Hardness of Heart

Hardness of Heart                            The Dover Church

October 7, 2012                      Scripture: Mark 10: 2-16

         Every year this text comes up at what seems to be an inopportune time for me; like when we are baptizing a baby. As one of the texts that Christians disagree most vehemently about, it needs to be preached. Ask someone what Christians believe about marriage and divorce and this is the primary text people point to. I think I can do it justice in under ten minutes.

         First a clarification: you all know or about to know that our branch of Christianity neither forbids divorce nor classifies divorced people as spiritually, morally or ethically inferior to non-divorced people.

         But what about the text, Max? That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Yes, it is. It's clearly over the top. As with last week’s text, Jesus is overstating his case, labeling divorced in new marriages adulterers, to make a point. Why? Then as now, marriage is a touchy subject, an issue of strong emotions. Then as now, marital status is a primary social identity, as well as an indicator of financial, ethical and moral status. Jesus drops the A-bomb to cut through all the emotional and social noise, knowing that, then as now, adultery catches people’s attention.

This text is not about marriage at its most fundamental level. Marriage is the petri dish if you will, but Jesus is talking about a more universal challenge, the universal human struggle, which he calls hardness of heart. What is hardness of heart? It is mindset and behaviors of fear and threat, which cause us to build walls around ourselves, protecting ourselves from others or beating up. Behind our walls we rest secure in our certainty of our rightness and their wrongness, our injuredness and their injuring. None of us are ever completely soft hearted, welcoming, embracing, open to others. None of us are always unbiased in our assessments of our personal relationships.

Jesus follows up with a little child in his arms as an example of soft heartedness. You all loved seeing little Lucy in our arms this morning, right? Can I get a righteous Amen to that? Everyone loves children. In all my years as a pastor, I have only met one man who said he did not like children. His own grown children confirmed this sadly enough when we were preparing his funeral. And yet, when he told me that he did not like children, we were sitting in his backyard at a party, surrounded by children. He was chuckling and looking here and there with evident delight at my then 3 year old son rolling around in the grass with some other boys. Let's just say the man was conflicted. His walls were insecure.

The point is this: each and every child is a gift from God, a window into the wonder and grace of God. We are all on board with that? Can I get another righteous Amen if you agree? Well, nothing essential changes as those babies grow up. Our exteriors change but our core identity remains the same from God's point of view. Every one of us, every person ever born, is no different than that child in Jesus arms and we, as disciples, are to go through life learning to embrace everyone, no exceptions, as Jesus embraces that child. Can you feel your hearts hardening even as I speak? "That’s a great theory, Max,” your hearts are telling you, “but in practice it’ll end up getting me torn to shreds. I can't live that way with the people in my life.” Can you see your minds ticking off the exceptions even as I speak? “That’s fine with hypothetical people in a sermon, but not the people I’m thinking about.”

Don’t worry. God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can doubt. God knows your fears. You can hide. God sees you. If you want to let go of all that, you'll want to take the Jesus cardiac sclerosis medicine. The next stranger you meet, the next person who ought to be loving you but feels like they're really grinding you down, try to see the child, really try to see the child, I mean really, really try to see the child, not the smiling happy child of your dreams but the very real child with colic who is fussing and screaming and can't be comforted, see that child, and then make your move. It will rarely turn out as you expect, but even trying may be more than you dare hope right now.