Let us pray. God open our ears to your voice, open our eyes to your work, open our hearts
to your presence, and open our lives to your call. Amen. Our second reading is from the
prophet Isaiah chapter 44 verses 9 through 20. Let us listen together now for God's Word to us.
All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses
neither see nor know, and so they will be put to shame. Who would fashion a god or cast an image
that can do no good? All its devotees shall be put to shame. The artisans too are merely human.
Let them all assemble, let them stand up. They shall be terrified, they shall all be put to shame.
The blacksmith works it with a tool over the coals, shaping it with hammers and forging it
with his strong arm. He becomes hungry and his strength fails. He drinks no water and is faint.
The carpenter stretches a line, marks it out with a stylus, fashions it with planes,
and marks it with a compass. He makes it in human form with human beauty to be set up in a shrine.
He cuts down cedars and chooses a home tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of
the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he
takes and warms himself. He kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it,
makes it a carved image and bows down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire. Over this half
he roasts meat, eats it, and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, I am warm by the fire.
The rest of it he makes into a god. His idol bows down to it and worships it. He prays to it and
says, save me for you are my god. They do not know nor do they comprehend for their eyes are
shut so that they cannot see and their minds as well so they cannot understand. No one considers,
nor is their knowledge or discernment to say, half of it I burned in the fire. I also baked
bread on its coals. I roasted meat and have eaten. Now shall I make of the rest of it an abomination.
Shall I fall down before a block of wood? He feeds on ashes. A diluted mind has led him astray.
And he cannot save himself or say, is not this thing in my right hand a fraud? This is the word
of the Lord. Thanks be to God. So we begin a new series today for the season of Lent looking at
the greatest commandments. Jesus's answer to that question, what is the greatest? And they are to
love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength,
and to love your neighbor as yourself. In his book, The Life We're Looking For, Andy Crouch takes
these commands and repackages them as a sense, as a way of thinking about human identity, who we are
and what we are made for. He says this, every human person is a heart, soul, mind, strength,
complex designed for love. It's who we are, it's how we are built, and it's what we were built for.
So this Lent we are going to try to rediscover that central aspect of who we are. We're going to think
about what stands in our way. We're going to consider how we can better reflect what we were
made to be. So we start today with heart. I read from Isaiah chapter 44, and in my Bible the heading
for that section is the absurdity of idol worship. And the prophet goes through this lengthy sort of
imaginary scenario, but very realistic in which artisans, craftsmen are constructing an idol as a
way to point out how ridiculous it is that the same materials that are used to cook bread and to warm
his cold body are also used to make a god to worship. And Isaiah's conclusion is this, he feeds on
ashes. A deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself, and he can't even say to
himself, is not this thing in my right hand a fraud? In the Hebrew where it says deluded mind,
it's actually a deluded heart. And when the Hebrew gets translated into the Greek, it's the same word
heart, not mind. Modern translators have turned it into mind because maybe that helps us imagine
what's going on here. But the problem for the artisan, the problem for the maker of an idol,
is a deluded heart. Idolatry is the result of a deluded heart. Every now and then I like to take
a peek at Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of scripture called The Message because it often adds a different
flavor to a text and sometimes sharpens the edge as it does here. I want to share with you a portion
of this passage from Peterson's The Message. Pretty stupid, wouldn't you say? Don't they have
eyes in their heads? Are their brains working at all? Doesn't it occur to them to say, half of this
tree I used for firewood, I baked bread, roasted meat, and enjoyed a good meal, and now I've used
the rest to make a repulsive no-god. Here I am praying to a stick of wood. This lover of emptiness,
of nothing, is so out of touch with reality, so far gone, that he can't even look at what he's doing,
can't even look at the no-god stick of wood in his hand and say, this is crazy.
A deluded heart, Peterson translates as a lover of emptiness. I've never seen that phrase before,
I'm a bit stuck on it. It's a captivating image, I think it is an excellent definition of idolatry,
we're going to have to come back to it, but first I need to explain to you how we got so quickly
from the subject of love, loving God with all of our heart, into idolatry.
We're going to spend five weeks on the subject of love, so in order to do that without being
repetitive, I'm going to have to narrow the focus a little bit, and when it comes to the heart,
that's probably the one of these four elements that most naturally associates with love.
We think of the heart when we think of love, so we've got to pull those apart just a little bit,
we've got to get clear about what it means to love God with our whole heart, what sort of work
is the heart doing that the mind and the body and the soul are not? Religion for us nowadays is often
seen as a matter of the mind, we think about our belief system, our ideas, our ideologies, religion
right? Our ideas, our ideologies, religion in that way is often in our minds akin to philosophy.
This is a result of the Enlightenment, this is the modern world at work in us and around us,
but before the Enlightenment, religion was not a matter of the mind, religion was a matter of the
heart. It was Augustine who said, in the fourth century, you, God, have made us for yourself,
and our heart is restless until it rests in you. The heart is the seat of the religious
impulse in us, the heart is active, the heart is in motion, the heart is questioning, the heart is
desiring, the heart is seeking. Later on in his book, The Confessions, Augustine will ask,
what do I love when I love my God? For him, it's not enough to say that he loves God, he has to
interrogate it further because there's more to it than that. It's not just a matter of mere
internal devotion or piety, it's not just a narrow focus on my relationship with my God.
It has sometimes become this in the life and the history of the Christian church and very often
it has become this in order to set aside the demands on our mind and the thinking and it's
been used to set aside the demands on the body, on our strength and our action. The heart is not
just the place where our warm feelings reside, it's not just the the house of our affections.
The heart breaks, the heart overflows, the heart moves and it cares, the heart closes,
and it opens, the heart longs and it despairs, the heart commits and the heart gives. The heart is
directional. This is what Augustine was getting at when he says, what do I love when I love my God?
At what things or thing is my heart directed? The heart is something that is pointed in a particular
direction. We point our hearts toward things that claim us, toward things that that capture us,
that captivate us. We point our hearts toward things that suggest or promise fulfillment.
We direct our hearts toward things that alleviate our pain or take away our guilt. We direct our
hearts toward things that answer our deep needs, which brings us back to idolatry.
John Calvin wrote in his Institutes, the human heart is a perpetual idle factory,
a perpetual idle factory. That's the human heart. Idolatry is not a matter of what we do,
it's not a matter of having the right or the wrong beliefs or philosophy or opinions or ideologies.
That's not what idolatry is. Idolatry is a matter of the heart. Isaiah says he feeds on ashes a
diluted heart has led him astray. This lover of emptiness, of nothing, is so out of touch with
reality, so far gone that he can't even look at what he's doing, can't even look at the no-God stick
of wood in his hand and say this is crazy. This lover of emptiness. Idolatry is the result of a
misdirected heart, a heart that is pointed toward emptiness, a heart that feeds on ashes.
So let's be clear, we are all lovers of emptiness, of empty things to some extent or another. We all
feed on ashes and is that not why we are here? Because we have known emptiness and we have also
known fullness and we'd like to have a little more of the one and a little bit less of the other.
We've talked a bit about the decline in religion or religious activity affiliation commitment in the
United States. There's been an interesting corollary to go along with religious decline in the United
States. Studies have shown that as religious affiliation declines belief in non-traditional
supernatural phenomena has gone up. For instance, roughly 30 percent of Americans today believe
they have had contact with someone who has died. Nearly 20 percent, one in five believe they have
been in the presence of a ghost. About one-third believe that ghosts exist and can interact with
and harm the living and these numbers are not just a matter of the number of people who are
and harm the living and these numbers are much higher than they were decades ago when religious
affiliation was much more prevalent and people who do not attend church are twice as likely
to believe in ghosts. The less religious people are the more likely they are to believe
things about unfounded things about UFOs and about alien intelligent life monitoring human
existence and governments covering these things up. People are turning in increasing numbers to
astrology and other forms of divination and even psychedelics. My point is not to point to the
world outside and say look at all of those idolaters out there who need to come in here. My point is to
say look at all of the restlessness. Look at all of these restless hearts. Look at all of these who
are searching for something and it's not just them it's us too. We also are restless. We also
are searching. John Caputo writes the truth that is trying to become true in religion
is the passionate search for the things we care most about the restlessness of our heart
in the midst of a mysterious world. Caputo is very intentionally echoing Augustine our hearts
are restless until they rest in God. I want to be careful that I don't suggest a simple
idea that there is a God-shaped hole inside of us you might have heard this before that only God
can fill. I think there's some truth to that but that's not what I'm meaning to say. That too easily
becomes a conviction that we here have the answer the perfectly shaped thing to fit inside that hole
that is in you. We don't have a hole you do and we can fill it for you because we have the answer
with a capital A. That's not the right way to imagine what this restlessness means what this
restlessness does to us and how it works on us. A better way to think about these restless hearts
is not that there is a void that needs to be filled but that there is an overflow that needs
to be directed that needs to be channeled. It's wrong to say that the world is full of empty hearts
misguided as we might think they are. The world is not full of empty hearts it is full of people
just like us who are tempted to give our hearts to empty things and to love God with all of our heart
is to acknowledge this problem this temptation it's to name the emptiness that we have tried
to love whatever that may be and to redirect our passionate search for the things we most care about
so that it is no longer rooted in ashes but in something lasting something enduring something
that is deeply real. To love God with all of our heart is not to love only one thing to the
exclusion of all others it is to keep our hearts pointed in only one direction which allows all of
our other loves to be properly ordered. We all know this about love that love has an endless or
that the heart rather has an endless capacity to expand if you have fallen in love if you have had
a child if you have experienced the depth of true friendship if you have brought a new pet into your
family you know that the heart when you think it's going to burst it only finds new ways to expand
but if our heart is ultimately misdirected if our heart is ultimately deluded what we get
instead of expansion is a kind of division or fragmentation what we get is disquiet
what we get is restlessness
Jesus said this is the greatest highest command to love God with all of our heart
we have all known and tried to love emptiness and we have known fullness we have fed on ashes and
we have tasted the goodness of the Lord so let us carry on our passionate search
search with renewed clarity about what is and is not worth our hearts
because our hearts are restless our hearts are restless until they rest in God let us pray
pray God take our restless hearts which we so easily give over to empty things
and direct them toward you
toward good and beautiful and lasting things eternal things in Christ's name we pray amen