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[The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "Living Without Wax."] Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The crowds who cheered him on Sunday cursed him on Friday. Those who threw palms before

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him on Sunday threw stones at him on Friday. Those who gave to him accolades at the beginning of the week were giving him accusations by the end of the week. And why was this so? It was so because these people were not pure in heart. We have been looking together in the last weeks at the opening words of our Lord's

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Sermon on the Mount, where he gives us what we might call a formula for happiness. And we have noted five of the factors in that formula. Jesus says, "Happy are the poor in spirit." That is, happy are those who depend upon God. Jesus says, "Happy are those who mourn." That is, those who are saddened by the state of the world, but who are gladdened

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by the opportunity to bring the world out of its sadness to joy. Jesus said, "Happy are the meek." The meek are those who are not weak, but who seek to do God's will and to do it mightily in the world. Jesus said, "Happy are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness." Those who go for the gold, sitious, alteous, sportious, always wanting

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to go faster, higher, stronger in the service of the Lord. Jesus said, "Happy are the merciful." For when the mercy of God flows into a person, it flows through them and out to other people. Now, Jesus says of these happy ones, that they inherit the kingdom of heaven, that they will be comforted by the Spirit of God, that the kingdom is particularly theirs, that they

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will be filled with the things for which they yearn, and that they will not only have the joy of being loved, but also of loving other people. Now in the sixth beatitude, Jesus, as it were, sums up the five which have preceded it. He says, "Happy are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." We might transliterate that

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in this way, "Happy are the sincere, for they shall know what it is to be in God's presence." The word sincere is a very interesting word. In the first century, those people who had a considerable amount of affluence, even as today, often spent it to procure objects of art. Sculpture was the most popular of the forms, and so many statues were carved in

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and sold and bought. Many of these are quite lovely, treasures in every sense of the word. But occasionally there would be a statue which in the process of its being produced, carved, would crack, or some part of it would chip off. It would be in one way or another flawed. When that happened, the unscrupulous salesman would take some of the dust of the stone and

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from that statue, and he would mingle that stone dust with wax, and he would fill in the cracks or the flawed places with the wax, which was the same color as the stone, and therefore could not readily be detected. In other words, he made the statue look like it was in fact whole when it wasn't whole.

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Now the Latin word for "without" is "sin," and the Latin word for "wax" is "seres." "Sin seres," "sincere," those who are without wax, those who are genuine throughout, those who are what they appear to be. Jesus says, "Happy are those who have in them no hypocrisy, but instead purity."

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Now one of the greatest honors that you could receive in the first century world was to have the opportunity to serve in the presence of the king or of the emperor. This was called a great privilege, for you could look upon the face of the ruler and also hear the pearls of wisdom that came from his mouth. When the queen of Sheba came to visit King Solomon,

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she was much impressed with him, and she expressed her awe of him and his abilities and majesty with these words, "Happy are those who serve you and stand continually before you and hear your wisdom." So what Jesus is saying then, if you put both thoughts, the sincere and standing in the

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presence of the king, as an honor, if you put them both together, what he is saying is this, "Happy are those who are without wax, because they are privileged to stand in the presence of the king." He is speaking, of course, about the heart, and the heart is a marvelous instrument. Only

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God could have thought it up. It's about the size of your fist. A woman's heart averages ten ounces in weight. A man's heart averages twelve ounces in weight. This has led some chauvinists to say that men have more heart than women. It's shaped rather like a pear, and as you know, it pumps the blood into all the parts of the body. Now it's only in the

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last 350 years that we have really come to understand very much about the mechanics of the heart. But the heart was important to people long before we ever understood its physiological significance. The word "heart," for example, appears 814 times in the Bible, and it is used there to describe the center of the emotions. That's the reason on Valentine's

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Day we send people hearts, or we will say of someone who is very brave, "He has a lot of heart." It was also used to describe the place of conscience, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, that is, cleanse my conscience." It is also used as the place of wisdom or intellect. The Bible says, "Out of the heart are the issues of life." That is where the

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wisdom, the expression of the personality comes from. So in Scripture, the heart is the emotional, the volitional, and the intellectual center of a person. It is the inner being, the essence of a person. It is that place so much down at the core of the personality, that there and only there can someone genuinely meet God.

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Now because God created the heart in the first place, there is within the heart of all people some desire to be in contact with the Maker. Augustine put it this way, "The heart is restless until it rests in thee." The person who is genuinely seeking some experience of God is seeking out of the heart. The person who doesn't have much hope of finding God, but who still

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does everything that she can do to find a God, if in fact there is a God, that comes out of the heart. The individual who has given up all hope for the church, but still hopes to find at the center of time and space a benevolent, loving God, that desire comes out of a longing heart. The agnostic who isn't sure, but who wants to be sure, is seeking

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out of his or her heart. Any person who seriously is searching for ultimate truth is seeking with the heart. The only people who do not do this, the only people whose hearts are not reaching out to something greater than anything they can know upon earth, are atheists. And that is because, of course, they have no spiritual ambition.

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Now when Jesus says, "Happy are those who are without wax," or "Happy are the pure in heart," what he is saying is, "Happy are those who honestly and sincerely and genuinely reach out for whatever experience with God they can possibly have." Notice he uses the word "pure," "pure in heart." Now the word "pure" in the Bible does not mean that which

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is perfect, that which is unblemished. The word "pure" means to be cleansed. So what Jesus is saying is, not that the heart must be clean before you reach out to God, but rather that you must be willing to offer the heart to God so that God can make it clean. That is the way it is with so many things in life. The oil which we bring up out of

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the ground, we don't put into our automobiles until we have first purified it and refined it. The gold that we dig up out of the earth, we do not use it for ornamentation or for other purposes until we have first purified it and refined it. The vegetables which we bring in from the garden to put on the table, we do not bring them straight from the garden

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and plop them on the plate. No, we wash them. There are pesticides and insecticides and things of that kind that are on them. We purify them before we begin to make use of them. Well just so, Jesus says that people without wax are people who desire to be purified, who desire to be cleansed, who desire to be everything that God wants them to be. They

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want to identify with the one who made them in the first place, for he's the only one who can cleanse them of everything that should not be in them. The result of this, of course, is that when a person earnestly seeks, God responds, and that person is made pure at the very center of her being.

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Now the man who has discussed all of this at greatest length is the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard wrote a book, one of the greatest devotional classics of all time. Every mature Christian should have read it at least three times. It is called Purity at Heart is to Will One Thing. Now what does Kierkegaard say in his book? He

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says this, that purity means, being cleansed by God means, that you have only one desire, not a double desire, but one desire. You may love a woman, and you may love the woman because of her money. That's a divided desire. You may love a man, but you love the man because of his physical appearance. That's a divided desire. Purity of desire, willing one thing,

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is to love that woman or that man for everything that that person is. It is to have all of one's wants going in one direction. It is to be totally focused on the desire of one's heart. Now he uses an illustration to explain this, and the illustration that he uses is from the sea, which is a natural thing for a Dane to do because no matter which of the

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islands of Denmark that you happen to be on, you're almost never without being able to see the sea. He points out that the deepest water in the sea is the purest water. On the surface the flotsam and jetsam collect, but down in the depths is the purest water, and the purest water, he says, is the transparent water. Water that is shallow, that has to

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depth, it easily becomes fouled, and you cannot see through it. It loses its transparency. But the water which comes from down deep, that water is the water that one can see through, and in seeing through it, one can, in that demonstration of purity, of depth and earthiness, and transparency, one can reach out and will the one thing of being identified with God.

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Kierkegaard points out that if a storm goes across the sea, it will kick the surface waters into a fury, but the deep waters remain still and calm. The shallow can be turned into a absolute turmoil, but in the depths there is solidity. So he says, in deep hearts, in pure hearts, transparent hearts, that is where we come in contact with God. Pure water, he

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says, transparent water is the kind of water which reflects the heavens above. But impure water, water that has been fouled, water that is not transparent, reflects nothing, and you cannot see what is above by looking into it. So the goal of our lives, he says, is to have nothing in our hearts which will stand between ourselves and God. No impurities,

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no double desires. We will will one thing, and that one thing is to do the will of God. And this can only happen in the purified heart, for it alone has depth and clarity and the power to reflect. Let me change the image altogether. Think for a moment of the Arthurian legends. You remember how Sir Launcelot goes out in search of the Holy Grail, as all the

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other knights do. The Holy Grail is the cup from which Christ is reported to have drunk at the Last Supper, and then Joseph of Arimathea takes it to the cross and catches in the cup some of the blood of the Lord as he dies. That's the Holy Grail. Now, Launcelot goes out in search of this Grail, but he never finds it. And he never finds it because he

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is not single-purposed. He is not reflective of good. As a matter of fact, he's engaged in an adulterous relationship with Guinevere, the wife of his king, Arthur. And so there is about him a shallowness, a cloudiness, a foul nature, which makes him impossible as one who will reach the Grail. Do you remember how the poet describes it? He says, "All

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that was pure and noble and knightly in him twined and clung round that single sin until the wholesome flower and the poisonous grew together, each as each, never to be plucked asunder." Now compare that with Galahad. Sir Galahad is also looking for the Grail. And Sir Galahad sees and is blessed with the vision of the Grail. And how does Tennyson

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describe Galahad? He says, "His strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure." Purity of heart is to surrender to God. We never get it totally done in this life. It's a long and a hard struggle. Some of us move ahead more rapidly than others. None of us achieve perfection in this human experience. There is some shallowness and

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some impurity in all of us. But if our goal is to be united ultimately with God, then gradually we will move toward that unity with him which is undefiled. And when we begin that move, that's when we stop acting like Christians and are Christians. And when we stop acting like Christians and are Christians. Now the reward for this, Jesus says, is they

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shall see God. "Blessed are the pure in heart, they shall see God." Now in the Old Testament it says that you must have a pure will in order to see God. Same thing it says in the New Testament. However, in the Old Testament there are certain ritualistic requirements laid down as well. A few moments ago, Psalm 24 was read in your hearing. Do you remember

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some of those words? "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart." Not just a pure heart. Clean hands and a pure heart. And the Old Testament says, "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart." Now that cleaning of the hands became a ritual, formulaic matter. As

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a matter of fact, the Jews developed a process of 142 different ways in which to cleanse the hands when one approached the things of God. In this particular passage, reference from the fingers to the wrist, five times the water flowing down this way. Then the same with the other hand, five times. Then the palm of one hand is cleansed with the

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fist of the other, and then that process is reversed. And then five times water is poured down over the hand from the wrist off the fingers. And then the same thing with the other hand. Who ascends to the hill of the Lord? The one who has a pure heart and the one who keeps all these rules and regulations. And these rules and regulations mean nothing.

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They mean no more than the ritual that some people will follow next Sunday morning when they show up here and make their annual appearance on Easter. It's a ritual, and it's pointless. Jesus is not saying to us that ritualism will make you pure. He's not saying that ritualism will take you into the presence of God. He is not saying that mysticism introduces us

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to God, that we must be isolated, that we have to dwell somehow in our own personal shrine, that we have to meet God in some cloudy inner chancel of our own spirit. He isn't saying that. He says you see God when the greatest desire of your heart, the honest desire of your heart, is to be cleansed and see him in all of his beauty and his holiness.

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Now when he says "see God," he does not mean to see him with the eye. The Scriptures tell us that no man can look upon God. If we were to look upon God in all of his mightiness and all of his magnificence and all of his incandescent brilliance, we would be burned instantly into nothingness. We would disappear, vanish away. The Scriptures say we shall see

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God in the person of his Son. In the kingdom of heaven we will see Jesus. And it says of him in the New Testament, "We shall see him as he is, and we shall be like him." That's the way we're going to see God. But there's another way in which Jesus suggests we can see God, and that is by our communion with him. Robert Louis Stevenson tells in one of

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his journals—I tried to locate where it was this last week but couldn't find it precisely—he tells of how when he was seven years old he accidentally locked himself in a room. And he became very frightened and he began to cry. And his father heard him and his father came to the door, the other side of the door—the door is locked—and the father began to speak

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to him through the door. And he calmed the boy's anxieties. And he actually got to playing a game with the boy through the closed door. They had a very real communion while someone went around the outside and came up through the window to unlock the door. Now that boy was having very real communion with his father. One could say he was seeing his father, even

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though in fact there was a solid door between them. The pure in heart see God in every star that shines. They see him in every flower that blooms. They see him in every bird that sings. They behold him in every great piece of art. They delight in him as they encounter him in worship. They are thrilled by him when his light falls upon them at the end of the

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dark night of their own soul. They see him as the leader of the pageant of history. They see him in the daily newspaper. They see him in the crowds that pass by on the streets in which there are friends and enemies and those altogether anonymous to us. The pure in heart, those who want to be like God and to have one purpose, that is to do God's

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will, they see God on television in the flickering of that tube. Sometimes in those newscasts terrible things are shown, but the person who is pure in heart sees God in those people who are seeking freedom with justice. Sees God in those people whose spirits have awakened within them and who are reaching for something in life that they never had the joy of knowing

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before. The pure in heart see God in those who are treated cruelly and against whom the gates of opportunity are closed. They see God in every right decision that is made. They see him in the martyrdom of the weak. After all, at the very center of our faith is a man being martyred on a cross. They behold God in the least of the brethren, for they

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learn very soon that when God appears he is almost always wearing worn out shoes. And having seen him, they want to see him more and more. It is as if somehow this desire to see him opens some kind of vacuum in them, and as that vacuum opens, more and more of God flows in. The response to their action is God's reaction, and out of this communion

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comes a vision of good and a hatred of evil, and an eventual melting of the soul into eternity. We all see things, of course, in terms of what we are. A botanist looks at a garden and he perhaps sees some rare flowers. Someone who is botanically ignorant sees nothing of significance at all. A man walks out one night, looks up at the sky and says, "Look at the

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stars." The learned astronomer walks out, looks up at the sky and says, "See the stars and the planets and the quasars and the comets." A child will laugh at something, but a child will not laugh at anything. Which makes an older person weep. Why? Because that older person has experienced enough of life to know what's really there to be seen. The filthy-minded

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will snicker at anything, but to the pure, everything is a gift. Everything is pure, and in even the ugliest moment they will find some scintillating indication of the presence of God and of good. Such ones will one thing, they love God, but they will not have the same desires. Jesus here calls us to be people who yearn for purity of heart,

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people who want to have sincerity in every purpose, people who long within themselves to live without wax. "Happy," Jesus says, "happy are those who live without wax, for they shall be cleansed by God, and in that cleansing and that sincerity they will find their way into the eternal presence of the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords."

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Pray with me. O God, our prayer this morning is a very simple one, and yet we pray it with all our hearts, and it requires every thought of which we are capable. By the power of thy cleansing spirit, may we see that when others see us, they will say, "The smile of the Lord that lights her face lets folks know that her heart is at home with God."

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We ask this in your name, and for today's prayer. Amen. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]