UCC Church of Charlotte

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Establish Our Hearts
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

Grace and Peace to you this morning.  Grace and Peace.
    
How often are our body parts a part of our prayers and our songs?

Guide my feet while I run this race oh yes my Lord.
Open my eyes, that I may see.
We have the strength to lift and bear.
O for a thousand tongues to sing.

Theresa of Avila put it into prayer something like this:

Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
compassion on this world.
Yours are the hands with which He is to bless people now.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

So with this background we read today’s scripture and hear of our hearts.

Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation
and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day [the day of
Christ’s return] catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.

Now may our God and Father himself, and our Lord Jesus, direct our way
to you; and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love to one
another and to all men, as we do to you, so that he may establish your
hearts unblamable in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming
of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

For many of us, the heart has two functions: it keeps the blood
circulating through the body, and it is the metaphorical seat of our
emotions and our courage.  For Jesus and for Paul, both steeped in the
Jewish tradition, the heart was more likely the place where decisions
were made, where thoughts took place.  In Hebrew, the same word is
used both for heart and for mind.  Emotions and courage were more
likely seen as taking place in the gut.

Let not your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness
and the worries of this life.

Sounds a lot like the advice in the Sermon on the Mount:  Be not ye
anxious.  Do not be anxious.  Sometimes we say that to people in
difficulty but really mean, “Better you than me.”

Let not your hearts be weighed down.  Easier said than done, isn’t it?
Loved ones who hurt and we can’t fix it.  Decisions to be made that
we don’t want to have to make.  Old hurts.  Griefs both old and new,
made more manifest at the holidays.  Local and state and national
economics and job situations and political turmoil can weigh down our
hearts.  Our personal struggles, places where life rubs us raw, our
own pains and difficulties weigh down our hearts as well, don’t they?

The problem with the Bible, the problem with Advent leading to
Christmas, the problem with healing, is that in order to get to the
Good News, we have to break through our denial about where we are and
who we are and what we have been carrying too long and what, other
than Jesus, we have been following for too long.  And it is more
comfortable to stay wrapped up in the way it has always been, like a
comforter on a cold morning.  But that is not where life is.

So we whose hearts are weighed down, where do we turn to dump all of
this weight?  If we aren’t careful, we might dump it all over those
around us without regard to the weights they are carrying already.  If
we are too careful, we will keep all this weight to ourselves, never
putting it down for fear of someone finding out, for fear of being
shamed, for fear of hurting someone else.

Occasionally we find communities of care, relationships of depth and
integrity, or counselors’ offices where, in safe and sacred space, our
burdens can be offloaded and our hearts can drop the weight that
presses them down.

Both of our texts this morning speak not simply of our hearts, but of
anticipation, expectation.  The reason for not letting our hearts be
weighed down is that it could keep us from being ready for Christ’s
return.  The reason for Paul’s prayer that our hearts be blameless is
for the coming of Jesus.

What Paul and Luke say is that a heart that is weighed down, a heart
that is overwhelmed, a heart that is closed rather than open and full
of love, cannot receive Christ, however Christ comes this time – at
Christmas, or at the end of time, or in the moment when we need grace
and healing right now.

So what do we do with all that is weighing us down?  If we are not
supposed to hold onto it, and we are not supposed to just dump it onto
our neighbor’s heart, how do we unburden ourselves?  Not through
self-medication, as Paul points out.  Not through more work, or sex,
or alcohol, or drugs, or franticness.

There is a safe and good place to put all that stuff weighing down our
hearts and minds.  We give it to God.  We take it, and we release our
need to control it and shape it so that we might control and shape
life, and we say a prayer asking God to take it, and trusting God to
do something far better with it than simply weigh down our hearts, and
we turn it over and we let it go.

And then we breathe, because that is what we will be able to do for
the first time in a long time now that our hearts are no longer
weighed down.  And we breathe, because that is what we do after
difficult tasks, and turning all that stuff over to God is not easy.

And then we look up, and we expect God to fill our hearts.  Not with
weight and heaviness and burden.  But to open our hearts and blow the
Spirit through them, and to fill them with that expectation of the
fullness of Christ, coming at Christmas, coming at the end of time,
coming even now, in this moment, when we need that grace and that
healing.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.