“Seeing with Your Heart” -Dr. John Nunes

First St Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church, Chicago, IL 2 June 2019

The Rev John Arthur Nunes, PhD

President, Concordia College, New York

“Seeing with Your Heart” Ephesians 1:18 (Ascension Sunday—Observed)

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In the name of Jesus + Amen. 

It hurts, heartbreakingly, to see what we see in this world, doesn’t it? So much pain on this planet. We’re overexposed to a non-stop news cycle of negativity. We overwhelmed in our own families with folks who share the same blood but cannot share a meal together without fighting. We’re overcome with anxiety and doubt about what we see, like the workplace shooting in Virginia Beach this past Friday, leading, predictably to more politicians shooting off their mouths than to real leaders digging in and working together for solutions. 

Or, the school shootings that have become so commonplace that to mention them feels cliché. Or, the street shootings killing black and brown kids so frequently that it doesn’t even make the news anymore—because these erupt so predictably to wartime levels every time there’s a warm weather weekend on the west or south sides of Chicago. So much that we see doesn’t make any sense.

We sing triumphant songs like “new hymns throughout the world shall ring” but we see the same old sins destroying us. We pray “in peace, let us pray to the Lord,” but our souls are restless. We hear the promise that we will receive power, yet we feel so powerless. The more I see down here,

no wonder we’re gazing up there to find any shred of hope. And this morning we see our redeemer, the hope of the world blasting off back to heaven like a rocket man. Do I ever need, as Ephesians says, the eyes of my heart to be enlightened so that I can see rightly! Because when the eyes of our hearts are enlightened, it doesn’t necessarily change what we see, but how we see. We see the same things but we see them as strangely blessed. 

Yesterday was the funeral for Rachel Held Evan, the promising and provocative Christian columnist who died recently at mere 37 years old. There was a final benediction from a Lutheran speaker (Nadia Bolz Webber) which included these words which describes the sorts of things we see, but it calls them blessed:

Blessed are those whom no one else notices. 

The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. 

The laundry guys at the hospital. 

The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers. 

The closeted. 

The teens who have to figure out ways 

     to hide the new cuts on their arms. 

Blessed are the meek. 

  You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.

I take great comfort that it’s not only I who doesn’t get it, the more I live the more I realize the less I know. With the tip of your fingers, tap your chest six times proudly. Now repeat after me: I / DON’T / KNOW / EV - ERY – THING. I often need to do that with students. 

I have found that questions that cannot be answered are often more important for my spiritual growth than are answers that cannot be questioned.  

These students of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, these followers of Jesus called disciples were enrolled in a three-year course with front row seats to the life of Jesus. Imagine being an eye-witness and an ear-witness to the Son of God performing signs and wonder and you see it with your own eyes, and yet the writer tells us that even they, even they still needed their minds opened to understand the Scriptures. They couldn’t “get it” without mind-opening intervention. How can we expect to get it without some help from above? That’s why I go to church.

The 20th century philosopher from the U.S., Mortimer Adler, was student of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. He spent a lifetime as a professional philosopher contemplating the complex realm of ideas. A long lifetime, he born in 1902 and died in 2001 at 98. After a lifetime of philosophically trying to make sense of it all—was not baptized until he was 81 years old—here’s what he said after a lifetime of tangling with truth: “My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy." 

This faith, my sisters and my brothers, this faith that we believe, teach and confess in the Creeds, this faith, up to and including the mysterious Ascension of Jesus, his return to the right hand of God, this faith is so much more than a philosophy. The way of the ancients makes the most sense to me, “getting it” requires an existential leap, a suspension of rationalism, it demands that you repent from thinking you’ve got it all figured out. You don’t know everything! Live in the mystery. Walk by faith and not by sight. Forgive the unforgivable. Love the unlovable. See the unseeable and call it blessed. Cling to the promises, like the promises that God loves you in Jesus Christ and Christ forgives you without you deserving it. Promises like Holy Spirit will not leave you alone, but that this “breath of God,” this ruach, is as close as the very    next      breath     you     will     take. We have ridiculed childlike faith until we have all lost our ability to believe in anything or anyone or any hope or any dream anymore.

Wystan Hugh Auden weighs in: 

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

Yes so much that we see seems so hard to believe but St Paul asks you First St Paul in First Corinthians, the first chapter:
²⁰ Where is the one who is wise? 

      Where is the scribe? 

   Where is the debater of this age? 

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 

²¹ For since, in the wisdom of God, 

      the world did not know God through wisdom,

 God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, 

         to save those who believe. 

²² For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 

²³ but we proclaim Christ crucified, 

     a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 

²⁴ but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, 

   Christ [IS] the power of God and the wisdom of God.” 

 ²⁵ For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, 

     and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

I would like to conclude with an excerpt from a book I am currently writing, to be published sometime next year by Concordia Publishing House. It is called Meant for More. Pr Johnson and I talked about this yesterday, that haunting sense we all have that our lives are meant for more

 which makes it hard to see what we actually see. Thanks for indulging me: 

In the same way that the word “sign,” S-I-G-N, is tucked into the beginning of the word “significance,” a divine sign always precedes and points us towards our ultimate significance. A sign is something you can see only with the eyes of faith. Too often we get this backwards, pursuing significance without being attentive to the Spirit’s sign. That’s why we don’t see, we’re too busy chasing stuff that doesn’t matter. Exhausted by a chase that leaves us empty, some go through life waggling superficially from job to job, from relationship to relationship, from website to website. Others spin downward into ditches of doubt. 

I believe the way out is found “in, with, and under” the font’s water and the altar’s bread and wine. Here, we find Jesus. Here, the eyes of our hearts see the future in new ways—which is why the Lutheran Confessions call this “a sign” (AAC 24:69). Like the magi who followed the star, faith follows the promise, not counting the costs, the consequences, or the painful crosses that shape us. No, we cannot escape life without scars. Yes, even the best pathway can be like traveling through a maze in a confused haze; but visible hints show up along the journey: signs reminding us of that irrevocable, invisible Signature imprinted on our new natures. 

Do you need reviving today? Mark yourself daily with the sign of the cross, your baptism. Eat and drink regularly of the gifts at the altar, then go out into the world without fear. Walk boldly, you’ve heard the Word! Walk forward as a witness who has sensed the mystically familiar scent of this grace. Significance awaits you in Jesus. See it with the eyes of your heart, enlightened!

Amen.