A HOME FOR BLEEDING HEARTS Matthew (21-28) August 17, 2014 Tim Phillips, Seattle First Baptist Church

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1 Page 1 A HOME FOR BLEEDING HEARTS Matthew (21-28) August 17, 2014 Tim Phillips, Seattle First Baptist Church SERMON I am wondering this morning how many of you, at some point in your life, have had the honor of being called a bleeding heart liberal? I realize that it isn t always seen as an honor. I have a friend who calls me that when we get into discussions about the state of the world. And when he does that, it usually means the conversation is over: Oh, you re just one of those bleeding heart liberals, he says and that s the end of it. Now maybe, in his mind, that s what I am. But I ve never fully identified with that label. First, because it isn t exactly meant to be a compliment and I m not used to having my opinions simply dismissed because someone thinks I am, in the end, unworthy to have one. Second, it s a label that doesn t feel like it fits because I have my own bias about bleeding heart liberals. I think of them as naïve, knee-jerk reactionaries, who have staked out a social position regardless of any information to the contrary. And I, on the other hand, am well-reasoned, worldly-wise, and my opinions are thoughtful and well-considered. Awhile ago, I decided to go looking for the origins of this phrase and found an article by Gary Leon Johnson who writes that the phrase seems to have been made popular by journalist and social critic Francis James Westbrook Pegler who railed against everything from labor unions to civil rights. His favorite targets were the Roosevelts, especially Eleanor Roosevelt. By the 1960s, he was so extreme in his views that he was forced out of the John Birch Society. For those of you who don t know the John Birch Society, suffice to say that you have to go a long way to be too extreme for that organization.

2 Page 2 Johnson also writes that the consensus seems to be that the history of the phrase probably reaches back to the Middle Ages and the semi-religious Order of the Bleeding Heart, established in honor of Mary whose heart was pierced with sorrow in the death of her son. One writer finds it odd that Christians would use bleeding heart liberal in a pejorative way when it appears that Mary and Jesus were the first ones. Was Jesus a bleeding heart liberal? It is true that Jesus is famous for his compassion; preaching good news to the poor, healing the sick, touching the untouchables, and standing up for the outcast. And he does, in the gospel of Matthew, have a lot to say about the heart. You know the Beatitudes: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. The existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard would say, purity of heart is to will one thing. It is a kind of single-minded devotion that can see God in all things. Or, as Deuteronomy says, it is to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might. Or later in Matthew, Jesus says: Come unto me, all that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest; take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart. There is purity of heart and humility of heart. Why not a bleeding heart? Except that Jesus isn t always so positive about the ways of the heart as is the case with the story from this morning in Matthew : Some Pharisees and teachers of the Law from Jerusalem came to Jesus and said, Why do your disciples violate the tradition of the elders? By the way, there is this tension in Matthew between the traditions which are the outer form of something and the heart of it the central core of meaning or value. Dr. King says that these stories are meant to prepare the disciples of Jesus to face those cold and arrogant men whose hearts had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. For Dr. King, Jesus represented the tender new shoots of spring in the face of the long winter of traditionalism. So

3 Page 3 Some Pharisees and teachers of the Law from Jerusalem came to Jesus and said, Why do your disciples violate the tradition of the elders. They don t perform a ritual hand-washing before they eat. Jesus replied, And why do you violate the commandments of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, honor your mother and father, and those who curse their mother or father must be put to death. But you say, whoever says to their parents, Any support you might have had from me is dedicated to God, is no longer obligated to support them. You therefore nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition! You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied well when he said of you: These people honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is worthless, And their doctrines are mere human rules. Jesus called the crowd together and said to them, Hear this and understand: it s not what enters your mouth that defiles you it s what comes out of your mouth that defiles you. Then the disciples approached him and said, Do you realize that the Pharisees were offended by what you said? Jesus replied, Every plant that my Abba God in heaven has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Ignore them they are blind people leading other blind people. And when the blind lead the blind, they will all fall into a ditch. Then Peter said to him, Explain this parable to us. Jesus replied, Do you still not understand? Don t you realize that everything that goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and eventually finds its way into the sewer and is gone? But what comes out of the mouth, comes from the heart. This is what makes a person unclean. For from the heart come all sorts of evil intentions murder, sexual infidelity, promiscuity, stealing, lying, even foul language. These things make a person unclean not eating with unwashed hands! For whatever good can come out of the heart, there is a lot of destructiveness as well, Jesus says. The evangelical and former pastor of the other Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Rob Bell, writes that the truth about the human heart is that as advanced and intelligent and educated as we are, there are some things about the human condition that have not changed in thousands of years. It s very important that we are honest about this glaring reality. We have

4 Page 4 progressed so incredibly far, invented so many things, found an endless array of new ways to process and share and communicate information, and yet the human heart has remained significantly unchanged, in that it still possesses the tremendous capacity to produce extraordinary ignorance, evil, and destruction. Do you think this is true? Do you think that with all of our human progress, humanity still has a chronic heart problem. And we can clean up our language but if our hearts are divided and hard, eventually that is going to come out our mouths? Does our technology mean that we have just figured out more efficient ways to spew our hatred and bitterness and meanness into the world? In all the years I have read this story, I have never put it together with the one that immeidately follows. Here is Matthew : Jesus left there [after saying that what comes out of our mouths is an indication of the heart] and he departed for the district of Tyre and Sidon. It happened that a Canaanite woman living in that area came and cried out to Jesus, Heir to the House of David, have pity on me! My daughter is horribly demon-possessed. Jesus gave her not one word of response. The disciples came up and repeatedly said to him, Please get rid of her! She keeps calling after us. Finally Jesus turned to the woman and said, My mission is only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. She then prostrated herself before him with the plea, Help me, Rabbi! Jesus answered, But it isn t right to take the children s food and throw it do the dogs. Really? Out of the mouth comes the intentions of the heart? Not to put too fine a point on it, that s not a very bleeding-heart-liberal kind of thing to say. What was in Jesus heart not to just ignore this woman; not to simply justify his dismissal of her; but to call her a dog? I don t know. What in my heart and what s in any of our hearts to ignore and dismiss the pleas of another person? Unacknowledged and unexamined prejudice? The resentment of a broken heart that refuses to heal? The jealousy that sees all the world as a competition and your neighbor, therefore, as the enemy? What is in any of our hearts to call another person a dog, something less than human, something less than worthy of our attention?

5 Page 5 Healing happens in this story not because Jesus is a bleeding heart liberal but because, somehow in this interaction with this woman and to the woman s credit -- Jesus has a change of heart: True, Rabbi, the woman replies. but even the dogs get to eat the scraps that fall from the table. Jesus then said in reply, Woman, you have great faith! Your wish will come to pass. At that very moment her daughter was healed. It s hard to tell what it is that changed Jesus heart. Is it her witty comeback? Yes, but even dogs get to eat the scraps. Is it her willingness to own her own oppression? Yes, I may be a dog but even dogs Is it, as Jesus says, her great faith which, from the outside looks like simply a matter of stubborn persistence? We don t know. What we can say is that healing happens when there is a change of heart. And this story may, in fact, be the pivot point of the gospel of Matthew. Jesus is never the same after that. It would be interesting to read this story as a parable of the current Israeli- Palestinian conflict. That s probably a pretty bleeding heart liberal thing to say. But I say it because I recognize in my own heart the loss and fear that can lead to hate and can make it impossible for me to listen to the pleas of others. It s one thing to recognize my humanity and the limits that make it difficult to take all the needs of the world into my heart. It s another thing to try to protect my heart by hardening it to dismiss other people as less than human, unworthy of my attention and care. If I am a bleeding heart liberal, I confess that sometimes I m not a very good one. I don t know what s in any of our hearts. What I can tell you is that healing can happen when we are open to a change of heart. Henri Nouwen tells the story of being hounded by an old nun to write something about the sacred heart of Jesus. Every time they talked, she would ask. And every time he politely promised that someday he would get around to it. But he was busy and life goes on and he never really connected with the whole sacred heart thing anyway.

6 Page 6 And then he burned out on his work and he became deeply depressed and his heart was broken. The plea of the old nun came back to him but he didn t have the energy to study the history and spiritual significance of the tradition of the sacred heart. So he just started spending time opening his own heart listening, paying attention, being aware of the brokenness around him and within his own heart. And guess what? He had a change of heart! And he wrote a series of prayers that became a little book called Heart Speaks to Heart: Your heart [he writes] is so full of the desire to love me, so aflame with a fire to warm me. You so much want to give me a home, a sense of belonging, a place to dwell, a shelter where I feel protected and a refuge in which I feel safe. You stand at so many squares and corners of my life and say with so much tenderness, Come and see, come and stay with me. When you are thirsty, come to me you who put your trust in me, come and drink. Come, you who are tired, exhausted, depressed, discouraged and dispirited. Come, you who feel pain in your body, fatigue in your anxious mind and doubt and anguish in the depth of your heart. Come and know that I have come to give you a new heart and a new spirit, yes, even a new body in which the struggles of your life can be seen as signs of beauty and hope. For Nouwen, these prayers are the story of a life-saving change of heart: You so much want to give me a home, a sense of belonging. I don t know what s in your heart this morning. You may have cleaned up your language because we are in church after all but maybe your heart is a mess. Maybe your heart has been broken by the cares of your life. Maybe it s the place where you harbor those old hurts and resentments so you have a convenient way of disregarding the needs of others. Maybe it s just that your heart has been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. I don t know what is in your heart this morning. All I can hope is that, as we sing this morning, Bring us home on love s renewing tide, to the place of our belonging, today, if you hear God s voice in that collective prayer, all I can hope is that you will not harden your hearts.

7 Page 7 NOTES Origin of the term Bleeding Heart Liberal by Gary Leon Johnson at The passages from Matthew 15 are from the Inclusive Bible. Dr. King writes about this section of Matthew in his sermon A tough mind and a tender heart, included in the collection Strength to Love (Fortress Press, 1963), p.13. Rob Bell s indictment of the human heart is in his What We Talk About When We Talk about God (HarperOne, 2013), p.170. Henri J.M. Houwen, Heart Speaks to Heart (Ave Maria Press, 1989), p.25.

8 Page 8 BLESSING [Pat and Mike first] Ruth and Dana, it has been a joy to have you with us. And, as I was thinking about a blessing for you, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the first question of which is: What is man s humanity s chief end (or destiny or purpose)? And the answer is: To glorify God and to enjoy God forever. I ve always thought it amazing that Calvinists would say that our primary purpose is to glorify and to enjoy! So, I want to thank you Ruth for helping us not only to glorify God in worship together but also to enjoy. And may you, as Isaiah says, be lead out with joy and be brought back in peace. It seems like the best way to gather our congregational blessing is to sing. So Ruth will go back to the organ and Melissa will lead us in singing When in our music God is glorified, hymn #561. I invite you to stand as we sing.