sang out joyfully. See, every Who who sang knew what mattered, what brings us together every week: the Love. I remember standing on those blue steps in Junior Choir and singing “Love the Lord will all your heart and soul and mind and strength. I will love the Lord with all I am.” Whole self love. Love with an open heart for the Holy Spirit to descend like a dove and help us grow with God. Love that transforms. The collective love of every Who in Whoville helped transform the Grinch, whose heart grew three sizes that day, wide open, transformed by love, and swelling with space for the Holy Spirit to work through him and love him, with the beautiful grace we live into each Sunday when we, too, pray for the forgiveness of our sins.

Last week, I revealed to you all how when my own job search dragged on. For a time, I struggled to keep my insecurities from poisoning me by making me believe that I wasn’t good enough.  “Not enough” is not in our God’s vocabulary and it is not a phrase that will bring us into a deeper relationship with our Creator. Like Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences teaches us that there are many ways to try to qualify the beauty of a brain, we as followers of Christ must remember that our God fed five thousand people with two fish and created us in perfect, Goldilocks approved, just-right proportions, whether we are part of a pair or not.

Like the Grinch, we each carry around our own wounds. And like the Grinch we can choose to hold on to them or let them go.  We can choose to work through them or let them work on us.  We can choose to walk with them or flee from them.  If we choose to face our wounds and walk with them then we are able to discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the Holy Spirit, in a mysterious way, is living at the center of the wound, descending upon us all like a dove even when things get messy and loving us with a love that transforms even with all of our imperfections.

So just how do you walk with wounds that are so deep and so alienating?  The answer Paul gives is Christ and the crucifixion.  Christ who understands and identifies with our loneliness.  Christ who carries our wounds. And by doing so, shows us the God who loves us.  It is in Christ that we can learn we belong – belong to a community of the wounded.  It is in Christ that we learn that we are loved, in spite of our woundedness.   And it is in the community of the wounded who encounter the living God in Christ, in whom we are healed, through our life together; our shared journey; our open, swelling, hearts; and our Baptism.  Baptism reminds us of the story of God’s love that comes to us amid our woundedness to give us healing and life. Baptism, just like weeping, requires water. It also reminds us of dying and rising with Christ, whose ugly death in the wounds of the crucifixion was a necessary stop on the journey to resurrection, and sets us on a path of walking with our woundedness in order to find life therein.

So as you walk through those doors today, walk boldly in all your strength from God and all of the imperfections of your wounds, knowing the Holy Spirit can descend upon your heart in joy or in pain. As the psalmist writes, Happy are we who seek the Lord will all our hearts[5]: all our hearts and souls and minds and strength. All our love. All God’s love. All that we are, wounds included.

[1] Psalm 119:2

[2] 1 Corinthians 13

[3] Deuteronomy 30:15-20

[4] Matthew 5:21-37

[5] Psalm 119:2