The Heart of the Problem

The scriptures referred to are Psalm 51:1-10 and 1 Timothy 1:12-17.

In the internet comedy Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the title character, an aspiring and not very successful supervillain, says, “The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.” And in that short statement we have a diagnosis of the world and a proposed solution. Unfortunately the solution is one people have been trying since the beginning of history: dictatorship. Give one human being absolute power and our problems are solved. And we've seen that solution fail time and again. And those who seek such power tend to have as their primary qualifications not wisdom or a sense of justice but strength and aggressiveness. History is littered with the results of the damage done by emperors, kings and conquerors.

But the diagnosis in Dr. Horrible's statement is rather vague. Yes, the world is a mess but why? In what way? Pinpoint the specific disease and its cause and you can start to look for a way to treat or even cure it. Which people have been trying to do for most of history as well. And various diagnoses and cures have been suggested and tried.

For many the problem is chaos and the solution is a strong highly organized country, with a strong leader and a strong military and strong laws and a strong enforcement of the laws. One problem is, as we've seen over and over, giving a person too much power tends to corrupt them. If you can do just about anything, what's to stop you? No one is completely immune to that temptation. Even the philosopher/emperor Marcus Aurelius, considered the last of the Five Good Emperors, was accused of putting friends and relatives into positions of power. And he is memorialized by a 130 foot marble column in Rome celebrating his wars against the barbarians. It depicts the destruction of their villages, the killing of unarmed civilians and the cruel punishment of his enemies. His stoic philosophy did not make him any less susceptible to committing atrocities. He was succeeded by his son, the dictatorial Commodus, whose reign marks the end of the Pax Romana or era of Roman Peace.

But another problem with that solution is the lack of content of those laws. If the main idea is simply that the laws must be strong and zealously enforced, then the Nazis or North Korea would qualify as a viable solution to chaos. But if they are not just laws and if the enforcement is harsh, that's not so much an improvement over chaos as it is the opposite extreme. The trains may run on time but you might notice your fellow passengers are gradually disappearing into concentration camps or mental asylums or prisons or killing fields. I'm not sure suffering and death at the hands of a police state is better than suffering and death at the hands of random marauders.

But even if the laws are just and their enforcement done with understanding and mercy, that will not magically eliminate crime and violence. Those problems come from people.

The sociological diagnosis is that poverty is the root cause of all the world's problems. And I don't wish to minimize poverty's real and terrible effect on people and their physical and mental health. A lot of problems would be solved if we made sure everyone had enough to eat and a place to live and the necessary healthcare to live a full and healthy life. There's a reason you don't see unrest or riots in the suburbs or in wealthy gated communities. The majority of people in those places are happy with the status quo. You don't usually see a lot of crime there. Well, not violent crime. Well, not outside homes where it can be seen. They are not immune from domestic violence or neglect. And those people are more likely to be the victims of pyramid schemes or other forms of financial fraud than the poor are, for obvious reasons. Not being poor does not bestow moral superiority, though people often think it does. It just means that problems don't come from folks just trying to survive. The problems such people cause are different.

Some see the root of our problems as ignorance. Education is the answer. But again while education is definitely a good thing and preferable to ignorance, it is not a panacea. Mere knowledge does not make people better. There have been a number of serial killers who were medical doctors. The Unabomber had a PhD in mathematics. The BTK killer had degrees in electronics and in Administration of Justice. Being smarter doesn't necessarily make you good; it just makes you more clever at doing bad things.

Some, however, think the real knowledge that people need is esoteric. The Gnostics, the Theosophists and plenty of conspiracy theorists on You Tube have lured people in with the idea that learning the truth about the the hidden and mystical laws governing the universe will somehow save them. So do cults, giving people the feeling that they know the real score and are therefore part of the elite, as opposed to the ignorant people, some of whom, they feel, are perversely and willfully ignorant of the truth.

Which leads us to the thing that conspiracy theories and cults and everyday bigotry have in common: the idea that what's wrong with the world is “those people.” Each group fills in the definition of “those people” with some other group they didn't like in the first place: the Jews, the Catholic church, Muslims, religious people in general, atheists, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, corporations, the rich, the poor, this race or country or that.

The problem with all these diagnoses and solutions, even the ones that have some truth to them, is that they leave out one key factor: our own moral failures. All humans are incapable of doing the right thing all the time and in every area of of their life. This problem is not confined to “those people”; it's in all of us. Good laws and the elimination of poverty and good education can help. But ask yourself this: what stands in the way of those good things being more widespread? Why do some laws favor certain people and groups over others? Why do some neighborhoods have better schools and resources? Why have even middle class wages, adjusted for inflation, stayed basically stagnant since the 1970s? The answer is greed and shortsightedness based in selfishness. These are moral problems. We know how to fix these things. We don't want to.

As our psalm and epistle this week show, the beginning of the solution is recognizing your own moral failures. Psalm 51 is traditionally attributed to David when his adultery with Bathsheba was exposed by the prophet Nathan. But let's not forget his engineering of the perfect crime: having her husband Uriah sent to the front in a war and then having the other troops withdraw so he is killed. (2 Samuel 11) Even David, a man after God's heart (Acts 13:22), could not resist abusing his power. But when it comes out, rather than pass the buck and blame others, he admits his sin and the evil he has done. He acknowledges that his impulse to do what he wants, regardless of the consequences, goes all the way back to his start in life. He asks God not just to forgive his sins but to cleanse him through and through. He pleads, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

Jesus diagnosed what is wrong with the world. He said, “For from within, out of the human heart, come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.” (Mark 7:21-22) The heart was considered the seat of the mind and will and emotions. The heart of the world's problems is the human heart. The world is a mess because our hearts are. What they pump out into the world is not healthy.

Medically if you are in heart failure, you are beyond cutting out salt and junk food and exercising more. You need a new heart. And you need faith in your cardiac surgeon who is going to cut you open and cut out the heart you were born with and put in the new heart which will restore you to life. And, by the way, for you to receive that new heart someone has to die.

In a spiritual sense David realizes that what's wrong with him is his heart. He knows this is fundamentally a moral and spiritual problem. He needs to change internally and he needs to do so in a deep and profound way. And he knows he can't do it by himself. He needs God to come in and fix him by giving a new heart and a new spirit.

In our epistle Paul admits something similar to his young colleague Timothy. He says, “...I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence.” Before he was converted, Paul, then called Saul, was a zealous persecutor of the first Christians, trying to wipe out this heresy by wiping out “those people” who spread their belief in Jesus. As he admits to King Agrippa in the book of Acts, “I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the saints in prison and I cast my vote against them when they were sentenced to death.” (Acts 26:9-10) So this future hero of the faith was responsible for the death of Christians!

But then the risen Jesus appeared to him while he was on the way to arrest more of them in Damascus. Saul is left physically blinded, and later healed through the prayer of a believer, while Jesus healed him of his spiritual blindness. As Paul later puts it, “...the grace of our Lord overflowed for me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.” Paul calls himself that because, when he was attacking those who were part of the body of Christ on earth, he was in essence attacking Jesus. After all, Jesus did say to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4) What we do to others we do to Jesus. (Matthew 25:40)

And this is why sin is at the heart of the problems the people of the world have. God created everyone in his image. He created us to love him and to love one another. Because God is love. God is the Father loving the Son and the Son loving the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. And so we, his creatures made in his image, are to be united in love. The night before he went to the cross Jesus prayed for the church, “that they may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. I pray that they will be in us...” (John 17:21) But when we harm and deceive and rob and neglect one another, we break the unity God intended for his creation. Jesus continues his thought about Christians being part of the oneness found in the Triune God “...so that the world will believe that you sent me.” Jesus prays that the world will see in his followers, the body of Christ, the unity it lacks and so desperately needs.

And it must break Jesus' heart that the world doesn't consistently see the unity and love of God in us. He said the world would know we are his disciples by our love for one another. (John 13:35) When the world doesn't see it, it's because we have put something other than Jesus, the God who is Love Incarnate, at the heart of our faith. We put various details of theology or ritual or unbiblical qualifications for belonging at the center of our faith. A person once told me that my denomination having a headquarters was bad! I told them that my salvation did not rely on that or anything other than Jesus: who he is, what he has done for me and is doing in me, and my response to him. And, thank God, that person, a Christian from another denomination, recognized that as true.

What we need is Jesus. Because, like David, we all need a change of heart. And only Jesus can do that. Only he can give us his Spirit, as he promised. (John 14:16-17) As Paul says, “...God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.” (Romans 5:5) Or as Jesus put it, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 14:23) Again Paul tells the church at Ephesus that he prays “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” (Ephesians 3:17) Jesus changes our hearts by entering into them.

But he will not force his way in. That's the way of the world: “I know what's you should do and I'm going to force you to comply.” Instead Jesus says, “I am standing at the door and knocking. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter and dine with him and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20) It's up to us to open our hearts to Jesus and invite him into our lives.

But he will not be content to sit in the corner and just watch us as we go about business as usual. If we invite him in, we can expect him to make changes. C.S. Lewis put it this way: “Imagine yourself a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps you can understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but he is building a palace.” Of course he is; he's going to live there and rule as King.

Dr. Horrible was right in that the world is a mess but wrong in that he or any mere human being should rule it. That arrogance is why the world is broken, shattered by our competing desires to be in control of everything, when we can't even control ourselves. The only one fit to rule us is both fully man and fully God, Jesus Christ. He knows what it is like to be one of us but he also knows what we can become.

And he will not reign from some distant capital but somewhere much closer: the heart. Jesus said, “The kingdom is within you.” (Luke 17:21) The kingdom of God exists wherever people have surrendered their lives to Jesus and let him rule their hearts. The seat of their minds and wills and emotions become his throne. The body of the Christian becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 6:19) We become his ambassadors. (2 Corinthians 5:20) And we spread the kingdom not by forcing others, nor by shunning sinners and the lost as “those people,” because all of us were “those people,” the ones responsible for making the world the mess it is. Instead, we spread the kingdom of God by sharing the the royal proclamation, the good news of Jesus, wherever we go, so like seed it scatters far and wide and takes root in the hearts of those who hear it. (Luke 8:11, 15)

We also need to show the love for one another that Jesus said would be the mark of his followers. But as it says in 1 John, “Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue but in deed and in truth.” (1 John 3:18) So let us also make good laws and educate people and see to it that those who are not as fortunate as we are have their needs met. Because giving good laws, teaching, feeding and healing people were all things Jesus did and things he told us to do.

Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; I do not give it as the world does.” (John 14:27) And the Greek word for peace comes from a root word meaning “to join together into a whole.” The peace Jesus gives is wholeness. The opposite of a world that is broken is one that is whole. And the world can only become whole when we all love one another as Jesus loves us. Real love is wanting the best for the beloved and then acting in order to achieve that. It requires patience and forgiveness and self-sacrifice but when everyone is working together for what is best for every person, not just themselves or a few, the world will know peace. And all will be one in Christ, the Prince of Peace.