following the heart

Proper 19 C 2010
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28; Ps 14; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-10


There was a man in the Middle East who thought he knew his own heart as well as the heart of God.

The young man grew up in privilege. He received a good liberal education. Perhaps it was his loneliness and sense of alienation among sophisticated fellow-students which set his feet on a dark path. See, the young man was raised in a stern faith which believes in one God, in the purity of God’s faithful people, and in observing clear laws that God has set down. As the world grew more complex, as their young people were exposed to more and more temptations of the flesh and of ideas, the teachers and leaders of this faith grew more stern in their demands and more angry in their preaching. The nations of the West, they said, brought nothing but greed and conquest to their lands and pollution to their young people and to their faith. A few teachers even advocated violence, violence against the Western forces who occupied their land, violence against their own people who co-operated in any way with those Western forces and who did not live up to the stern demands of those teachers. Any who died in this holy war, said the teachers, were God’s martyrs, guaranteed a hero’s reward in the life to come.

The bright and idealistic young man drank in this harsh teaching like cold water on a hot day. His heart thrilled to the white-hot, single-minded commitment required of a warrior for God. He was finally drawn into violence. He helped his new friends kill a man, a man whose beliefs ran against the approved teaching of the young man’s group.

Inspired, and secretly thrilled at violence for religion’s sake, the young man set out with the blessing of his leadership to harass and arrest his own people whose faith fell short of his standards and haul them before religious courts.

And the young man would have lived and probably died for this harsh, utterly committed faith, sure of his own heart and of the heart of God. But the strangest thing happened. The One God in whom the young man believed with all his heart showed up. God knocked the young man down and told him he was wrong, wrong about his own heart and about the heart of God.

This story sounds strangely like the tale of a member of the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda. In a sense it is. The young man was not Muslim, he was Jewish. His given name was Saul. Today we call him Saint Paul.

Saul thought he knew his heart and the heart of God. Do not underestimate the depth of his fanaticism. Only the lack of technology limited its power. I myself need little effort to imagine unchanged Saul sitting in a cave on the Afghani border, watching the Twin Towers fall on CNN and nodding in approval.

One Desert Father said, “Of all evil suggestions, the most terrible is the prompting to follow your own heart.” Now that’s really dark, and really counter-cultural—over and over again we are urged to “follow our hearts.” If you do not follow your heart, says popular wisdom, then you are allowing external authority to force you to be untrue to yourself.

Today the Scriptures suggest that we may not really know our own hearts. Our impulses and our most deeply cherished, unexamined beliefs are not necessarily our deepest truth. That poor fellow in Florida who was about to burn the Koran—he was following his heart and his most cherished beliefs. So are many misguided people, small or great. I am still on a journey to listen to my own true heart. Since our true heart is made to rest in God, it takes at least a lifetime to know ourselves even somewhat as God knows us. In the meanwhile, I face the fact that as often as I felt certitude, even a deep sense of passion about my ideals, all too often I have strayed into self-deception. “My people are foolish; they do not know me”, says God in Jeremiah. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” says Paul. “But I received mercy…”

“But I received mercy…” This weekend, we remember the death and destruction worked by young men who were absolutely sure they were right, that God was guiding them, that they were willing to die for their faith and their truth. As we remember, let us humbly ask for the grace to make a better world, not by rushing to assert that our enemies are wrong and we are right. That path leads all too easily to our willingness to make others suffer and die for our rightness. The violence, the single-mindedness, the self-deception is in us, and it awaits us always if we think we always know our own hearts and the heart of God. Our hope is not in our own sense of rightness. Our hope is in the God who is willing to search for us even in our times of anger, fear, and violence. Like a shepherd so single-minded he will leave the other sheep to search, like the woman who quits even cooking food to search her house for one coin, the God who truly knows us will search us out from every crack and crevice we have rolled into chosen for ourselves. Just ask Saul—God searched hard for him and finally had to knock him down to get his attention. Our single-mindedness does not save. The God who searches our minds and looks beneath our illusions and fears—it is this God who saves.