March 4, 2018 Tinman: Where Is Your Heart Rev. Danielle Jones Scripture: Matthew 6:1-6; 16-21

As we continue our journey looking at the characters of The Wizard of and what they have to teach us, we have what I would call a bit of a mash up of this this morning. You might be familiar with that term when it comes to music – two songs mashed together that don’t always go together. You might think that about this scripture reading that Chris is going to read in just a moment, but we’re going to explore how practices of lent connect with our heart and how all of it is treasure.

(Chis Pearson reads Matthew 6:1-6 and 16-21.)

Let us pray. God, thank you for giving each one of us a heart and thank you for your heart that loves us and calls us to follow you. Speak to us now, we pray, as we seek new treasure with you in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Well, as I think many of you know, my husband Brian and I have two daughters, and what you may not know is that I also have a brother who lives here is the Twin Cities, and he has three sons. So, together there are five grandchildren on my side of the family, and they are each one year apart. So, five years in a row, we had kids. It’s crazy. It’s getting a little less crazy, but it was really crazy for a while, and back in probably at the craziest point, my dad was looking for creative ways to gather us together. So, he decided a “pirate party” was in order. His inspiration for the pirate party was a huge inflatable pirate pool that he found somewhere. This thing can fit all five kids at the same time. The hose connects to a cannon that squirts water. You can only imagine the tears – and the joy – that come as a result of that, and that is where the pirate party was first born. After the first year, my dad decided he needed to kick it up a notch. So, when we arrived there were 100 water balloons waiting for us for the kids to pelt one another with.

There always was food involved, but the third year we came, there was a watermelon boat in the shape of a pirate head that you scooped the fruit out of. (He’s retired. He has a lot of free time.) There’s Jell- O in the shape of pirate objects, and there’s all sorts of fun to be had, but of course the whole pirate party culminates in a treasure hunt. My dad spends days writing clues that rhyme with words like pirate, “aargh” and booty. The kids run around the yard looking for clue after clue and are perfectly thrilled when, once again, they find their treasure. This tradition is becoming a family treasure for our whole family and all the cousins.

Our sermon series this lent is also a bit of a treasure hunt through the story of The . All month, we’re examining community and home, brains and heart, courage and wisdom through the lens of one of America’s most famous fairy tales ever written. Two weeks ago, we began by looking at the center of the story through the character Gale, and we talked about the inevitable storms that come up in all of our lives. We’re reminded that outside of Oz there is no such thing as a to lead us to the place of perfect happiness, but instead we’re called to make community together and make the road by walking, discerning how that’s to follow God. Last week, the reminded us that it’s one thing to have a brain, and it’s another thing to use your brain. Like the Scarecrow, we can get hung up on what gets between what we know of God and how we live out our faith in the world. John spoke to us through the lens of the tragedy in Lakeland Florida and the lock down at Orono Schools, pressing us as the people of God to respond using our faith as a guide.

This week we are focusing on the and his search for a heart. Now, many of you may know that The Wizard of Oz is based on a series of fourteen children’s books written by L. Frank Baum. In one of the earlier books in the series, we learn where the Tin Man comes from. The Tin Man first appears in the series as a real man who is a wood cutter who lived in the forest and carried on his family’s tradition of cutting down lumber to make a living. It’s while he’s out working in the woods that he meets and falls in love with a young maiden who was a servant in a nearby house. The woman who owned the house caught wind of the love that was growing between the wood cutter and the maiden, and she asked the witch of the East to help her keep the two apart so that she would not lose her prized servant. The witch, of course, hated love. So, she cast a spell on that turned him into tin metal.

Now, interestingly, at first the Woodsman thought this was a blessing. He had been trying to save money to buy a home for himself and his would-be bride. His new tin armor meant that he could work nearly as powerfully as a machine. He thought he had beaten the wicked witch by being able to work harder than ever to attain his goal of his new home and his new bride. But while he was working in the woods, we are told, his axe slipped and he cut off his limbs and even cut himself in half. (These fairy tales always get so gory!) Although a local tinner was able to put him back together, he forgot the heart. So, no longer having a heart, the Woodsman fell out of love with his love and just stays in the forest working where he finally ends up rusted in place, unable to move, unable to work and - he thinks- unable to love. That is where Dorothy and the Scarecrow first find him.

Now, oddly, I think our scripture passage this morning is another story of what it means to set out on a journey and find unexpected treasure along the way. Matthew six, which we just heard, is at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, and after establishing the nature and mission of community and after emphasizing God’s love and righteousness as the defining characteristic of community, Jesus stresses that not all faith is created equal. Faith is to be genuine, not showy because where your treasure is, well, that’s where your heart will be also. The Bible speaks a lot about heart. Depending on the translation of scripture that you read, the word heart is used more than 600 times in the Old and New Testaments. These various passages, widely diverse, describe what the heart holds.

Scripture tells us that giving comes from the heart. Evil comes from the heart. Love resides in the heart. Hearts can be stirred, hearts can also me hardened, hearts can be willing or unwilling, hearts can be moved and even connected to God, and hearts, we all know, the Tin Man especially, can be grieved. We’re told in scripture to guard our hearts, and we’re told that God knows the contents of our hearts and the intention of our hearts. Scripture not only describes human hearts, but scripture describes the heart of God as well, and in scripture the heart and mind, the thinking and feeling, are actually inter- connected. And the heart is the place where we find our deepest treasures to be contained.

Jesus teaches us that there is often, then, a great difference between those who look like they are faithful and those who really are faithful. In Matthew Chapter Six, Jesus describes that faith practices can be used to show off our faith, show how great we are, but that that was never the intention of them. Instead, faith practices were designed to shape our hearts, often in the quiet. The faith practices described in this passage are alms giving – better known as giving to those in need – fasting and prayer, the three practices that also happen to be the pillars of the Lenten journey throughout church history. Now, it’s easy to contain these three practices in a six-week period of time, but these three practices are intended to shape us and our relationship with God all year long, not just during lent. And, so, Jesus says, “Do not be holy because it’s what the world expects of you but, rather, learn to live holy lives,” because it’s there that you’ll find a deeper relationship with God, the God who loves you. It’s actually drawing closer to God that serves as the reward for our faith practices, not being seen by the world. But sometimes it does feel safer to just put our heads down and perform what’s expected of us, even in the life of faith. We can go through the motions of faith just like we go through the motions of so many other things, but when we do that, we’re not growing and being changed and transformed. We’re simply checking off the boxes of faith.

The Tin Man thought that, if he could build up enough earthly treasure to purchase the home he wanted, he could finally keep the love he desired, but in his quest for more to supposedly gain that love, he lost sight of the truth that he had actually already found it. One of my favorite authors, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “People seem to look all over the place for treasure. They travel, they acquire things, they seek what they think they want somewhere outside of themselves, but the last place most of us look for treasure is right under our feet, right in the midst of the everyday activities, accidents and encounters of our daily lives. No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those who are wise about the spiritual life, suggest that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X we’re looking for is that we’re standing right on top of it.”

Like the Tin Man, the treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need and that our treasure resides right here inside of us with God (puts her hand over her heart). When the Tin Man finally meets the wizard, the Wizard tells him that hearts are not practical because they’re breakable, and then he tells him that the heart is judged by how much you are loved by others. Thinking for his whole journey that love was somewhere outside of himself, the Tin man didn’t realize that the treasure that he longed for most was right here all along (put hand on heart).

At the heart of all these faith practices listed in the Sermon on the Mount – to give, to fast, to pray – Jesus offers a universal truth. Jesus essentially says the world will tell you to prepare for the worst, to secure your borders, to hoard your money, to avoid the stranger, take care of your own, even put on your own armor to protect yourself, but Jesus says to prepare for the best. Live whole heartedly. Live a life that is expanding not shrinking. Don’t protect yourself. Trust instead that God will protect you. Give generously. Engage the stranger and care for those in need. It’s in joining that little rag-tag community journeying to Oz that the Tin Man uncovers the heart that was always inside of him, and it’s in this rag-tag community called the Church that we, too, can discover what’s always been inside of us – love, the kingdom of God. Love is everywhere, and the purpose of faith practices is to reconnect us to that love that we so often search for in other places, God’s love already inside of us.

Self-proclaimed agnostic A. J. Jacobs wrote a book called The Year of Living Biblically. In his book Jacobs documents what it was like to spend a year living by the Bible’s rules and disciplines in modern day New York City. In his quest, what Jacobs found is that sometimes the life of faith is about cognitive dissonance. We want peace, but to find true peace we have to navigate through a lot of unrest. We want security. So, we put armor on, building tin suits of our own, but the only way to find true security is to live with Christ and community. We desire love, real love, true love, but to fully love and be loved, we need to allow God to love us first and then become vulnerable and real with others.

“Sometimes,” Jacobs writes, “you have to put yourself into a practice to fully learn it.” At the conclusion of his experiment of living Biblically as an atheist for a year, he doesn’t describe some radical conversion, but he instead talks about a new and genuine openness to faith that he found and an experience of the love of God, he says, which he believes was the result of these faith practices in his life. Jacobs set out to live out his religion very publically, but in the end, he said, real changes happened in the quiet of his heart.

So, what’s the condition of your heart today? What are the practices that God is inviting you into to strengthen your connection to God’s deep and generous love for you? Where do you find yourself searching for some sort of treasure that is most likely buried right inside you? The story of The Wizard of Oz reminds us that we are all on a treasure hunt, a hunt that is richer and fuller when lived in community, celebrating our gifts and sharing them with the world because most times the other people can see in us what we lose sight of. And the story of Jesus reminds us that our purpose in this life goes far beyond gathering up the treasures of this world. Instead, we’re called to follow God wherever the road takes us and to discover a treasure that has been here all along right inside our hearts.

Let us pray. God, thank you for the treasure that resides in each one of us, the treasure of your radical love that has nothing to do with what we do but has everything to do with you and how you made us. So, God, help us to see the treasure in one another. Help us to call it out. Help us to share it with the world for the sake of other people discovering how deep your love is for them. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.