Right to the Heart

There was a moment in history of great importance.  Harry Truman was taking over the Presidency of the United States of America after the passing of President Roosevelt.  A very good friend of his, Sam Rayburn, a Texan, gave him some salient advice, advice which Harry Truman repeated many times afterwards.  Rayburn said to the new President, “There will be people who will want to build a wall around you and make sure that the only voices that you listen to are theirs, any ideas that come forward must come from them, and they will build a wall that will protect you from everyone else except their influence.  They will also tell you, Harry that you are a great man, but you know you ain’t.”  Truman said that those humbling words to him many times over the years – and how right Rayburn was! He knew even though he had ascended to the Presidency of the United States of America, he wasn’t perfect, he probably wasn’t even a great man in many ways, but he was President.

The Scriptures talk about the same thing, and it relates not just to Presidents and Prime Ministers and ambassadors; it talks to us all.  Jesus, for example, in that poignant moment when people were getting ready to stone an adulterous woman came to them and said, “He who is without sin cast the first stone.”  In other words, there is not one of you here that is great or perfect or totally pure.  The Apostle Paul, in writing to the Romans, in that magnificent section at the beginning of Romans in Chapter 3 says that there is not one of us who is righteous, we all fall short of the glory of God in Jesus Christ, our Lord.
 
This recognition of the mutual imperfection of us all is a powerful, particularly because we live in a society that seems to be very self-absorbed and self-congratulatory. People want to show that they are special or unique or better or different than everybody else.  Any one of us who has been on Facebook, knows the temptation, and it is a temptation, I face it, to put something on there that is going to make you seem special or unusual or important or great and somehow to impress others with either our accomplishments, achievements, or character.
 
Likewise, we also live in a very self-righteous age.  There used to be a time when the people who were pointed to as the most self-righteous were religious people.  People of faith were often seen as being self-righteous, and a fingers pointed at them for their self-righteousness and for the way that they often looked down on others from a lofty, high moral place.  Now, we are also living in another form of a self-righteous world, and it is not just limited to those who are religious or who have a particular creed or conviction, but to those who are always advertising the good that they are doing, always trying to say how they make a difference, wanting to put themselves forward as examples for everyone.  We live in a very self-righteous world, but a world that doesn’t seem to think or know that it is accountable to something greater than itself.
 
That is why our passage this morning from the Book of Hebrews is so powerful.  It suggests that the Word of God goes right to the core of our being, and exposes us and leaves us laid bare – or in the King James’ translation “naked’ – before God.  There is no room for the poseurs, no room for the artificially self-righteous, and no room for all of those who think that they are so great to hide.  Before God, everything is revealed right down to the very core of our being.  So, when we think we can fool God, or our outward appearance and the way that we present ourselves to each other and to the world is the true self, we know deep down that there is One who knows the very innermost thoughts of our hearts and minds.  There is no place to hide.

You might think that this is a word of judgement, and in a sense there is a judgement in it, but the purpose this preacher points this out is not because the writer of Hebrews wanted to judge people, but rather to reveal to them the grace and the peace that comes from knowing that God knows you and in so doing you avoid the pitfalls of the arrogance and the proud and the self-righteous.  It affords you the opportunity not to be caught up in your own cozy world, but to realize that your heart and your life is revealed for what it is.  He does this by making some really powerful affirmations that I really hope you will take home with you today, because they are vitally important for our walk with God.

The first affirmation is this: the Word of God is active and effective.  He uses the word dunamis – dynamite – that it has power, that it is effective.  But what did he mean by “the Word of God?”  This is because there seem to be many answers to that.  There are some, for example, who hold that the Word of God, particularly for the writer of Hebrews was limited to The Old Testament canon, the Hebrew Scriptures, maybe a few of the earliest Gospels and the writings of St. Paul, which preceded them.  Others have suggested that it was the whole canon of Scripture that he anticipated, The Old Testament and The New Testament, and we refer to this as the Word of God.  On the other hand, the writer of Hebrews is preaching Scripture, he is propounding and expounding the Word of God, so there is a sense in which the Word of God is proclaimed, the Word of God is spoken, the Word of God is preached.  But there is also the sense, and it is also true that the Word of God is Jesus Christ, that he is referred to in The Gospel of John as the logos – the Word of God – and that God’s word was incarnate in his Son, Jesus, and so Jesus is the Word of God.

There is a sense in which all of those are correct.  The Word of God comes to us in different forms.  One is dependent, I would suggest to you, on the other.  There can be no proclamation in a sermon if there is no Gospel of Jesus Christ and, if The Old Testament is all that we have to rely on, and if we do not have the person of Jesus, we do not see the incarnate Word of God spoken in time and in place, and if we don’t have the great prophetic tradition of The Old Testament, the great stories of creation and redemption, then we have no history on which to base what we believe.  No!  The Word of God is all of these things!  It is because it is all of these things, it is effective and it is dynamic.  Essentially, it is based on this reality:  The great Latin phrase puts it deus dixit – God speaks, God has a word.  But God’s word is not just a word frozen in time; it is dynamic, it is effective, it speaks to every single generation.

One of the most famous theologians and one of my favourites is a man called Helmut Thielike, and he wrote this about the word of the Gospel: “The Gospel must be preached afresh and told in new ways to every generation, since every generation has its own unique questions.  The Gospel must constantly be forwarded to a new address, because the recipient is repeatedly changing their place of residence.”
 
In other words, every generation needs to hear the Word of God afresh and new.  That is one of the reasons why churches exist, one of the reasons we read Scripture, we preach sermons, we have hymns, we say prayers, and in every single address of humanity the Word must go forward.  The Word of God must be proclaimed, read, spoken, preached, and believed in.  It is important to do that.  I am sure all of you that have e-mail have experienced this, you send e-mails to someone at a very important moment and you get a reply from MAILER.DEAMON that the e-mail address is invalid.  Unless they have told you what their new address is, you are scrambling around trying to find it, maybe even asking a friend or sending another e-mail to a colleague trying to find the right address.  There always seems to be a direct correlation between the urgency of a message you need to send and the fact that they have gone and changed their address, don’t you find?  Well, the Word of God is just like that, it is going forth with an urgency, but peoples’ addresses have been changing and the world needs to be updated with the Word and the Word goes forth.  It is effective.  It is dynamic.  It doesn’t stop.

This Word of God is also profoundly for us.  Between you and me, it goes no further than in this room – and to the many thousands listening on the radio!  I sometimes think that there is often way too much emphasis in the Christian community on emphasizing dramatic changes in peoples’ lives when it comes to faith, and that in fact it is the transition from being at the very lowest to being at the very highest, and the dramatic stories of change that take place really grab our imagination.  While these dramatic stories might be legitimate and cause us to think long and hard about the faith, oftentimes we think that they are the only legitimate stories of faith.  But what about those who have lived in what I would call a cocoon of respectability, who haven’t perhaps reached the bottom and the low?  Perhaps they are not crashed and burned out, perhaps have not had some dramatic conversion experience, does the Word of God not also speak to them?  Are they not also laid bare at the very core of their being by the Word of God?  Does not the Word of God also pierce them?  I think so.  It is not just for the dramatic story that the Word of God is effective and powerful; it is for all human beings, sometimes whether they know it or not.  Regardless of what they have done in this life or how religious they may be, or how content or how moral they have been, still the Word of God goes right into the heart of us, no matter who we are.

I love what Soren Kierkegaard says:  “The Word of God talks to me and about me.”  It is not just us who read the Word of God, it is not just us who hears the Word of God, rather it is the Word of God that reads us, that reaches into us, about us, and that is what has made our faith so vibrant for 2,000 years, and how it is remarkable that regardless of the language or the culture or the color of our skin or our nationality, somehow this Word penetrates into places that we could never ever imagine, because it is a Word for us and it is about us.  But it is also, and this is the great affirmation again, it is a Word that goes to the very core of our being.  The language that is used here is fascinating.  It is the language of the Greek culture of the time that the writer of Hebrews preached, and it suggests that the Word of God goes between the spirit and the soul, goes right between the psuche and the pneuma, the soul and the spirit, the very thing that makes up our life, the very core of our being.  In the Greek language there was no language that could be used to describe the inner person more than the soul and the spirit, and between the soul and the spirit, the Word of God speaks.  In physical terms, he talks about it going between the bone and the marrow, between the very joints that we have and the bone and the marrow of which it is made, and so right to the physical core of our being.

I love what St. Patrick wrote about the Word: “God’s might to direct me, God’s power to protect me, God’s wisdom for learning, God’s eye for discerning, God’s ear for my hearing, God’s Word for my clearing.”  
Going right to the very heart of our being!

You knew there had to be a moment in this sermon when I would talk about the Toronto Blue Jays!  I didn’t have to dig very deeply to do this, because I was reminded this last week as R. A. Dickey was pitching, of an event three years ago when he was the recipient of an honorary doctorate at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto.  I was able to watch as the hood was placed on his shoulders.  Dickey had just written an incredible book about his life and about his walk with God.  But, he received his degree after only being with the Blue Jays a few weeks.  It was in May, and they hadn’t had a very good start, he had lost something like four games in a row.  He wondered why anyone would want to give him an honorary degree at that point.  But then he got up and gave the keynote address.  I have got to be honest with you, the thought of a baseball pitcher giving the honorary address at a theological seminary graduation with young ministers who had just been ordained, with other people who had received doctorates from the college, with eminent theologians, with representatives of government, with university chancellors, I must admit I was on the edge of my seat.  I wasn’t disappointed.  It was one of the finest things I have heard in years!
 
It was so special because he talked about his faith in very personal terms.  He did so by talking about his childhood, and how he had become a Christian at the age of thirteen, but that in many ways he had had a rough upbringing, so rough in fact that he talks in the book that was published before he received the degree about abuse as a child. It goes right to the heart!  Okay, it is a dramatic story of change, but this one was real.  He had reached a point six years before that graduation, nine years ago where he had hit rock bottom, his game was no good, his pitching was no good, his family life was no good, everything had fallen apart.  Even though he was still a confessing Christian, he didn’t seem to have much faith left within him, and he had reached a point, and he said this in his speech, where he went into a garage and sat down in his car, closed all the doors and the widows, and was about to turn on the engine to end it.  At that moment, what happens?  He said, “So here I was, in this place, I was about to turn the key, and I really felt the Holy Spirit saying, ‘R. A., I am not done with you yet.  Don’t do that.’  Literally, those words ‘Do not do that’.  So as lonely as I felt in that moment at the steering wheel of a Chevrolet Cavalier, I never felt truly alone.  I think there is something to be said in that.  I heard the words clearly, ‘Do not do that.’”

At the end of this most memorable speech – you can see it online, by the way, some of us went to him and talked afterwards.  We said, “What on earth happened?”

He said, “I don’t know.  I don’t know whether it is just years of having the words of Scripture in my ear prompting me.  I don’t know whether it is the fact that the words have been spoken to me over the years about the grace of God.  I don’t know whether it is just simply because in the depth of my need I listened like I have never listened before.  But, as true as anything, it was as if God had spoken to me.”  For R. A. Dickey, the Word had gone to the core of his being, between his soul and his spirit, between his bone and his marrow; it had gone to his very centre.
 
The Word of God is like that.  We never know when the word of Scripture is going to make a difference in our lives and hold us back from doing something we shouldn’t, or empowering us and encouraging us to do something we should.  We never know when the Word of God that is proclaimed just reaches out to us and touches us and says, “I am speaking to you and about you.”  We never know when Jesus comes to us through his Holy Spirit and just whispers in our ear, “Don’t do that.”  One thing I do know, one thing is real, the Word of God is active, it is effective, and it is about us.  Aren’t we glad it is?! Amen.