Saturday, May 17, 2014
Proper 17 ~ Graft in our Hearts the love of your Name
Sermon
for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Proper
17B ~ August 30, 2009
Holy
Trinity & St. Anskar
Pray in the Spirit at all times
+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided
Trinity
Today’s propers contain several references to the human heart:
For it is from within, from the human heart,
that evil intentions come
'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me
Graft in out Hearts the love of your Name.
The heart is the center of a thing, what is really important about it,
it’s essence, its core. (Cor meansheart in Latin, cognate with
the Greek kardia as incardiologist.) For Aristotle, the heart was the center of the whole human being, physical, emotional, and
mental. Aristotle thought that the heart, not the brain, was where we did our
thinking.
We know differently: we
can poke the brain and produce muscular motion, sensations of pain and
pleasure, and moods. We can identify the parts of the brain that control speech
and mathematical calculation. And the heart in our imagination has,
accordingly, been reduced to a mere blood-pump ~ necessary, but no longer
the core of being that it once was. Yet it
persists as such in our language: The heart is where you take something when
you take it to heart, what you offer when you put your heart into it, what is broken, when you break your heart, and what is good about a good-hearted person. Since we know that we don’t think
with our hearts, we customarily use it as a metaphor for feelings or desires
only, but that is not what these vestigial expressions really mean; they mean heart in the Aristotelian ~ and biblical ~ sense: the core of a human being.
So, when we ask God to graft in our hearts the love of God’s Name, we are not asking God to excite in us certain feelings regarding the Name. What then are we asking? What is the love of your name, as used by this wonderful collect, which it is
useful to memorize and use every day?
Meister Eckhart, the
late-medieval mystic, once remarked that “The Eye with which I see God is the
same Eye with which God sees me” That eye is the heartand the seeing to which he referred is the love of God’s Name. God’s Name is God’s essential self,
insofar as it can be known by human beings. The love of God’s Nameis God’s love for us and our love for God. They are one and the same: Meister Eckhardt’s
“eye”, with which God is seen, as Jesus said, by the pure in heart.
If we love God, it is
because the Holy Spirit loves within us. This is the love for which today’s
collect prays. We ask in it for nothing less than the fulfillment of Jesus’
most remarkable promise: “if anyone keeps my commandments, my Father will love
her, and we will come to her and
make our home with her.”
The human heart becomes the residence of God Almighty, heaven on earth, here
and now.
But as ultimate as that
may sound, we ask for even more: increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and
bring forth in us the fruit of good works. For a definition of true religion,
we can do no better than the Holy Apostle James:
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God,
the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to
keep oneself unstained by the world.
So to increase in true religion is to devote ourselves to Christ’s
commandment to love others as He has loved us, and to allow Him to free us not
from the earth of material life, but from the world of slavery to ego. We do not expect to be able to do this all at
once, so we ask for the continuing increase of true religion; the ongoingnourishment in all goodness, which is the
growth in thelove of God’s Name that underlies the whole process; and the final issue of good works, which transform into the Kingdom of God, not only the world but
our own hearts: our core our essential being.
The whole
prayer is a metaphor of an organic process of growth, like gestation. Like Our
Lady, every baptized Christian is pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Thelove of
the Name is the seed, grafted in
our essential coreand nourished by the Holy Spirit, Who is all goodness; the resulting fruit is good works:
the care for orphans and widows in their distress, which is also the content oftrue religion.
This
process goes on without too much help from us ~ just like a pregnancy. But it
is not inevitable. We have a choice. We can choose to coöperate or
not. So-called “religious practices” are meant to assist us in our choice to
coöperate. And so, we come to church, receive the sacraments, give alms, fast,
and pray in private.
Jesus
advised us, when we pray, to go into a closet and shut the door. Christians
have traditionally interpreted this closet to refer to our own hearts. Eastern
Orthodox monks for at least a thousand years have taken this in the literal,
Aristotelian sense. The form of prayer known as “the Prayer of the Heart” is
intended to quietthe heart so that we are as still as possible at
our core. The word for stillness is hesychia. The practioners of it
are the hesychasts, who describe this state of consciousness as
“standing with the mind in the heart before God”. This means that the
busyness of our involuntary thoughts quiets down, so that we may hear God,
Whose language is silence. As Meister Eckhart said, “there is nothing so like
God as silence.” We can enter this secret closet anywhere, at any time. Thehesychasts also take literally Paul’s advice to “pray in
the Spirit without ceasing”. They say this is what he meant, and they try to
live constantly in the stillness.
Our
transfiguration into the undistorted likeness of God will, no doubt, progress
without this kind of intentional coöperation on our part, but it will happen
much sooner with it. Insofar as it does, we can become living vessels of grace,
as the Love of God’s Name brings forth in us the fruits of good works, giving
birth to the New Creation, and transforming the earth into the Kingdom of
Heaven.
Amen
Maranatha
Come, Lord Jesus
