Our Shrine, The Good Heart

sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday February 5th, 2006


Opening Words - Andrew C. Kennedy

We come to love a church,
the traditions, the history,
and especially the people associated with it.
And through these people,
young and old,
known and unknown,
we reach out --
Both backward into history
and forward into the future --
To link together the generations
in this imperfect, but blessed community
of memory and hope.


READING: Luke 12: 13-34

A Baptist youth minister was trying to explain to his Sunday School class the significance of Christ’s teachings on Christian charity.

"If I sold my house and my car, had a big garage sale, and gave all my money to the church, would that get me into heaven?" he asked.

"NO!" the children all answered.

"If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept everything neat and tidy, would that get me into heaven?"

"NO!" they all answered again.

"Well, then, what if I were kind to animals and gave candy to all the children and loved my wife, would that get me into heaven?" he asked them again.

Once more they all answered, "NO!"

"All right," he continued, thinking they were a good bit more theologically sophisticated than he had given them credit for, "then how CAN I get into heaven?"

A five-year-old boy shouted out, "You gotta be DEAD!"


Today’s sermon is the second in a series of sermons based on the words of Theodore Parker that I use each Sunday as a benediction to close the service. Last week I started out by talking about the idea of shared ministry, and the process that we each go through in order to discern our own unique vocation or “calling” to serve a higher purpose, regardless of the anxiety we may feel about our ability to meet the many challenges we see all around us, and the very real possibility that we might fail to meet them. And now today I want to continue with this theme for awhile, by talking a little more about the idea of courage, or “the good heart.”

Courage comes from the heart, you know. That’s pretty much what the word means in French. Courage is literally the act of facing something that you know is dangerous, rather than running away from it, because the Love in your heart has overcome the Fear you are feeling other places in your body. When our courage fails us, we are said to “lose heart” and become discouraged, at which point we need for the people around us to encourage us to “take heart” again, and to swallow our fears so that we might once more face the danger and defeat it.

And then there is also always the risk of becoming “broken hearted” -- of growing so disillusioned and disappointed by the apparent heartlessness of the world that we lose hope entirely, because our heart simply isn’t in it any more, and we can’t seem to find the heart to keep trying any longer.

But here’s the real heart of the matter. The heart is at the center. And the things we take TO heart -- the things we learn to value, the things we find worthy -- are what give our lives value, and make life itself good, and worthwhile. “Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” We grow to love the things we treasure most. But the opposite is also be true. When we find the courage to follow our hearts, we eventually discover a richness in life more precious than anything else we have known before. We find it first within us, and then we learn to see it all around us. And the more we are able to share it, to give it away, the more valuable it becomes.

That’s basically my entire message for this morning. But we still have a little time left, so let me amplify it a bit. A shrine is generally thought of as a holy place of devotion and veneration. Shrines often house some sort of relic, like the bones of a saint or some other sanctified artifact, and are destinations for pilgrims, who travel great distances in order to be blessed or healed there. So when Theodore Parker characterized “the good heart” as the “shrine” of our religion, in effect he was saying that the sacred object of our veneration should not be a relic of the past, the ossified vestiges of some long-dead saint, but rather that we should seek our blessing by looking inward, and by finding the courage to follow what we find there -- the heartfelt wisdom of our own good hearts -- devoting our lives to the values we treasure most, and through which we hope to heal both ourselves and the world. Parker looked to the future rather than to the past; to Hope rather than Memory. Our lives become temples of the Spirit of God in the world, and through our service we bring to life the power of God’s Love.

You know, there are two fundamental truths about life which seem so obvious that they hardly seem worth mentioning, but which are likewise so routinely ignored that we should all probably repeat them out loud to ourselves daily. The first truth is that there is no Growth without Change. Or to put it another way, if you want things to be different, you need to learn to do things differently. That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? And the second truth is like unto it: there is no Change without Struggle, or perhaps even a little Conflict. If you want to get traction, then there needs to be some friction; otherwise, you just end up spinning your wheels and going nowhere. Life is a struggle. Even when things seem to be going smoothly, it’s probably just because we’ve been coasting for awhile. If we want to make real progress, we generally need to push a little; we can’t just let ourselves keep sliding downhill forever.

Of course, we also often find ourselves struggling to avoid change, or even for there to be plenty of change without progress, without growth. People run themselves around in circles all the time -- motion without movement, activity without accomplishment. In order for us to feel confident that our activities have meaning, we also need to keep the big picture in view. We need to have a vision, we need to set a direction, we need to make goals. If we DON’T know where we’re going, that’s probably where we’ll end up: lost, misguided, directionless.

Obviously, it’s important from time to time just to listen the heart, and then to follow wherever it may lead, however much the path may seem to twist and meander. But at some point, it’s not enough just to listen -- one also needs to respond to what one has heard. And as I said last week, that calling, that vocation to serve something larger than ourselves, is ministry: a ministry which we learn to share when we congregate together as members of a community of faith. So, head in the clouds and feet on the ground, eyes on the prize (or at least on the horizon), as we listen faithfully to our hearts, and learn to put one foot in front of the other while struggling forward along a difficult and often treacherous path...this is what pilgrims do for a living. It’s not a contest, or a race (although I suppose you could think of it as a career) -- but it is without question an act of faith, and therefore a matter of learning to trust.

Saint Augustine once famously described faith as “a belief in things unseen,” which for many of us (who possess a modern, scientific worldview) has evolved into (and then been dismissed as) “a belief in things we know aren’t true.” But faith, fidelity, is a lot more about trust than it is belief. Or once again, to put it another way, it’s about believing (and trusting) the evidence of our hearts as WELL as the evidence of our senses, not in spite of it. Believing what our hearts want to be true when our own eyes tell us otherwise isn’t faith, it’s wishful thinking. But learning to trust the wisdom of our hearts can also often prevent us from being deceived by mere appearances, and empower us to see past the superficial to the true heart of the subject.

Faith is also an act of creative imagination: the power to envision things we now see only in our mind’s eye, and then make them vivid so that others can see them as well. When we speak from the heart about our dreams, we sometimes run the risk of being ridiculed -- but in the company of other good-hearted people, our dreams are nurtured and encouraged, and perhaps even come to life. The difficult process of giving birth to a common vision, and a shared dream, can often seem like something that is ONLY truly possible in the company of good-hearted people, who not only trust one another, but can also communicate, compromise, and then collaborate together in order to create a common purpose.

A senior colleague of mine once defined Collaboration as “an unnatural act between consenting adults.” It’s not always easy to set aside our individual dreams, desires, tastes, preferences, habitual practices and heart-felt ambitions in order to cooperate with others in a shared enterprise. It’s not always easy to surrender control, and to sacrifice the authority to make our own decisions, in order to forge a common purpose. We all have our own vision of what we would like the future to be. Sometimes those visions overlap, sometimes they run in parallel, sometimes they work at cross-purposes, or perhaps even are in direct conflict with one another...but we never really notice until we try to work together, and discover that our lack of agreement is more than just a failure to communicate. Without a shared vision and shared goals, our efforts to all pull together can easily degenerate into a tug-of-war, in which strong-willed individuals constantly attempt to pull the group more in the direction of their own vision, under the pretext of providing “leadership.”

But the real challenge of leadership is not about figuring out how to pull harder than anyone else, so that your will controls the direction of the group. Rather, a good leader is someone who can speak from the heart to the hearts of others, and encourage them to keep the big picture in view. A good leader forces people to question the privileged status of their own assumptions, and to listen thoughtfully to the expectations and assumptions of others.

Good leadership is about helping a group of individuals become a team, all pulling together toward a goal they all share, and which each member of the team feels like they own as if it were their own, and they had thought it up themselves. Which, of course, they did, thanks to the help of their leader, who also listened carefully to what they had to say, and then tried to articulate it in such a way that everyone who wished to be on the team could get behind it and help move it along.

And yet good leaders also need to maintain a certain “critical distance,” which allows them to remain somewhat objective and above the struggle, capable of differentiating between their own desires and what is best for the group. This is perhaps the greatest challenge all good leaders face: to motivate and not manipulate; to inspire without misleading, or abusing their authority and influence; to tell people what they truly need to hear rather than merely what they want to hear; and to maintain that crucial “critical distance” without appearing either too distant, or too critical.

Good leaders don’t impose their will on others. Rather, they point to the horizon, and invite the people to lift up their eyes and see the big picture; to take a good, hard look at who they are, and where it is they want to go.

In the thirteenth stanza of The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayam wrote: “Look within,” whispers the rose. “Open your consciousness to soul-understanding, ere the petals of our life fall and scatter on the garden path -- lovely no longer, but shriveled, lifeless -- brown.” Look within, and open your consciousness, to the understanding of the heart.

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