Tender Hearts

Psalm 34, Ephesians 4:25-5:2

August 13, 2006

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Near the end of the film The Wizard of Oz, after Dorothy and her friends have melted the Wicked Witch of the West and returned to discover that the Wonderful Wizard is actually a man hiding behind a curtain, each of them waits to receive their desires from the Wizard. When the Tin Man asks again for a heart, the Wizard says this:

As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how

lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can

be made unbreakable. I could have been a world figure, a power among men,

a successful wizard, had I not been obstructed by a heart.

This passage from Paul’s letter to Ephesus and the one that immediately precedes what we read today has a lot to say about hearts and their power. Just before the piece we heard, Paul cautions the new Christians not to be like those who are “alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart.” Then he urges the Ephesians to “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

What is all this about our hearts and their relative textures, hard or tender? Obviously we are not in medical territory here. Nor are we in the realm of romance. In Paul’s time and culture, the heart was not used as an idiom only for feelings, which is what we tend to do. We talk about a “broken heart” or a “bleeding heart” by which we mean emotions related to love and often relationships, hence all the heart stuff on Valentine’s Day. Paul’s readers understood the heart as not only the center of emotion, but the center period. All one’s personality, intellect, attitudes, plans, hopes, dreams, fears, and will as well as emotion all were understood as being unified in the heart, sort of like a combination of how we talk about the brain and the heart. Hence the great consequences of a heart being hardened, as was Pharaoh’s in Egypt when Moses wanted him to let the people go, or the consequences of a heart being tender, like Jesus. Hard or tender hearts can have an impact far beyond the life of the one in whose chest that heart dwells.

I think something we have in common with the people of Paul’s time is that hardness of heart seems to be considered a requirement for leadership in government or commerce while tenderness of heart is often considered the opposite of strength. Hence the Wizard of Oz’s comment that he could have been a world figure or a power among people if he had not been “obstructed” by a heart, presumably a tender one. So we see lots of evidence around us daily of hard hearts. These people who would have gotten on jets in London and thought nothing of killing hundreds of their fellow human beings to make a political, or worse a religious, point. Hezbollah and the Israelis, equally culpable in my book, raining bombs down on apartment buildings and terrorizing the Lebanese people, as Mary Mikael, president of the American University in Beirut said last week, undoing in six days all the rebuilding work of 15 years since the Lebanese civil war ended. Hard hearts. American soldiers in Iraq who can in cold blood rape a child and kill her family to keep them silent, and then claim the stress of combat excuses their actions. Then there’s the hardness of heart of political leaders who put young men and women in such situations to begin with. Right here in Connecticut, young people use guns on each other for the most incredible of reasons, as one of our Divinity students discovered recently, and both street gangs and elite school fraternities require new members to inflict harm on someone as a sign of strength. Get tough! Harden your hearts or you can’t make it in this world.

Where has the witness of the church been about how our hearts might work differently? Oh, we have our own history, and present, to deal with along those lines. What is our witness? When I was in the Middle East, I discovered that the memory of the Crusades is not as distant there as it is here, so that when the U.S. Embassy was built outside Amman, Jordan to resemble a crusader castle (I saw it), the message is not lost on the population. Then there’s our history of slavery, often excused at the time, even here in New Haven, by appealing to the Bible (what kind of hard and warped heart does it take to use the conversion of Africans to Christianity as an excuse to enslave and torture human beings?). More recently, there’s the witness of Northern Ireland, and closer in geography and in time, there’s the kind of religious language used in this country to justify all sorts of hard-hearted behavior toward other people.

So if that’s the hard hearts, what do Paul’s “tender hearted” folk look like? The Jerusalem Bible translates verse 31, which precedes the “tender hearted” comment, like this: “Never hold grudges or lose your temper or raise your voice to anybody or call each other names or allow any sort of spitefulness.” Sounds like instructions a teacher might make to children on the playground, “now say you’re sorry, use your indoor voice, don’t call each other names, take a time out and calm down!” But Paul wasn’t writing to children. Hard hearts hold onto those grudges tightly, sometimes they pass them down to their children (my husband is from a small town in Michigan whose original residents all came over on the same boat from Bavaria in the late 19^th century and he claims in his childhood their descendants could still argue about who said what to whom on the boat!) Sometimes nations or ethnic groups make sure to teach those grudges to each new generation ensuring hatred that is hundreds of years old might flare up as it did in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda or hundreds of other places. Tender hearts seek to do what the Truth and Reconciliation committees have tried to do in South Africa: get at the truth not to inflame hatred but to allow healing.

Hard hearts and hot heads seem to go together, too. The loud voices, after all, get the press, and all too often the loud voices are the angry ones. I read an article this week by an Arab-American young woman who writes poignantly of how she wishes Americans could know the Lebanon she knows, the colorful blend of peoples, culturally sophisticated (Beirut was once called the Paris of the Middle East), religiously diverse living in a land of striking beauty. She tells of how lonely her Lebanese American roommate feels because the cry of the media and powerful voices here stand up mostly for Israel’s rights. She longed to hear loud voices with tender hearts for the people of Lebanon. Then, at a concert by the group the Flaming Lips, the lead singer, Wayne Coyne, invited the crowd to sing along to his next song to “stop Israel from bombing Lebanon.” Her roommate’s heart soared to hear out loud in a public place a cry from a tender heart for the suffering of Lebanon. We also might cry out loud for Hezbollah to stop bombing Israel, but Hezbollah’s leaders, we know, do not listen to our voices, indeed disdain them. Israel, however, has a strong relationship with our nation and we have considerable influence there. Tender hearts need to raise voices not of hate and revenge, but of justice, and raise them often in the halls of the powerful in this country.

And, Paul says, don’t call each other names. My how in hardness of heart labels have become dirty words. “You immigrant, conservative, liberal, feminazi, fundy, snob, gay,” and I’m not even going into the territory of racial or ethnic labels or those seemingly innocuous “jokes,” as in “can’t you take a joke; you need a thicker skin” –read harder heart.

You get the picture. Our friend the Wizard was misguided when he said that hearts would never be practical until they could be made unbreakable. The preacher Tony Campolo has a different take on that. He once said that faithfulness means your heart breaking for the same things that break God’s heart. Tender hearts do break. But having a tender heart does not mean being passive, going to your room and feeling sad. That’s certainly not what Paul means here. The Psalmist today sang that God is near the brokenhearted and saves the “crushed in spirit.” How will these people know that God is near? That’s not going to happen by us feeling sad. If groups like the Flaming Lips or Bono and U2 can raise their voices and proclaim that hardness of heart is not the only way to lead and be strong, God knows the church ought to be doing more along those lines, too. I pray that all of us, like the Wizard, may be obstructed by our hearts from being satisfied with the world’s definitions of power, strength and practicality. Let us put our imaginations to work and find ways here and in the larger world to work on tenderizing the profusion of hard hearts. Amen.