Bless Your Heart

Bless Your Heart
Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
September 15, 2019
Proper 19, Year C
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
Growing up in the Deep South requires fluency in more than one language.  We might all argue about how deep the South can get, but the Deep South of my rearing involved heat, humidity, sweet tea, and turns of phrase that are well known code words to soften the harshness of reality.  It is often said of Southerners that we do not hide the strange or bizarre, rather we dress them up and sit them on the front porch with the rest of us.  I suppose there are other places in the world where families are normal and people speak clearly and directly, but I suspect that they are rare and more or less deceptive in nature.  Where I grew up, there were things people said… then, there was what they meant.
 
​For example, they would talk about cousin Jane and it went something like this: ‘Janie is such a bird!  After she went to that school up north, she only shops at that natural food store and makes macramé belts for her boyfriends.  Translation: Cousin Jane came from a grew up in a good family like the rest of us, but she left home and lost her way.’  Or Uncle Billy: ‘Billy is such a homebody.  When his friends went off to school, he stayed home to take care of Big Mama and now he is sacking groceries over a the Piggly Wiggly.  They were good to give him a job.’  Translation:  Billy is an underachiever.
 
Such things are rarely said with malice, though there is always a tinge of judgement and wonder in how they were presented.  Learning to understand this second language describing human behavior is essential in Southern culture.  Learning to speak it is essential in learning how to behave.  Most of us were taught that if we do not have something nice to say, then we should not say anything at all.  Thus, the best and safest things to say to others in the messes of life is “Bless your heart.”
 
That one statement is not only useful and kind, it is so theologically sound.  Part of growing up in a culture where family is just what it is, and strange is more normal than not, is a certain theological realization that humans are, by nature, a big ole mess.  While there are plenty of questionable theological shortcuts in popular parlance, like “everything happens for a reason” or “love the sinner hate the sin,” “bless your heart” cuts through the pretense of purity or righteousness and accepts the basic anthropology of human nature.
 
When Jesus hangs out with notorious sinners, his critics give him hell.  Of course, they are looking for anything that will ding his reputation or dissuade his followers from following because, what Jesus knows and makes clear is that all of us fall short of the Glory of God.  For the hyper religious Pharisees and the law worshipping scribes, there is this only black and white: clean and unclean, righteous and unworthy, good and evil people.  When Jesus sees the potential for good in everyone, he hits too close to home, challenging power which they believe is derived from their pharisaic purity, their scribal piety, and their inherent belief that they are just better than other people.
 
Rather than feeding the fire of human puffery, Jesus turns the conversation toward two parables.  One is about the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep in search on the one lost one, and the other of a woman who stops everything in her household to clean up and find a lost coin.  Instead of giving power and credence to human machinations, Jesus points to our generous God, a God who takes both male and female form, a God who seeks and searches and finds and rejoices in what is found.
 
As a reset and a conversation changer, these parables appreciate that all of God’s people are a mixed up and confused bunch.  We are capable of such idiocy and destruction, but we are also capable of great love and unlimited creativity.  The Pharisees and scribes propagate a self-styled faith-based privilege system in which they believe good people staying away from those who are not as good as they believe they are.  It is not that they are indifferent, rather that they start with erroneous assumptions about themselves and others.
 
We see this played out in modern religious expression all of the time.  The prosperity gospel movement, which is widely and commercially popular, works on the principle of the holy scoreboard.  This game depends on some people living more rightly than others and, thereby, earning more holy favor.  Accordingly, the reward for such goodness is made evident in material success, public adulation, and pious notoriety.  But such moral high ground is impossible to hold.  People fail, fumble, and fall. 
 
In seeking the lost and the least, Jesus kills the power to the scoreboard, ascribing all power to the Loving Source.  We do not do the will of God to curry favor and earn points.  We do the will of God because of our delight and amazement in what God is already doing for us.
 
The great author, writer, and Christian theologian, C.S. Lewis, was found alone on his knees and weeping in the Chapel of St. John’s College, Oxford, where he lived and taught.  One of his colleagues came along side of him and asked what was the matter.  Lewis then told his friend of his companion, a woman with whom he was very much in love, and her recent diagnosis of incurable cancer.  The colleague, attempting to comfort Lewis, told him that surely God would hear his prayers, the prayers of a such a dedicated Christian apologist, and heal his love.  Lewis is reported to have said: “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me.”
 
Lewis would go on to marry the woman and care for her young son.  In later life he wrote more about his grief acknowledging that his experience of that love was a glimmer of the depth of God’s love for us; a blessing mixed in the messiness of life, saying: “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.” [1]
 
While we are apt to default into thinking of our relationship with God is a transactional business, Jesus lives and shows God’s love as an abiding force, not a conditional matter.  We come to Church not to hang out with the righteous elect, but to know and feel the heart of God beating in ours.  The message of the Gospel is not that we are any better than everyone else, just that we have a clue as to where to turn for help, and whom to thank for all we have been given. We are here to pray because we can't help ourselves.  We are here to pray because the need flows out of us.  We do not pray to change God. We pray to change us.  Bless our hearts.  Amen.


[1] For an excellent story of Lewis’s life and love, see the movie, Shadowlands, whence these quotations are collected.