Seek the Ground of My Heart

Have you ever noticed that we drop our voices for the real thing? Not the General Confession, which we say out loud together and mean well enough. I mean the private admission, the one you make on the drive home, or lying awake at two in the morning with the ceiling fan going. Some part of us still handles a sin as though it were information, a report God hadn’t yet received, and the more softly we file it the less damage it might do.

Then we stood up this morning and prayed a Collect that takes that instinct apart. “Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve.” Take it slowly. Before we’ve said a word, He’s readier to hear it than we are to say it. Then come two petitions that don’t say the same thing: “forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid,” and “giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask.” Our conscience is afraid. Our asking isn’t worthy. Both ends of us are compromised, and the Collect doesn’t pretend otherwise. It puts the remedy somewhere else entirely, in “the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ.” That’s the doctrine this morning rests on. Confession doesn’t inform God. It opens us.

Which is what the Psalm has been saying since long before any of us was born. “O Lord, thou hast searched me out, and known me. Thou knowest my down-sitting, and mine uprising; thou understandest my thoughts long before.” Long before. He has the thought whole before it’s finished forming. “For lo, there is not a word in my tongue, but thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.”

That doesn’t land as comfort the first time through. It lands as exposure.

“Thou hast beset me behind and before.” Beset is a siege word. “Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit? or whither shall I go then from thy presence?” That isn’t a man marveling. That’s a man checking the exits. Heaven, hell, the wings of the morning, the uttermost parts of the sea, and every door is the same door. Even the dark won’t cooperate: “then shall my night be turned to day.”

Then, right where you’d expect him to give up, it turns over on one clause. “Even there also shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” The hand that found him isn’t the hand of an investigator. It’s the hand of the One who made him. “For my reins are thine; thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.” He isn’t being tracked. He’s being held, and by Somebody who was there before he was.

Augustine put that discovery into a line in the tenth book of his Confessions: “Let me know thee, my knower; let me know thee as I am known.” Notice what he asks for. Not to be known less. To know the One who already knows him. He’d given up defending the house.

We generally don’t get that far. The psalmist doesn’t either, not straight off. He takes a detour first, and we know it by heart. “Wilt thou not slay the wicked, O God? Depart from me, ye blood-thirsty men… Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?… Yea, I hate them right sore.” He’s fluent here. He’s confident. He knows exactly where the wickedness is, it’s over there in those people, and he’d like it dealt with.

Then in the last two verses the searchlight swings. “Try me, O God, and seek the ground of my heart; prove me, and examine my thoughts. Look well if there be any way of wickedness in me; and lead me in the way everlasting.”

In me.

That’s where repentance begins. Not when we admit that sin exists, which costs us nothing, but when we stop locating it exclusively in other people. And notice he doesn’t ask God to try him and find him clean. He says look well. Search the ground, the subsoil, the part I can’t get at with my own honesty.

Deuteronomy shows us the alternative, and it’s a generous one. Moses tells Israel to lay up these words “in your heart and in your soul,” then to “bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes,” and write them “upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates.” Heart, hand, forehead, doorpost, gate. There’s nothing wrong with any of it. That’s the law doing its very best work.

And notice what it asks for first. The heart. The law commands the one thing it hasn’t the power to produce, so everything it can actually do ends up written on the outside. Paul, who knew that law from the inside out, says the thing none of us would dare say about it: “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” He isn’t sneering at Moses. He grants that the ministration engraven in stones “was glorious.” It just couldn’t get in. It could tell a man the ground of his heart was bad. It couldn’t do anything about the ground.

So God does something about it Himself, and Mark shows us how.

“And they bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him.” Read that again for who’s doing the verbs. They bring. They beseech. The man at the center never asks for a thing, and that isn’t modesty, it’s the whole point. He can’t hear the offer, and couldn’t frame the request if he had. Everything he receives that day he receives without ever having managed to want it properly.

Last Sunday the publican stood afar off with seven honest words and no notion of what God had done about his sin. This man hasn’t got the seven words. It changes nothing.

“And he took him aside from the multitude.” He could have done this in front of everybody; it would have made a better spectacle. He takes him out of the crowd instead. Whatever this is about to be, it isn’t going to be a performance, and the man isn’t going to be an exhibit. “And put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed.” Fingers. Spittle. A sigh. A word would have served; He’d healed at a distance before. Here He gets near enough to touch the two places that don’t work.

And He sighs. Whatever else that sigh is, it isn’t indifference.

“Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.”

It’s a passive. Nobody opens himself. The word is spoken over a man who couldn’t hear it being spoken, and “straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.” He gets back more than his friends came for. They asked for a hand laid on him. He goes away hearing and speaking both, which is our Collect in flesh and bone: more than either we desire or deserve.

Encouragers, that one is worth sitting with. Whatever’s open in you this morning, you didn’t open it. That a room full of people can hear the words “Be opened” and know what they mean is the result of somebody’s fingers in our ears years ago, most of us too young or too far gone to have asked. “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.” Paul puts it that way so we can’t take credit even for the thinking.

In a few minutes you’ll come to this rail, and the first thing we said this morning will still be true of every one of us: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” We say that before the lessons, before the sermon, before the confession. It’s the ground rule of the whole service. No secrets. And knowing it, we come anyway, and we’re fed anyway.

I’ll tell you what I’ve been slowest to learn. For years I treated that sentence as a warning to get past on the way to the good part. It isn’t the warning. It’s the good part. A man keeping a secret from God can never rest in His presence, because he’s busy managing the relationship. A son doesn’t manage. He’s known all the way down, examined in the ground of his heart, and he’s still at the table, still being handed the Body and Blood of the One who searched him. The Spirit that giveth life doesn’t make us better defendants. He makes us sons, and a son can be searched without being condemned.

So hear it the way the Prayer Book has taught us to pray it. If He is always more ready to hear than we are to pray, then the hesitation you feel coming up here was never the obstacle you took it for. If our sufficiency is of God and not of ourselves, then the insufficiency you’ve been keeping quiet was never news to Him, and it was never the disqualification either. And if He covered you in your mother’s womb already knowing every word your tongue would ever speak, then nothing you confess this week can cost you the hand that’s been holding you the whole way.

So come up with the secret still in you, and let Him do what He’s been ready to do since before you sat down.

The God from whom we cannot hide is the God from whom we need not hide.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.