Testing the
Mind, Searching the Heart
© by the Reverend Dr. Byron E. Shafer
(Rutgers, February 11, 2001; 6th
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C;
Holy Communion; Reception of New
Members; Black History Month)
Jeremiah 17:5–10 (OT, pp. 799–800); Luke
6:17–26 (NT, pp. 65–66)
God
knows who we are far better than we know ourselves. You see, as the prophet Jeremiah learned so long ago, God
tests our minds and searches our hearts. And
in so doing God comes to know what our core commitments really are.
Oh, we can deceive ourselves about our values and motives, as Freud also
recognized, but nothing can be hidden from God.
God can discern whether at the center of our hearts and minds there lies
self-interest or love for God and neighbor.
God can discern whether at the center of our pursuits there stands making
life better for ourselves or making life better for more of God’s children.
And
if God is testing our minds and
searching our hearts, how much more
ought we to be testing and searching
our own minds and hearts, how much more ought we ourselves to be probing just
what our core commitments really are,
fearlessly stripping away any camouflage for selfishness we may have erected by
false words and deceptive deeds. For
when all is said and done, it is the nature of our core commitments that is the
most significant thing to be known about ourselves, about anyone.
This
morning’s gospel lesson speaks of a great multitude who come to receive from
Jesus both teaching and healing.
I
suspect that the people back then were not very different from us today.
Some of us turn to faith and its teachings to be healed in body.
But many more of us turn to faith and its teachings to be healed in heart
and mind—to be given the gifts of self-discernment and inner transformation
that can turn our hearts and minds from love of self to love of God and
neighbor.
A
man was once asked by a minister whether he had accepted Jesus Christ as his
Lord and Savior. He gave one of the
best answers to that question I’ve ever heard.
He said, “Why do you ask me
such a thing? I could tell you,
‘Yes,’ but I might be deceiving myself.
Here are three names—those of a neighbor, a co-worker, and my daughter.
Ask them if Jesus is my Lord
and Savior.”
Or
ask recent graduates of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg,
like Stephanie Bullock and Carletta Barnes, or ask the members of the Friendship
Baptist Church there—ask them if Jesus was the Lord and Savior of of a woman
named Oseola McCarty. I’m sure
they’d say, “Why, yes indeed!”
Miss
Ola, as she was affectionately known, was an African-American washerwoman who
read her tattered Bible almost every day. It
was bound with scotch tape to keep Corinthians from falling out.
For 75 years she took in laundry, lived simply, and managed to save from
her always meager income the $150,000 that she gave away in 1995 to the
University of Southern Mississippi, an historically black college.
She requested that her money be used for scholarships, so others could
gain the education she never got.
Miss
Ola was once asked if it hadn’t been hard to save so much when she’d earned
so little, and she replied, “It wasn’t hard.
I just didn’t buy things I didn’t need…
The Lord helped me, and will help you, too.” “If you put Jesus in front, he’ll guide you, and you’ll
live the life he wants you to live.”
Well,
Miss Ola died a year and a half ago of liver cancer, at age 91.
She died as a person who had definitely given back to life far more than
she’d taken from it. And it was her faith in Jesus that gave her the healing grace
to strip away any camouflage for selfishness and to turn her heart and mind from
self-interest to love for God and neighbor.
As Miss Ola approached death and God once more tested her mind and
searched her heart, I’m confident God joined with all of her friends and
neighbors in finding them quite healthy and whole.
Now,
the society of which we’re a part makes it hard for us to hear and heed the
teachings of Jesus and to be healed of heart and mind, so that we, too, may turn
away from placing self-interest at the center of our lives.
We’re
told tax cuts will give us more money to spend on ourselves.
We’re invited to see the relentlessly selfish gamesmanship of
television programs like Survivor as wholesome entertainment. We’re encouraged to camouflage the greed behind our trying
to win the lottery by telling ourselves we’re helping education.
We’re asked to find it both expectable and acceptable that
multinational corporations relentlessly pursue the escalation of profits, even
when this pursuit militates against such a thing as providing medicines to the
multitudes of poverty-stricken Africans suffering from diseases like AIDS and
sleeping sickness.
You
see, our society and economy are based on the profit motive and competition, not
on the things Jesus taught: altruism and cooperativeness.
Witness
the article on the front page of last Friday’s New York Times captioned, “Cosmetic Saves a Cure for Sleeping
Sickness.” Just after
pharmaceutical companies had phased out as “unprofitable” the manufacture of
by far the best, most miraculous drug for curing African sleeping sickness, they
have discovered that the drug has a secondary use for eliminating facial hair in
women. So they’ve decided to
start manufacturing the drug again, not because it will save thousands of
African lives but because when it’s blended into a cream there’s a high
profit to be had from selling it to Western women as a prescribed cosmetic.
Yes,
our society and economy really do make it hard for us to remove self-interest
from the center of our lives. That’s
why we find people like Miss Ola remarkable rather than commonplace.
Today
six of you have newly reaffirmed your faith in Jesus as your Lord and Savior,
taking vows to follow him. And by
your having done so, the rest of us have been reminded of the vows we took when
last we declared ourselves to be followers of Jesus.
I
invite each of us today, in fulfillment of those vows we’ve taken, to test our
mind and search our heart, asking ourselves what our core commitments really
are. And I invite each of us as we come to the communion table
this morning to turn to Jesus for a healing of heart and mind, for receiving
from him his gifts of self-discernment and inner transformation.
For it is through his healing, his gifts offered to us at this table,
that we can strip away the camouflage for our self-centeredness that we’ve
erected through the years .
Come,
then, to the table of Jesus for a healing of heart and mind, that there may come
to stand at the center of all our pursuits love for God and neighbor and the
desire to make life better for more of God’s children.
Through
the healing grace of Jesus offered to us in this meal, may each of us help to
make people like Miss Ola commonplace in our world.
Let
us pray:
O God, we
come to the table of Christ unworthy in mind and heart.
Transform us, we pray, that we may come to love God and neighbor above
all and that others may come to say of us, “Truly, Jesus is their Lord and
Savior.” Amen.
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