June 23, 2024
Open Wide Your Hearts
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
We are in a series this summer in 2 Corinthians, and today’s reading comes from the sixth chapter of that letter. Paul is writing perhaps his most agonized and intimate letter to a church he founded in the city of Corinth. Listen once more for God’s word to us:
“As we work together with God, we entreat you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For God says, ‘At an acceptable time, I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation, I have helped you.’ Look, now is the acceptable time; look, now is the day of salvation. We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry. But as servants of God, we have commended ourselves in every way: in great endurance, afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; in purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well-known; as dying, and look—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything. We have spoken frankly to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return—I speak as to children—open wide your hearts also.”
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
We are here for a service of worship, and we are here to say goodbye to Jeremy and Garrett, and to give thanks for Jeremy’s ministry here. My sermon might be long, so you’ve got time to breathe. Try not to make it too long! If you’re friends with him on Facebook, you might have seen a picture he posted yesterday of Jeremy and Garrett enjoying ice cream in front of their favorite ice cream shop. The caption read, “We took a break from packing to go to our favorite ice cream place.” Joe Potter, who is helping them move with his company, commented, “Get back to packing!”
Would you join me in prayer once more?
Oh God, settle our hearts, open our ears to hear your word. Give to me the gift of preaching, that we may hear the word that you say to us—not simply a human word, but a word of grace from your Spirit to ours. In your name, we pray. Amen.
I want to talk with you this morning about that last phrase from Paul: “open wide your hearts.”
The first successful heart surgery was performed in Chicago in 1893 by Daniel Hale Williams, the son of a barber who founded the first Black-owned hospital in America. Williams had rallied the state of Illinois to create the nation’s first interracial hospital in 1891, called the Provident Hospital and Training School, to train white and Black doctors and Black nurses.
So, on a summer night in 1893, James Cornish walked in with a stab wound to the chest. Repairing the artery around the heart, Dr. Williams noticed that the pericardium had a wound. With only salt to cleanse the wound and no transfusion available, he grabbed it with his forceps and sewed the wound together with the heart still beating. After 51 days of recovery, James Cornish walked out and lived another 20 years. That was in 1893, and Dr. Daniel Williams was hailed as a hero. His legacy in the Black medical community continues to such a degree that at the Howard University Medical School, they call a code blue, which is a life-threatening situation, a “Dr. Dan.”
Now, I tell you that story because the Apostle Paul, writing 1,800 years earlier, was kind of working on the same thing, but from a spiritual standpoint. He was trying to do heart surgery on the church in Corinth. He was trying to open up and reconfigure their hearts, or at least make room for God to do that. Their hearts were closed to the gospel of God’s love and reconciliation. They were baptized members of the church, the people God had gathered in Corinth, but their hearts were not open—they were not changed, they were not healed.
Why is that? Because they continued to see their world and the people, especially people like Paul, according to the values of their culture. They continued to look at themselves, their friends in the church, and Paul through the values of success, prestige, reputation, and honor. Specifically, with Paul, who founded that church, they continued to be confused by their pastor. Have you ever been confused by your pastor? They continued to be embarrassed by their pastor. Hopefully, you’ve never been embarrassed by your pastor. Their friends would ask, “Well, you know, how’s your pastor doing now?” And they would have to say, “Well, I heard he’s in prison.” They’d say, “Well, have you seen Paul recently?” “Well, we did see him; he looked awful; he’d been beaten up.” They didn’t know how to interpret this. They were embarrassed by what he was doing, unsure about his life, confused by the way he conducted his ministry. They were divided over him. Some criticized him, some disagreed with his message. They saw his life through their cultural values of wealth, prestige, success, and honor. Their hearts were not yet open to the gospel of a suffering Savior, so they did not know what to make of Paul. They needed a change of heart. They needed to have their hearts opened and healed to a life that looked more like the gospel and less like their culture.
So Paul wrote them this letter to defend himself, yes, but also to commend his life as an example of the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ. His heart, he says, is open to them. He says, “I’ve opened my heart, I’ve let my hair down, I’m bearing my soul, I’m telling you exactly how it is.” And when we read these wonderful words, we read them with 2,000 years of history behind us and we see virtue all over every sentence. But that’s not how his audience would have heard it. This was exactly what they didn’t want to hear. This vulnerability and honesty from him made them really uncomfortable. They wanted a success story. They wanted to hear about how many more churches he had planted, how many people had attended, how many lives were being changed.
But Paul pressed on with a lot of rhetorical flourish, putting together this list of contrasts and clashes that sound like two notes’ dissonance that needs to be resolved. Yes, I’ve had beatings and imprisonments, and yes, I’ve found patience and kindness emerging. Yes, I’ve had hard work and sleepless nights, and yes, I found that I was able to speak the truth and find a place of genuine love for the people I was working with. Yes, there were riots; they ran me out of town. Yes, there was calamity; I was shipwrecked. But I found the power of God working through that stuff, and I found that I had a purity of spirit I hadn’t known before. Yes, I was treated as an impostor. Yes, I was misunderstood, sad, poor—yes, all of that. But at the same time, I found that I was well-known to God. I was truly myself, fully alive. I was rejoicing. I was making others rich. I possessed everything that mattered, and I was content.
Yes, there was hardship, and there was incredible blessing. For every hardship that Paul saw in his life, he perceived the resurrection life of Christ coming out of every pore. This is a mark of maturity as a Christian, as a follower of Christ. Maturity in faith is not getting to a point where you say, “You know, everything is going just fine. I see the hand of God behind every little thing, even when people I love move to a place like Nebraska.” Maturity in faith is not getting to that point because, friends, that’s shallow and hypocritical, and the harder we try to keep that veneer, the more brittle our faith becomes.
On the other hand, a mature life of faith is not a kind of gloom and doom embracing of suffering as if that were all there is and life is one tragedy after another. Rather, the truth about the life of faith is just what Paul is saying here. It’s not a little bit of this and a little bit of that—it’s a lot of both. The call of a life that is transformed by God’s love is to open our hearts wide to all of it, to refuse to be blinded or numbed by the shallow virtues that are symptomatic of a narrow and wounded heart. Rather, to be fully alive with a heart that is open and transformed by the persistent, suffering, patient love of God.
N.T. Wright, in commenting on this text—he’s a New Testament scholar—writes, “Part of the task, not only of being a Christian but of leading a Christian community, is to be able to grieve and celebrate at the same time, to share the pain and the joy of the world, and indeed the tears and the laughter of God.”
God wants us to open our hearts wide to all of it. There’s a song in our hymnal that captures this really well. It goes to a Celtic tune, we call it “Spirit, Open My Heart”:
“Spirit, open my heart to the joy and pain of living. As you love, may I love in receiving and in giving, Spirit, open my heart.”
That song’s been on my mind and heart a lot this week, partly because of this text, but partly because it was one of two songs that we asked our music director candidates to play for the audition eight-plus years ago in this sanctuary. So I went back this week and pulled out that file.
I have here a resume and a cover letter* that came on May 1st, 2016. A few of us gathered in this room—it was kind of dark, we were trying to keep people out of the narthex so nobody knew who we were talking to—and we had this guy, Jeremy Roberts, from Ohio, who was auditioning. We had his resume in front of us, and we knew that he filled the boxes: he was director of music, organist, M.A. in church music, Bachelor of Music, organ teacher, conducting teacher. I mean, he checked all the boxes. But we weren’t just looking for resume virtues. We were looking for mature Christian faith, for a heart wide open to the transforming love of God. And so, as we met you and talked with you and heard you play, we knew that we had found our person.
Jeremy, in your time here, your musical leadership has been stellar. Your Christian leadership has made a deep, deep impact. As I’ve talked with many of you in the last few weeks about what Jeremy’s ministry here has meant to you, so often people come back to your open heart—the open-heartedness with which you have led us in music—for which we are deeply, deeply grateful.
But this service is not just about saying goodbye to you, so I have a conclusion to give you in a minute. Today is a day of worship, and it’s also about us. It’s about our call not simply to admire the open hearts of others, but to open wide our own hearts. That’s what Paul’s getting at. It can be challenging in many ways to open our hearts. Our culture is not altogether different than the one Paul was writing to. We are enamored with the trappings of outward success, with wealth, and with winning. We look for strength; we long to be vulnerable but we’re afraid to be. We’re not sure of what to do with the hard things in our life or others’ lives. We’re not sure how to talk about them or open up about them. It doesn’t help that we are busy and we stay that way, that we curate our lives to present on social media, but we live with relatively few real friends who truly understand us.
Part of the reason that this session several months ago asked me, Shannon, and David to lead us in a small group ministry was to address this very need. We have a few small groups that meet in our congregation, and they are a source of life, faith, and strength for the people in them. But we need more. More of us need to be in intentional groups that are designed not just for fellowship but for sharing life together—joys and sorrows, lots of both at the same time. Caitlyn and I plan to be in a small group this fall. I hope you will choose to be in a small group this fall. Join us in this hearts wide open kind of community. Shannon is planning for it, and in mid-July, she’s going to start getting information out and a time to sign up. Please prayerfully consider that as part of your life of faith.
Let me conclude this sermon with a quote from one of Jeremy’s very favorite theologians, Nadia Bolz-Weber. If you don’t know who she is, she’s a Lutheran pastor and public theologian who’s been through a great deal of pain, including addiction and wrestling with shame, to come to a place of grace and openness to God and his love in her life. As she reflected on her life in one of her books and the way that pain and joy rubbed together, where hardship and blessing coexist, she wrote this:
“When these kinds of things happen in my life—things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on their own—I just have no other explanation than this: God.”
That’s what Paul means by this strange resume of hardship and blessing. He means that if we will open our hearts wide to God’s grace, we will find more beauty and redemption and reconciliation than our cranky personalities or stony hearts or anxious spirits or fearful souls could ever manufacture on our own. We will live fully alive, and the only explanation will be that God is love and it is true.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
* Thanksgiving and Blessing for Jeremy Roberts
I was trying to think about what I could say to capture the eight-plus years of ministry that you’ve offered this congregation. The friendship you’ve offered all of us through lots of transitions, including a worldwide pandemic. On the other side of the pandemic, those of us who have been here for a long time can see and hear the evidence of the fruitfulness of your ministry. This is evident in the children and youth, in the hearts that are open wide through the gift of music and ministry.
Before I turn it over to you to say a few words, I think the best thing I can do is quote from the cover letter we received from you on May 1st. This is what sold us:
“In Celtic theology, there are places in nature which are often referred to as thin places. These thin places are seen as mystical spaces where the veil between heaven and earth is thin. I believe that music can create such places, places where we commune with God and the spirit is alive and moving among us. I have a passion for creating worship that allows all of God’s people, no matter our age or station in life, to experience these places. As a musician, I am passionate about proclaiming the gospel in word and song. I have a relational approach to ministry that is deeply rooted in the Triune God who reaches out and forms relationships with us through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”
We have experienced the integrity and truth of those words.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina