Just a few feet from here, it is all about hearts. Leave the sanctuary, enter the Great Hall, take a right turn and tour our children’s ministry area. You will find hearts. It is all about hearts right now.  February is heart month because right in the middle of the month is Valentine’s Day.  The tiniest of tots barely two years old are into the hearts.

 

This is the first year of holiday consciousness for them but the red and pink mania will follow them for the rest of their lives. It will start off with Sponge Bob Valentines and heart cupcakes and move on to passing messages on tiny candy hearts. Eventually, there will be chocolate and flowers and romance. They are just beginning a journey of finding treasures of the heart. 

 

We aren’t going to spend a month on the heart. It will take seven weeks. Today, we begin our annual journey to Easter, setting aside time to begin anew the interior work needed to connect with God. By your presence here today, you acknowledge your need for this time. You recognize your need to consider the state of your heart.

 

This seems counter-intuitive when we focus on the head. Ash Wednesday gets its name from the liturgical rite of dabbing ashes on the forehead of worshipers. The ashes remind us of our mortality. It comes from words which you hear shortly during the imposition of ashes, words spoken first by God to Adam, “for dust you are, and to dust you will return.” From that point on, from the moment when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden, ashes have been a symbol of mourning. For centuries, on this day, ashes are placed on the head as a sign of the grief we have about our sin. We place the mark on our head instead of our heart.

 

Placing the sign on our head instead of our heart is reflective of the way we approach our faith. We make it a matter of the head rather than the heart. It’s how we talk about faith. Christians describe themselves as believers. “What do you believe?” people ask me when they consider joining our church. Following Jesus is about belief in Jesus, about accepting a number of claims that we consider to be true.  Faith is about what’s in your head.  But the idea that faith as a matter of the head isn’t really biblical. Rather, it is a modern development which began a few hundred years ago. The Enlightenment ushered in the day of reason. Today, in our post-modern world, we can’t really imagine anyone making an important decision without thinking about it and making a decision in our head.

 

Prior to this time, faith resided not in the head but in the heart. It is difficult to truly understand the Bible and Christian tradition without understanding this.  In the Bible, the heart isn’t that organ that beats 72 times a minute although there are few occasions when the word “heart” describes the physical organ. It isn’t even the site where emotions arise, like the love we celebrate in this Valentines’ month. The Bible sees those kinds of feelings coming from the “gut.”

 

Most of the time, when the Bible uses the word “heart”, is a metaphor for a deepest level of our being, the level below our conscious thinking, or feeling or acting. The “heart” is our core being, our center and it is so important, that the word “heart” appears well over a thousand times in the Bible. [1] It might be an amazing worship, perhaps on Ash Wednesday to sit in the stillness of the sanctuary and read the passages, over and over. I wonder how long it would take. At one time or another, you’ve heard many of them. 

            “Serve the Lord your God with all your heart” (Deut. 10:12).

            “I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart” (Ps. 9:1)

            “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” (Psalm 51:10)

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. (Deut. 6:5-6). This last passage is the Shema. Jewish men are required to repeat it twice a day to imprint on their heart the love of God. The reason: the Bible speaks of the heart as the place where we make contact with God.  The Psalmist writes: "Come," my heart says, ‘seek his face!’ Your face, Lord, do I seek” (Psalm 27:8).The heart is the place where we trust God. “The Lord is my strength and my shield; in him my heart trusts” (Psalm 28:7). It is in fact, the place where the word of God dwells. “…. the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe” (Deuteronomy 30:14).

 

You can see how important these many heart passages are. Of course there is the passage I read to you earlier from the Sermon on the Mount, a traditional passage for Ash Wednesday, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21)”  When Jesus makes this statement, there is an implicit question. It is a question about your heart, about your core being, about your spiritual center.  Oddly, the question is even more appropriate today but needs the earlier verses to give it context. Jesus says “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven….For where your treasure is, you will find your spiritual center, your core being, your heart.”

 

Do not store up. But we do. We store up a lot of stuff. According to the Self Storage Association, a trade group charged with monitoring the trend of storing up stuff, our country now possesses about 1.9 billion square feet of personal storage space outside of the home. All this space is contained in nearly 40,000 facilities owned and operated by more than 2,000 entrepreneurs, including a handful of publicly traded giants like Public Storage, Storage USA, and Shurgard.

 

According to a recent survey, the owners of 1 out of every 11 homes also own a self-storage space. This represents an increase of 75 percent since 1995. Most operators of self-storage facilities report 90 percent occupancy, with average stints among renters of 15 months. Last year alone saw a 24 percent spike in the number of self-storage units on the market.

 

But, amazingly, as the amount of storage space required by homeowners has grown, so has the average size of the American house. In fact, the National Association of Homebuilders reports that the average American house grew from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,400 square feet in 2004.

 

So let's get this straight—houses got bigger, average family sizes got smaller, and yet we still need to tack on almost two billion square feet of extra space to store our stuff?[2] Jesus says what you store up, what you treasure, it reflects the condition of your spiritual center, your core, your heart.

 

Last night our youth sponsored its annual fat Tuesday pancake supper. By tradition, “fat Tuesday” was the day to empty out the larder of all the fat food so that the temptation of rich food might be out of the house and a Lenten fast might be observed. It comes from the passage about what we treasure which includes injunctions about fasting and prayer. While few hold to a strict seven week fast, many give up sweets or chocolate as a small spiritual discipline, reminding them of this penitential period. Given the American insatiable diet of storing up stuff, what might be a better discipline than to give up buying stuff.  

 

Every day Americans buy an average of:

-         3,972,603 movie tickets

-         1,683,835 songs and albums from on-line resources

-         1,650,000 DVD rentals from Netflix

-         978,030 bags of Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet popcorn

-         568,764 Titleist golf balls

-         443,650 large French fries at Burger King

-         160,968 bottles of Absolut Vodka

-         7,500 Samsung LCD TVs

-         60 Ford Mustangs on eBay[3]

What do you treasure most? Instead of giving up chocolate or sweets, wouldn’t it be an interesting exercise if we gave up spending. For forty days and nights, we enter the wilderness of non-consumption. I’m confident that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake might send federal agents out to censure such a suggestion, but economics aside, it would address our hearts.

 

In the Sermon on the Mount, the traditional passage of scripture for Ash Wednesday, Jesus is teaching us about the inner life, about our core being, about our heart. It is why he begins this section with the classic challenge of Ash Wednesday “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). Jesus' words of caution are aimed at our inner life.  In terms of prayer, we need to be careful that the outward expression of our religious life is not aimed at receiving the praise of others. It reveals that in our heart, we are more concerned about recognition than our relationship with God. The same holds true about what we treasure. Our consumption reveals that in our heart, at our spiritual center, what really counts is not God but our stuff. 

 

Jesus preached this sermon on the Galilean countryside to farmers and fishermen, to a peasant community that had meager resources. When asked by one who was more affluent and influential - a person of means - what was important, Jesus said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10: 27)

 

Jesus is saying that the only stuff that really counts is loving God and loving neighbor. That’s what needs to be at the center of your being. You need to have a heart for God and a heart for others. When we have a heart for others, when our core being, our spiritual center, our innermost spring of life is open to others, we express our love for God. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6: 21). It is a question about who you really are, about your spiritual center. It’s about your heart.

 

You can see why it is all about the heart. It’s not just at the other end of this church building because we are so near to Valentine’s Day. So as you begin this forty day journey, who are you and what do you treasure? What’s really important to you? Do you love God and do you love others?  You find the answer, not in your head, but in your heart.  

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