Seeing Actively
Matthew 11:2-11
Heart and Life. If there is a way to sum up what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ, particularly in the Wesleyan tradition, it is heart and life. The grace of Jesus Christ changes our heart, and it changes our life. “Going on to perfection in love” is simply working towards our heart and our life consistently and fully revealing the heart and life of Jesus Christ.
I wanted to make this point first, because sometimes we forget this. And when we forget this, we tend to divide heart and life from each other. When we make this split, Christianity is either all about giving your heart to Jesus, or it is all about living a righteous life. And while both parts bring important and vital truth to our understanding of discipleship, neither is complete or sufficient by itself. Heart and life must be held together if we are to be disciples. This is important, because there are consequences for our faith when we fail to see this.
Since most of us know someone, and likely multiple someones, who believe that Christianity is either heart or life, and they seem to be good people, how big a deal can it be to separate heart from life? How big of a deal can it be to separate life from heart? Let me give you secular examples of what happens in this split, so It doesn't feel like I am picking on someone else's faith traditions.
There was a story on National Public Radio recently which featured a discussion about whether we would be better served as humans if we could just be as logical as computers when it comes to making decisions. There is a certain appeal in some corners for having clearly defined rules for deciding what is right and what it wrong. We would like to think that life would be so much easier if we could all consistently and logically figure out what choices need to be make in life, apart from the messy emotions which can make decisions difficult.
A surgeon told a story about a patient who had been referred to him. By every outward measure, this patient was living the American Dream. He was successful in his company, happily married with two well-behaved and high-achieving children, living in a comfortable home. His abilities were recognized and valued where he worked, as he made his way into upper management by doing analytical accounting. He seemed to have it all.
During a check-up with his physician, and some follow up testing, it was discovered that he had a brain tumor – which is how he came to be referred to this surgeon. The tumor was removed, and it seemed to be a successful surgery. The accountant was able to go back to his work and his life, as if the tumor had never happened.
Slowly, however, evidence of some deficits started to appear. For example, the accountant couldn’t choose between his black ink pen and his blue ink pen for signing documents at work. He would analyze his choices as logically as he could, from as many different angles as he could, so that he would make the right choice about which pen to use.
What this accountant discovered was that there was no discernible, consistently logical reason for choosing one pen over the other. So, he literally could not make a choice between the pens. And because he could not choose a pen, he couldn’t sign the documents, which meant he couldn’t do his job.
The accountant also discovered that he couldn’t go to the grocery store any more, as even the breakfast cereal aisle became overwhelming in its choices. He would analyze each cereal by fiber content, by sugar content, by calories, by color, by flavorings, by price units, by serving sizes, and by dozens of other categories – but there was no discernible, consistently logical reason for choosing any one cereal over another.
What the neurologists discovered was that there had been some damage done to this man’s brain which affected his ability to like something. The damage was in the part of his brain which connected what he liked with what he thought. No matter what the choices were, his heart just wasn’t into any of them.
If you will, he had lost heart. He still had logic, but without heart, he knew that any choice he made might be the right choice and any choice might be the wrong choice. Without heart, there was no way to decide for sure if it was the right choice. Because of this inability to choose, he lost his job as an accountant, his wife divorced him, he lost his house, and his children were alienated from him – and all because he had lost heart.
It can be just as devastating to be all heart. There is a young man at one of the churches I have served before who is all heart. He would literally give you his last dollar if you asked him, without any hesitation. He wanted to help anyone who said they had a need, and he never hesitated to give all that he had. Yet, because of some deficits he had, he wasn’t able to see beyond the moment of giving and helping. He wasn't able to consider the logical and personal consequences of his choices.
When he graduated from high school, he tried independent living, using his paycheck from the sheltered workshop to pay his rent and other expenses. Unfortunately, his so-called friends would stop by to ask him to pay their rent, to pay for their food and clothing, and to pay for them to go to the movies without him. Always wanting to help, he gave them money every they asked – until the money ran out.
As a result, this young man couldn’t pay his own rent, he didn’t have any money for his own food and clothing, and he didn’t have any friends when the money ran out each month. His parents would come to his rescue and pay his rent. They would admonish him to be careful with his money, but the cycle of giving away his money without any thought for himself would start all over again when he got his next paycheck.
When it became clear that this young man couldn't live independently, his parents got him moved into a group home, where he would have a little more supervision. He even managed to take some classes on money management. Still, if any one asked him for money for anything at all, he would give it to them because he was all heart. And he still couldn’t pay his rent, pay for his food or clothing, or have any friends when the money ran out each month.
If you will, he had lost his life. While he had plenty of heart, he had no control over his life. He still had compassion for others, but without logic, every opportunity to help others was more important than helping himself. Because he didn’t have any way to discern the difference between a fraudulent need and a real need, he lost his right to choose where he lived, and his right to spend the money he earned, and his right to pick his own friends – and all because he didn’t have the ability to be logical.
Life without heart lead to isolation and despair. Heart without life lead to abuse and lack of control. To be a full and functioning person, we need both heart and life.
Most of us, most of the time, can balance the demands of heart and life. We usually have the freedom and ability to make choices we like, and we have the education and information to justify the choices we make. And even if we don’t always like the choices that are before us, we can usually find a way to justify making a choice we can live with. Or, if the choices we can make are limited by circumstances beyond our control, we can usually find something to like better about one of the choices which are left to us.
Still, there are times when our heart and our life can get out of balance. We might suffer “compassion fatigue” while feeling like our life is out of control, and we lose heart. Or, we might let our heart get the best of us and make a choice which is not in our own or someone else's best interest, and this may lead to a loss in life. At these times, the struggle we face is in trying to find that balance again of heart and life.
We need both heart and life in order to function in the kingdoms of this world, and in the kingdom of God. And we can see this challenge in the heart and life of John the Baptist, who came to proclaim the coming of the Lord.
At the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry, there was a calling to restore this balance between heart and life in our relationship with God, and in our relationships with our neighbors. If John wasn’t being literal about leveling the mountains, filling the valleys, and making straight the crooked ways, then we can understand it as a calling to a faithful balance between heart and life.
We can see this calling in the advice John gave to the people who came out to the Jordan River to be baptized. To those who had control in life, he told them to have a heart toward others. To those who had heart, he told them to get their lives under control. The call from John was not either heart or life, by both heart and life.The call was to be the people God created us to be, as we live with God and our neighbors.
John's call to prepare ourselves for doing God’s will was not “everyone needs more heart” or “everyone needs more control.” Preparing the way of the Lord meant addressing our deficits, whether they are sins of the heart or the sins of life.
Over the next few years, John continued to proclaim his message. The Roman-appointed king over the Jews didn’t like being told that he had to get control over his life. He didn't like being told that he had to get control over his heart. He thought he had plenty of control, acting with impunity towards any he suspected might be a threat to his control as king. He thought he had a lot of heart, and one of the things the king’s heart wanted was his brother’s wife.
This king did what kings then could do – he had his brother killed, and he married his ex-sister-in-law. He was convinced that this was the perfect balance between heart and life. He used his control to get what his heart wanted.
John, however, rather loudly protested that this king's action indicated that his life was drastically out of balance.
As further proof of this imbalance, this king did what kings then could do – he had John arrested for what he said about the king. And just a few chapters later in our gospel, this king had John beheaded when again the king's heart wanted something, and his life promised something, both of which were so very wrong.
In our reading for today, we are in that in-between time. John is still sitting in jail, waiting to learn his fate. He is starting to have doubts that people really can balance heart and life. He is even starting to doubt this about the one person he had thought had that perfect balance of heart and life, of human and divine, of this world and the next. He has doubts that Jesus is the one he has proclaimed as the coming messiah.
If you will, John the Baptist has lost heart. He still knew the scriptures and the prophecies, and how they pointed to Jesus; but without heart, he doesn’t know if he has read the signs correctly. He doesn't know if Jesus is the right choice or the wrong choice. Maybe someone else matched the prophesies better than Jesus did. Maybe John had missed something. Maybe someone else was the messiah.
John had a choice to make about Jesus, but he can't make it because he has lost heart. His analysis means that either Jesus is the messiah, or that John is a failure. And sitting in that prison cell, he may have felt more like a failure than a prophet. Before he could make his choice, however, he wanted to do the last logical thing he could do – he would send someone to ask Jesus if he was the messiah.
I am really glad that Jesus didn't send someone back to John with this answer: “Yes. I, Jesus, am the messiah.” I don't think that answer would have helped someone who had lost heart. But Jesus knew that – which is why Jesus gave the answer he did.
His answer for John was this: Look at the evidence, at all the heart-warming things Jesus has done. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. People who had lost control of their lives were made whole – and that has to warm your heart, which is exactly what John needed to hear.
Heart and life. These can get out of balance for us, particularly in a season of shorter days, hectic schedules, increased financial pressures, and even over-eating. There will be a lot of advice given about how to regain control in the midst of chaos – but it won’t mean anything if you have lost heart.
There is no prescription which will work for all people, in every circumstance, for getting your life back into balance – except this: look to Jesus. Look and see Jesus as a baby in the manger. Look and see Jesus as a child growing up. Look and see Jesus as a teacher on the mountain. Look and see Jesus as a healer in the valleys. Look and see Jesus as the resurrected Lord on Easter.
Look and see the heart and life of Jesus, and know that by his grace, this life can be yours. This life if offered to us as a gift – thegift of Christmas. May we continue to prepare our hearts and lives to receive it!
UMH 256 “We Would See Jesus”