11/18/18 “The Religion of Christ” by Nancy Petty

Text: Hebrews 10:11-25

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;

naught be all else to me, save that thou art

thou my best thought by day or by night,

waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

O Lord of my heart. Heart Religion is on my mind today.

The Evangelical Revival of the mid-eighteenth century was a major turning point in Protestant history. In England, Wesleyan Methodists became a separate denomination around 1795, and Welsh Calvinistic Methodists became independent of the Church of England in 1811. By this point, evangelicalism had emerged as a major religious force across the British Isles, making inroads among Anglicans as well as Irish and Scottish Presbyterians. Evangelical Dissent proliferated through thousands of Methodist, Baptist, and Congregational churches; even Quakers were strongly influenced by evangelical religion. These evangelicals were often at odds with each other over matters of doctrine, ecclesiology, politics, and worship. [Not much has changed over the last 200 years. We are still at odds over doctrine, ecclesiology, politics, and worship.] What they shared, however, was a cross-centered, Bible-based piety that stressed conversion and stimulated evangelism.蜉 This evangelical religion, though express in different styles, was and still is most often described as “heart religion.”

I grew up on this heart religion. Every Sunday morning worship service, every Sunday night worship service, and every Wednesday night prayer meeting ended with a plea to us sinners to just “give our hearts to Jesus.” Always, always the emphasis was on conversion of the heart to secure that place in the sweet by and by. Now I did a little calculation this week. And if I started counting from the time I was eight years of age through the year of my 16th birthday, those formative faith years, I calculated that I attended some 1,248 worship services between the two small Southern Baptist Churches I grew up in. That’s a lot of heart religion. Both of those Baptist churches—Sandy Plains Baptist and Pleasant Ridge Baptist—were indeed heart religion churches. That is, religion in those churches was not intellectualized nor was the emphasis on a moralistic religion. There was no formal liturgy. We didn’t observe Advent or Lent. For most services there was not a worship guide. The hymn numbers were posted on a board at the front of the church or the music director called them out as we stood to sing. There were no robes or stoles or liturgist. At prayer time, and without prior notice, the preacher would call on someone (usually a male deacon) to pray. These prayers were known as prayers from the heart. Every worship, and I mean every worship concluded with an altar call. Even as I mention it, I can still feel that feeling of my heart beating as if it is going to jump out of my chest as we sang what seemed like hundreds of verses of Just As I Am— some with our eyes closed, some with us just humming while the preacher encouraged us to take that first step toward the front. In those experiences decisions about faith and religion and belief were not made in the mind, they were of the heart. My faith in those days was this kind of heart religion. There was no mistaking ideas for saving faith, no shallow moralism that substituted good works for true religion. My Baptist religious experience affirmed the teaching of John Wesley: “Let thy religion be the religion of the heart.” I am aware that in revisiting these memories and by just mentioning Just As I Am I have made some of you break out in a sweat and you are ready to run for the door to seek shelter. I would ask that you hang with me a bit longer.

In fairness, it should be noted that, “Wesley was not against outward decorum and a beautiful liturgy. He genuinely loved the Anglican liturgy and the Book of Common Prayer. But [for Wesley] forms are only forms. ‘Supporting these [forms] to be ever so decent and significant, ever so expressive of inward things,’ Wesley said, they would still not avail. ‘The religion of Christ rises infinitely higher, and lies immensely deeper, than all these.’ The value of external forms is derivative, and in times of need they are even expendable…Wesley was not anti-liturgical, but he knew from experience how liturgy could serve as a place to hide from God.”蜉

There came a time in my own spiritual journey where I had to step away from this heart religion that had shaped and nurtured my faith. As I moved from my youth and into adulthood I experienced a growing uneasiness with this heart religion, at least the kind that I had known. Heart religion began to feel, to me, coercive and manipulative. It played to my fears and elicited emotional reactions that left me feeling shame and guilt. In my understanding, it asked of me (maybe even required me) to ignore the questions and doubts I had about my faith. I had become weary of how this heart religion had me walking the aisle Sunday after Sunday to confess, all over again, my unworthiness as a human being as the congregation sang yet another verse of Just As I Am.

And the hardest part for me was that I began to distrust my heart. The church, at least the churches I went to, were preaching and teaching things that stood in conflict with what my heart told me to be true. My heart told me that God loved me just as I was. My church’s religion told me that I was not ok and that God’s judgment was stronger than God’s love. Things that I knew felt right in my heart, were at odds with was I was taught as “Christian teaching.” And so, I stepped away from heart religion and lived my faith solely in my mind. It seemed, at least then, that the two could not co-exist.

I thought of the heart religion I grew up with as I reflected on our lectionary text from both Hebrews 10 and that of the story of Hannah in I Samuel chapter 1—the story of her grief over being childless. As I read both these sacred texts, I found myself wishing that I had been exposed earlier in life to the kind of heart religion Hannah knew and that Hebrews chapter 10 speaks of. Not the kind that manipulates and coerces and instills fear. Not the kind of heart religion that is about fleeting emotions. But rather, the kind of heart religion that has the possibility to heal our wounded emotions. The kind Hannah knew. The kind of heart religion that doesn’t require offering again and again, Sunday after Sunday, the same old confession of an original sin that really never was. The kind of heart religion that has the full assurance that all of us are held in God’s promise of an unbounded and unconditional love and grace. The kind of heart religion that invites us, compels us to bring our deep distresses to our houses of worship and pray and weep bitterly, pouring out our souls before the One who holds faithful the covenant of love and forgiveness and grace without judgment or punishment.

When Hannah made her way to the temple she went to pour out her heart before her God. Day after day, year after year, she had lived with a pain in her heart that would not go away. “Possibility thinking, positive psychology, words of affirmation, wishing, hoping”蜉 couldn’t make the hurt go away. Even at the temple her heart pain was met with skepticism by the one who was suppose to understand her heart. But that didn’t stop Hannah. No, she offered her authentic heart, her breaking heart, her un-edited heart to God with all her doubts and questions and real pain. And there, offering her heart, she found healing and peace for her distress. Hannah had the confidence to enter the sanctuary of God’s love with a true heart in full assurance that God would hear her prayer, even when she had no words to offer.

With the story of Hannah and the words of Hebrews stirring, there is longing in my soul to explore again heart religion. Not a heart religion that ignores the intellect. Heart religion—the religion of Christ never intended such. Rather, just the opposite. It is through the heart that we find enlightenment and understanding of the sacred, the holy, the divine.

Wisdom teacher Cynthia Bourgeault describes it this way. She writes: “According to the great wisdom traditions of the West (Christian, Jewish, Islamic), the heart is first and foremost an organ of spiritual perception. Its primary function is to look beyond the obvious, the boundaried surface of things, and see into a deeper reality, emerging from some unknown profundity, which plays lightly upon the surface of this life without being caught there: a world where meaning, insight, and clarity come together in a whole different way. Saint Paul talked about this other kind of perceptivity with the term “faith” (“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”), but the word “faith” is itself often misunderstood by the linear mind. What it really designates is not a leaping into the dark (as so often misconstrued) but a subtle seeing in the dark, a kind of spiritual night vision that allows one to see with inner certainty that the elusive golden thread glimpsed from within actually does lead somewhere.”蜉 It is from the heart that we see.

I don’t know about you but my soul and spirit is longing for a return to such heart religion. Not the heart religion of my early faith. But a kind of heart religion that gives me the confidence to pray my deep distress like Hannah. The kind of heart religion that provokes us to love one another and do good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, but rather encourage one another in faith. The kind of heart religion that helps me look—that helps us look—beyond the obvious, to see into a deeper reality, that opens us to a world where meaning and insight and clarity come together in a whole different way. The kind of heart religion that we can trust that is capable of sensing the divine—that we can actually still encounter the living Jesus from that center of knowing. Such heart religion will require us to stop depending solely on our mind, our intellect, being right, even being “good.” It will require us to lean into what is in our heart. Not the Hallmark version of heart, dripping with sentiment, or as my wife likes to call it, the LifeTime Television version. But the heart that holds paradox—the heart that believes a sitting president is morally bankrupt but can hold compassion for him and see the hurt that fuels his insecurity, a heart that can be anxious about how women are treated in Islamic nations but trust and love and learn from a Muslim Imam. A heart that lives with pain and fear but also lives with hope and love.

To heal our personal distresses, to heal our world’s distresses we will need to seek out a religion of the heart; the kind that helps us look beyond the obvious, to see a deeper reality, that opens us to a world where meaning and insight and clarity come together in a whole different way. After all, was this not the religion of Christ? A heart religion that shows us a different way of living.

I leave you with an image from the spiritual writings from the Christian East. There is a mantra that goes like this: Put the mind in the heart…Put the mind in the heart…Stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart. Close your eyes and imagine holding your mind in the center of your heart. How might this transform how you see the world and those around you? How might this image change how you see and understand yourself?

As people of faith, may our vision be to hold our mind in the center of our heart. For at the heart of every religion is a religion of the heart.