Greater than our Hearts
1 John 3:18-24
4th Sunday of Easter
7 May 2006
Stacey Simpson Duke

The writer of this morning’s Scripture might’ve agreed with the Beatles when they sang, “All You Need is Love.”  St. Augustine said that the first letter of John holds up only one thing:  love.   All You Need is Love.  And he doesn’t mean love as some sort of abstract principle; John urges love in its most concrete forms.

In this morning’s passage from his first letter, we come to the clearest expression of that understanding of what love is.  “Little children,” he writes, “let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”  It is a great goal – and one we fail at pretty miserably.  The problem is our hearts.  

We may want to love, and we may intend to love, and we may try to love in truth and action, but love is not the only thing there in our hearts.  There is also anger, anxiety, guilt, apathy, inertia, hopelessness, despair, deceit.  So many things are all mixed up inside of us that the command to love cannot simply take root and flower.  In fact, with our hearts so divided, we sometimes can’t help but hear the exhortation to love as an unpleasant obligation instead of a generous invitation.  And we find we cannot live up to such a difficult demand.    

So we doubt our own ability to love faithfully and well.  Or maybe whether we ourselves are loved completely.  Or we can’t believe that we belong to the God who is only love.

To the gnawing rat of doubt in our hearts, John speaks a word of comfort and reassurance: “….we set our hearts at rest in God’s presence whenever our hearts condemn us.  For God is greater than our hearts, and … knows everything.”

This is a reality we lose sight of too often.  We do not worship a heart-sized God.  Our God is greater than our hearts.  

When we equate our conscience with God’s will, we are thinking far too small.  We do this when we associate our sense of duty or obligation with God.  Or when we associate our sense of guilt or shame with God.  Or when we take our own feelings of doubt or hopelessness as the true gauge of a situation, as if God can’t possibly be present and active if we ourselves do not sense it.  God is more than what our hearts tell us.  

The Christians in John’s community struggled with trusting this.  Their particular issue was their sense of guilt and self-recrimination.  It is often the case that the most devout, conscientious people are the ones riddled with anxiety about their own inadequacy.  Of course there is a time for honest guilt, the realization of real sin – we have sinned, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.  Honest guilt moves us toward confession, repentance, and reconciliation.  But at that point, it has served its purpose.  If you can’t let go of it from there, it has moved into the realm of neurotic guilt, which is never life-giving and often debilitating.

Religion, of course, is famous for maximizing this kind of guilt.  People joke about Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt.  Certainly many of us were raised with Baptist guilt.  Certain forms of religion manipulate our natural insecurities and anxieties about ourselves.  Many have come to associate God and faith almost entirely with such a sense of duty and guilt.

John will have none of that.  When our hearts try to condemn us, he urges us to remember – God is greater than our hearts.  This affirmation is not the same thing as simply rationalizing away any wrong we’ve ever done in order to feel better about ourselves. That is simply denial and dishonesty and doesn’t really move us towards deeper love of others or ourselves.  Self-reflection and honesty lie at the core of what it means to be fully Christian, not to mention to be fully human.

But honesty also means being clear about the fact that our hearts don’t always tell us the truth.  The human heart is fickle, faulty, and sometimes manipulated.  

So, John urges, when you turn on yourself and your heart condemns you, when shame nibbles at the edges of your consciousness day in and day out, remember – God is greater than our hearts.

Of course, this is true about more than just shame and self-recrimination.  The fact is we don’t see the whole picture about any present situation, and our feelings and sensibilities are not the most accurate rule of measure.  There is only one reliable standard of reality, and that is the God who is greater than our hearts.

Are you facing some difficulty that makes you anxious, restless, fearful?  It is so easy to be taken over by the dread, to get locked into a perpetual state of unease.  The anxiety colors everything – our perspective, our feelings, our action.  It is difficult for our clenched and quivering hearts to imagine real reason for peace, for assurance, for calm.  Over all that fretting stands this word – God is greater than our hearts.

Are you in grief over a broken relationship, a broken heart, a broken promise?  It is so easy to take such fracture as the last word.  It is difficult for our sorrowing hearts to imagine a reality beyond the present sense of being shattered.  But over all the fragments of disillusionment and grief stands one word – God is greater than our hearts.

Are you in despair over the news you read, the violence in our world, a conflict in your own family?  It is so easy to give up hope of things ever getting any better than they are.  It is difficult for our disappointed hearts to imagine where help will come from, or how we can fix things.  Over so much hopelessness stands this one word – God is greater than our hearts.

In so many ways, our hearts deceive us.  They condemn us.  Or they get all shaken up with too much worry.  Or they get weighed down by grief, or despair.  It is not that those feelings or the causes for them are not real.  But they are not the whole story, they are not the last word.  The last word is this:  God is greater than our hearts. God is the ground of all reality and all possibility.  

When we take this seriously, God then also becomes the ground of our ability to love in action and in truth.  Because the same is true of love as of all the other senses our hearts make of the world.  We think love is about a feeling, but it’s really about a choice and a reality.  I wonder how many people sigh with something like bitterness or cynicism when they hear words like the ones I quoted at the beginning of this sermon.  All you need is love.  Is that true?  Is it really true?

Depends on what you mean by “love.”  The feeling of love?  The feelings of love can turn out to have been fleeting and empty.  This is why the writer of 1st John in particular – like the Bible in general – is adamant that love is defined not by feelings but by deeds.  Love is an action, it is a truth, a reality; love is God’s own self.  Which means love, too, is greater than our hearts.  We incline our hearts towards it, and every day we must choose to take hold of it again.  

In the end, the central call of John’s exhortation is an invitation to the calm trust of a profound humility.  We’re just creatures.  We’re just creatures.  And whatever else we experience, and feel, and face, God is greater.  If we can relax into the reality of that, our whole selves can open up to a new kind of living, mindful and responsive to the call of real love.

Martin Luther once wrote, “Conscience is one drop; the reconciling God is an ocean of comfort.”  There is so much more to reality than what our hearts can know.  We are this one little drop, and God is so much greater.  Everything else – our self-condemnation, our anger, our anxiety, our despair, our grief – everything else is small too, in the face of so much greatness and love.

I think Luther might’ve liked this story.  There was this wave way out in the ocean.  He was just gliding along being a wave, splashing and spraying in the sunlight, until one day he saw wave after wave in front of him crashing on the beach and he got scared.  He was sad, and he was anxious, as he watched all those waves exploding on the shore.  But then this older wave in front of him said, “I know exactly what your problem is.  You’ve been so fixated on being a wave that you forgot - you’re really just a part of the ocean.

It’s what John would have us hear today - Don’t forget what you’re part of.