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“THE CONTRITE HEART” Recently, I read this quotation from Monica Baldwin: “What makes humility so desirable is the marvelous thing it does to us: It creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with God.” In the margin, I wrote my immediate response: “Being proud is so undesirable because of the hideous thing it does to us: It creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with our own egos.” This reaction of mine expresses a profound truth for me: sooner or later, we all get God and our egos mixed up. Our natural tendency to pride and self-exaltation makes it easy for our egos to justify all manner of actions and strategies, believing easily and intimately in our self-righteous certainties that God wants precisely what we want, the critical distinction between God and self then being largely blurred. Humility and a contrite heart make this sort of spiritual mistake much less likely; it is in brokenness, woundedness, emptiness and failure that God’s true blessings find a natural place to be received and to dwell in the human heart, much as a parched desert soaks up life-giving rain. Isaiah 57: 15 states: “For thus says the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose Name is Holy; ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite. For I will not continually accuse, nor will I always be angry, for then the spirits would grow faint before me, even the souls that I have made.’ ” I cannot help but notice that God’s will to revive the spirit of the humble and the heart of the contrite does not extend to the heart of the proud, or perhaps cannot extend to the heart of the proud. It appears that there may even be some things that God cannot or will not do; indeed, in Pharaoh's case, God “hardened” Pharaoh's heart, which was pretty hard to begin with. With the assurance that God will not always be “angry” or “accusatory” with us, all essential reasons for us to harden our hearts have been removed, for God knows that this condition leads us to weaken before God, to “grow faint,” we, the souls that God has made. And yet, we harden our hearts anyway, because we are proud, we are important, we are right, we are willful, we are defiant, we are the center of anything vital, we have our turf to defend, we have our honor to uphold, we have our place in the community to protect, we have our judgment to be vindicated, we have our desire to win to fulfill...enjoying immensely the closest possible intimacy with our own egos. To paraphrase John Milton’s famous line for Satan in Paradise Lost, “I would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!” Now that’s a hard heart! And, rather like holding our breath, we become weak and faint in so doing, without realizing it, cutting ourselves off from God’s life-giving “breath” (“ruach” in Hebrew, the breath God breathed into clay to make us all human, to make us in God’s Image). Psalm 51: 17 states: “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.” Abraham Joshua Heschel writes: “We are not obliged to be perfect once and for all, but only to rise again and again beyond the level of self. Perfection is divine. All we can do is try to wring our hearts clean in contrition. To be contrite at our failures is holier than to be complacent in perfection.” With these spiritual truths in mind and in heart, please covenant with me to participate in our second Service of Healing which we will conduct here during the Sunday worship hour, August 17, 2008. While people will bring many issues with which “to wring their hearts clean in contrition,” we invite everyone who struggled with the challenges presented to us in 2003, 2004 and 2005 to be open to this gracious opportunity, for the giving and the receiving of forgiveness from our Lord Jesus Christ, Who offered and offers forgiveness to all of us “who know not what they do.” The same Jesus Christ Who reconciles us to God and to each other through His sacrifice. Of course, for those of us with hardness-of-heart afflictions, we already know—are certain, in fact-- that we know what we are doing, all the time, and this opportunity will be of no use to us. However, for those of you who are really tired of holding your breath and really need a big gulp of life-giving air from the Lord Who revives the faint of heart, the contrite, the humble, then this may just be the right thing for you to do, just now. You decide. Blessings and Shalom, Pastor Walt |
