Sunday 14 February 2016

Lips and Hearts (Rom 10:8b-13)



(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Feb 14, 2016, Lent I)

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On a Day Such As Today

“Be mine.” “Yes dear.” “Hug me.” “XOXO.” Or today, you may find: “Text me.” “Friend me.” “Tweet me.” Thus read the candy hearts that will be consumed by countless Valentine’s Day celebrants today. Maybe you’ve already had a few yourself. I haven’t. But even so, they’ve been on my mind as I read today’s text….

Maybe it’s just because today is Valentine’s Day. Maybe it’s just because today is a day when millions of people will exchange heart-shaped gifts and confess their love with their lips. Whatever the reason is, when I read today’s familiar passage, I am struck by a couple of unfamiliar repetitions within it. “Lips.” “Hearts.” Two images in the passage that had never struck me before. But on a day such as today, I cannot help but notice them. And on a day such as today, they cannot help but conjure up two helpless individuals gazing into each other’s eyes, two hearts somehow breaking through their protective ribcages and straining toward one another, two pairs of lips spouting sweetness or silliness…or doing whatever else lips do.

A How-to for Getting into Heaven?

Never before today did these starry-eyed visions visit me when I read this passage. Before today, this passage was simply a set of instructions for salvation, a how-to for getting into heaven. I cannot tell you how many times I memorized one of its verses in youth group: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (10:9).

Before Valentine’s Day gate-crashed my reading of today’s scripture, before its “lips” and “hearts” infiltrated my interpretation, this passage explained membership in God’s club. It outlined the initiation rite for Christianity. Many Christians trace the birth of their faith back to the moment when they said “the prayer,” a prayer which may well have included some of today’s passage. And for many Christians, “the prayer” really is like an induction. A leader says, “Now repeat after me,” and carefully planned phrase by carefully planned phrase, you would confess Jesus as Lord.

At the Heart of Faith Is a Heart

Which is a bit odd, to be honest, because this sort of programmed faith seems to have been precisely what Paul was trying to get away from when he wrote this text. In today’s text, he’s trying to jailbreak faith, to get it away from the law, from the idea that you have to fulfill some requirement in order to be saved. He’s trying to say, “You don’t have to complete a holy merit project or say a certain sacred password in order to receive life.”[1]

Readers have traditionally been quick to point out that Paul is criticizing the legalistic Jews of his day, the ones who followed the law but had forgotten why, who had lost the spirit behind the law. But in fact what Paul says cuts both ways. If some Jewish believers had been guilty of reducing faith to a set of laws, then some Christian believers have been equally guilty of reducing faith to a set of beliefs. So what really is at the heart of faith, if not laws or beliefs? “The word [of faith],” Paul says, quoting the Jewish scriptures approvingly, “is near you, on your lips and in your heart” (10:8). At the heart of faith is—what else?—but a heart.

A Confession of Love

I guess what Valentine’s Day and its imagery of hearts and lips have helped me to see in today’s scripture is that our faith is not some abstract idea held at a distance from our bodies. It is forged, rather, in the passionate furnace of our bodies, where we feel things, where our inspiration comes from, where the truest words our lips will ever speak come from. The picture Paul is painting is not of raised hands and solemn oaths. It is, rather, a picture of lips and hearts. It is not the confession of a creed (or the completion of a deed) and subsequent initiation into a club. It is a confession of love. It has a lot more to do with the way a parent kisses a child goodnight and says, “I love you,” or the way a couple share the depths of their hearts through trembling lips. These are the scenes that reflect the heart, that reveal an undying commitment.

What is this word of faith? Does it sound more like, “I believe in God, the Father almighty?” Or does it sound more like, “I do”? More like “I take this one…for better or worse…in sickness and health”? What is this word that is near us, this word of faith on our lips and in our hearts, if not a word of love?

John writes, “We love because he first loved us,” and so as I reread today’s scripture, I cannot help but envision two lovers, or a parent and a child, or a child and her beloved dog—two individuals in love with one another. This story is two-sided. It is a dialogue. The word first trembled on God’s lips, first stirred in God’s heart. God believes in us with all the divine heart (cf. 1 Cor 13:7), confesses an undying love for us with trembling divine lips. Today’s story is less about a creed that binds us to a master, less about a peace treaty between conqueror and conquered, and more about a call and response between lover and beloved.

If our confession of faith is indeed a confession of lips and hearts, then it really is a confession of love.

A Confession That Stirs on All Lips, in All Hearts

And while it is a confession that may be contained in the church, it is by no means contained by the church. This confession of faith, this confession of love, is one that, I would wager, everyone makes from time to time, one that we cannot help but make if we are living in the world with all our heart. It is not “lip service” that we pay because we have to. (Unfortunately that’s what a church service or a pledge of allegiance or other such programmed confessions often become.) Our confession of faith and love is the free and unplanned response of the soul, a response to God’s own confession of love for us. God’s confession of love and our response—this back-and-forth is nothing more than the hearts and lips that Paul paints for us: two hearts breaking out of their protective ribcage, two lips trembling with words that cannot do justice to the depths of feeling within.

And this back-and-forth confession of love, God’s for us and ours for God, is unique, different each time, catching us by surprise each time, arising as it does from the heart. It is the morning sunrise that God embraces you with, and in response a word dances on your lips, a belief in your heart, “How beautiful.” It is the smile of a grandchild with which God says to you, “I love you,” in a way that no words could ever express, and a word weightlessly rises to your lips, a belief in your heart, “Oh….” It is a silent hug of consolation, or forgiveness, through which God’s loving tears wet your face, and a word quivers on your lips, a belief in your heart, “Thank God.”

Salvation—Or the Embrace of God

To restage what has traditionally been read merely as a confession of faith, as more fully a confession of love—as Valentine’s Day and its lips and hearts have unwittingly helped us to do[2]—also means to restage what Paul says comes next: salvation. To “be saved” in the Greek means literally to be made safe. And what is the greatest anxiety of any love-stricken person if not the fear of rejection, the fear that his or her love will not be held safe in the heart of the beloved, but will be loosely handled, dropped, shattered on the hard ground? And so what else is salvation but being held safe in the embrace of God, being hugged into wholeness by the God who is invisible in all things? What else is salvation but knowing that the moment of beating hearts and trembling lips is not an exception, not just a blip in our lives, but is rather a kiss from the God who dwelt fully in Christ and seeks to dwell fully in all things, an undying promise that this God loves you and will always love you and nothing—“neither death, nor life…nor anything else in all creation” (Rom 8:38-39)—nothing will ever separate you from that love.

Prayer

Tender but insistent God, the word was first on your lips, first in your heart. It was a word of love. We have all heard its echo in our lives—most fully in the person of Christ, whose love allures us, enthralls us, fills us with desire, and brings the word to our lips and our hearts. May our confessions of faith be unique and heartfelt confessions of love for you. For it is in this love that we are truly saved. In the name of Christ. Amen.


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[1] Cf. 10:5, 8: “[T]he righteousness that comes from the law [says], ‘the person who does these things will live by them.’” The righteousness that comes from faith, however, says, “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” In other words, salvation is not earned through the law, through doing a certain deed or saying a certain word. It is received through faith, through what is said and done in the heart.

[2] Valentine’s Day was an uninvited guest in today’s lectionary. And yet a strange thing has happened. It has added depth to today’s text, even as today’s text has added depth to it. Love, if Paul has anything to say about it, has to do with more than candy hearts. And faith, if we truly allow it the “lips” and “hearts” that Paul gives it, has to do with a lot more than disembodied confessions.

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