A NEW HEART
Preached on October 15, 1995
by The Reverend Dr. Thomas C. Sheffield
Ruth Gendler has written an extraordinary little book
called The Book of Qualities. Ms. Gendler has taken qualities of our
lives and literally given them life. Pleasure, worry, fear and patience
all are described not in the abstract, but as if they are real live
persons. Here is what she writes about blame. Blame keeps a pharmacist's
scale at the corner of his desk. He is very good at measuring emotions
and calculating who has suffered more than whom. No one doubts that
he is clever. The quality of depression is described with these words:
Depression is the child of lethargy and despair. She was born tired.
She has always had beautiful dreams. As she grew up, she stopped believing
them. Depression sits at the table staring out the window as if there's
no escape. She makes sure no one comes too close. Then she frets about
being lonely.
To her descriptions of blame and depression, I would
add that I think that they are very close friends and companions. At
least I see them together all the time. They are part of our every day
and speak to us about all that we see. Blaming who is responsible, blaming
someone else for what is happening, blaming others for wrongs, blaming
for what the world is doing lead to depression. Depression is living
without acting, without doing, without believing one can or should do
anything about anything at all. Once the blame is correctly placed,
one can go away, without care or responsibility.
Blame and depression stand in opposition to these words:
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of
Judah.... I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their
hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
God's law is spoken individually to each one of us.
There is no escaping the responsibility for keeping it. When it is not
kept there is no use looking around for whom to blame. We are the responsible
ones. When God's law needs to be lived, there is no use seeing who else
should do it. It is we who are to keep the law. It is we who are the
ones to do the work. It is we who are to live in the way of God. We
are the ones to whom God is looking. It is our personal responsibility
to decide to live as God's people. No matter what goes on around us,
we still have the responsibility. No matter what others say or do, we
still are to do for God. No matter what forces force their way on us,
no matter what pressures bear down on us, no matter what has happened
in our lives, God's word, God's law, God's life is to be our word, our
law, our life.
It is all as simple and difficult as this: being God's
person is up to us. It isn't up to us to live other people's Christian
lives. It is up to us to live our own. One day I was in conversation
with members of the church. They were decrying the terrible way that
society has left the ways of faith. Even the schools, they said, conspired
in this. Sports events, band competitions and required activities all
have been held not only on Sunday, but on Sunday morning, they said.
Yes, I admitted that that was true. But I also asked how many of them
had gone to work on a Sunday. How many, of their own free will, had
gone into the office during worship hours. How many had begun travel
for business on a Sunday morning because it was more convenient? The
answer was ... all of them.
It wasn't the employers' fault that they went to work.
They went to work because they chose to go. It isn't the school or the
town recreation departments or the dance studio or the soccer leagues'
fault if children are not in worship and church school and choir and
youth activities. It is parents who choose to have their children participate
in those things over the church. It is our responsibility to keep Gods
law. We are the ones who must decide and live and take responsibility.
We are the ones who must stand up for our faith and stand against anything
that demeans or trivializes or lessens our faith. We are the ones who
must know the Lord in our lives.
We do this not just to keep some dead and lifeless form.
We do this so that we can know what and where God is doing. We do this
because God is doing now, God always is doing a new thing, performing
a new work, writing a new covenant in our lives and hearts and world.
The words of Jeremiah also stand against depression, that attitude that
we can do nothing and that nothing can happen. The words speak forcefully
against the feeling that we are caught in the old, held by what others
have done, gripped and grasped by problems.
God is doing something about those problems. God, the
God we know in Jesus Christ, is right now making a new heaven and a
new earth. God is setting free those gripped by blame and grasped by
depression. God is doing new things, and if we want to be with God,
if we want to be part of what God is doing, we had better be giving
up the idea that we can do nothing, we have no impact in this world,
we have no way to change what is happening. What we have is God. What
we can do is God's work. Whatever problem you see, if you give into
depression, if you believe that nothing can change it, you are going
against what God is doing.
There is something that bothers you in this world, isn't
there? There may be a lot of somethings. There are things which cause
you to be sickened, which disturb your sleep and which creep into your
waking thoughts when you least expect it. It may be different for you
than for anyone else here, but the point is that you can do something
to change ... heal ... transform. The point is that it is your personal
responsibility. The point is that that is what God is doing.
A man had never been to Washington, DC. A business man,
he arrived by train at Union Station. He hailed a taxi and then informed
the driver that he wanted to see all the important buildings in the
nation's capital. Thinking he had died and gone to heaven, the driver
drove by the Capitol Building, the Smithsonian's many buildings, the
White House. He went by the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
Finally, he went by the National Archives. Looking out at the building,
the man saw and read aloud the inscription at the top of the building:
All that is past is prologue. "I wonder what that means,"
he wondered aloud. Buddy, the driver said, "It means you ain't
seen nothin' yet."
That is the final message of Jeremiah to us: With God,
with God in our lives, with our taking responsibility for all we are
given, with all that is around us, with all that is yet to come, "We
ain't seen nothin' yet."
We are part of a great adventure of faith and love that
will claim the whole world. We possess a Spirit that can enable us to
meet all problems without blame, without depression. We have the hope
of Christ that sees all as God's children and all time as lived within
God's love. We claim that hope as our own and go forward to work and
serve with the joy of Christ.
