The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
You’ve heard the advice. It’s pretty much given in just about every rom-com movie that’s made: “Just follow your heart.” Undoubtedly you’ve heard it. People have spoken it to you a few times before. But even those who are not Christians know that that is utterly terrible advice. Even many secular psychologists — and I don’t have a lot of fondness for psychologists — but even secular ones say to follow your heart can lead to disastrous outcomes, since the heart is the seat of emotions, and following every positive or negative feeling can cause anybody to make a mess in their life. Some of these psychologists suggest that you follow instead your head, your intellect, or your gut, the seat of intuition. But properly educated Christians disagree with these solutions too. And I hope by the time we’re done with the sermon, you too will disagree with those other two axioms. We disagree because while we believe the heart is sinful, we also must understand that the heart, the will, corrupts even the intellect and our own intuition. It makes every part of our human existence sinful and unclean. Thus “just follow your heart” cannot be supplanted by “just follow your intellect” or “just follow your gut instinct.” The fact of the matter is: where the heart is corrupt, the rest of the body also follows. The only real solution to our problem of knowing what to do, and what is right and what is wrong, is to have God come to us from outside of our own brain, outside of our own gut, outside of our own heart, and speak His Word of truth to us as it was meant to be spoken. Both of these — all of human nature — are defiled and are evil in God’s sight. He comes to us, though, and He leads us by His Word. He tells us and teaches us what is good and right — if we, in fact, know where to find it, namely in the biblical text, in His Word, in His spoken and His sung and His proclaimed Word. He tells us and teaches us what is good and right, what makes us clean, more importantly. And that’s something that the Pharisees, and the people then, and people now, didn’t and don’t understand.
The Pharisees and scribes lived as if something else defiled a person. A person’s duty was to avoid the things that made him or her unclean, not seek the things that make them clean. There’s a world of difference between those two things. Following the traditions of the elders was one of the ways in the New Testament time that the Jews thought they could be kept clean. That’s why the Pharisees asked Jesus why His disciples ate without washing their hands, which was against the tradition of the elders. They thought that forsaking this tradition defiled the one who forsook it. That was last week’s Gospel lesson. That was the lesson, Mark 7, verses 2–5. The Pharisees saw that some of His disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, according to the tradition of the elders. You see, they believed that human beings, especially if you’re a Hebrew, were basically good, good people in the sight of God. They believed and lived as if what defiled a person is what goes into them, or if a person was going to stay clean, they had to do certain things: eat certain foods in the right kind of way, observe the labor laws of the tradition of the elders, and so much more. The Bible, though, teaches a different approach, for a very different reason. In the Old Testament lesson, Deuteronomy 4, God did not say, “I have created you with a brain and with a heart and with a gut, so that you can feel and think and have intuitions of what is to be done and not to be done.” He didn’t say that so that you could live. No, He said, “Listen, O Israel, to the statutes and to the rules that I am teaching you to do, and do them. You shall not add a word that I command, nor take away a word from the command, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God that I command you.” That is, we don’t have any liberty to add things like traditions of the elders that add additional requirements to what has been written and spoken in the Word of God. We don’t have any authority whatsoever to ignore them either. The Lord God speaks to us from outside. You want to know what to do? Go to the biblical text and read it as you’re supposed to read, and listen to the preachers and teachers who use the Word correctly. He speaks through Moses. He comes from outside to the Hebrew people, and He speaks so that they can hear with their ears, see with their eyes. It’s not something from the imagination. It’s God speaking and giving His words to a prophet — the prophets of the Old Testament, the apostles of the New Testament — and all of them speak to us for the sole purpose that we become children of God, made clean in His Word and Sacrament ministry of the church. 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” — that emphasis on the last one — “that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
Now, the problem with human beings is that they do not understand human nature. We tend to think too highly of ourselves as creatures. Take communism, or any form of utopianism that you care to consider. This political ideology believes that the big problem with humanity isn’t human nature per se. It is the inequitable circumstances that people find themselves in. They reason that if you want to get rid of coveting and jealousy and envy and animosity between groups and individuals, people, then create a government and a society where no one has any more or any less than another, because what makes a person sinful, in their view, is that the haves have and the have-nots don’t. That, they believe, is the root of all evil. Eliminate private ownership, individual responsibility — we use that word “control” in place of that — and the inequity, and the problem, so they think, goes away. It’s solved, because then people will all have a kumbaya existence. As a side note: if you create a political system that doesn’t understand human nature, then the only solution to keeping order out of chaos is any kind of form of authoritarianism — which, by the way, makes everything the worse. But we’ll get there soon.
The Pharisees in the Gospels believed that human beings are basically good, and that a person becomes unclean, sinful, by coming into contact with things, people, and circumstances that make them unclean. Here in Mark 7, Jesus teaches that it’s not what goes into a person — excuse me, it’s not what goes into a person that makes him unclean, but what comes out. Verse 19: since, as Jesus says, it enters his stomach and is expelled. Mark adds this little commentary, for all people on all sides of dietary rules and regulations: thus He, Jesus, declares all foods clean. It’s what comes out of a person that defiles. “From within,” Jesus said, “out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts” — and much more. It’s our natural state of existence, apart from the person of Jesus Christ. We do nothing, think nothing, that is pleasing in God’s sight. As evidence for His argument, Jesus offers up a catalog of vices that describe what follows from the natural human heart. He names both actions like sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, and attitudes related to those actions: deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. That’s the normal list of things that we think and that we do, if we’re left untethered to the Law and to the Gospel. Original sin causes actual sin. That’s your catechism days. There’s two kinds: the original — we are born sinful and unclean — and the individual things we do, most of the time without knowing at all we’ve done them, that are sinful. We are not sinners because we sin. That’s the Reformed, Baptist, in the mainline — you become sinful when you commit your first sin. We sin because we are sinners. This is true of all of us, except Christ alone. Remember that young man that ran up to Jesus to ask Him a question? He said, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus replied, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God.” Jesus wasn’t denying that He was, in fact, good. He was confirming that no one except God is good — namely, Him.
In Mark 7, Jesus taught the crowds that their religious leaders and forefathers had usurped the words of God and the preaching and teaching of the Law and Gospel with the traditions, of pure law, of the elders. This tradition then fed a system of works and self-righteousness: do this, don’t do that, so that you will, in fact, remain clean and not become unclean. Most people also think of themselves today as a good person. “Oh, I’m a good person. God wouldn’t condemn me.” After all, popular culture and advertising and movies tell us constantly: we deserve better than we got. We deserve this over that. I guess we deserve all these things because we’re so darn good. People today don’t think of themselves as poor, miserable sinners who need to come to confess their sin before God’s representative and receive Holy Absolution. That’s the greatest sin of all of our relatives that have fallen away from good church attendance and a faithful church. They’ve forsaken what they are in and of themselves. They’ve come to believe a myth about their own nature and their own good intentions. People think that they must do something really, really bad, like — or be a conservative — to earn God’s wrath.
In Mark 7, the crowd thought that they had heard enough, so they began to disperse. But Jesus wasn’t done with them. Jesus called the people to Him again and said to them, “Hear Me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” He wants to emphasize this way of looking at reality above all other things in regard to human nature. Jesus wants them to understand the reality and the hopelessness of the human condition. So He summons the crowd back to make the point a second time. At the time of the Reformation, the church thought, and the people believed, that human nature had a measure of free will, that a person could please God and contribute their own salvation by making decisions in favor of God. Well, Luther studied the Scripture over and over and over again, was troubled over and over and over again by the unqualified, universal condemnation of sinful human beings and human nature. He learned that when it came to the matters of salvation, a man doesn’t have a free will, because he’s born in sin and cannot free himself. This discovery turned Christendom upside down — which is its proper position, by the way. Jesus is doing the same thing here. He’s teaching that human beings are not clean. They are not good. They are the exact opposite of good and clean. We do not start off undefiled. We are born defiled. The Book of Judges, for example, recounts the deepest, darkest, and most grievous immoral sins in the history of the Israelites. Cruelty, obscenity, greed, and unbelief reach their deepest depths in the Book of Judges. God summarizes their depravity in this way. It’s an accurate summary of our day and age: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Through the prophet Jeremiah, God said of human beings: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” After the flood, the Lord God issued a promise, but also said the following: “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Hardly a modern endorsement of the psychological approach taken by most today.
But the Lord creates a new, clean heart in us through Jesus Christ, by His Word, the Gospel. This clean heart existed only in one man, the God-man Jesus Christ. His heart was pure and holy, because He is the Son of God made flesh. From His heart came forth both love of God, the first commandment, and love of fellow man, all the other commandments, fulfilling God’s Law for our sakes. Galatians 4:4 and 5: from His heart flowed water and blood, as He was pierced for our transgressions, for our sin (John 19:34). And cleansed by His atoning blood, by the Spirit of the Gospel, God gives us all, everything that Jesus gained going to the cross. Jesus rose from the dead, promised and sent the Holy Spirit to take what is His and, quote, “declare it to you” — that’s John 16:14. If God declares something to you about you, it’s true. That means all that Jesus accomplished, the Spirit now declares, gives to you, to be your very own. What is His is now yours — including His heart and His mind. Yep, even the mind. We have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). By the Gospel, He washes you thoroughly from your iniquity and cleanses you thoroughly from your sin, making you whiter than snow, and creating in you a clean heart, as we sing. In Holy Baptism, He gave you the washing of regeneration and renewal, whom He poured out richly on us through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life (Titus 3:5 and 7). Ephesians 5:26: through faith alone, our hearts are newly created by the Spirit. Acts 15:9: through faith we receive what God gained in His life, death, and resurrection, and what the Spirit gives to us in the imparting of the Gospel, be that through Baptism or the normal spoken word of Absolution. With such a heart of Christ, we can now approach the throne of grace and, quote, “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (Hebrews 10:22).
At the same time, we must remember that while we’ve been given a new heart in the image of Christ, and a new mind in the image of Christ, the fact of the matter is the old still lives in us very strongly. It wasn’t removed by Baptism, but remains in us until we die the natural death. With our natural heart, in spite of our faith and sanctified good intentions, those evil thoughts and the catalog of vices continue to defile us each and every day. As St. Paul wrote in Romans 7:18–19: “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” He admits and confesses to the doctrine of two natures, simul justus et peccator: we are both saints, declared so by Christ in the Gospel, and we are sinners, declared so in our own human nature. That’s why we return to the cleansing of our Baptism by confessing our sins and receiving Holy Absolution. “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). We do not look to our hearts to decide what is good and what is bad, since our hearts are defiled and deceive us from the very beginning. Instead, the Bible teaches that God prepares us beforehand for the good works that we are to do — that’s Ephesians 2:10. They are done according to His Law and lived out in our assorted stations in life. What’s a station? Mother, father is a station. Employee, employer is a station. A citizen of the United States of America is a station. These are vocations, stations, hats we wear as we go about our daily activity in the two kingdoms, the state and the church. Now, one I don’t talk about very often, but probably should more often, is called the three estates. It’s kind of a unique contribution from the Lutherans. What are the three estates? Number one is government. So you ask the Ten Commandment questions in your relationship to the government: are you obedient or are you not? Do you believe that which is true and right? Do you defend your neighbor’s property rights, or do you vote for the government to take his stuff away? Okay. Number two: the household. There’s a hierarchy there too. It’s called parents — although they’ve forfeited it to their youngest children, but nonetheless, it’s an estate. And the third one is your place in the church. And what do you do and don’t do for the church? How do you live out your faith in relationship to your brothers and sisters in Christ, to the office of pastor, to all that encompasses the word “church”? Paul sums it up this way: “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” “Just follow your heart” — you will find that nowhere in a creed that’s called Christian, because your natural heart isn’t Christian. It’s not a Christian creed, or even a good piece of advice. Here’s what you should think instead: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” That’s the prayer. That prayer relies solely on God’s grace, on a voice that comes from without, outside your own brain and your own heart and your own gut, to know what is good and right to do in your circumstance, in your life. For you have the forgiveness of sins, and you have the new heart in Christ. That’s the heart of the man. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen.