Jeremiah 17.5-10, Luke 6.17-26
Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day. You might love it or hate it, dread it or look forward to it, but it’s hard to ignore completely, not least because it’s such a big marketing opportunity for the shops. It’s hard to go anywhere without being confronted with the imagery connected with it, and most common among those images is the that of the heart. There’s nothing that says love like a heart.
But it wasn’t always that way. Hearts weren’t always a symbol of romance, of feelings, of emotions. Our ancient ancestors thought of emotions as coming from the gut. For them, the heart was the seat of thinking, of the will. It was the organ people used in decision making. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, thought that the brain was just a cooling device, which is understandable. After all, it doesn’t look as if it is doing anything much to the naked eye, whereas hearts are obviously beating and active – we can hear them and feel them.
Those might seem like odd ideas, but they took a long time to change, and they are still there in a lot of our idioms. We talk about being faint-hearted or lion-hearted. We say that our hearts weren’t really in something when we have done it half-heartedly, rather than whole-heartedly. We say someone has a big heart or a soft heart, a heart of gold, or a heart of stone because they’ve hardened their hearts. Our hearts bleed, melt, sink, leap in response to things we like, or don’t. We help others out of the goodness of our hearts, pursue an interest to our heart’s content, feel young at heart , or maybe not. And I could go on. Not one of those expressions has anything to do with the organ that is pumping away in our chests, sending blood around our bodies as I speak. Nor are they just about emotion, let alone romantic love. They are about who we are “at heart” – there that’s word again - how we approach the world, our motivations and priorities, what makes us tick, the essence of our being.
So when we come across the image of the heart in the Bible, this is what was going through the minds of those who wrote and read it first – not romance or just emotion, not just physical life, but our inmost nature. It’s there in our first reading from the book of Jeremiah. Cursed are those “whose hearts turn away from the Lord” he says. That curse isn’t some arbitrary punishment; it’s just an inevitable result, to Jeremiah. He describes turning away from God as like turning away from water. You can’t expect to do that for long without serious consequences. Ultimately, separated from this essential ingredient of life, we shrivel up, like a shrub in the desert when the rains fail.
But turning our hearts towards God, orienting our lives to what is good, investing ourselves in things that are life-giving has the opposite effect. Then, says Jeremiah, we become like a tree planted by the waterside. “It shall not fear when the heat comes… in the year of drought it is not anxious.” I love that phrase – “in the year of drought it is not anxious”. It doesn’t say that we won’t encounter times of drought, or scorching heat which sears us, but that when that happens, our leaves will stay green and we will bear fruit, because our roots reach down into the living water of God. I’ve known many people who have endured terrible times, and yet still seem able to find goodness in the world, still seem able to help others, to love and be loved. It’s not that they don’t suffer, despair, mourn, hurt, like anyone else, but they’ve found a source of life that goes deeper than the troubles they experience, so they aren’t destroyed by them. When you talk to them, you often find that’s not an accident. They’ve chosen to root themselves into things that are good and life-giving. What that looks like varies from person to person, but it often includes a discipline of prayer and Bible reading, coming together with others, even when they don’t much feel like it, finding opportunities to love and to serve, and accepting the love and service of others. It has shaped their hearts, set their orientation, sunk into the depths of their being, so that their instincts are to hope, to love, to maintain their moral compass when times are hard.
There’s heart language in today’s collect too. It’s another classic, like last week’s collect. It goes back to the 8th century, and it prays that “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found”. It’s not just about knowing right from wrong, but about having a heart in tune with God, and the hallmark of that, the prayer tells us, is joy, the joy that comes from being who we are meant to be, children of God, loving what he loves.
Today’s Gospel reading doesn’t contain any mention of the word “heart”, but it seems to me that hearts are at the heart of it too.
It is Luke’s version of the famous list of sayings often called the Beatitudes. Beatitude comes from the Latin “Beatus”, which means blessed, because that’s the word Jesus uses again and again in it. But sometimes people also talk about them as Be–attitudes. Attitudes which shape our being. Attitudes which come from the heart of us, and go to the heart of us too.
It’s easy to assume that wealth, worldly achievements and popular acclaim are signs that we are blessed, favoured, special. But Jesus turns that upside down. Set your hearts on those, he says, and you may get them, but they’ll be all you get, and when they pass, as they always will, you may find yourself with nothing but the yawning gap where once they were – woe indeed. Learn to trust that God is present in times of trouble, on the other hand, that you’re loved by God when you have nothing, when no one else loves you, and you’ll have a blessing that nothing can take from you, springs of living water, welling up to eternal life, as Jesus puts it elsewhere.
Today’s readings ask us to think about where our hearts are fixed, what our hearts are set on, what we are whole-hearted about. It’s often said that a clue to that is to look at our bank accounts and our diaries. What have we spent our time and money on? What have we put our best efforts into? Jesus said “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. What have we invested the treasure of our lives in? Have we made investments in things which will sustain us “in the year of drought”? Have we sunk our roots into God’s love? Whatever Valentine’s Day holds for us, God’s love is always there, a never-failing stream that brings the driest heart to life if we will only draw on it.
Amen
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