“Start With the Heart”
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15,
21-23
September 3, 2006
St. Paul United
Rev. John A. Fleming,
Senior Pastor
In his book, The Applause of Heaven, my favorite author,
Max Lucado tells about being a ten year old and going
to work with his dad. Max didn’t follow
his father into the ministry. His dad
wasn’t a pastor. Max’s dad worked in the
oil fields of
Max says that the countryside was flat and predictable. Out there on the plain, there was nothing higher than a windmill. So when Max saw something strange and different in the far away landscape, he pointed and excitedly asked his dad, “What’s that?” His father looked up and saw what his son had seen. He gently said, “That’s a refinery.” It was a jungle of pipes and tanks and tubes and generators and heaters and pumps and pipes and filters and hoses and conduits and switches and circuits. Max says that to him, the refinery looked like a giant Tinker Toy set.
Max learned later that the purpose of a refinery is defined by it’s name. It refines. It takes gasoline, oil, chemicals, and whatever else comes in and purifies it so that it is ready to go out. The preacher in Max writes, “The refinery does for petroleum and its by-products what our hearts should do for us. Our hearts are supposed to take out the bad and utilize the good.”
We tend to think of our hearts as the middle of our emotions. We talk about heart aches. We refer to heart throbs. We speak about broken hearts. But those who heard Jesus speak for the first time knew that the heart was the center of the will. The heart is supposed to be the control tower. It should be the cock-pit. The heart is thought to be the center of the character. It is the place where all desires and affections and perceptions and thoughts and reasoning and imaginations get their start. It is the place where the conscience lives and where intentions and purposes and faith and your will get their start. So when the writer of the Proverb pens the words, “Above all else, guard your heart” he was really writing something. To those who first heard Jesus’ words, the heart was like the switch house at the train yard. It receives all emotions and sends them off in the right direction. And just as bad gasoline would make you wonder about the work of the refinery, evil acts and impure thoughts can cause you to question the condition of your heart.
So Jesus writes in our lesson for this morning, “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” Jesus says what others have believed, “The heart is the center of the spiritual life.” Which makes me want to ask this morning, “How is the condition of your heart?”
Jesus taught the importance of the
heart, and when he does in our lesson for this morning, the Pharisees are put
in their places. By the time we arrive
at Mark’s seventh chapter, the Pharisees are watching Jesus closely. They are looking for anything and everything
that will send him to his cross. The
leaders of the Pharisees send a delegation the sixty or so miles from
Now we know a little bit about the Pharisees. We know that they had been following the rules for a long time, both the ones that were written down in the first five books of the Bible and the ones that had been created since then to cover just about any situation. Pharisees were lay people. They were not clergy. But still they developed high standards for themselves. They observed Sabbath days. They tithed. They ate all of their meals in purity because they saw their bodies as temples. They would not even think of cutting themselves slack. For some reason they had trouble believing the good news Jesus brought. For some reason they could not trade in their rules and their righteousness for a relationship with Jesus.
You may know this. I am a rule follower. I am also an expectation follower. There may be a little Pharisee in me. When I was in school, I was often asked to write down the names of those who misbehaved while the teacher was out of the room. I was not popular when I did that. So you see, I don’t think the Pharisees were all that bad. They were just misguided. You might say the Pharisees were some of the best people around. They were serious about their faith. They were concerned about being pure. They were devoted to pleasing God and living the best lives they could live. And my guess is that there is someone in your life who lived like that. My best guess is that there is someone in your present or in your past whose obedience to God seemed like a light on a foggy night. Someone who just by the way they lived helped you find your way.
That is the way it was for the Pharisees. They kept high standards which would have been just fine if it helped them with their relationship with other people. It didn’t. Two-thirds of the rules they held on to were about eating. There were laws about what you could eat and who you could eat it with. There were rules about what kind of dishes you could use and what pots and pans were on the approved list. Some of these laws were practical. After all, the hands were the silverware of their day. You might not want to share a meal with someone who refused to wash up after killing a fatted calf.
More of the laws were spiritual. Dirty hands, thought the Pharisees, meant a dirty heart. Touching a dead body and shaking hands with a leper were among the first things that got you banned from the Lord’s table. The Pharisees thought that there were spiritual germs everywhere. The world was a dirty place. Sinners were dirty people. Dirt was dangerous, not just to your body, but also to your soul. That is the reason the Pharisees were so shocked when they saw Jesus’ disciples eating without washing. They dug into their lunches without washing their hands first. According to the Pharisees, what they did was not just bad manners, it was bad faith.
Now the great preacher, Barbara
Brown Taylor, helped me to see that there is no evidence that the disciples
openly defied the laws. She doesn’t
think they broke the law on purpose.
They did not know better. Jesus
called these twelve. None of them were
educated in Jewish law. The twelve were
fishermen, day laborers, and civil servants.
Jesus was the educated one among them.
He was supposed to teach them about these things. He didn’t.
In seven short chapters, Jesus ate with sinners, healed a man with
leprosy, went to the house of Jarius’ and raised his
daughter, who had been presumed dead. He
also sent a group of pigs off a cliff.
These were all against the rules.
And when it came time to observe the Sabbath day, well, Jesus broke that
law a time or two, also. If Jesus were
leading by his example, he wasn’t setting a good example. Instead of concentrating on the rules, Jesus
concentrated on things like forgiveness, sacrifice, faith, and the power of
love.
When the Pharisees brought up the subject, Jesus was ready. He quoted Isaiah, a passage about a people whose lips honor God but whose hearts are far from there. Jesus says, the danger is not outside of you, waiting to creep in through the dirt on your hands. The real danger, says Jesus, is already inside of you. It is in your heart. If you want to be pure, start there. Start with yourself. Start with your heart.
One of my favorite stories is one that Max Lucado tells on himself. He tells of the time he unplugged a radio from an outlet in his house. The problem was that the radio sat on top of a freezer. What Max thought he was unplugging was the radio. What he did unplug was that freezer, a freezer full of food. The Lucados went out of town just after he did that. When they returned, Max’s wife Denalyn discovered what had happened. Since it was Max’s fault, he volunteered to clean up his mess. He reached for several wash cloths and old rags, a bucket, and soapy water. He wiped the outside of the freezer until it shined. Max admitted that the freezer looked brand new. He was proud of his work. He opened the lid and the stench nearly knocked him over. It sounds a little crazy, doesn’t it? If there is a problem on the inside, why would he work on the outside? Many do. We buy clothes to make ourselves feel better. We drink to make our troubles go away. We don’t concentrate on the inside when there is an inside problem.
Jesus knew about inside problems. He also knew the full potential of our hearts. He just hopes we know about our heart’s potential. While we work on them, Jesus says things like, “Give me what you fear. Give me what is inside of you. I am not afraid of getting dirty. Germs don’t scare me. Now, sit down at my table, whoever you are, whatever you have become. Take. Eat. This is my body, given for you. Let us pray.
(Special thanks to the writings of Max Lucado
and Barbara Brown Taylor who helped me with ideas in this sermon. Special thanks to God who
continues to give us grace despite our hearts. Go home with this question in mind: How is it
with your heart?)