Pure in Heart

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists

Sabbath, March 9, 2013

A couple of weeks ago, I was above Paradise on Mt. Rainier. We were at 6000 feet, climbing in a cold fog. Visibility was so bad I would have turned around because of the risk of getting lost—except I was with a highly experienced climber who had done this route many times. Then even the guy I was hiking with, Dan Lauren, expressed second thoughts about the hike. Not because he felt unsafe—he never compromises on safety—but just because conditions were so miserable. Middle thirties, wet, wind blowing hard.

As we crested the ridge at Panorama Point, a group of guys materialized out of gloom. They had been high on the mountain over night and were headed down. And they had news.

On the drive down to the park that morning looking at the weather, Dan had discussed taking a lower, easier hike. He thought there might be good weather high on the mountain, but that was very iffy. I told him I was willing to risk going high if he thought we might find sun. I had brought enough cold and wet weather gear, I should be able to handle it.

We got out of car at the Paradise parking lot in a dense blowing fog. Hardly ideal conditions for climbing Anvil Rock up near Camp Muir. We finally decided to go ahead and attempt the higher climb hoping that maybe, just maybe, we'd get above the clouds and fog. We strapped on our snowshoes and headed out.

Our uncertain hope of good weather up high became less and less motivating during the first mile or two of hiking. We had the necessary gear. Extra clothes and food, a shovel. We would be safe, but neither of us really wanted to spend the entire day battling wet and cold with nothing to show for our efforts, but the efforts themselves. We were out on the mountain because of our desire for visions of grandeur. And as we climbed out of the trees the fog was getting denser. The wind stronger.

Then we met the guys coming down the mountain, and they told us that at 8000 feet they had been in blazing sunshine. The pay off.

We slogged on up the mountain with new enthusiasm. We did not suddenly start sprinting up the mountain. We were still in the fog and needed to pay careful attention to route finding. We were still traveling on snowshoes which is not quite the same thing as hiking on a trail. And we were still climbing steeply at elevation, which is not the same thing as jogging on flat trail. It was work. But it was now happy work. We had the promise that it would be worth it.

We still had 2000 feet of snowshoeing up a steep ridge before we reached 8000 feet, 2000 feet and a couple of hours of marching in the gloom and blustery cold. But no problem. We were headed for the sun. It would be worth it.

This is a good model of my understanding of the words of Jesus, “Blessed are the pure in heart, they will see God.”

Purity costs hard work. Jesus blesses those who do the work and assures them their work will pay off. They will experience the highest, richest, brightest dream of religion and spiritual life: They will see God.

Purity is not a natural state. It is constructed, achieved, accomplished.

Years ago we bought a house that had been foreclosed. The lawn, if you could call it that, was a collection of tough weeds. I put in a sprinkler system. We planted a weed-free grass mix. How long do you think it stayed weed free?

In your garden, how long does your rose bed remain a pure rose bed with no mixture of other plants?

Purity is not a natural state. Weeds alter the composition of our lawns and gardens, bacteria, algae, and who knows what else transform our birdbaths into the biology laboratories.

Or to approach it from other other direction: how do we come by pure copper? We start by digging tons of rock out of the ground, smash it into bits, put it through several processes to remove the dross and slag and end up with a few pounds of the valuable metal.

Rare earth elements are all the buzz now. To get any of them in usable quantities requires complicated refining. They do not occur as pure masses, but are all mixed up. Purity requires effort.

You see the need for active effort even in something as prosaic as gravel. A couple of miles from our home there is a gravel mine. They're digging in an old moraine. I buy drain rock there and pea gravel and pipe bedding. All of these occur in great quantity in this gravel deposit, but to get pea gravel or drain rock or pipe bedding, they have do run it through a huge separator. The pure pea gravel I need for the dog pens is not natural. In the natural world it's all mixed up with clay and boulders and sand and cobbles. Purity takes effort.

Purity of heart also requires effort. Smart effort. Sometimes intense effort. Effort continued over time. This Beatitude or Blessing promises the effort will pay off. We will hike into the sun of God's presence. We will see God. But arriving in the blaze of light above the clouds requires effort.

Cultivating purity of heart requires active pursuit of goodness and often active resistance to evil.

I am reminded of the occasional laments I hear from a piano teacher. Occasionally, a self-taught or poorly taught student comes to her studio. Some of these students have so much to unlearn. Less than optimal fingering patterns, counterproductive hand positions.

The best piano performance—a pure piano performance—is the presence of wonderful music and the absence of awkwardness and wrong notes. In the same way, purity of heart is both the presence of goodness and the absence of evil.

Blessed are the pure in heart. They will see God.

Today we have with us the families of Cypress School. Operating a school is an enormous challenge. It is a long, hard slog up an endless mountain. In Adventist education we have twin objectives: We want to teach, to model, to honor goodness and we want to exclude, to attenuate, to wither evil.

We challenge our kids to develop their minds to the nth degree, to master math and science and language, to cultivate their artistic abilities. We aim to fill their minds with good stuff. The first step toward the exclusion of evil is an abundant supply of goodness.

One of the impressive features of Cypress School is the amount of Bible memorization the kids do. Speaking from personal experience, it was vastly easier to learn memorize Bible verses when I was thirteen than it is now at sixty. Inputting a lot of Bible verses is one method of pursuing purity of heart.

In addition Cypress School deliberately seeks to teach ideas and behaviors that are conducive to moral, spiritual purity. We intentionally, purposefully seek to encourage kids in forming pure hearts.

What does it mean to be pure in heart? It means to be genuinely good, to be full of goodness. Just a few verses after the Beatitudes, the Gospel of Matthew records a number of sayings by Jesus that illuminate this idea of a pure heart:

"But I warn you—unless your righteousness is better than the righteousness of the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven! "You have heard that our ancestors were told, 'You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment.' But I say, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell. Matthew 5:20-22

It's a good idea to refrain from punching someone or pulling out your gun and shooting them. But this is not proof of a pure heart. Obviously, refraining from murder is a good thing. If you feel like killing someone, the first step toward a pure heart is to not do it! Excluding murder is absolutely essential for maintaining a pure heart. But it is hardly enough.

Jesus points us deeper: you must avoid name calling! Now, we're getting really challenging. Let me ask the kids, did you call anyone a name this past week? Did you write anything on facebook about someone that was unkind?

Parents, could we play a tape recording of all your remarks to your kids this week without embarrassing you? When your kids brought home a less than acceptable grade? What did you say and how did you say it? When you checked their room for the third time? When they spilled their milk or broke something in your shop? Did you call them names? Did you imply he was an idiot or that you were ashamed of her?

A pure heart does not spout scorn for one's kids.

Words, especially words in private, words at home, words on the internet, reveal our hearts. Sharp and cutting words are evidence of a heart tainted with impurity.

Kids how did you speak to your parents this week? How did you speak about them when they weren't around? Are you working on a pure heart?

To all of us, what did your write this week in email or on facebook or on twitter. Did everything you write evince respect, even for those persons you disagree with? A pure heart does not produce impure speech.

God help us!

One of the most challenging applications of Jesus' call to purity of heart comes in the next verses.

"So if you are presenting a sacrifice at the altar in the Temple and you suddenly remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there at the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God. Matthew 5:23-24.

For a pure heart, reconciliation is a higher priority than going to church! Or to put it another way, a pure heart does not contaminate its devotion to God with a casual acceptance of alienation from people.

Note the hope presented in this text. Jesus does not say, if you've done something to offend someone else, you're damned. He does not say we have lost our membership in the kingdom of God. But he does issue a challenge: Don't go through the motions of worship unless you have attempted the difficult, sometimes painful, sometimes impossible task of reconciliation. Before we can participate fully in the spiritual essence of worship we must seek reconciliation with people. Worship is no substitute for reconciliation.

Worship is much, much easier than reconciliation. At least coming to church and singing songs and kneeling and sitting and listening to a sermon. Those things are a piece of cake compared with reconciliation.

The great danger of coming to worship with impure hearts is that we will use our church experience as a substitute for seeing God. At church we will feel affirmed in our resentment, our disgust, our hatred, our disdain toward others. Our hearing of God, our vision of God is distorted by our own impurity and eventually we make God an accessory of our impurity. We imagine that God agrees with our disgust, our revulsion, our scorn for the people who offend us, annoy us, differ from us.

Beware. We don't want God to see as we see. We want to learn to see as God sees.

Have you ever wondered why people go to churches where the preacher lambasts sin every week? One of the temptations in that setting is to hear all the things that apply to other people. This is one reason preachers in some churches bash homosexuals so often. It's a way to be tough on sin without offending anyone. Because the preacher assumes that no one in his congregation is struggling with sexual identity issues. He's blasting people out there, strangers, people “not like us.” And we are usually far harsher to people we don't see. (That's one reason email is so famously destructive in conflicts. We are looking at words on a screen instead of at the face of a person.)

Of course, this simply means these preachers are blind. They cannot see the hurting people sitting in their own congregation, people who came to church that morning desperate to connect with God, only to be slapped by a message of rejection.

Blessed are the pure in heart. In the context of worship, that means blessed are those who do the difficult, sometimes tiring work of pursuing reconciliation so that when they hear the gospel of peace preached on Sabbath they understand the cost of peace. They prize the glory of peace.

What does it mean to see God?

It is a vision of glory that is ultimately satisfying. I have had enough. I am content. It is an understanding of the universe, the cosmos. You get it.

It's like climbing into the light.

When Dan and I reached 8000 feet, we climbed out of the fog into dazzling brilliant sun. The whole world was lit. Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens. The world was suffused with light. We were filled with light.

When we see God, eventually we are ourselves filled with light. We come to see the world as God sees. We see people with new eyes. Even the most broken person wears the halo of divine affection.

Sometimes church people seem to specialize in noticing the evil in the world. They are full of knowledge about the latest evidence of cultural decay. They are obsessed with evidence of evil. When they look at the world they notice only, or especially, the darkness.

This preoccupation with evil is evidence of impurity in the heart.

When we have pure hearts, we will see God not just on his throne in heaven, we will see him every where we turn our eyes. When our hearts are pure we will not just look in God's direction, we will begin seeing with God's vision.

We will be aware of the existence of the fog, but if we are in the fog we will busy ourselves climbing out of it. Our goal will be a vision of the world full of the glory of God. We will not rest until we are walking in a world of light.