Hardness of Heart ExtraChristy - Podcast
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- Christianity
How Hearts Get Hard and Why In God’s Name It Matters Hardness of Heart a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey DOWNLOAD A LIVE RECORDING Audio from worship at 10 AM Worship Service October 3, 2021 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Carson City. I am wearing a mask so the deep breathing is not a sign of illness but a sign of caring for others. edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine. Mark 10:2-16 Sermons also available free on iTunes I want to talk to you about hardness of heart. Hardness of heart. Now, forget what you know about being hard-hearted because that is probably society’s definition of what hard-hearted is: someone that is not kind, not generous, not compassionate. Kindness, generosity, and compassion are all good things. But in the Bible, the lack of them is not what makes one hard-hearted. To find out the Bible’s meaning of hard-hearted, we have to go back to the Hebrew Scriptures. There’s a lot of hard-heartedness going along in the Hebrew Scriptures. The most common place where there’s hard-heartedness is the story of – anyone? Anyone? Bueller? No? Nothing? Anybody on Zoom chat? The Exodus story with Pharaoh. That Pharaoh guy was always getting his heart hardened. Right? And every time there was a plague; Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. And it wasn’t because he wasn’t kind or generous or compassionate or understanding. Hard-hearted in the Bible means you can’t see what God is doing in the world. This comes from not caring why things are happening only how. And Pharaoh lived for the how, never the why. Remember the first plagues that came up, the frogs, the Nile turning to blood-red, all these things? Pharaoh was focused on how. Because he turned to his magicians, and his magicians did the same thing. Oh, well, that’s not anything special. My magicians can do that, as well. I know how you did it. I know the secret. I know the trick. I know the magic. And he completely missed why God was doing it. For that he was called “hard-hearted.” Hard-hearted is when we don’t see what God is doing in the world and instead focus on how we are in the world. Don’t we do that a lot? In the beginning of our Greek scripture reading we hear more about how. In fact, all through this chapter it’s about the hows presented to Jesus, and Jesus going, why is God doing this in the world? The Pharisees come up and say is it lawful – how – for a man to divorce his wife? And Jesus asks them, what does the law say? And they answer with a how. Well, you give her a certificate of divorce, you go to a notary public, you get it stamped, you do all the things and that. And Jesus calls that “hard-hearted.” Not because of the lack of compassion or kindness, the meanness of divorce, but because, as he goes on to explain, it’s not what God intends. You see, Jesus isn’t here giving some moral rules for divorce. He isn’t here outlawing divorce. He isn’t tell you how to live your life. He isn’t telling you a bunch of reasons. We don’t have to go back and break out the scarlet letter “A” and put it on people so we know not to marry them. He’s telling us the why. And I know you all are a little titillated, maybe, about that word “adultery.” Can we say that in church? Have the children left? But you know, adultery is not just what we usually think of it in culture. Adultery means to water down; right? If you have adulterated milk, that means someone put some water in it or some other things, watered it down. If a food or anything else is adulterated, it means it’s not the way it should be. If you think about that, the why of the adultery, instead of the scandlous how, it’s obvious today whoever does these things isn’t living the way God wants us to live. Every time in this chapter, and it’s three stories in one chapter, but we’ve only have two this week because as Father Jeff says, the lectionary elf says oh, no, only two, only tw
How Hearts Get Hard and Why In God’s Name It Matters Hardness of Heart a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey DOWNLOAD A LIVE RECORDING Audio from worship at 10 AM Worship Service October 3, 2021 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Carson City. I am wearing a mask so the deep breathing is not a sign of illness but a sign of caring for others. edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine. Mark 10:2-16 Sermons also available free on iTunes I want to talk to you about hardness of heart. Hardness of heart. Now, forget what you know about being hard-hearted because that is probably society’s definition of what hard-hearted is: someone that is not kind, not generous, not compassionate. Kindness, generosity, and compassion are all good things. But in the Bible, the lack of them is not what makes one hard-hearted. To find out the Bible’s meaning of hard-hearted, we have to go back to the Hebrew Scriptures. There’s a lot of hard-heartedness going along in the Hebrew Scriptures. The most common place where there’s hard-heartedness is the story of – anyone? Anyone? Bueller? No? Nothing? Anybody on Zoom chat? The Exodus story with Pharaoh. That Pharaoh guy was always getting his heart hardened. Right? And every time there was a plague; Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. And it wasn’t because he wasn’t kind or generous or compassionate or understanding. Hard-hearted in the Bible means you can’t see what God is doing in the world. This comes from not caring why things are happening only how. And Pharaoh lived for the how, never the why. Remember the first plagues that came up, the frogs, the Nile turning to blood-red, all these things? Pharaoh was focused on how. Because he turned to his magicians, and his magicians did the same thing. Oh, well, that’s not anything special. My magicians can do that, as well. I know how you did it. I know the secret. I know the trick. I know the magic. And he completely missed why God was doing it. For that he was called “hard-hearted.” Hard-hearted is when we don’t see what God is doing in the world and instead focus on how we are in the world. Don’t we do that a lot? In the beginning of our Greek scripture reading we hear more about how. In fact, all through this chapter it’s about the hows presented to Jesus, and Jesus going, why is God doing this in the world? The Pharisees come up and say is it lawful – how – for a man to divorce his wife? And Jesus asks them, what does the law say? And they answer with a how. Well, you give her a certificate of divorce, you go to a notary public, you get it stamped, you do all the things and that. And Jesus calls that “hard-hearted.” Not because of the lack of compassion or kindness, the meanness of divorce, but because, as he goes on to explain, it’s not what God intends. You see, Jesus isn’t here giving some moral rules for divorce. He isn’t here outlawing divorce. He isn’t tell you how to live your life. He isn’t telling you a bunch of reasons. We don’t have to go back and break out the scarlet letter “A” and put it on people so we know not to marry them. He’s telling us the why. And I know you all are a little titillated, maybe, about that word “adultery.” Can we say that in church? Have the children left? But you know, adultery is not just what we usually think of it in culture. Adultery means to water down; right? If you have adulterated milk, that means someone put some water in it or some other things, watered it down. If a food or anything else is adulterated, it means it’s not the way it should be. If you think about that, the why of the adultery, instead of the scandlous how, it’s obvious today whoever does these things isn’t living the way God wants us to live. Every time in this chapter, and it’s three stories in one chapter, but we’ve only have two this week because as Father Jeff says, the lectionary elf says oh, no, only two, only tw