UNDERSTAND WITH YOUR HEART
June 26, 2005
Texts – Psalm 19
Matthew 13: 10 - 17
Let’s begin with a little quiz I ran across this week. It’s the perfect illustration for my sermon this morning. The question is – What is the difference between a dog and a cat? The answer is – A dog says, “You pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me; you must be God.” A cat says, “You pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me; I must be God.”
Don’t you love it? Two identical experiences; two totally opposite interpretations of those experiences. The point? How we feel and respond to life is not determined by what happens to us in life, but rather by how we interpret it.
It doesn’t seem that way, does it? Someone ignores me at a party and I feel hurt. Someone cuts you off on Williston Road and the anger surges. Someone disparages your or my particular point of view on religion or politics and we feel put down. Someone’s career takes a disappointing turn and almost immediately they feel like a failure.
It certainly seems like these emotional responses to life are created by what comes at us, and in large that’s because invariably event and emotion come almost simultaneously. Someone treats me unfairly and I become angry. So I say, “He made me angry.” But the truth is no other human being’s action alone ever makes you or me angry. Between his action and our anger there is an interpretative moment, however brief, however below the level of consciousness. The real story is – he does something, you interpret it as a threat to you, and then you become angry. So how you think about and understand what comes at you in life plays a decisive role in how you will function. Plato said: “We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are.” Proverbs 23: 7 says: “As a man thinks within himself, so he is.”
We are governed in our inner most thoughts, these old philosophers say, by a collection of irrational but almost always absolute ideas. Here’s a collection of modern ones –
$ Diets never work.
$ You always nag.
$ All men are tyrants.
$ It is all my fault.
$ It is all your fault.
$ If I can’t find a way out of this, I’ll die.
$ I never seem to get anything right.
$ I just know my kids are going to be a mess.
Recognize any of your inner voices there? The thing to note in each of them is that these are crazy ideas – words like “never” and “always” and “all” – but we buy into things like this all the time without being aware of it and they almost always leave us feeling helpless and despairing.
I love the story about a woman who blamed everything that happened on her husband. Bad restaurant meals, late flights, even imperfect creases in her dry-cleaned trousers. “Sweetheart,” the man said one day, in exasperation after being bawled out because her hair dryer didn’t work, “you seem to blame everything that happens to you on others.” “That’s right,” she snapped, “and it’s all your fault!”
As long as I’m telling stories, here’s another – A man said to his friend, “My wife and I had a fight last night.” “How did it end up?” his friend asked. “She came crawling to me on her hands and knees,” the man boasted. “What did she say?” “She said, ‘Come out from under that bed, you coward!’” Don’t you love it?
We are surrounded by words and stories which we use to interpret what happens to us. Many of them are words which others have pounded into us and which we have learned to repeat to ourselves. Words like – “Can’t you be just a little more thoughtful?” “You’ll never amount to anything.” “Can’t you get anything right?” “If you don’t work harder, you will never get anywhere.” “Who do you think you are Mister?” Any of those sound familiar?
Repetition is key to many of these phrases. Hear them once or twice or even three times and it makes no matter. But have them repeated to you over and over and over again and pretty soon they start to sound believable. Similarly, watch television eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and pretty soon you’ll come to believe that the streets outside our doors are full of criminals just waiting to pounce. . . which of course is exactly what a great many people have come to think. Criminals and terrorists everywhere! It’s a frightening world . . . But as Proverbs tells us,“As a man thinks within himself, so he is.” And few things are as frightening as a person who operates only out of fear.
“This people’s heart has grown dull,” Jesus said of his contemporaries, quoting the prophet Isaiah, “and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed.” [Matthew 13: 15] They have already made up their minds. They have already internalized a message of gloom and doom. It has been beaten into them, generation after generation. God doesn’t care. God doesn’t see. God will not act to save you or help you. You are on your own. That’s what they believe within themselves, he says in so many words – and being convinced of that, they cannot see or hear anything different. So I speak to them in parables, he says. I use stories with surprising twists and turns within them, hoping to make them stop and think, to surprise them, before they simply say “Oh that . . .” and then move on. “Seeing, they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” [v. 13]
There is a lot of that still going on in the world today, isn’t there? Some of it is probably going on in you and in me right now. But the stories he told . . . the parables he spun . . . they are still here. Many of us have heard them so often over the years we’ve begun to internalize them. We know them almost by heart. Oh, not word for word, but I’ll bet if you tried you could re-tell, even as I can, some of those stories.
For instance, there’s one about a sower who went out to sew seeds . . . just like you and me when we throw grass seed on our lawns in the spring. And some of it fell on hard-packed earth, and it never came up at all. And some of it fell in the midst of weeds and brambles, and even though it took root it was soon choked out. A lot of it just went to waste, you see. But some of it actually took root . . . and there was enough rain, and enough sunshine . . . and low and behold it sprouted and grew and flourished.
You and I are like that when you think about it. We’ve had so many times in our lives when God’s grace has been showered upon us, but we were too busy to notice, weren’t we? We were trying to get our careers started, or we were busy raising the kids . . . we were like that hard-packed earth – nothing was going to get through. And then there were those times for some of us when were too busy being stupid to notice! I wanted to prove to everybody that I was deserving of their affection so I practiced drinking a six-pack of beer every Friday and Saturday night, and then I got to practice being hung-over every Saturday and Sunday morning. Did you ever do that? Boy that was fun! My life was like that patch of ground which was almost choked with weeds and brambles. But the miracle which the story points to is that in spite of all of that some of those seeds of grace actually took root in me. And I wasn’t overwhelmed by the demands of career and parenting, and I didn’t get lost like so many I know did in the haze of alcohol and self-destructive behavior, and there’s actually been a whole harvest of grace in my life. “He who has ears,” Jesus said; “let him hear.” [Matthew 13: 9]
Do you remember any other parables, any other stories? I hope so. How about the one about the young man who demanded his inheritance long before either his father or mother was dead? You remember that one – it’s the story of the trust-fund baby! So he took the wealth he’d been given, and he wasted it, didn’t he? I don’t remember all the details of where and when and how. I just know that it’s a story about a fellow who clearly wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the box, and who made just about every mistake it’s possible for a person to succumb to, and who then reached the conclusion which in my heart of hearts – and probably in yours too – seems all but inevitable: “I’m worthless . . . I’m stupid . . . I’m absolutely no good.” And so he heads for home, with his tail between his legs, determined to throw himself on the ground at his father’s feet and to beg to be allowed to come home and live like a servant. But before he gets there . . . while he’s still way down the road – not even within shouting distance – his father sees him coming and throws open his arms to welcome him and orders a grand celebration for him.
“You can go home again,” the story says. “Nothing that you’ve done is unforgivable. You and I are of infinite value and worth. All we have to do is come to our senses, open our eyes and ears, and receive the embrace that even now is being offered to us.” Is that a message you need to hear?
One of the reasons many of us keep coming back here Sunday after Sunday is to refresh our memories of these stories which speak the truth about love. We need them to counter-balance some of those other messages we carry around inside our heads – those messages of doom and gloom and defeat.
Religion, in the final analysis, is not really about doctrine or theology; it most certainly is not about institutions or organizations. Religion, at its heart, is rather about how we look at life, how we interpret reality, and how we understand what comes at us as we move out into each new day. In this sense, there is no human being who is “religion-less.” Alas, what this also means is that there are far too many human beings who are the victims of bad religion, of infantile faith, of beliefs that represent an incoherent collection of notions about life.
Whether we engage the challenges and troubles of Monday morning with strength and courage and intelligence depends a great deal on how we understand them. If we or our children see a set-back as an absolute disaster, we find it harder to cope. If we or our children see a set-back as just one more challenge that we will get through with the help of God, we find it easier to cope. It’s that simple and that important.
“I came that you might have life, and that abundantly,” Jesus said. It is here for all of us. All we need be is willing to see and hear, willing to be open to a hopeful and healing way of understanding our lives. Amen.