Sermons

 Hearts’ Desire

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
June 21, 2009	1 Samuel 17:32-49/1 Corinthians 6:1-13

Most of us don’t have the privilege and opportunity to design stained glass windows. The churches to which we show up, depending on their vintage, have windows there already. I remember a few years back, Bonny and I were teaching a Qabats class. Our task was to tell the church’s story, and our assignment was to help the children understand the church’s story through the stained glass windows in this sanctuary. It was sunset time, at least. We brought big flashlights out and showed the various interesting windows around the room, and had children describe what they especially liked. We then asked them a question: “If you could add a new stained glass window to our sanctuary, whose picture might you include?” And almost to a one, the response was Martin Luther King, Jr. I thought to myself, “Somebody taught them pretty well.”

Most of us don’t design stained glass windows, but this church has had the opportunity more recently, if by recently we mean in the last 40, or 50, or 60 years. This large chancel window that is vintage early 1950s, when the sanctuary redesign was done. Among the many religious symbols it includes, there are also famous historical figures in the life of faith, people like Schweitzer, Jane Addams, Charles Finney, and Walter Rauschenbusch.

If you wander over to the chapel later on today, you would see these extraordinary blue windows on the east and west walls, which themselves are kind of historical textbooks. On one side you’ll see a United Nations seal, remembering that that window was put in place about when the United Nations was coming into being. On another wall you’ll see --- and the choir will be comforted to know about this --- Bach, the great church musician, from whom we’ll hear later on today. There’s another window tucked away I like a lot of a father going to church with his children. It seems like a good reminder on a day like today, Fathers’ Day.

And back to this room. The architectural phrase is “clerestory.” If you look around above you, around the perimeter of the ceiling of the sanctuary, you’ll notice 36 clerestory windows. They were a gift, and it’s an incredible story. If you can get him to, I’m sure William Young will tell you a much longer story than I’m about to tell you. They were gifts from the sisters Happ, The Happ sisters. Frances donated them in memory of her sister Emmaline. They arrived in our sanctuary around 1967 or so. William Young worked with the sisters and with James O’Hara of Pike Studios throughout the whole process..

They are quite extraordinary. They are hard to see from where you are sitting, so take the time to look at them after church. There are extraordinarily vibrant colors that tell the Christian story first and foremost, but then the more particular Presbyterian and Third Church stories. In fact, climb up the balcony here or over here, or go from here to look over there, or come to the choir loft and you can see outward to the windows that we’re privileged to see. There are the Third Church representations right there above this little section of the sanctuary.

I need to tell you about my favorite one of the clerestory windows. It’s tucked away in a corner up there in the Meigs Street balcony. Sometimes on a day that’s loaded up with meetings, I’ll take a little break and sit here in the darkness of the sanctuary and look at it. On the way home, I’ll sit in the balcony for a bit and look at that window. In fact, we made a modest effort to reproduce the window for you in the handout in your bulletin this morning. On the one side of it (it’s not a very good image, but you get the picture, anyway) is a hand holding a heart. The seal of John Calvin. That image, along with Calvin’s motto, something like what we put on the bulletin cover this morning –

* “To you, O God, I offer my heart, promptly and sincerely” – is the way that Calvin wanted to be recognized, not with pictures of himself, but with this image of a hand holding a heart.

Your browser may not support display of this image. “To you, O God, I offer my heart, promptly and sincerely.” On the back of the handout we put some other artistic representations of what that might look like, a seal and a medallion and even a sculpture representation of Calvin’s hand holding a heart, offering it to God. (It’s a kind of very low tech Powerpoint!)

You’ll hear much in the next few months about John Calvin, perhaps more than you’ll ever want to hear. Calvin is the anchor of our theological tradition, one from whom nearly everything Presbyterian has come. He was first a French lawyer. He trained for the priesthood, wasn’t interested in that, so he went into the study of law. But when the second wave of the Protestant Reformation came into play, after Luther, Calvin got interested again in church leadership. He led the church in French-speaking Germany for a while, but eventually ended up in Geneva, where he led the church in that very vibrant, international, commercial city.

Calvin viewed himself not as a theologian primarily, but as a biblical teacher. He taught in the auditorium nearly every single day, and his sermons read as much as Bible studies as what we might recognize as a sermon, though preacher he was. His Institutes on the Christian Religion remain the very foundational landmark of systematic Christian theology, even now more than 500 years after their original appearance.

John Calvin was an important historical figure as well as a crucial theological one. His influence continues in politics and economics, in the interaction between the arts and the social sciences.

Why we are going to pay attention to him a little more than we usually do is that it’s Calvin’s 500th birthday this summer. This fall at Third Church, through some adult classes and through some sermons, we’ll remember him a little bit more --- mark your calendars. I’m sure you won’t want to miss anything you might possibly be able to soak up about John Calvin.

I’d say mark your calendars not so much to become experts on John Calvin, but to explore more deeply his themes, themes that continue to play themselves out in our religious life together, and in the life of the world: his absolute insistence on the primacy of the grace of God; his absolute insistence on God’s sovereignty in all of life; and therefore, his insistence that all of us, whoever we are, have a vocation that is a gift from God, that can serve God’s purposes while serving our neighbor’s purposes.

Calvin insisted that God’s business was in all of life, so to talk about the public and the political nature of religion is an essentially Calvinist conversation. But at the heart of all that is this again: Calvin offering his heart to God, and encouraging all of us to think that way as well.

The historian William Bouwsma’s magisterial portrait of Calvin reminds us of all the battles and arguments he was waging. On one hand, it was the philosophizers of religion, those who were trying to make faith simply an intellectual conversation, a set of principles to which one assented. On the other hand were those who would think about religion as a purely mindless set of practices filled with emotional response but no “head” at all.

Remember, Calvin was a lawyer and a humanist. He believed in the life of the mind, but he believed that our faith was a holistic faith, that it brought together our hearts and our heads and our emotions and our feelings and our experiences. At the center of it all was our heart. Faith for Calvin was knowing with your whole being --- not just the head, not just your emotions, but the whole heart, to lead to understanding about who God was, that real knowledge about God and ourselves and our world was held in the soul and the spirit and in the heart.

Now, for some of us that does not feel particularly Presbyterian, we who have been trained in the orderliness and systematic nature of Presbyterian things. That’s in part because we have been trained to confuse Calvin with Calvinism and Calvinist. That’s not to say that Calvin was a kind of emotional party animal. He’s often portrayed as a dour, humorless theologian, a lawyer who wrote for 8 or 10 hours in his study, often not ever leaving his bed during the day, but writing, and writing, and writing, and then writing some more.

But in his heart, Calvin understood who God is, and who we are. So he insisted that we don’t offer God our minds or our time or our money, but that we offer God our heart, promptly and sincerely. And when we do that, the rest will follow.

We’re experiencing a kind of “Where’s Waldo?” with this morning’s hymns. They all have the word heart in them. There are many, many more, but think about what is at the heart of our life together, when we sing “In the Bleak Mid-winter,” and sing, “What can I give him?/ Give him my heart.” When every Sunday morning at the time of the offering, or around the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we say the sursum corda, “Lift up your hearts/ We lift them to the Lord.” Or Augustine’s great prayer, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”

It seems to me David knew that. Rod has read for us an extraordinary story about David facing the Philistine giant. And David, poor little David, the shepherd who has left his sheep to come watch what was going on, when faced with a threat, says, “Let no one’s heart fail because of him.” “Let no one’s heart fail.” David most likely would have understood the military odds, but yet he understood with his heart that God’s business was with these people, and by investing his heart in the battle, we know where that statement of faith would take him.

And Paul knew it as well, it seems to me. What we know as I Corinthians is filled with that imagery that we love so much, that together we’re the body of Christ, and “the greatest of these is love.” But after that letter was sent to that Corinthian church, relationships with the community deteriorated. It broke Paul’s heart to hear how much that little new community of Christians was disagreeing with and rejecting what Paul was teaching them. So he wrote to the Corinthians of his plight: beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger.” Even so, he says, “I have met every persecution with the gift of righteousness.”

Then he puts it all on the line: “I have spoken frankly to you,” still using the royal “we.” And then this: “Our heart is wide open to you.” That means, he says, “Everything I have and I am I’m giving to you”... I’m showing to you, I’m demonstrating to you, so that you might see me as I truly am. And because my heart is wide open to you, Paul says, open wide your heart also.

It’s a heartfelt plea, no pun intended, not to logic, not to power, not to intellect, not to culture, but to the heart. The Corinthian writings are written in the context of reconciliation. And Paul clearly understood that for us to be reconciled to God meant that we had to be reconciled to one another. And if we weren’t reconciled with one another we couldn’t be reconciled with God. That’s why he pleads for a new relationship, a relationship from the heart, between the church that he loved so much and the church that seemed to reject what he was writing to them and teaching them.

Without that reconciliation, the heart remains broken. And when the heart remains broken, there can’t be a true and full relationship in community or with God.

So even for Paul, the great theologian, faith is at the end of the day not about agreeing to a set of principles, but about a heart-to-heart relationship with God and with one another --- in Christian community. And it only happens if our hearts can be open wide.

The scholar Marcus Borg, who many of you have read very happily, has a new book called The Heart of Christianity. Borg reminds us that the concept of heart is talked about more than a thousand times in the Bible, with images about a closed heart, images about a clean heart, images about a new heart. Borg considers what an open heart would look like and what it would mean in our own lives, and in the life of the world. An open heart would be alive to wonder. An open heart would be alive to gratitude. An open heart would be alive to passion and compassion, leading us to act with justice, and mercy, and righteousness. Borg writes that at the very heart of our human existence we yearn for an open heart, and a new heart, and a transformed heart, gifts that are from God by the Spirit.

It reminds me of the hymn we sang a week ago, as the children were leading us in worship, from the African-American tradition, Lord, I Want To Be a Christian, In My Heart.

Some of you will remember Dag Hammarskjöld, who was the second secretary general of the United Nations, from 1953 until 1961, when he died in a plane crash. It wasn’t learned until after his death that Hammarskjöld was a person of faith. He called himself a “Christian mystic.” In fact, he had been keeping a diary, a kind of spiritual autobiography, from 1925 until his death in 1961. That book was published after his death, called Markings. Included in it is this prayer, worth hearing this morning:

Give us pure hearts, that we may see you,

Humble hearts that we may hear you,

Hearts of love that we may serve you,

Hearts of faith that we may abide in you.

John Calvin knew that. David knew it. Paul knew it. We know it as well, that when we give God our hearts, promptly and sincerely, they will be made whole, and glad, and clean, and new, and become connected to the very heart of God, to whom alone belongs all glory and praise. AMEN.