photo credit: Annie Spratt (https://unsplash.com/@anniespratt)

Luke 13:31-35 (NRSV)

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you."

He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, "Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.'

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, "Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.' "

Friday morning we all awoke to the news that 49 people were killed and 20 seriously injured in mass shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. As of this morning the death toll has risen to 50. “The attack was unleashed at lunchtime local time Friday, when mosques were full of worshippers. Footage of the massacre was streamed live online, and a rambling manifesto laced with white supremacist references was published just before the shootings unfolded.”*

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in a press conference, “This is and will be one of New Zealand’s darkest days.” I would add, it is one of the darkest days for all the nations of the earth.

Five months ago I preached on the Sunday following the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pennsylvania in which 11 worshippers lost their lives. In that message I condemned the violence as well as the sinful motivations of the man who was charged with these hate crimes. You may also recall that I invited you to sign you name to letters that would be mailed to Hebrew synagogues throughout the Indianapolis area. These letters amounted to a confession of the Lutheran Church’s history intwined with anti-Semitism and a pledge to stand up against the forces of anti-Semitism as we encounter them in the world.

What I haven’t yet told you is that we received letters in return. I would like to read you the responses from the rabbis who received our letters….

Additionally, I was honored to receive a phone call and have a wonderful conversation with another rabbi who wanted to tell me how much he and his congregation appreciated our gesture.

This morning, unfortunately, it’s time to do it all over again. Once again, God beckons us to condemn the acts violence and intentional taking of life, this time as it occurred in New Zealand. I once again condemn the sinful motivations of the man who has been charged with these acts of terrorism. And I ask you to sign your name to letters that will be mailed to various mosques and Muslim centers in Indianapolis indicating our pledge to stand up against the anti-Muslim forces of hate as we encounter them in the world.

We cannot imagine what it must be like to be a Muslim today. We cannot imagine how much heartache would go into a Muslim man or woman’s decision whether or not to not go to prayers because they feared that they could be targeted next.

It is hard to know how to respond. By signing your name to these letters you are expressing solidarity with people who feel vulnerable, targeted, and vilified. Let the responses of the Hebrew congregations remind you that this is a very meaningful gesture.

It is also important to lament. I’m sure I could have easily found a more eloquent definition of lament, but I think it’s suffice to define lament as “telling God about all the crap that’s going on and insisting it shouldn’t be this way.” Over one-third of all the psalms in the Hebrew scripture are laments. Even Jesus was prone to lament, as we see in the conclusion of today’s gospel selection.

Jesus’ lament is wrapped up in beautiful feminine imagery, identifying his motherly, nurturing and protective inclination towards the people who inhabit the holy city of Jerusalem – the same people who will reject him and have a hand in his death.

Notice, however, that Jesus’ lament is not about his own destiny. He is not lamenting the fact that his life is going to end in Jerusalem. Rather, his lament is for the people who cannot hear the good news and will not accept the love and grace of God. And his lament is not bound by our ideas of time and space. In the same way that Jesus’ laments the hardened hearts of the people in his own time; he also laments the hardened hearts that continue to reject God’s love and grace today.

We walk a well-worn path when we lament how many people, Christians included, effortlessly replace the truths of God’s love and the oneness of creation with the low hanging fruit of hatred, jealousy, fear of, and violence toward people who do not look like us, pray like us, talk like us. Jesus demonstrates what it means to have a heart that is consumed with God’s love. No other ideology, -ism, or affiliation should ever take priority over the truth that all people are beloved image-bearers of the divine. Nothing else is good news.

This morning take the time in prayer to examine how much of your heart is consumed with God. What else is occupying your heart space? What do you believe that incompatible with the good news of God’s love for you and for all people? My list is long, I assure you; and I ask for your prayers in that regard.

One of the most effective things we can do to reduce the amount of violence in our world is to dwell in our belovedness. I can say with absolute certainty that the New Zealand shooter had no idea what it meant that God had claimed his life, loved him wholly and completely, and invited him to share that good news with the world. May our faith guide us to realizations that honor the truth of our belovedness and that will shape the world into a place that honors the good God of all creation. Amen.

Amen.

* https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/14/asia/christchurch-mosque-shooting-intl/index.html

John 15:7-11

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

If you weren’t here last week for Ash Wednesday, you might not be sure about what we’re up to. On Wednesday nights, over the course of the next few weeks, as we make our Lenten journey to the cross, we’re going to engage some of these ancient Celtic Christian practices. So much of popular culture and popular theology and popular practice, when it comes to Lent these days, is about “giving something up,” “taking something away,” “sacrificing” something as a way to focus our attention on the season, to mimic some solidarity with the sacrifice of Christ, whatever. And that’s all well and good and as meaningful as we’re able to make it.

But I hope it can be meaningful, too, to add something to our life of faith and how we practice what we’re up to around here. So I hope these practices we’ll look at will be fun and meaningful practices and disciplines that might inspire some new insights and understandings for us; some new ways for us to bring life and faith together; some new ways to meditate, pray, focus our attention differently, learn something about ourselves and what God might be up to in us and for us and through us these days – and that might last even after Lent ends and we’re living on the other side of the tomb again.

Pastor Aaron and I will do most of the preaching, but we have a guest coming for one of the evenings, too. And we picked our topics from this book – The Soul’s Slow Ripening – which some of you have signed up to read along with us as part of it all. We picked practices that spoke to us, personally, and that we thought we might have something to learn from and share about for the good of the cause.

So it might not surprise you that I picked this ancient Celtic practice of “Learning by Heart.” You know that most Sunday’s I commit the Gospel to memory as part of my preaching. It’s something I started doing way back in the day, during my first year or two of ministry. To be honest, I first started doing it as a kind of party-trick; as a special effect for worship that I’d seen other preachers and pastors do. I thought it would be an interesting challenge and something that would add a bit of interest and drama to the way we hear and receive the Word from one Sunday to the next.

And that’s all it amounted to, in the beginning. It was a challenge for me from one week to the next and something fun and interesting for worship in general.

And, in order to get some of these Gospel readings locked into my very scattered and busy brain, I start on Monday or Tuesday, if I’m lucky. Whenever I get into my car to drive somewhere longer than my commute from home to church, I start to read and re-read – out loud to myself – whatever passage I’m trying to commit to memory. (I imagine people who see me on the road assume I’m talking to myself, or by way of Bluetooth, on the cell phone.) It’s also a really good way to fall asleep at night.

My litmus test for how well I have internalized a passage and learned it by heart is to see if I can recite it, with the radio on. If I can recite a passage out loud, uninterrupted, without losing my train of thought, while simultaneously listening to a song I’d just as soon be singing along to, I feel pretty confident that I’ve learned it “by heart” enough to share with all of you, in worship.

I’ve gotten better at it over the years. And thankfully many of the passages show up again and again every three years, thanks to the lectionary, and they get easier to recall.

But what I learned after making it happen week after week, year after year, is how much more inspired it seemed my preaching became; and how my personal engagement with and learning from Scripture seemed to grow over time. I started to hear the voices in Scripture more dramatically. I started to wonder differently about which words Jesus might have emphasized, or not. I started to reflect on the emotions behind what was said, to whom, and so on.

These Gospel stories and the words of Jesus become a part of my on-going, inner dialogue from day to day so that I have experienced, through this practice of “learning by heart,” what, I believe, the ancient Celts were up to so many generations ago.

In her book, The Soul’s Slow Ripening, the author’s husband talks about how ancient cultures, like those in ancient Israel, didn’t necessarily understand that the brain is the organ that stores memory and learning and wisdom. He says ancient Egyptians were under the impression that the brain wasn’t used for anything more than cooling the blood, so that, while the other organs of dead pharaohs were preserved with a sense of reverence, their brains were scooped out through their noses and thrown away.

All of that is to say, when we hear Jeremiah talk about “writing God’s law on the hearts of the people,” we’re to understand that the heart was believed to be the seat of – not just love and emotion – but of learning, wisdom and understanding. So that “writing God’s word” on your heart wasn’t just an invitation to emotional reverence for or worship of God’s commands, but it was just as likely a practical call to an intellectual commitment to God’s Word, and teaching and commandments for God’s people.

And there is something as practical about that invitation as there is something holy and spiritual about making it happen. There’s something practical and holy about committing God’s word to memory; searing it into your brain; learning it by heart.

A well-known trick for coaches and athletes who run or swim or otherwise compete against a clock, for instance, is to repeat a goal-time over and over in advance of a competition, in order to prepare themselves to achieve that time or to beat that goal. (You might not know that my wife, Christa, was a really good swimmer in high school and her mother would leave index cards around the house with those goal times written on them in the days before her swim meets.)

If you’ve ever loved someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease – or if you’ve ever been with Joyce Ammerman when she’s taken communion to local nursing homes – you know what it is to have frustrating, seemingly empty conversations with these poor, elderly men and women until the time comes to sing a familiar old hymn or recite the Lord’s Prayer. When you wonder if you’ve wasted your time… if they’ve heard or grasped a word you’ve said… if your praying has been in vain… they suddenly come to life and sing or pray those words right along with you. It’s holy, beautiful, surprising thing, every time.

I’ve heard stories of prisoners of war who saved their sanity, salvaged their hope, by practicing their faith in the form of whatever Bible verses and prayers they could remember during their years of torture, confinement and captivity. You never know when “learning by heart” might just save your life, I suppose.

And we heard a great example of this – if not the greatest example of this – just this past Sunday in the Gospel story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. The devil tempts Jesus over and over and over again… “Turn this stone into a loaf of bread,” “Bow down and worship me,” “Throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple.” And after each temptation Jesus counters the devil’s test with the words of Scripture that he had written on his heart. “One does not live by bread alone.” “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” “You should not put the Lord your God to the test.”

The practice of learning by heart is as practical as it is holy. And I hope you’ll give it a go this week – and that it might become a fun, regular spiritual practice and discipline for you. On the table before you leave, are a handful of passages from Scripture to choose from. I hope you’ll draw one out before you leave and work on learning it, by heart, over the course of the next week. It will take some time and repetition, but I’m certain everyone here can do this. (I’ve started small. And there is a variety to choose from. I’m not suggesting anyone memorize the Gospel of John, for crying out loud!)

If we want our hearts and our minds and our lives to be filled with the Word and promises of God… let’s fill our hearts and our minds with the Word and promises of God. Let’s invest at least as much time and energy on God’s Word and God’s promises as we do investing our time and energy on less hope-filled, less fruitful pursuits. Let’s let God’s Word and God’s promises take up more prominence, more power more space in our hearts and in our minds than all the other destructive distractions that compete for our energy and attention too much of the time.

Let’s write the Word of God on our hearts in a new way. Let’s abide in God’s Word and let the Word of God abide in and through us so that we might be changed by the joy it brings – for us and through us – when we do.

Amen

Lamenting the Lack of a God-Consumed Heart

Seeking the Sacred - Learning by Heart