Hilton Head Island, SC – May 8, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 10:17-22; Matthew 16:13-20
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. Matthew 5:8 (RSV)
Blessings For The Uniquely Pure
Charles Schulz was one of the greatest social philosophers of the 20th century. It was he, of course, who was the creator of the cartoon characters called Peanuts. Mr. Schulz gave expression to virtually every phase of the human condition through Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, Peppermint Patty, Schroeder, Pigpen, and all the others.
In one of his cartoons, Lucy was watching television, while her little brother Linus sat beside her, sucking his thumb and holding his omnipresent blanket to the side of his head for comfort. He was audibly sighing. Lucy snapped at him (because she usually snaps at everybody), “Stop that sighing!” “There’s nothing wrong with sighing,” says Linus. “There is if it bugs someone!” exclaims his crabby big sister. “It’s scriptural,” retorts Linus, once again holding his blanket and sucking his thumb. “It’s what?” Lucy asks, incredulously. So Linus quotes, “’Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with signs too deep for words.’” Then Linus adds, “’Romans’… Eighth chapter.” Lucy, once again staring at the TV, says, “I don’t know…I’m either going to have to slug him, or start going back to Sunday school.”
No one would ever mistake Lucy Van Pelt for being pure in heart. She truly is and always has been a crabby little girl. But her little brother Linus has a purity within his inner being which most of us can only admire but very seldom duplicate. We may have moments when our hearts are relatively pure, but whatever other terminology anyone might use to verbalize our essence, “purity of heart” would be a phrase used as a frequent description for very few of us. Novels are written about people who are pure in heart, but never biographies. Nearly all of us are too much like Lucy and too little like Linus.
In the sixth Beatitude, I suspect Jesus was not referring to something we can work to acquire. Either we have purity of heart, or we don’t. And, unless I am too jaundiced in my assessment of most of the human race, I think most of us don’t have it on a permanent basis, nor can we effectively work to create it in ourselves. It would be wonderful if we could do it, but we can’t. Getting purity of heart is like getting great athletic prowess or extraordinary intellectual ability; either you have it, or you don’t. You might make some improvements in the purity of heart department, but it isn’t a quality one can truly attempt to emulate.
Dare I, on this Mother’s Day, say that not even most mothers have genuine purity of heart? I dare say it. This is not to disparage mothers, or anyone else who lacks purity of heart, for that matter, but we need to recognize that purity of heart is a truly rare virtue. Most devoted mothers have numerous other virtues, but purity of heart is a trait so unusual that we should not expect anyone to have it, but instead we should rejoice whenever we do come across it.
I would first of all note that there seems to be an innocence in people who have what I understand to be “purity of heart.” They are never fundamentally worldly or world-weary or duplicitous or anything other than uniquely single-minded. They are, as we say, “almost too good to be true,” except that they are true and real and genuine. It’s just that there are so few of them. According to my understanding of this trait, Jesus himself was not essentially pure in heart either. He was too shrewd, too cunning, too “knowing” to possess the innocence which purity of heart seems to require. Nonetheless he sufficiently admired the quality to include it in the Beatitudes.
Jesus also knew purity of heart when he saw it, and in Mark 10:17-22, we see an example of this. Matthew (19:16-30) and Luke (18:18-30) also have versions of this same story, but they do not include the singular observation of Jesus which Mark has. (Incidentally, only when I was writing this and the previous two Beatitude sermons did it hit me that there are several stories in the three Synoptic Gospels which may actually be variations of just one historical incident from the life of Jesus. Last week a man asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and again another man does it this week. But the rest of Mark’s story is different from then on. As I implied last week, Bible study can be as confounding as it is comforting.)
In Mark, the story begins when the man says, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answers him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Mark is very hesitant even to hint that Jesus might be the Messiah, let alone that he is the Son of God or that he is divine, so he has Jesus insist that only God is truly good. Then Jesus cited some of the commandments which we are all required to follow. “Teacher,” said the man, “all these I have observed from my youth.”
Then comes a fascinating verse. “And Jesus looking upon him loved him,” Mark says. Jesus recognized in this unnamed person a rare quality, and I choose to think it was purity of heart. This man was uniquely pure, extraordinarily pure. But Jesus could sense that there was one thing in the man that was holding him back; “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor.” Jesus knew that would be something the man couldn’t do. Perhaps he couldn’t give everything away, for example, because the man thought it would be unfair to his father Mordechai, who bequeathed him his wealth, or to his Uncle Shlomo, who had no children and left everything to him, or who knows what. But Jesus loved the purity of heart he saw in this person, and he prayed God’s blessings, His beatitudes, to be with him.
Alyosha Karamazov had purity of heart in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Billy Budd, of whom I spoke in the sermon a couple of weeks ago, also had it. So did Tess in Tess of the D’Ubervilles. But they are fictional characters, and it is relatively easy for writers to insert purity of heart into the people created by their fertile imaginations. But how many of us have ever known anyone who was so uniquely pure that we could honestly say they had “purity of heart”?
As I thought about this while writing this sermon, it struck me that there are a small group of people I have known personally through the years who have what I think Jesus might have meant by the term “purity of heart.” These folks have it because of a genetic condition they share. In my experience not everyone with this condition possesses a unique purity among humans, but many of them do. I am referring to those who have what is known as Down’s Syndrome.
To be sure, there are various gradations of Down’s Syndrome, from Very Mild to Very Severe. Nevertheless, I would say a majority of the relatively small number of such folks I have known do have purity of heart. They have no intention of ever hurting anyone, they rejoice in the rejoicing of others, they are genuinely sympathetic when others are hurting, and they are truly loving and affectionate to a degree few of us could ever match, however much we might try.
All of us are old enough to remember the Challenger space shuttle explosion thirty years ago. National Public Radio had a lengthy piece about it on the anniversary of the disaster. They quoted a NASA engineer named Bob Ebeling who, with others, had advised the higher-ups not to launch the spacecraft, because they feared it was too cold for the O-rings to function properly. The launch went ahead anyway, and we know the result. Mr. Ebeling has felt guilty ever since that he did not stop the launch. As a result of the NPR broadcast, many people contacted Bob Ebeling to try to convince him he had done all he could, and that it was not within his power to postpone the flight. But it was not until one of the NASA officials who had gone ahead to approve the launch that day called him to absolve him of his sense of guilt. Fortunately Mr. Ebeling was then finally able to move beyond his sense of failure.
Bob Ebeling may be a man with purity of heart. His three decades of anguish over the disaster suggests as much, even though he did everything he could to postpone the launch.
A few weeks back I heard a man telling a beautiful story. Years ago, he said, he was in a railway station somewhere in central Europe, and he couldn’t even remember exactly where. An inebriated Hungarian Roma, a Gypsy, was there, holding a violin. People were ignoring him as they hurried by to catch their trains. The Roma, who looked very sad, picked up his violin and began to play the Hungarian Dances by Brahms. Passengers stopped in their tracks. He played for half an hour, tears running down his face, the man said, and many people listened as long as they could before they sped off to make their trains. It was, the man said, an electric memory.
Did the violinist have purity of heart? Is that what mesmerized the people? Did he gain purity of heart because of his intoxication, or did he always have it, and he played despite his intoxication? Whatever it was, it seemed to me an illustration of someone uniquely pure in his own special way. The music, said the man telling the story, was exquisite beyond description.
Which is better, to hear a musician who is technically brilliant but who plays with no soul, or a musician with less talent who plays with great soul? And does “soul” produce purity of heart?
Robert Schumann wrote a German lied, a song, which set to music a poem by a 19th century German poet, Anastasius Grun. It describes an elderly couple rocking together out on the lawn. They were watched by their grandson and his lover, who lay not far from them, admiring them. The poem is translated into English in this way:
Grandfather and Grandmother sat rocking on the lawn;
She quietly smiled, as mildly as sun on a winter morn.
Arms linked, myself and my lover lay resting not far away,
Our hearts in blossom and singing like flowering meads in May.
A brook was babbling beside us its murmuring, wandering song,
Clouds drifted mutely above us and passed from view before long.
Sere autumn rustled and scattered the trees’ dry aftermath,
And Time himself, the silent, went by on his noiseless path.
The quiet old couple mutely considered the youthful pair,
And life’s great double mirror stood lucid and faithful there:
They gazed at us, recollecting fine times that had passed away;
We gazed at them, reflecting on times we would know one day.
Did the old grandparents have a purity of heart which had become etched into their being through the years, and the young couple recognized it? Did the grandson and his beloved perceive in the grandparents a glimmer of unique purity? What is the origin of purity of heart?
In all four Gospels, the first disciple to be called into his inner circle by Jesus was Simon Peter, known in Hebrew as Cephas, a name which means “Rock,” which is what Petros (Peter) means in Greek. Jesus never bothers to tell us why he chose any of the twelve; he just chose them, presumably for reasons only he could know.
The most famous incident regarding Peter occurred late in Jesus’ ministry. He was with the disciples at a place in northern Israel called Caesarea Philippi. He asked them what they had been hearing others were saying as to the true identity of Jesus. They told Jesus that some had thought him to be John the Baptist, returned from the dead, or a new Elijah or Jeremiah, a new prophet for a new time. Then Jesus asked the twelve who they thought he was. Without waiting an instant, Peter exclaimed with no hesitation, but perhaps never once having thought it before, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” To that Jesus replied, according to Matthew, “You are Petros, and upon this Petra I will build my church.”
The Church of Jesus Christ is not built on the man named Cephas/ Petros/ Peter/ Rock. It is built on the kind of basic faith Peter had, the wholehearted acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, the promised Anointed One of God. Peter was almost certainly not the brightest bulb in the disparate bunch of the twelve disciples. He was too impetuous to be unfailingly intelligent. But Peter had purity of heart; he was a man Jesus could count on when the crunch came. Peter failed Jesus in the Roman Praetorium the night before he was crucified, and apparently he wasn’t there when Jesus died on the cross, but on Easter, when Jesus really needed Peter to hear the story and see the story and tell the story, Peter was there.
Great intelligence and great purity of heart may be inimical to one another. I doubt that Jesus selected Peter for his smarts. Instead, he chose him for his credulity and his faith, and for the fact that he was uniquely pure. A man such as that could become the Prince of Apostles and serve with great distinction in the years in which the Church was feeling its way toward institutional viability.
You and I will probably never acquire true purity of heart. It is just not there in the genetic or personality hand of cards we were dealt. However, we must always treasure the few people who have come into our lives who do have it. They are singular gifts from God who light up our lives by their very existence. And because they are so rare they can see God as almost none of the rest of us can see him.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.