The Heart of Us

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 10.26.14

Scripture Lesson:  Matthew 22:34-46

Here we are, right on the cusp of All Hallows Eve, that day every year when our neighborhoods hum and bustle through the evening, as hordes of little people and not-so-little people come drifting through the twilight, carefully escorted by flashlight-toting parents.  It’s a time for community, a time to see the neighbors and their little ones, and to marvel at how very quickly those trick-or-treating years went.

And every year, a festival of masks and illusions, as at our door arrives a parade of individuals pretending to be someone that they are not.  “Are you Elsa from Frozen?  How cute,” we’ll say, as we hand candy to the tiny girl with the light blue dress and fake blonde braid wig.  “Are you Elsa from Frozen?  How cute,” we’ll say to the tiny girl next to her with the light blue dress and fake blonde braid wig.  We are going to be saying that a whole bunch this year.

It’s a time when we get to be someone we are not, to play with the concept of our identity.

What makes us who we are?  What is our core, our person, our heart, our soul?

It seems like it should be remarkably easy question, on the one hand, and on the other, it’s an astoundingly difficult one.  We can rattle off a bunch of stats, our height and our weight, our eye color and the color of our hair.  We can talk about our age and our favorite hobbies, our political leanings and our relationships.

There’s all sorts of different things that comprise us, that make up who we are.   And yet we ourselves are strange, ephemeral, and ever-changing beings.  We are, after all, mostly water.  Our cells, our flesh, about sixty five percent of who we are is water.   Even if we don’t get out there and sweat, adult human beings take in and put out a minimum of seven pounds of water every day.  Most of our bodies flow through us like a river.

We talk about who we are in our hearts, but our large four chambered hearts themselves rotate out about one percent of their cells every year.  What are we?  Where does the I that we are reside?  It’s not the heart, of course, but our minds.

We might say that it resides in our memories, the recall we have of things.  I remember, for example, as a deep and old memory, the wet sweetness of my grandparents basement in Athens, Georgia.  Whenever I step into a room rich with the scent of must, I’m cast back to the remembrance of being a boy, mucking around with the old HO-scale electric trainset that sparked and hummed, and the hours lost sorting through endless boxes of comics.  I remember, for example, the scent of the U.Va. library, of hundreds of thousands of books wafting their rich odor of settling paper into that shallow-ceilinged labyrinth.  I smell that smell, and I’m there.  That’s me, right?

And yet we know that the cells in our brains that store scent information...in the hippocampus and the olfactory bulb...are repeatedly replaced over the course of our lives.  That original memory itself, the fragrance of childhood, no longer exists.  It has been passed over to other cells, which have passed them along to others.

And those cells themselves are comprised of atoms, eight octillion in all...and atoms are almost entirely empty space.  Our body is ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent nothingness.

Where are we, in all of that?  Where does the heart of the person that we know ourselves to be reside?  Are we the same person we were when we were seven, or seventeen, or forty seven, or seventy-five?  We are, in ourselves, like a paradox, like smoke.

What defines us, then?  Where can we honestly say we find our identities?  What makes us cohere and hold together as persons?  The simple answer to that is our purpose, what philosophy calls our telos, the goal of our lives, the reason we exist.

The fundamental essence of that Way is laid out for us in the passage from Matthew this morning.   Matthew’s Gospel continues the story of Jesus being challenged and tested by the religious and cultural authorities.  Last week, the question was about taxes and Caesar.  This week finds the Pharisees again coming to Jesus with a challenge, this one about the nature of the law.

He’s approached by a lawyer, although it’s important to note that this “lawyer” isn’t the kind of lawyer we’re used to.  This isn’t the kind of lawyer whose firm you see being pitched by William Shatner on daytime television.   This isn’t that $750-an-hour litigator from Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld, the one whose house you tell your kids to avoid on Halloween, because the two minutes she spends handing them candy is potentially billable.  This is a theologian, a Bible scholar, a student of the sacred law of Torah.

That lawyer asks him a question, one that required a knowledge of the sacred law.  The question is simple:  which law is the most important.  This was a non-trivial question, as the law of Torah was not simple.  At the time of Jesus, the rabbis had identified 613 different laws which governed the life of an observant Jew, and every one of those laws were open to debate, discussion, and interpretation by different schools of thought.   It was a tricky one.  Try to dodge the question, and you aren’t showing that you know the law.  Choose one, and you set yourself up for an argument that could last for generations.

But as he did last week, Jesus gave a gracious response, providing his interrogator with a teaching that is at the core of both ancient and modern Judaism.  He first quotes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5, a passage from Torah that lays out the essential duty of everyone who stands in covenant relationship with God.   That text, known as the shema, reads:  “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

This little snippet of Torah lays out the basic responsibility of everyone who stands in relationship with God to prioritize that relationship, to allow it to be the thing which defines the character and purpose of everything else in your life.

The second response comes from elsewhere in Torah, from the Book of Leviticus, chapter six, in a section that lays out the fundamental ethical responsibilities of every human being towards every other human being.  We heard an excerpt from that section read earlier, but the baseline teaching is the one Jesus drew out from Leviticus 19:18.  “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In this tight and well structured response, Jesus gets down to the essence of covenant.  If you ditch everything but these things, if you peer through the fog and chaos of complexity and interpretation to what it means to live as a faithful and ethical human being, you end up with this.  This is what counts.  This is where the rubber meets the spiritual road, where it is less about law and more about a way of living.  There, in this answer, Jesus provides the purpose that gives cohesion to the complexity of the Bible.

That was important, because though the Torah itself was a good thing, it was easy to lose yourself in it.  Instead of seeing the point of it all, human beings got lost in chasing the details, in arguments over nuance and debates over minutia...and forgot the point of what they were doing.

Which we can, too, as we press our way through the competing demands and expectations of all of the different identities we take on in our lives.  We are students and teachers, parents and children, friends and lovers and spouses.  We are saints and sinners, sometimes whole, sometimes broken.  There can be so many parts to us that it becomes hard to see where the truth of us lies.

And there, as we struggle to come to terms with the complexity of our identities, Jesus offers up this beacon, illuminating the point of the faith he proclaimed and the life he offered to us.  That, he tells us, can be both the goal towards which we strive and the heart of who we are.

Let that be so, for you and for me,

AMEN.