Pure of heart ... ?

Theology Time: Still stuck on the Beatitudes I am. I suppose it’s because they suffer these days from being so “bigly” ignored. I can’t turn anywhere without having the stricture from Leviticus against homosexuality thrust in my face. Pretty explicit it is. The writer called it, a man laying with another man as with a woman that is, “an abomination.”

The writer was from a group just emerging from the Stone Age, so he wrote without the scientific knowledge of biological descent through modification, or of genomic organization and the modifications possible. Still, he allowed his strictures to be quite explicit.

But so were the commands by Moses concerning the fate of the Midianite women and children captured in war—explicit that is. Seems he commanded his victorious soldiers, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” - Numbers 31 (NIV)

How can we, if we are to accept every sentence in the Old Testament as coming directly from the mouth of the Almighty, supposed to reconcile all this? Last time I visited a church full of evangelicals (the ones who hate the differently genomed the most), about half those under 40 years of age had violated a direct command from Himself. In Leviticus 19:28, the Bible says, "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am Lord."

I am sure that he didn’t mean to include faded nautical tattoos on the shoulders of aging vets, just the flowers and snakes crawling from the bodices of beautiful young women and the hateful sayings on the arms of swaggering young men. But, anyway …

Do I stand as the only confused one? I fear that many (so-called) Christians seem to have abandoned the words of Yahweh and, instead, follow the words, written by poet Paul Simon, and sung with his pal Art Garfunkel, “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” How are we supposed to maintain a purity of heart in these times?

That brings us to today’s Beatitude, the sixth: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”

Oh dear.

Are you afraid, dear reader, as am I, that our national leaders of today would consider the act of striving to be pure of heart as a sign of weakness? If you aren’t, carry a person who is dying of a curable disease to one of our leaders and seek succor for this example of the least of those among us. You’ll find out real fast (dare I say “bigly”) who shall see God and who won’t, at least according to the Galilean. (Someday, we’ll get back to what he had to say about divorce. That’s a real hoot).

The Sermon on the Mount is a marvelous account of purity in thought and heart. I only wish someone could get the haters to read it. Maybe some have. That possibility makes me think of Exodus 9-12, (NIV) “But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart and he would not listen … .” The Lord? Surely not. That makes me think of a college experience. A nationally-known sociologist, Dr. Grant Bogue, assigned me a reading back in the 1960s called Our Schizophrenic Society. It as all about how the disparity between the teachings of adults and their actions must have been adversely affecting the minds of the young.

If that was true in the 1960s, what would we make of it today? Pure of heart? Give me a break.