Blessed are the Pure in Heart for they will See God

A sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III

St. Mark’s Presbyterian

March 6, 2005

For the past week, I have tried to live inside of this beatitude and to seek to understand what Jesus meant when he said, Blessed are the Pure in Heart for they will see God. I must confess that it has been far more easy to understand what Jesus did not mean by purity than to say what he did mean.  In his life, his witness and teaching the historical Jesus launched a spiritual broadside against purity as the central religious structure of his people.  Jesus attacked the so- called purity codes of his own religious tradition in his willingness to cross over the boundaries between the clean and the unclean, between Jew and Gentile, healthy and sick, men and women, between the righteous and the sinner. Jesus seemed completely oblivious to the concerns about purity of body, of food or whom you sat down to eat with. He said we do not make ourselves pure by what we do on the outside but what comes from within. He did not seem to have a whole lot to say about sexual purity beyond suggesting that the sins of the flesh were far less grievous to God than the sin of pride and lovelessness. Throughout history, there are have been those who sought to purify the church by excluding those they considered impure. Today it is the purity of the church that is invoked when some would exclude gays and lesbians as unclean.  And we are witnessing an especially virulent recurrence of immigrant backlash, that unfortunate pattern in US history of excluding the immigrant as an unclean presence that pollutes the purity of the nation. I believe that the living Christ is working in the world to overturn this understanding of purity. But what is the blessing of the pure in heart that Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount and that the Living Christ is calling us to experience today? What is the blessing of the pure in heart and how do we find it? 

Webster’s Dictionary definition of purity makes it clear that purity describes many dimensions of life. In chemistry purity is defined as being undiluted with foreign substances. In biology, purity points toward the homogeneity of a particular species or group of creatures.  But reading these definitions do not really help us understand purity in a spiritual sense. We can not really understand what is purity of heart until we see it embodied in human life. In the year 1958, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk was returning from an extended period in solitary retreat when he had his eyes opened standing on a busy corner in downtown Louisville, KY.  He wrote: "In Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. I have the immense joy of being human, a member of the race in which God himself became incarnate. The sorrows and stupidities of the human condition can no longer overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. If only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun". Once when I was in Louisville attending the General Assembly of the PCUSA, I set off from my hotel in search of Fourth and Walnut in search of the place where Merton had his epiphany. There on that same street corner where Merton had seen everything in a new light, was a state historical marker; perhaps the only historical marker in the country dedicated to a spiritual epiphany. As I stood there enjoying a moment of quiet reverie, a panhandler approached me, hitting me up for a handout. As I turned and faced this panhandler, I have to admit that I could not see him as Merton might have seen him, shining in the light. Merton a holy man a contemplative monk: maybe he could experience purity of heart. But how about the rest of us who are busy getting our hands dirty in life. How about the rest of us who are attending to a thousand and one things in life?  In other words how do I get purified? How do I become pure in heart? How do I attain this blessing of the pure in heart that can see God?

The quest for spiritual purity has motivated all religious traditions throughout history.  Jews in the first century might have undergone a cleansing ritual of a bath, Early Christians thought of their baptism as a ritual cleansing. Mystics from a variety of traditions have cleansed the bodies through fasting and cleansed the soul through solitary prayer.

 Some Native Americans undergo purification through the experience of a sweat lodge.  In my own spiritual pilgrimage, Over and over again, I have gone to nature to find purity. Over and over again, I have felt purified by the beauty of God’s creation. A few years ago I spent a week hiking around in S.Utah.  Early one morning I followed a wash covered in sage and began to go deeper and deeper into this canyon until near the back of it I came to a group of pine trees gathered around a lovely spring fed pool. From there I looked up and saw the ruins of Anasazi cliff dwellings high above me. I lay down in the shade of those pine trees next to the pool of water where it must have been that the women gathered to wash and the children to play. I listened to the descending notes of a canyon wren. The same breeze that was pushing clouds down the canyon brushed gently against my face.  My mind, my heart, my inward self slowly began to reflect this landscape. My soul became the open spaciousness of the canyon, the strength and patience of that ancient rock; my heart opened up with a clarity that was reflected in that spring fed pool at my feet. Is this what Jesus meant in his Sermon on the Mount when he said,” Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God?”

Go with me back to that redrock canyon and let’s sit awhile beside that spring fed pool. Look with me into the constant stream of thoughts and feelings that move through our hearts at any given moment. See those clouds moving through the canyon. I cannot stop them, or judge them I only watch and learn and accept. It is impossible to cling to a cloud and it is futile to cling to any thought or feeling passing through us even when it is this experience of peace and well being.  Is this purity of heart to know that in my deepest self, I am not all the flurry and chaos, the thousand and one thoughts and impressions that pass through my heart? Is this purity of heart to know that I am this quiet warm earth, ancient and wise and good? Purity of heart is the compassionate mindfulness that allows one to sit in one spot ground oneself and watch everything that passes through us with acceptance and trust.  Purity of heart to find a certain amount of detachment that comes from knowing you are not any one thing that you are thinking, you are more than the sum of all your thoughts and feelings. Purity of heart is to be able to sit down and look into this spring fed pool where we are cooling off our hot feet. We swish our feet and the pool briefly becomes murky and obscure. But as we watch the sediments settle and gradually the pool returns to its transparent clarity.   With this beatitude, Jesus is saying to us “ the human heart is like that pool. Every human being has within them, the spiritual transparency of this pool but our souls become stirred up with busyness and anxious striving. The clear pool of our soul is obscured by pettiness, by fear and self-loathing. If we can learn to be still, to wait and pray, the transparency of the soul, that purity of heart can be restored which will enable us to see God in ourselves and in everything and everyone around us. Spiritual purity is not a process of adding something to your life that you lack. It is a process of subtracting something that is in the way.  Spiritual growth is not accumulating that which you still lack – be it purity of heart. It is letting go of that which still blinds you. It is allowing the soul to return to its blessed state, the original blessing of knowing that God is over all, through all, in all, God is all!   Look back into the spring fed pool of that red rock canyon and see the tiny fish swimming in the sparkling transparency. You are like that fish. We are all fishes that swim in an ocean that is god. God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being. God desires to bless you with purity of heart that will enable you to see God in all things.  

Okay, we are no longer in a beautiful Utah canyon, sitting beside that spring fed pool. We are now on the corner of fourth and walnut on any busy intersection in our lives. How do I claim the blessing of the pure in heart when my life might feel splintered into thousands of details and fragments that hardly seem god-like? How do I claim the blessing of the pure in heart when my heart may be filled with doubleminded confusion and ambivalence? How do I practice this beatitude in my daily life so that I can experience the blessing of the pure in heart that see God?  A wise Christian thinker by the name of Soren Kierkegaard once wrote that purity of heart is to will one thing. To will one thing is not to search through all the big and important things that could be the goals of life and then to decide on one.  It is not simply to set one’s priorities and to stay focused. It is not to make anything the one thing. No whereever a person is in world, whatever road he or she travels, when she wills one thing, she is on the road to God. All ways lead to God if one wills only one thing.  What is that one thing? St. Paul said it was to seek the Kingdom of God. Let me say it a different way. Purity of heart is found in the person who seeks to respond to God in all things. Purity of heart is found in the person who seeks to respond to God in all things. If gradually in all things, we begin to will this one thing of responding in love to God, our eyes will be opened, and we will see God. And we will be blessed.