Posted on by Esther Baird
| By Esther C. Baird, as written for the Silver Bay Spiritual Life Center, Silver Bay, NY. To subscribe to the mailing please email: pastoralrespite@silverbay.org |
| At Silver Bay, we place a great priority on the clean water of Lake George. My family’s camp just north of the Bay has water lines that go directly into the lake. It’s the water that comes into our showers, our sinks, and of course, our coffee maker. Growing up we all drank from the tap. Now it’s mostly my dad – – but he is almost 80 so I’d say the water hasn’t adversely affected him. The point is, it’s clear, clean, fresh water. And Silver Bay has invested in the lake in some cutting edge ways to showcase how a large facility, with many water needs, can steward the purity of this clear and beautiful water. So what if we did all that but when out on our canoes, or boats, secretly dumped our trash in the water? What if we gave money to Silver Bay’s water treatment system but then brought in boats from other rivers and lakes we knew were infested with invasive species and snuck our boats in when the inspectors weren’t there to check? It wouldn’t make sense. Our outward actions of investing in the purity of the water, wouldn’t match our secret actions when we thought no one was looking. The sixth beatitude is a little bit like that. Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” We all understand what the word pure means. It’s clean, it’s without tarnish, it often has a moral connotation as well, something along the lines of innocent, or not exposed to the darkness of life. But how can our hearts be pure? Remember this is all in the context of describing what it means to belong in the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom of God. A kingdom we can’t get into ourselves, but when we accept the invitation to follow Jesus he makes it possible. He rescues us and brings us in because he’s the King. We’ve talked a lot about what that means and how it should inform our thoughts and actions, but this beatitude gets to the sincerity of our actions. Are we just pretending to do all the right things, or do we really mean it? Are we making a big deal about the clean water but secretly dumping in our trash? Jesus goes on to talk about this later in the book of Matthew in chapter 23 when speaking to the Pharisees – – they loved to focus on outward appearances and showiness. But Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” That’s pretty clear. Whitewashed on the outside, but dead bones on the inside. Our hearts are to be both visibly pure but also our inner lives, our thoughts, our actions when no one is looking, our views and beliefs, must be pure and alive, the opposite of dead bones. If we want to be in this kingdom, if we want to follow this King who rescues us and calls us to the life we were truly designed for, then our thoughts and inner life must match our outer life. And then, we will ‘see God.’ What does that mean? Clearly, it’s unlikely that God is going to appear on the campus of Silver Bay in a blaze of fire and smoke. But we’ve talked about how when we follow this King of the Kingdom of God, we do in part see God. Because the King gives us his heart, and his Spirit, and so God comes to dwell in us in a way that is only possible in this Kingdom. We see the actions of those who follow the King, we see the attributes we’ve talked about in this beatitude series: meekness, mercy, grief at the state of our hearts and world, a desire to be in right standing with God. We see people in whom the Spirit of the King of Heaven dwells. This is seeing God in a very real sense, not in full like we will some day, but in part. Bu we can’t windex our hearts into being pure. There are no really fantastic service projects or donations or extra hard work that will make our hearts pure on the inside. Only when we let the King of the Kingdom give us his heart, only then can our hearts be truly pure. Anything else will be like making a big fuss about the water systems while every night dumping our trash into the lake. But if we allow the King to give us new hearts, if we long to have our hearts on the inside match our lives on the outside, then the King will call us blessed. |
| Extra Reading: If you want to read more, I’d encourage you to read Romans 3. Any translation will do, though I often find the New Living Translation to be an easy one to follow (you can use biblegateway.com to get quick free access to different translations). |