Our scripture readings this morning are from the Acts of the
Apostles and the Gospel according to Luke.
Both texts are written by the same author; the Acts of the Apostles is
the sequel to Luke’s Gospel. Luke
records Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. The Book of Acts picks up the story at the
ascension, and continues with a depiction of the life of the early church,
centered around the ministries of St. Peter and St. Paul, as it spreads from
Jerusalem to Rome, the center of the known world.
There are a number of themes that weave together the
two-volume work of Luke-Acts. Today’s
readings highlight the theme of the spiritual heart. Note that in Acts, as Peter concludes his
inaugural sermon, we are told that his listeners were “cut to the heart,” and when they ask him what they should do in response
to his teaching, Peter says to them, “Change your hearts.”[1] Our translation reads, “Repent,” but as David
Bentley Hart points out, a more literal
translation of metanoeรต is “change your mind” or, better, “change your heart.”[2]
In Luke’s account of the appearance of
the Risen Jesus to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus chides them
for their hearts being slow to believe the prophets.[3] Later, after the two realize that the
stranger they encountered on the road is the Risen Jesus, they exclaim to each
other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the
road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”[4]
What is this spiritual heart? Why does it need to change?
In the Bible, as well as later Jewish and Christian
traditions, the “heart” is an image for the core of each human being. It is the seat of our capacity for intuitive
knowing and the center of our deep affections, those fundamental dispositions
or attitudes that align our actions with the perception of truth. The “heart” is the place of encounter with
the mystery we call “God,” the place of profound communion with reality.
The Torah teaches that God’s instruction “is not too
baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach . . . No, the thing is very close to
you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.”[5]
The Psalmist prays, “Fashion a pure heart for me, O God; create in me a
steadfast spirit. Do not cast me out of
Your presence, or take Your holy spirit away from me.”[6] The heart is the throne of the glory of God,
the place where the shekinah, the Presence of God, dwells and instructs
us. St. Paul echoes these words when,
writing of our hope in sharing the glory of God, he says “hope does not
disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the
Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”[7] God dwells in you – in your spiritual
heart.
But, as the Torah also teaches, our hearts can turn away from God
and refuse to heed God’s word, cutting ourselves off from the love that gives
life.[8] Our heart can become enclosed within itself,
walled off from God’s Presence. So the
Psalmist warns, “Do not harden your hearts”[9]
and the prophets promise that God will give us a new heart and a new spirit,
replacing our heart of stone with a heart of flesh so that we might again love
God with all our heart.[10] We are all susceptible to the malady of sklericardia – hardness of heart – and the consequences can
be quite serious; even deadly. And so
Jesus places at the center of his message of good news the invitation, “Change
your heart!” It is a call to open our hearts to the Presence of God, the wellspring
of love the gives life to the world.
Conversion, then, is not a just matter of repentance in the
sense of feeling bad about our moral failings.
It goes deeper than that.
Conversion is a willingness to have our hearts softened to become receptive
to the divine invitations to love; to become vulnerable to God; to live and act
and choose with a heart that beats in time with God’s heart.
In her book, Dakota, Kathleen Norris records a
conversation that she had with a Benedictine monk that describes this larger
understanding of conversion. She writes
that
Repentance
means "not primarily. . . ." a sense of regret but a
"renunciation of narrow and sectarian human views that are not large
enough for God's mystery." It means recognizing that we have not always
seen grace where it exists in the world, and agreeing "to turn away from a
stubborn and obdurate position that cannot accept what is new and different and
therefore cannot entertain God's mysterious ways." The word
"entertain" is used advisedly here, as the monk goes on to speak of
hospitality: "the classic sign of [our] acceptance of God's mystery is
welcoming and making room for the stranger, the other, the surprising, the
unlooked for and the unwanted."[11]
The invitation to “change your heart” refers to this
softening and enlarging of the spiritual heart to make room for God. It refers to a change in how we perceive
reality that inflames the deep affections of the heart, reorienting us toward
God and aligning our desire with God’s desire.
We begin to imagine new possibilities and act in new ways, with a sense
of inner spaciousness and freedom.
This is precisely what we see happening to Cleopas and his
unnamed companion on their way to Emmaus (I suspect it was his wife, since the
gospel writers seem to have such a hard time remembering women’s names). They
are weighed down with confusion and grief at the death of their friend and
teacher, in whom they had invested their hopes for the renewal of their world;
a hope that has been shattered. They
have heard rumors that the tomb is empty and that their hope is still very much
alive, but their eyes were kept from seeing the truth even when Jesus is right
in front of them. Their hearts were
hardened. They couldn’t see a way
forward.
But when this stranger appears on the road, the disciples
begin to open their hearts to him. Their
vulnerability relaxes their defenses enough to reignite the flame of love. Their hearts begin to burn within them. This stranger invites them to reimagine the
story they have been telling themselves about themselves in light of scripture,
opening up new possibilities for perceiving and responding to God’s invitations
to love even in the midst of loss and death and despair. Their hearts begin to expand with an enlarged
capacity for compassion. They receive
this stranger as a friend, a brother, and offer him hospitality. From their enclosure in self-pity they reopen
to the world in unselfconscious service.
When they break bread together, their eyes are opened and in
the very moment that they recognize the stranger as the Risen Jesus, he
disappears. The Jesus they knew and
loved has gone ahead of them into the fullness of communion with God; a
communion in which we all share. They
realize that God dwells in them, in their spiritual heart; the spacious field
of awareness illumined by God’s love in which nothing and no one ever is lost.
In her inimitable way, St. Teresa of Avila once wrote, “The
center of our soul is difficult to define.
It’s hard enough just to believe in it.”[12] The spiritual heart, the seat of God’s
Presence within us, is as great a mystery as God. We don’t always trust the deep desires of our
heart, even if we are conscious of them.
To paraphrase Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, we might be
surprised to discover what our heart is saying to God. It takes courage to live with our mind in our
spiritual heart, to cultivate awareness of what our heart is saying to
God.
But when we do, as Tilden Edwards assures us, “Our hearts then are open doors through which
we most directly realize Radiant Love as the divine heart of reality. Our deepest identity, our core being, is a
unique, dynamic, free shaping of that Love.”[13] This
awareness is what the disciples perceived when their eyes were opened through
the words of scripture and the breaking of bread with Jesus. Their hearts were changed, opening up a new
future for them and for the world.
This is not the world we were expecting. As we shelter in place, with tens of
thousands of people dying and millions more facing economic collapse, we are
more than a little confused and afraid, perhaps even feeling powerless if not
hopeless. It is tempting to harden our
hearts and retreat into self-centered defensiveness, wanting to protect ourselves. But as followers of Jesus, we are committed
to living with our mind in our hearts, open to the divine love that renews
life.
Right here, right now, the most
valuable contribution we can make to the healing of the world is our
willingness to cultivate intentional awareness of our spiritual heart, and the
freedom to respond to its invitations to love.
To love even when it is scary. To
love even when it is hard. To love even
when we aren’t sure it will make any difference at all. To love until we have nothing left to give
but love.
Life does not move backwards.
Nor should we wish it to. As Sonya
Renee Taylor recently posted,
We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.[14]
I think Taylor is naming a deep desire of the heart. Will we listen to what our heart is saying to
God? How w
Change your heart and trust the good news. Amen.
[1]
Acts 2:37-38.
[2]
David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2017), p. 560
[3]
Luke 24:25.
[4]
Luke 24:32.
[5]
Deuteronomy 30:11, 14 (TANAKH).
[6]
Psalm 51:12-13 (TANAKH).
[7]
Romans 5:5 (NRSV).
[8]
Deuteronomy 30:6,15-20.
[9]
Psalm 95:8 (NRSV).
[10]
See for example, Jeremiah 24:7; 32:39 and Ezekiel 18:31; 36:26 – recalling
Deuteronomy 30:6.
[11]
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co.,
1993), p. 197.
[12]
Quoted in Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and
Contemplation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 59.
[13]
Tilden Edwards, public lecture, Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation,
January, 2009.
