THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF CANTON
Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor
Sunday, March 18, 2018 ~ Lent V

Sermon: “It’s in the Heart”
Gospel Lesson: Jeremiah 31:27-34

© 2018, Dr. Tamilio

John Wesley, the co-founder of the Methodist Church, was an interesting character. He collaborated with his brother Charles to pen many hymns. (It is said that Charles wrote over 6,000 hymns!) John was a circuit rider, which means that he would ride on horseback throughout his native England preaching numerous sermons outside. According to one source, “John Wesley rode over 250,000 miles…a distance equal to ten circuits of the globe along the equator. He preached over 40,000 sermons!” That’s the equivalent of a sermon a day for 110 years! Obviously he doubled and tripled and quadrupled up.

John Wesley is also credited for developing the Quadrilateral. (It isn’t nearly as complex as it sounds.) Basically, if you ask anyone why they believe what they believe, their answers will fall within four categories: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. Quad as in 4: Quadrilateral.

a Scripture is easy: the thirty-nine book that make-up the Hebrew Bible (commonly called the Old Testament) and the twenty-seven that comprise the New Testament are the primary authority for doctrine and practice for Christians. I spoke at length about this last week — Reformers, like Martin Luther, railed against the Roman Catholic Church claiming that Scripture alone (solo scriptura) is what should guide and govern the Church.

a Tradition is everything we have inherited from the Church (and even our families) when it comes to what we believe. Not everything the Church does and believes comes directly from the Bible. Some of it is the result of ancient councils that developed the classic creeds of Christendom; some of it comes from the work of theologians; some of it comes from the lived faith. Parents, preachers, Sunday school teachers: all of them have had a tremendous influence on what we believe.

a Reason is all about using critical inquiry to try to prove the existence of God. The philosophy of religion is a field of study that does exactly this. Philosophers of religion look at things like the vastness of the cosmos, the purposefulness of humankind, and even the nature of love to argue for God’s existence. Although, critical reasoning cannot prove (or disprove) that God exists, people like C. Stephen Evans argue for a cumulative case: does the preponderance of the evidence point to the probability that there is a God?

a The fourth part of the Quadrilateral is Experience. This is the one that figures largely for people of faith. In other words, if you ask most believers why they believe in God, they will tell you a story — a story about how they experienced God in their lives. It may have been something profound (like a near-death experience or a vision), or it may have been something simple — like looking in awe at a sunset and thinking to yourself, “There must be a God, and he must be an artist!”

It’s the experience part of faith that I want to reflect upon today.

While I was working on my doctorate at Boston University, I wrote an article on the late-eighteenth/early nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. In that piece, I explain that, for Schleiermacher, “Religious experience is grounded in a feeling of absolute dependence on God.” In other words, we know that our very existence is due to God’s creative activity and that our very survival is contingent upon the Holy Spirit at work in our lives. Deep down, we have a feeling of absolute dependence on God.

But I believe that this was part of God’s plan in the first place. The seventeenth century French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist René Descartes believed that God exists, because no one other than God could have put have put the idea of God into our minds. I think that Jeremiah would agree. In the passage we read today, the prophet writes:

“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.”

Previously, prior to the deportation of Israel to Babylon and Judah to Assyria, the Law — the doctrines and practices of the Hebrews — was spelled out in a text (the Torah) and was even enfleshed in the covenant of circumcision. With their liberation from foreign bondage, and especially with the coming of the Messiah, things would be different. The Law would not be nullified, but it would be revealed in a different way. It would be written upon people’s hearts!

The heart. It is the center of who we are. We place our hand on it when we say the Pledge of Allegiance. According to the contemporary Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje “the heart is an organ of fire.” We construct images of it to represent how we feel about others. Our very own Capital Campaign uses two hands conjoined to create a heart to illustrate the love of God that we find manifest in this community. We believe that how we feel about everything is rooted in the heart: the organ of elastic rhythmicity — the organ that will keep beating even if it is removed from the chest and kept moist. (That was a bit gross, no?)

The heart. Ultimately, our relationship with God is not based on what we have read, or what we have been told, or even what our brains tell us, but, rather, what we feel. Maybe God is totally experiential: the flower that blooms, the sun that rises, the child that is born, the love that two people share.

Yes, God is a lot like the love that two people share. I have been teaching Philosophy of Religion and World Religions classes at Salem State University for several years now and, at the end of the day, my students and I know that God is not something that can be proven or disproven (as I mentioned a moment ago). That said, people who believe in God often speak about how they feel it, deep within. It doesn’t matter what science or logic can prove, because this is a matter of the heart. Much like love. I cannot explain the love that I have for my wife, but I know it is as real as this pulpit. No one can convince me otherwise. Maybe that’s because “Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye,” as the author H. Jackson Brown, Jr. wrote.

Look deep within, my friends. The answer is there. You’ll find it if you look not hard enough, but easy enough. God loves you beyond compare. God will never desert you, even if you think that the rest of the world has. Not only has God given you life; God has also invited you to be part of this covenantal community where all of us receive spiritual sustenance ad the love of one another. We know we are in the right place, because God has written the promises of this covenant on our hearts, just as he told the prophet Jeremiah.

I’ll leave you with this thought by Joseph Stowell, President of Cornerstone University:

[The] Heart is used in Scripture as the most comprehensive term for the authentic person. It is the part of our being where we desire, deliberate, and decide. It has been described as “the place of conscious and decisive spiritual activity,” “the comprehensive term for a person as a whole; his feelings, desires, passions, thought, understanding and will,” and “the center of a person. The place to which God turns.”

Study your faith with this [point to my temple], but know that it is real here [point to my heart]. Indeed, this is the place to which God turns — and always will. Amen.