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Sermon 04/02/2006
The Writing on the Heart
~ by Tom Kinder
April 2, 2006 Fifth Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont,
UCC
Psalm 51; Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-33
The Christian churches in Germany responded in
various ways to Hitler’s Nazi Government.
Some churches actively supported Hitler. Some
remained silent. And some stood up and said that
what their government was doing was wrong and
went against the way of Jesus Christ. Which kind
of church would you have wanted to belong to?
One that supported the Nazi government, or remained
silent, or actively opposed it?
This is not as simple a question as it sounds.
Most ministers of churches that opposed Hitler
were forced to join the army, sent to the front
lines, given the most dangerous assignments and
were killed in battle. I imagine their congregations
received similar treatment. Even without those
extreme consequences, it always feels safer to
support the status quo or to keep quiet. So consider
carefully which you think you would have wanted
to do.
The opposition group called themselves the Confessing
Churches. They meant the word confessing in the
sense of “confession of faith,” meaning
that they were taking a stand and boldly bearing
witness to what their faith said was right and
true. But the word confessing also meant that
they confessed to the world the sins committed
in their name by their national government.
On February 18th the leaders of the United States
Conference for the World Council of Churches published
an open letter to their fellow churches from around
the world confessing the failure of the American
churches to oppose our government’s wrongs
boldly enough. This may turn out to be an extremely
important document and February 18th, 2006 a historic
date, the day that the Confessing Churches of
the United States declared themselves in opposition
to our government’s policies. Or the document
and date may fade into insignificance. Whether
this becomes the beginning of a new heroic resistance
or just another murmur in the church’s slumber
depends on us. Will we become a confessing church,
or will we support our government policies, or
will we be silent?
The letter was signed by the leaders of thirty-four
denominations, including by the President of our
own denomination, the United Church of Christ,
the Rev. John Thomas. It begins by talking about
how supportive of us the world churches were after
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Then
it goes on:
We are citizens of a nation that has done much
in these years to
endanger the human family and to abuse the creation.
Following the
terrorist attacks you…[invited] us into a
deeper solidarity with those
who suffer daily from violence around the world.
But our country
responded by seeking to reclaim a privileged and
secure place in the
world, raining down the terror on the truly vulnerable
among our global
neighbors. Our leaders turned a deaf ear to the
voices of church leaders
throughout our nation and the world, entering
into imperial projects that
seek to dominate and control for the sake of our
own national interests.
Nations have been demonized and God has been enlisted
in national agendas
that are nothing short of idolatrous. We lament
with special anguish the war
in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global
norms of justice and
human rights. We mourn all who have died or been
injured in this war, we acknowledge with shame
abuses carried our in our name, and we confess
that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice
loud enough and persistent enough to deter our
leaders from this path of pre-emptive war. Lord,
have mercy.
The rivers, oceans, lakes, rainforests and wetlands
that sustain us,
and even the air we breathe continue to be violated,
and global warming
goes unchecked while we allow God’s creations
to veer toward
destruction. Yet our own country refuses to acknowledge
its complicity
and rejects multilateral agreements aimed at reversing
disastrous
trends. We consume without replenishing; we grasp
finite resources as
if they are private possessions; our uncontrolled
appetites devour more
and more of earth’s gifts. We confess that
we have failed to raise a
prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough
to call our nation to
global responsibility for the creation, and that
we ourselves are
complicit in a culture of consumption that diminishes
the earth.
Christ, have mercy.
The vast majority of the peoples of the earth
live in crushing
poverty. The starvation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic,
the treatable diseases
that go untreated indict us, revealing the grim
features of global
economic injustice we have too often failed to
acknowledge or confront.
Our nation enjoys enormous wealth, yet we cling
to our possessions
rather than share. We have failed to embody the
covenant of life to
which our God calls us; Hurricane Katrina revealed
to the world those
left behind in our own nation by the rupture of
our social contract. As
a nation we have refused to confront the racism
that exists in our own
communities and the racism that infects our policies
around the world.
We confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic
voice loud enough
and persistent enough to call our nation to seek
just economic
structures so that sharing by all will mean scarcity
for none. In the
face of the earth’s poverty, our wealth condemns
us. Lord, have mercy.
This letter challenges all American Christians
who hear it. Will we support our government on
these issues of war, degradation and poverty or
will we remain silent or will we do what it takes
to make our congregation a Confessing Church?
To be a Confessing Church in the spirit of the
German churches that opposed Hitler’s policies,
we would need to have the courage and persistence
to express our opposition and teach the way of
Christ as we understand it. We would need to do
so boldly and publicly in every venue and at every
opportunity we could find, not just waiting for
opportunities, but creating them. We would need
to be willing to risk our popularity, our comfort,
even our safety, if necessary, as Jesus did in
opposing the corrupt, violent and oppressive governments
of his day, and as Christian martyrs have done
from the Apostles Peter and Paul to Martin Luther
King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
But before we did all that outer confessing, to
be a Confessing Church we would need to do inner
confessing. Before confessing our faith we would
need to confess our sins—not only our complicity
in the sins of our government, but also our own
personal condition of separation from God’s
sacred way. Without confessing in this sense we
would run the risk of seeking to replace one set
of government policies corrupted by self interest
with a different set also corrupted by self-interest.
Today’s scriptures remind us that “those
who love their life lose it, and those who hate
their life in this world will keep it for eternal
life.” This teaching of Jesus is as central
to his message as the love commandments. It means
that we need to let go of our selfish desires
and concerns for this life before we can get hold
of true and undying life in God. We need to empty
ourselves of our ego with all its self-serving
impulses, all its addictions and compulsions and
obsessions, all its greed and various kinds of
lusts and pride—all the attachments to this
world and to our self that hold us back from freely
following the way of Jesus Christ. We need to
do this within ourselves if we wish to create
a society around us that is free of selfishness,
addictions or greed.
As one Eastern Orthodox teacher puts it, “Through
confession a human being becomes humbled, and
through humility one reaches true metanoia, the
transformation of one’s mind in the form
of deep repentance. It leads to the removal of
egotism, which is the very root of logismoi.”
(The Mountain of Silence, p 141)
That last word, logismoi, is Greek for “thought,”
but as a theological term logismoi usually refers
to the kind of thoughts that can penetrate our
heart and come between God and us. Often we do
not recognize logismoi at work within us, or do
not see how they are leading us astray.
The 51st Psalm says, “You desire truth in
the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in
my secret heart….Create I me a clean heart,
O God and put in me a new and right spirit.”
Confessing the truth of our inward being humbles
us and begins to empty us of these logismoi that
have taken control of our hearts and minds. Confessing
helps us die to this life in the spiritual sense.
Then we become like the grain of wheat that goes
into the earth and dies so that it can bear much
fruit. Emptied of our ego’s selfishness,
God can, in the words of Jeremiah, write on our
heart the laws of a new covenant.
In the book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
Harry finds a magical diary. The pages are blank,
but he discovers that if you write on them, an
invisible hand writes back. Harry does not realize
it, but the voice speaking through the invisible
hand is evil and is leading him into a trap. It
is a powerfully seductive and addictive voice.
It has already driven Harry’s friend Ginny
to do terrible things. It is controlling Harry
more than he realizes.
This is a good image for what happens to people
who do not get to know the truth of their inward
being. They do not look beneath the surface to
see whose hand is writing on their heart. They
follow their impulses, assuming they are good
and right, just because they think or feel them.
But they may not be from God or leading to God.
They may be
logismoi leading them into delusions of self-interest.
Unless they search their heart with humility,
they may never see the need to confess these logismoi
and ask God for a clean heart. But if they are
willing to die the spiritual death of letting
go of their attachment to their selfish voice,
then they may begin to find God writing on the
blank pages of their heart.
How can you know if a voice is ego or God? It
is not always easy. Even spiritual masters can
be fooled sometimes, thinking they are doing something
at God’s urging when it is their own pride
in disguise. That is why we need to keep looking
for the truth of what is happening in us, and
confessing it. We need to quiet our thoughts and
be still so that we may hear God speaking. We
need to pray.
One indication that it is God’s writing on
our heart is if it leads us to love and serve
others without feeding our own ego. Another is
if it leads to the nonviolence, healing and lifting
up of the poor that characterize the way of Jesus
Christ.
By these tests, the February 18th letter of the
confessing churches of the United States seems
indeed to have God’s hand in it. Now it is
up to us to decide if God’s writing in our
heart moves us to join them and become a confessing
church ourselves.
So let us become still, quieting the logismoi,
our distracting, self-concerned thoughts, asking
God to create in us a clean heart and put in us
anew and right spirit. Let us pray in silence,
asking God to fill us and lead us...
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