“God's Place in Your Heart”

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”  This is such a powerful prayer.  Try it sometime. Those words can bring the Holy Spirit close when you most need God’s help.  I’ve known parents who found them very effective, like counting to 10 – you know, when something in the other room crashes to the floor. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me!” 

I have a friend who tells the story of his 5-year-old son, fidgeting as usual during the time for children.  Only this time it was when their new minister – fresh out of seminary – was doing her first baptism.  She started out well enough – gathering the children around her, telling them how Jesus has a special place inside every heart, how we are all precious children of God and vessels of grace.  But once the baptism began, she got into trouble.  She made the rookie mistake of praying the entire UCC baptism prayer.  Whoever wrote that thing never had kids – or never sat next to a kid in church! 

It’s the prayer I make fun of when someone asks me to lead a “quick prayer” at the end of a long meeting: “O Lord God Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, you whose breath moved across the face of the waters at the beginning of time, you who spoke to your mighty prophets – to Noah and to Abraham, to Jacob and his sons, to Moses and Elijah – and to your beloved son Jesus, and through his grace, finally, to us.” You can just imagine how well that prayer goes over with small children – not to mention a baptism baby squirming over the font! 

My friend was only half-listening, because as father of 3, he knew disaster was coming.  But then he heard it.  His son had started to snore.  First softly, but then louder and louder, because he was setting off these great ripples of giggles from all the kids.  The poor dad was in the choir and couldn’t get up to do anything without making an even bigger scene.  So he had to wait.  But when “amen” finally came, he jumped out of his chair, grabbed the kid by the neck and started dragging him to the nearest side door.  And that’s when the kid – who it turns out, had been listening to the children’s sermon after all – said, “Wait!  Wait!  You can’t hurt me.  You heard the lady.... I am God’s child.  I have Jesus inside my heart.  You wouldn’t hurt Jesus would you?”

Well, that about sums it up, doesn’t it? What a great paradox – our divinity and our humanity, our holiness and our sinfulness.  We might actually know, as my friend’s son did, that God is supposed to have a place in our heart – but what we do not know is how to actually clean up our act enough to let the Spirit inside.  God might want to write the Law of Love on my heart, but if God was to take a good look around inside me, and see the truth of my “secret heart,” as the Psalmist says – well, it’s kind of like the inside of my house – let’s just say God might have a hard time finding an unbroken pencil and a nice clean sheet of paper to write on. [Sigh.]  “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”  That’s the challenge.  How exactly does that happen?

No wonder ancient peoples liked to think of God as far away and high up – as in the top of Mt. Sinai, or at the center of the Jerusalem Temple on Mt. Zion.  It’s daunting to have to make such a great hike up to the place of God.  But on the other hand, it puts God in His place.  We know where to find him, and how to hide from him.  I mean, how could anyone find the courage to look directly at the glory of God, as Moses did in the burning bush, or to enter into the God’s presence inside the Holy of Holies?  When the High Priest did go into that innermost room where God was said to live, it was only on the Day of Atonement, the one day of the year when that was permitted during the time of Jesus.  It was considered such risky work, they actually tied a rope to his ankle – just in case he should fall down and die in God’s presence and need to be pulled back out.

How much harder is it, then, to invite the Spirit of God make a home inside our hearts?  We don’t usually do it very well.  Jeremiah is such a great book.  It’s the longest one in the whole Bible – the most words, not the most verses.  And it’s full of great parables and stories.  My favorite one I like to call it the “Parable of the Dirty Underpants.”  It actually goes over very well with kids, as you might imagine.  Now if you look it up in your pew Bibles it’s in Jeremiah 13, page 661, but it won’t say “underpants,” it says “linen waistcloth” to “put on your loins.”  Depending on your translation, it’ll say loincloth, or girdle, or even belt.  But we all know what it is – it’s underpants!   Jeremiah calls us to cling to God like nice clean underpants!

That puts an interesting “spin,” so to speak, on the Apostle Paul’s challenge to one of the first churches he planted, in first century Greece.  In his first Letter to the Corinthians, he writes, “¹⁹Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Cor. 6:19)  How can any of us ever clean up our act enough for that?

That’s where I love the images in Psalm 51.   “Have mercy on me, O God...blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin..... Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”  Here God starts to sound less like a fearsome storm god raining down fire from a mountaintop and more and more like my Appalachian grandmother on laundry day.  She’d get out her big tin washtub and her old washboard and go at scrubbing down her whites with the Ivory Snow – and a few hours later, I would help her bring in that nice, stiff, fresh, clean laundry off the clothesline.  Can God really take the stink of our sin off of us and make us smell that fresh – like bright spring sunshine?  Well... yes.  God can. God does. God does that hard work FOR us.  We just have to let Christ into our hearts to get started.  You know how the Bible says, “Behold I stand at the door and knock?”  Well, maybe it’s time to open the door and let Him come in and do our soul’s “laundry”! 

When we think of “Wellspring of Welcome” and our church vision statement – Make Jesus Your Mentor, Pray, Share, Welcome – when we think of that “welcome” priority, I know we think of welcoming people into our church.  We’ve been hearing “Welcome” stories all during Lent, and we’ll hear another one today.  But the ultimate act of Welcome, when you stop to think about it, is not to just invite newcomers into this meetinghouse but to welcome Jesus to take his rightful place inside us, inside our hearts. 

So how exactly do we do that?  Well... practice your faith.  Come to church every week.  Find your voice to pray and praise God.  Open your ears and your heart to God’s word speaking to you in scripture, sermons, and song.  When you do, even if you’re not hyper-religious outside these walls, I think you’ll find you will soon be making wiser choices about how you spend your time, what you put inside your body what words you speak, and what actions you take.  Plus, the covenant of brother- and sisterhood we share in Christ’s Church helps us to hold one another accountable for our behavior.  It’s starts to become not just a duty but a real joy to come to classes, to share with people in need, to extend warm welcome to refugees – whether they are physical refugees from another country, or spiritual refugees, maybe like you, from our harsh world outside. 

I want to close with a story about one of my favorite places in Berkeley, was this one upscale lighting store.  Now I could never afford one of these beautiful lamps – many with stained glass, Tiffany-style shades – but I enjoyed stopping in just to look.  Many lamps were like sculptures – some for kids in the shape of frogs or piggies or butterflies, and some much more elaborate, like a world globe, or a green snake climbing a tall tree.  The proprietor was the artist, and it was a funky place – you can imagine many of these creations sat on the shelf a long time before they were sold.   So sometimes it was hard to guess what a lamp off in some dusty corner would actually look like in use.  But what I loved was how the owner – who had to know me as a perpetual window-shopper – would always happily pull out a lamp to show me.  He’d get out a little Windex and a rag and clean it up good, put in a new 60-watt bulb, plug it in, and enjoy my reaction when I’d see its true beauty shine through.

The God who made each of us is like that artist.  God knows every detail of our being.  God knows we are each beautiful in our own unique way – even when we get pushed into some dark and dusty corner where no one ever notices us anymore, where no one touches us with love or sees us as useful.  God our Maker is the one who will happily bring us back out into the light, dust us off, polish us up, and plug us back in to the source of all life and light – God’s own great heart of love, shared with us in Jesus Christ.

Know that is true about you too.  God makes no mistakes.  If God made you, then go ahead – bring yourself forward into the light, let the bright love of Jesus fill your heart.  Let the strong hands of God polish you up into the work of art you were meant to be.  Jeremiah once preached that God is the potter and we are the clay.  And it is true.  Our hearts were shaped to be shining vessels of Christ’s powerful, transforming love. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

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Psalm 51:1-2, 6-7, 10

1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin..... 6 You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. 7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. .... 10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

Jeremiah 13:1-11a

1 Thus said the Lord to me, "Go and buy yourself a linen loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water." 2 So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. 3 And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, 4 "Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock." 5 So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. 6 And after many days the Lord said to me, "Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I commanded you to hide there." 7 Then I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth was ruined; it was good for nothing. 8 Then the word of the Lord came to me: 9 Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. 10 This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly follow their own will and have gone after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing. 11 For as the loincloth clings to one's loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory.

Jeremiah 31:31-35

31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the Lord," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.