How pure are your best motives? Are there strings attached to even your most altruistic gestures? Here are some reflections on Jesus' blessing the pure in heart:
Matthew 5:8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
Let’s face it, no one in this room is going to see God. Not in our lifetimes anyway. If purity in heart is the prerequisite, then I’m afraid we’re all out of luck.
I certainly don’t meet the criteria for seeing God. When I’m honest with myself, I have to acknowledge that everything I say and everything I do always has mixed motives. Even in my most unselfish moments, I can’t ever get away from myself. I can’t not be mindful of the impact that I anticipate the things I do for others will have on my life. And those mixed motives end up influencing my behavior. I say and do things that I believe will win your favor. I like to be liked. I don’t like having people upset with me so I don’t always tell people the things I know they don’t want to hear. I tell them what I think they can handle.
When I do good things for people, there is always a part of me that expects some favorable treatment in return. Even if the terms of the exchange haven’t ever been spelled out, my expectation always involves reciprocity. I do something nice for you and you return the favor by doing something nice for me.
Even when I do something altruistic, when I give money to a stranger who asks for help, I have some agenda attached to the gift. I have some expectation that the person who received the gift will be grateful, will express appreciation to me for my generosity, will use it only for things that would meet with my approval (after all, it was my money).
I like to believe that my heart is pure at least in my most intimate relationships, but these last few weeks have reminded me that even when I’m at my best, there is always a self-serving motivation behind what I do. My love for Patrice is far from selfless. She’d been battling a nasty cold for the past few weeks and I tried to be sympathetic to her. I made her some soup, encouraged her to stay in bed and rest and I picked up some extra chores around the house: I cleaned up the supper dishes, I emptied the dishwasher in the morning, I even folded a load of laundry without being asked. But as much as I love Patrice and as sympathetic as I was to her feeling stuffy and run down, by the end of the second week I was starting to feel pretty resentful. The balance in our relationship had shifted and my compassion only carried me so far. By the end of the second week I was brooding, sullen and ill tempered.
I’m not going to see God because my motives are never pure. And neither is my interior life. Even though I am pretty disciplined in my spiritual practices, even though I begin most days by reading scripture, journaling, spending time in prayer and reading some inspirational writing, by the time I’m out the door on my way to church I’ve got all kinds of unholy sentiments swirling inside of me. I carry doubts about my own suitability for doing this work, anxiety about the future sustainability of the church, resentments over the petty squabbles that entangle us in our life together, frustration over the slow pace of progress as we work to expand the scope and reach of our ministries. I carry feelings of failure when the sanctuary is half empty on Sunday mornings. When people leave the fellowship of our faith community, I feel responsible for failing to give them what they needed. When people complain about things they don’t like in our church, I begin to question my own judgment and my own leadership abilities.
My devotional life encourages me to live with faith, hope, patience and perseverance, but those things are always in tension with my own inner feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, doubt and despair. Some days it is wonder that I manage to make it out the door.
I know I’m not the only the person in this room who won’t be seeing God any time soon. None of us can truly claim to be pure in heart. Lust, greed, envy, anger, jealousy, resentment, hostility…we all carry these things in our hearts. The reason we are constantly warned against the impure vices is because they are constantly corrupting the purity of our hearts. No one is ever exempt.
And yet Jesus taught his disciples saying, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” He said those words to the very people who would betray him, deny him, and abandon him in his hour of need. He said those words to the people who argued over which of them was the greatest, who lobbied for the privilege of being seated in places of honor at Jesus’ side, who-after three years of traveling together through the hills of Galilee-still weren’t sure who Jesus was or what he had come to do. Even the disciples, whom Jesus hand-picked to mentor and train and send out as witnesses of the kingdom of God, even the twelve people in Jesus’ inner circle were far from being pure in heart. They doubted, they wavered in their faith, they got into petty arguments, they got caught up in politics and power struggles. The first disciples of Jesus Christ struggled with the same mixed motives that color everything we say and do.
So what hope do any of us have of ever seeing God? The answer, I think has everything to do with community. Jesus didn’t share the beatitudes with the disciples during private, one on one conversations. He didn’t send them out on their own to embody the values commended in the beatitudes. The Sermon on the Mount begins with the disciples coming to Jesus on the mountain. It was only when they were together that Jesus began to teach them.
The beatitudes were given to the gathered community of believers. They are values that form the covenantal relationship that bind our lives together in faith. They aren’t practices that any of us can live out on our own. They are the ideals that community calls us to return to every time gather in the name of Jesus.
Our individual hearts will always be filled with pure and impure motives. From moment to moment will we vacillate between saying and doing things that inspiringly altruistic and in the very next instant saying and do things that are shamefully self-serving. Jesus said, “…it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. (Mark 7: 21-22).”
But when we come together to worship as a community of faith, we hear the values of Jesus proclaimed and we sing songs that inspire us to rise above our own self-interests. We learn from the collective wisdom 10,000 years of recorded experiences of our forbearers as we study the lessons recorded in our sacred texts. We inspire and encourage one another as we share the challenges of living faithfully in the world through our small group conversations. We stand together in common witness, common service, common cause in order to more fully embody the values of our faith in the life of our city, our country, our world.
Our individual hearts are easily corrupted when we are separated from each other, but our hearts are purified by the transforming power of God’s Holy Spirit moving among us whenever two or more of us are gathered together in the name of Jesus. Here we listen to each other’s confessions and remind each other of the redeeming power of God’s mercy and grace. Here we acknowledge our struggles, our doubts, our frustrations and fears and find comfort, strength, courage and hope. Here we step out of the myth of ever being on our own and instead rejoice in the ties that bind our lives in authentic community.
We live in a culture that idolizes superstars. We elevate individuals to super human status. In sports, one player’s success or failure dictates the success or failure of the team. If the Lions don’t re-sign Ndamukong Suh they won’t have a chance of making the playoff next year. If Cabrera or Martinez don’t recover from their injuries in time for opening day, the Tigers won’t have the hitting they need to compete in the American League Central Division. Our culture idolizes superstars. Their individual abilities and performances make or break a team’s chances for success. But here in the church, we know that just the opposite is true. Christians know that community shapes the individual. That’s why we can stand to be apart from each other for longer than a week at a time. That is why the idea of trying to be a faithful follower of Jesus without being connected to the community that he founded is absurd to us. That is why we spend so much money building and maintaining gathering places where communities of believers can come together and have their hearts renewed through worship, study, fellowship and service.
The Bible isn’t a self-help guide. It is written to the community of believers for the sake of building up the community of believers. We don’t have books written about individual superstars. We have books written to inspire communities of faithful people gathered in Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae and Thessalonica.
None of have a chance of seeing God on our own. Our hearts will never be pure. But here in Christ’s church, God is incarnated in the faith, the love, the wisdom, the fellowship and the service of the gathered community and the face of God is constantly being revealed in the faces of our brothers and sisters in Christ join in common witness.
It is to us collectively, to the whole community of believers, that Jesus promised, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Amen.
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