| Sermon for Sunday, February 27, 2005 OPENING OUR HEARTS 8th in a series on The Heart of Christianity; What is the Christian Life All About? By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz Scripture: Ezekiel 36:26 26 A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.We are eight Sundays into a ten Sunday overview of the themes in the book, “The Heart of Christianity” now, and today’s topic is about opening our hearts to God. Dr. Borg tells us that there are some experiences and some places in our lives that can be “thin places”, experiences where the boundary between us and God becomes very thin and we feel like we are in the presence of the Holy. Thin places can be certain experiences when we feel God very close to us, or they can be actual geographical places. Let me talk about some physical places. In our congregational trip to Greece last April, one of the sites we visited the island of Patmos where St John the writer of the book of Revelation composed that very misunderstood and very important book of the Bible. He lived on that beautiful Greek island for a while and the site where he is said to have lived and received his dramatic visions and then have written them down is a large cave that is, of course, still there. In fact, the site has become a Greek Orthodox Church site now. The Greek Orthodox tradition is one that I grew up in and was baptized in and I am very familiar with the ancient liturgy in Greek and the incense and the chanting—smells and bells, some people call it. The day that we were visiting Patmos happened to be a Sunday and as we wound our way down the long sets of stairs leading to the cave I began to feel a sense of mystery and awe surrounding me as I thought about old John taking on the powerful Roman empire in his writing about how God was going to outlast and prevail over the evil of Rome. And then, as we approached the cave, we realized that, because it was Sunday morning, there was a worship service going on. We all filed into the crowded space reverently and respectfully, and all the experiences of my childhood came back. There was a choir of young men chanting the liturgy, the smoke from the incense was strong, and the bearded priest was up front leading the liturgy. There were families and old people and babies and it was an intense religious experience for me and for others to be in that cave where part of our Bible was written and to experience Christian worship there 1900 years after St. John was there. It was a thin place where I felt close to God. I have had that same feeling of awe and wonder when we have been on other pilgrimages. I have felt that in our first trip to Israel when we stood in the garden of Gethsemane, the place Jesus prayed all night asking God if it were possible for this cup of suffering to be removed from him and also re-affirming his faithfulness to God. That story is such an important story for me about the humanity of Jesus and it meant a great deal for me not only to stand in that place with some other clergy in my first time in Israel and to read the story aloud about what happened there. Dr. Borg says that putting ourselves into some thin places—not just some physical spaces but also some reliable experiences—is very important. We need to do this on a regular basis because our hearts get hardened and covered over and closed to the holy and to God. We need our hearts to be opened and to be softened and to be more compassionate. Did you know that the word “heart” is a very, very important word in our book? The heart is the inner self, the real person, and in the Bible “heart” shows up over 1000 times!! We heard it in our scripture today where the prophet Ezekiel speaking for God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take away your heart of stone and give you a human heart.” Did you recognize some of the verses we used in our call to worship? “Incline your hearts to the Lord. Return to the Lord with all your heart. Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you. Create in me a clean heart O’God and renew a right spirit within me.” These are words you can use in your devotional life this week because we need to have a new heart, the Bible says. Our hearts become covered and hardened and insensitive to the spirit of God that is surrounding us every day. The prophet Isaiah says, “These people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.” Do you understand why Isaiah says that? Life can harden us. The other Biblical ways of describing this are we become blind, we deceive ourselves, we lack gratitude for each day of life, we become insensitive to suffering around us, we lose our sense of awe, we forget God. We all understand why our hearts become hardened and closed. We could not get through a day if we truly tuned into all the pain around us. So we just shut ourselves off so we can survive. We pass the homeless person on the corner of downtown Denver with their sign and we know that by giving them a quarter we may be perpetuating their dependency instead of encouraging them to seek real help from an agency that can really help them—but we still feel a tug at our heart strings. I always have mixed feelings when I am sitting beside a person with a sign, waiting for the light to change. I usually don’t share money but my heart is still moved and I do share money with Denver Urban ministries and other groups that can provide more help than my quarter or dollar will do. I had a different response to the children begging on the streets in Nazareth four years ago when we were there and always gave money to them. We understand why our hearts become shut and closed, but we cannot go through all of life with a shell around us, and thin places are those experiences where we become more open to the God who is always around us and in whom we live and move and have our very being. A thin place is anywhere our hearts are more open to God and when we feel the distance we sometimes put between us and God evaporating. What are some reliable thin places for you—spaces and experiences when you know God is real? The sanctuary in our former building was one of those spaces for so many of us—a space where we had baptisms and weddings and funerals and where we may have first committed our lives to Christ! This space will become like that and is already becoming that for us. It became holy ground for me the Sunday afternoon 700 of us gathered here after a four-mile walk and sang hymns and read psalms and said prayers of thanksgiving. We will be doing some additional work here with new banners and appropriate stained glass and other art in our building—we are not finished yet—but as we worship here and have baptisms and funerals and weddings this space will be for more and more of us a reliable thin place where we meet God. There are many other spaces where we feel a sense of awe and reverence. When we are in the mountains hiking or when we get off the ski lift and come to the beginning of a slope and look over the majesty of God’s creation. Walking the labyrinth every other week here is a thin place for many people. Praying the Lord’s Prayer each Sunday or even more slowly in our personal devotions is a thin place for me and many others. Times of birth when we know we are in the presence of a miracle. Times of death and grief. I feel I am in a thin place every time Melanie and I sit with new persons in our new member sessions and hear people tell about why they are thinking about connecting with any church and why they are here at this particular church. We will hear a bit of those experiences as 50 plus people join our church today for the first time in this building. And for me music is almost always a thin place, a time to feel God very close. When we sang our theme song, All Are Welcome on the Sunday afternoon after our processional walk here, I knew the Lord was in this place. When the quartet sang the Ken Medema song on our first Sunday morning about this being a place where we can bring our questions and our doubts and our fears and our tears—I knew we were offering a thin place for all of us. Music and worship are a fairly reliable thin place for most of us and if it is not, we are not doing our job. The hymn we will close with as new members join us, is one of our favorites—Here I Am Lord—and it is one that you can use in your personal worship time frequently if you are not yet doing that. Music is a thin place for most of us and that is why we are going to close this short sermon with music. Before we do that, I hope you have already been thinking about the reliable experiences and spaces in your life that are thin places—experiences and locations when you know you are in the presence of God and that you will practice them and use them so your heart may be open and not closed.
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