November 9, 2008
Matthew 5:3-8
Pure in Heart
3Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
5Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
7Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
8Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Two young adults were involved in a fender bender and at first they were angry with one another and accused the other of being at fault, but finally, calmer heads prevailed and they decided to call the police and let them settle the matter.
As they waited for the police to arrive they continued to talk to one another and discovered they had a lot in common, and the chemistry began to flow between the two.
Finally the young woman said, “You know, maybe it was God’s will that we had this accident and we get to meet one another.”
And the young man, who was really attracted to the young woman said, “you’re absolutely right!”
The young woman said, “Its silly for us to stand out here in the cold. Let’s get inside your car and sit where it will be a little warmer.” And the young man readily agreed.
As they sat talking in the car the young woman said, “You know, I just happened to be at the store and I bought a bottle of wine and I have some paper cups. How about if I get it and we have a toast to this chance meeting.” The young man thought that was a good idea.
They made their toast, he gulped down his wine and she sipped her wine. She offered him some more, which he took. Then he noticed she really was not sipping her wine, in fact, she was not drinking it at all. So, he asked her, “Aren’t you going to drink your wine?”
She said, “No, I’ll just wait for the police to arrive before I have my drink.”
I wonder how pure her heart was? What are you motives for what you say and do?
This morning we are looking at the 6th of the Beatitudes of Jesus.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
What does it mean to have a pure heart? What does it even mean to be pure?
Think about the advertisement for Ivory Soap. What does it mean that something is only 99 44/100% pure? What does that mean for the other 56/100%? Does it matter? Does it really make you want to buy Ivory soap? Probably not.
Then there is water. We want to drink clean water, we all do. But would you drink this water? No way!! We wouldn’t come close to that, but we would trade it for a nice glass of cold water. Water that seems pure!
We wouldn’t eat soup which is fly infested or even has a fly in it, would we. It’s not pure, it’s not clean. We would send it back and we would ask for a good, hot bowl of pure, clean soup.
So, when Jesus talks about a pure heart, what exactly is a pure heart? The Greek word for pure implies being clean, unpolluted, and that what is pure was not always pure, but has been purified, cleansed, and washed out. A “catharsis” (from the Greek word for pure) is an emotional resolution; it is also defined by Oxford as a “purgation, especially evacuation of the bowels.” The pure heart would be a heart that has been emptied of what is unclean, purged of what no longer belongs.
19th century theologian, Soren Kierkegaard wrote a famous book called, “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.” Our problem is that we let ourselves get stressed out because we try to do so many things in so many different directions. We try to be and do everything, when we were made for just one thing, for the one thing that really and ultimately matters: God. If purity of heart is “to will one thing,” then focus is everything. The pure, like a racehorse, need “blinders” to block out their peripheral vision, so they keep their eyes on the one goal, straight ahead, the finish line.
If purity of heart is to will one thing, that one thing can’t be just any old thing. We may will the penthouse office in the corporate tower, or we may will the glamour of being cool or good-looking. We may will whatever it is we think we want, and that often leads to a swift plunge away from God. That’s because we scale the heights for what is impressive, or when we settle back for what is easy, instead of doing what Paul tells us in Philippians 4, ‘pressing for whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, those are the things we should be doing.’
The pure in heart will the one thing that is genuinely and enduringly good. They want God, and no substitute will do.
Impurity is everywhere, its as if it is in the very air we breathe. Impurity is on television, is overheard in our conversations and in our actions. It has taken an unwelcome residence in our hearts and souls. Part of impurity’s lure is that it seems to pay. Who’s getting ahead in the world? And who on the surface seems to be happy and blessed? Not the pure, not the poor in spirit, or those who mourn, or the merciful or the meek?
Take a good, hard look at Psalm 73. Asaph starts by saying, “Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold. 13 Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence. 14 All day long I have been plagued; I have been punished every morning.”
Look at this psalmist, he has attempted to live life with a pure heart. Now he is questioning, “where has this gotten me? I look around and all the others are arrogant and mocking God. They think God is weak, helpless and harmless. I feared God and look where it got me!!” This guy was faithful and righteous and good, but where did it get him? His reward was suffering and pain and poverty. If God is good, isn’t He supposed to bless us? Especially if we attempt to be pure in heart!!
As the psalm moves on, the psalmist sees the fiction behind the old belief in a retributional God, that the good will be rewarded and the wicked will be punished. He was tempted to give up until He “entered the sanctuary of God, and then he understood.” Somehow in the Temple he caught a glimpse of hope. The presence of God can do things to a person, especially to one who is suffering. The Psalmist is not miraculously healed. His flesh and heart are still failing. He doesn’t win the lottery, he is still poor. But he now affirms with a new certainty, “God is good to the pure in heart.” Listen to these closing words,
26“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
28 As for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign LORD my refuge; I will tell of all your deeds.”
For Asaph, God is no longer the great cashier in the sky, who rings up your good deeds, and with a big “thank you” hands you some payout. No, God is the one whose love never fails, the one who is there, who is not trivialized by human schemes of deserving. For Christians, that God has a face, and the contours of that face are the compassion, wisdom, tenderness, love, grace and mercy; and it is also the great power and strength and courage that comes as well when we experience God.
And God is good. But the good that God gives us is no “thing.” What God gives isn’t some arbitrary thing. What God gives to us is the miraculous, but we don’t recognize because most of the time, we are too full of ourselves
You see, God’s great gift to us, is . . . God’s very own self.
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God is good to the pure in heart. Purity of heart is no longer just doing nice things, or avoiding grimy things. In fact, no impurity of heart is more defiling than self righteousness! Dietrich Bonhoeffer wisely suggested that the pure in heart are “those whose hearts are undefiled by their own evil – and by their own virtues too” (Cost of Discipleship). What comes out of the heart? Not a mountain of good deeds, but love.
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But how do we get love to come flowing out of our hearts, when Jeremiah (17:9) could write - “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
We don’t always understand our hearts, do we? We do things and say things which are amazingly hurtful, we avoid people for reasons which don’t make sense, we tell stories when we don’t know the real stories, we’re good at seeing the problems in others, but how dare someone to point out our issues. Jeremiah was correct, the heart is deceitful, but is it beyond all cure?
This is where the words of Solomon come in. In Proverbs 4:23, he tells us - “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” Oh dear friends, how true that is. You see, all of life flows through our heart. Not only is our heart, our life source, beating over 36 million times in just one year, but beating over 1.8 trillion times in a 50 year life span. That is astounding. The absolutely perfect way God created our bodies . . . WOW!!
But our hearts are more than that. For those of the ancient world, and we forget how true this is, the heart is the center of who you are. So we must guard our hearts, because all of life flows through our heart. When we gossip and are angry at people, when we will not forgive, when we say some of those hurtful things . . . and more, they are coming from our hearts, not our brains, because our brain knows better, but in those instances our brain takes instruction from our heart.
And conversely, when we do good things. When we choose to help someone, when we serve, when we give, when we submit ourselves to God, we are doing these actions from our heart. So, we must, we must, we must guard what flows into our hearts, because what flows in to our hearts, will lead us to make the decisions, the life decisions we make.
For Jesus, as for all people in Bible times, the heart was not a pulsating organ inside your chest to be strengthened by exercise and a good diet; or to be cured by a cardiologist. The heart is your truest self. The heart is part of you that feels, delights grieves, desires. The heart is the “imagination,” the place inside where we conceive, where we make connections, where we dream. The heart is the place where you exercise your freedom, where you decide, the mechanism that chooses what to do this evening, who you will marry, whether to lie or not, how to respond to a crisis. The heart is the sphere where we meet God or avoid meeting God.
Blessed are the pure in heart, who will one thing, who will the one thing, who love, with a love that can bear any defeat. Such pure lovers are not the same people they were before they found themselves in Jesus’ words. Thomas Merton wrote, “purity of heart . . . means the renunciation of all deluded images of ourselves, all exaggerated estimates of our own capacities, in order to obey God’s will as it comes to us in the difficult demands of life in its exacting truth. Purity of heart is then correlative to a new spiritual identity” (Contemplative Prayer, 68).
So what is the blessedness of the pure in heart? They shall see God. So it must be impurity of heart that blinds us to God. The divided, scattered, busy, stressed self grows anxious: I cannot see God! If only I could see God I could get all this stuff done and cope better. But it is the pure in heart who can see God. What is the catharsis that is required here? Perhaps some mourning: tears are like a washing out of the self. Perhaps some poverty: having nothing provides a clearing in which God may be noticed. Perhaps fasting, since the Beatitudes are a ladder, so those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are likely to be pure in heart. Perhaps if I could simplify my life I could see God: every day we have thousands of choices, and if over and over we choose the simpler way, if in various ways we choose renunciation, then we are less and less enmeshed with the world, and have more freedom, and available space, a purity so we might see God.
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As St. Augustine said in the 5th century in his famous book, The City of God . . .
“Now at best, because of our fallen nature, our impurity of heart, if we see God we see through that “glass darkly”. But it will not always be so: when the body, freed from corruption, offers no hindrance to the soul, the saints will certainly need no bodily eyes to see what is there to be seen. . . . The Lord’s Day . . . which is to last forever. . . . There we shall be still and see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold, what will be, in the end, without end!”
The pure in heart see, and they see in order to love, and they love to fulfill their eternal vocation of praise. Such is Jesus’ heady promise.
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The pure in heart love Jesus, and want nothing but to be near Him — and so they stick close to the poor Jesus blessed, and so they see Him. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
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This is what Jesus meant when he said the pure in heart will see God. Once we have become truly "pure in heart," we can begin to see things, to understand things, in an entirely new way. No longer do we see God as some terrible Simon Legare sitting up on a cloud somewhere waiting to zap us if we get out of line. Nor do we see God as some kindly old grandfather willing to overlook all the things that we do that are wrong. We begin to SEE GOD, to understand God, as God is - one who loves us and wants the absolute best for us and for this whole wide world as well.
So we turn again to the world. We see the economic mess, the ongoing wars, the energy crisis, the climate change, the unfair health care system, the school problems, the infrastructure deterioration. Are you happy? Not with any of that, we sigh in despair. And we know God is not happy with them either. So we do our best to make a difference as we SEE God, as God gives us guidance.
Alfred Lord Tennyson was once asked what his fondest desire was and he responded, "a clearer vision of God." Perhaps that is the reason that he requested that when his poems would be collected after his death, any publication of them would end with the one called "Crossing the Bar." Its concluding words express it all:
And though from out this bourne of time and place,
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my pilot face to face,
When I have crossed the bar.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will meet the Pilot, they will see God."
