Saturday, August 8, 2015

“Blessed Are the Pure in Heart” - August 9, 2015

I John 3:1-3


What exactly does it mean to be pure in heart, as Jesus said when he taught us,

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”?

There are two verses from I John [3:2-3] that also talk about purity of heart and seeing God.

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”

Those are hopeful verses, because they suggest that purity of heart is possible.

            “Purity” is a tricky term, you know.  Week by week, on A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keilor sings the praises of Powdermilk Biscuits, “made from wheat grown by Norwegian bachelor farmers, so you know it’s pure, mostly.”  Every time I hear that, I scratch my head and wonder a) what that means and b) if I really want to know what that means.  Ivory Soap used to advertise itself as 99 and 44/100 percent pure.  Great!  What is the other 54/100 percent made of?  “Purification” can be a good thing.  That’s what happens to honey in between the hive and the jar, and it involves straining out things like bees’ wings that you might not want on your Powdermilk Biscuits.  But it is also a term that dangerous people have used for genocide.

            What, then, is the sort of purity that let’s us see God?  Or maybe we should ask it the other way around: what are the impurities in us that block our view?

            The monks and nuns of the Middle Ages spent a lot of time examining their lives and developed some practical classifications for sin.  I sometimes have asked confirmation students to memorize the “Seven Deadly Sins”: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust.  Being adolescents, they often get hung up on that last one, but purity involves the absence, or at least the control, of all of these, because they are all clouds that can come between us and the sunlight of God’s presence.  When I John says that “Those who have this hope [of seeing God] purify themselves, as Christ is pure,” the scripture points out the importance of making a conscious effort to turn away from these.

            That’s not always fun, but if you give it a try there is a certain real satisfaction that comes from the effort.  It’s similar to those times when you open the refrigerator and your nose tells you that it may be time to take a look in some of those containers that were put there with good intentions at some indistinct point.  You have a feeling that most of them are just fine, but that one of them has something inside that you would prefer not to know about.  In the course of it, you discover not only the suspect carton of some sort of Chinese food but also a dried-out piece of cake, two moldy peppers, and something that once was a pork chop.  Before you know it, you decide that it might be a good idea to wash off the shelves while they are exposed.  You don’t really need the twelve packets of ketchup, either, and the date on the mayonnaise is a little old, even if it does seem harmless.

            So start somewhere – anywhere.  Pick one practice or one attitude that may seem small but that, if you’re honest, stinks.  As you face that down, you will come upon others.  You can count on that.  But keep on going anyway.

            I knew a couple who went on a cruise around the Baltic.  They started in Sweden and worked their way toward Finland, which was where they were going to get off the ship one day to take a guided tour.  The wife decided that it would help to put her hearing aids into her ears to understand the tour guide better, which was when she discovered they were not anywhere in her luggage.  The best she could figure was that she left them in customs somewhere, in one of those baskets they use when you go through a metal detector.  That made the rest of the trip extremely frustrating.

            When they got home they ordered a new set.  A few weeks after those arrived she was getting ready to make supper and reached into the freezer for something, and with it came a plastic baggie with two small, tan, plastic, bean-shaped things…

            Keep on going.  God shows good things along the way to demonstrate the help he gives us to move forward.  What was lost to sin can be and is restored by grace.  God does not want to stay hidden.  As Augustine of Hippo wrote sixteen hundred years ago, God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in him.  All that keeps us from him, he will help to remove in his own time and his own way.

            The poet John Donne describes his experience of what we call “sanctifying grace”, the action of God that not only forgives us but purifies our hearts.  Donne, who started out life as a combination of a Don Juan and a political hack, was, by the time he wrote his “Hymn to God the Father”, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.  Listen to how he makes puns on his own name, but even more to what he asks of God.

“Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
         Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
         And do run still, though still I do deplore?
                When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
         Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
         A year or two, but wallow'd in, a score?
                When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
         My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
         Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
                And, having done that, thou hast done;
                        I fear no more.”

            You and I are no different, for that is the story of all God’s children, prodigals making their way back to a Father who has been waiting anxiously the whole time.

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.”


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