Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

And as we enter the month of June, we are once again reminded that the secular, particularly corporate world is celebrating Pride Month.

It's been very in your face for years now, and I'm sure many of my fellow Christians are getting sick of it all.

And you might know as well that for us as Catholics, June is also the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Now, in response to so-called Pride Month, I've seen people kind of weaponize the Sacred Heart, almost like a sort of in your face in response to those celebrating Pride.

But I don't think it's appropriate to use the Sacred Heart to insult people.

So, how should good Christians respond to Pride?

And I think the Sacred Heart actually is an important part of that answer.

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Okay, so remember a second ago, I mentioned that June is also the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Turns out, there's actually a surprising connection between the two holidays.

We're gonna call it the rainbow connection.

So, what is this rainbow connection that I see between the two competing holidays of Pride and the month of the Sacred Heart?

Well, there's this fascinating detail in the writings of Pope Pius XI that I haven't seen anyone else point out or notice.

In his 1928 encyclical on the Sacred Heart, he suggests that the rainbow, which God showed to Noah in Genesis 9 as a sign of His friendly covenant, prefigured the Sacred Heart, which Jesus gives us as a sign of his love.

This is the only Old Testament example he uses in this part.

And that's from almost a hundred years ago.

Pius couldn't possibly have known that June was going to become this annual face-off between Pride and Sacred Heart, or that people promoting Pride Month would make use of the sign of the rainbow.

Now, maybe that's all just a coincidence, or maybe we're meant to actually take something from it.

But if so, what?

Well, I would suggest both the Sacred Heart and the rainbow, Biblically understood, are these powerful reminders that God's love for us remains even when we are at our worst.

Here, it might help to explain a little bit of the backstory as to why Catholics are all about the Sacred Heart.

As Pius explained, The Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was instituted at a time when men were oppressed by the sad and gloomy severity of Jansenism, which had made their hearts grow cold and shut them out from the love of God and the hope of salvation.

Now, on the surface, that sounds nothing like today.

People today tend to minimize the severity of sin.

Do you ever feel like you need to talk about sin more?

You know, when I talk, I just feel like I do it in a different way.

I- I get that, you know, that criticism sometime, but, you know, when I talk about it, I talk about, you know, how we can become better, how we can overcome.

You know, I- I probably categorize it bigger and But, but I don't feel like I'm supposed to go and beat people down.

Most people know what they're doing wrong.

Well, the Jansenists focused on sin so extensively that, in Pius's words, they treated God as an implacable judge rather than a loving Father.

But the reason that people's hearts grew cold in response to Jansenism is that they were giving up.

Living a Christian life seemed impossible.

They couldn't be perfect enough to satisfy the strict judge that the Jansenists were preaching, and so they just got discouraged.

They lost sight of both the love of God and the hope of salvation.

And I would suggest that many people today turn to sin for precisely the same reason.

Christianity comes to feel like a burden, this moral standard that is impossible to live up to.

There were a lot of things that were healthy for me to shed, in terms of, um, judgment and shame and how I processed that.

And frankly, there's even a certain logic in that attitude.

If heaven seems unattainable, why bother trying?

Just enjoy yourself here on Earth while you still can.

I'm reminded of St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians, If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

If you become convinced that God's promises either aren't real or that they're for somebody else and not for you, why not spend your life gratifying the flesh to at least get what comfort you can before you die?

Well, it's precisely here that we find the Sacred Heart.

It's a visible reminder of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another.

This way, we don't lose sight of the love of God or treat God's love as a kind of disembodied spiritual truth, because the danger is that even while we say things like, God loves us, or, God is love, the fact that God is infinitely beyond us and our comprehension can make those words ring hollow.

But Jesus, the eternal Son of God, chose to love each of us with a human heart, with feelings and emotions, a human love that points towards the reality of divine love.

We are invited into the reality of this divine love, but without missing the fact that Jesus' love for us is both fully and truly human as well.

Now, if you want to s- see what this love looks like in Scripture, you're gonna have to pay attention to the gaze, that's G-A-Z-E, of Jesus.

This idea of the gaze of Jesus is something that Pope Francis talked about in connection with the Sacred Heart.

In Francis's words, If Jesus calls you and summons you for a mission, he first looks at you, plumbs the depths of your heart, and knowing everything about you, fixes his gaze upon you.

There's something tremendously beautiful about these subtle details we see in Scripture about the way that Jesus is described as looking, listening, and loving the people with whom he's speaking.

Because we have this twofold desire.

We want to be known, and we want to be loved.

And one of the terrifying thoughts is this idea that those two desires might be in conflict with one another, that if people could really see our hearts, the naked truth about ourselves, they wouldn't love us anymore.

Yet, time and time again in the New Testament, Jesus shows people that he does see them.

He sees them even at their worst, and he still loves them.

For instance, when the rich young man comes to Jesus, St. Mark says that Jesus, looking upon him, loved him.And then he told him that he was still lacking one thing, a detachment from wealth.

Now, Jesus doesn't wait to love the man until he's free from materialism or greed.

He loves him right then and there, and from that place of love, can call him to let go of the one thing holding him back.

And he does this even though he already knows that the young man isn't ready to let go yet.

He's not ready to give up the sin that he's been holding onto.

After Jesus speaks to the woman at the well, a woman living a life of sexual sin, she comes away not with a heavy sense of condemnation, but a sense of the liberation of being seen and loved.

She rushes back to tell the folks back home, Come see a man who told me all that I ever did.

Can this be the Christ?

Or when Zacchaeus climbs up a tree to see Jesus, we're told that Jesus looked up at him before speaking to him by name and inviting himself over to Zacchaeus's house.

And it's in this encounter that we see Zacchaeus led to repent, and Jesus rejoicing that today salvation has come to his house, reminding those present that the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

Or finally when St. Peter denies Christ three times.

St. Luke says that the Lord turned and looked at Peter.

At the look of Jesus, Peter realizes the depth of his betrayal, and he begins to weep bitterly.

St. Ambrose describes this moment by saying that, In mercy, the Lord silently and secretly approached, touched the heart, recalled the memory of the past, with his own internal grace visited Peter, stirred and brought out into external tears the feelings of his inner man.

Elsewhere, Ambrose puts it even more simply, He washed away his sins with his tears.

So I want you to notice how Jesus avoids the two pitfalls we can sometimes feel like we have to choose between.

On the one hand, Jesus doesn't lead with condemnation and critique.

In our desire to tell the truth, we sometimes act in this way as Christians.

We think we need to start every conversation with, Hey, by the way, I disagree with your lifestyle.

But that is not the way that Jesus handles people.

It's not how he handles the rich young man or the woman at the well or Zacchaeus or St. Peter, and the list goes on.

But then, of course, the opposite pitfall is this idea that we have to therefore celebrate or condone or accept the sinful lifestyle or to act like it's not really a problem.

But the people who experience the gaze of Jesus felt his love and mercy, but they didn't come away believing that their sins weren't a problem.

Rather, it seems like they came away with the strength to repent, at least oftentimes, and a desire to turn away from sin.

So how do we love people and speak to them like that?

Saint John Henry Newman's motto as a cardinal was cor et cor loquitur, heart speaks to heart.

Now, of course, when we talk about the heart in this context, we, we don't mean the literal organ of the body.

Hopefully that's clear at this point.

We mean it in this Biblical sense of that place within us that is hidden to the world and even in some ways beyond our own comprehension.

Christ saves us by revealing his heart to us and by speaking directly to our hearts.

And as Pope Francis observes, it's a good thing that he does.

If Christianity was simply about having the right knowledge and responding to it, that could easily lead into a sort of self-reliant moralism or even an intellectual pride if salvation is just have the right theological knowledge, get all the right stuff in order, and then you're gonna be fine.

That's not it though, because as St. Paul warns, Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

And so only the heart is capable of setting our other powers and passions and our entire person in a stance of reverence and loving obedience before the Lord.

It is not enough to have faith in God or to entrust God with your soul and your mind and your strength.

Jesus gives the great commandment which begins by declaring that God is one, and that before all else, we must love him with all our hearts.

So just as we're not permitted to believe in a disembodied Jesus, it's not enough for us to serve him in a disembodied way where he gets our mind but not our hearts.

As then Cardinal Ratzinger explained, Over and against the Aristotelian concept of God who is thought thinking itself, the Christian emphasis is on the heart without which there could have been no passion on the part of the Son.

So the heart is at the, well, at the heart of Christianity.

And here's the thing, heart speaks to heart isn't just true of how Christ reaches us.

It's also true of how we reach one another.

Pope Pius XII called devotion to the sacred heart the most effective school of the love of God because it teaches us not only about God's love for us, but about what our love means to be for each other.

Now that doesn't mean that devotion to the sacred heart means you're never gonna be stuck in an awkward situation where you don't know what to say, or that you're gonna be, uh, talking to someone whose life is out of step with the Gospel and you're gonna be thinking very carefully, What do I say?

What do I do next?

But a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and an awareness of what he has done for your heart can help to reorient you so you're thinking about these tough questions in the right framework.

That is, it becomes less what mistakes is this other person making that need correcting right here, and more in what ways does the love of Christ need to be shown to my neighbor in front of me?

Now to be sure, this transforming love of Christ still means there are gonna be hard conversation because behavioral change is sometimes in order.

And you might say, Joe, the people promoting Pride Month aren't just out of step.

They're waging war on God.

That might be so, at least in some cases, but here's the good news.

St. Paul reminds us while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son.

And Jesus says that he hasn't come for those of us who are well, but that he's come for those of us who are sick.

He's come not to call the righteous, but sinners.

Of course, he is calling them to conversion, but he is also even more fundamentally calling them to himself.

Think about it this way.

Imagine that you're in an unhealthy dating relationship, and you know on some level the relationship isn't going well, doesn't look like it's gonna improve.

You might have reason to suspect God isn't calling you to marry this person.

Now by itself, that knowledge might not be enough to motivate you to take the hard action of breaking up.

There's too many things that keep you stuck in those old patterns.

As humans, we often don't change just because things aren't going well.

We'll stay in dead-end jobs and toxic relationship, and even lives of sin- even while we know that those things aren't working and that they're not good for us, and that they're not making us truly happy.

But now imagine instead that you meet the woman of your dreams and you suddenly realize, hey, staying in this unhappy, unhealthy relationship is keeping me from ever being in a happy and healthy one.

Well, now suddenly, you have a greater motive to do the thing you kinda knew you should've been doing the whole time.

That's how the sacred heart works.

Our hearts are restless until they rest in God, but we occasionally need a glimpse of the true desire of our hearts to motivate us to cut out the people and behaviors and patterns that aren't leading to our true happiness.

And so frequently, the most powerful thing you could do for your neighbor isn't to condemn them for their sin, but to show them that there is something and someone that's better out there for them.

I want to say a word for those of you who might be experiencing this from a very different angle.

Maybe you're somebody who's feeling the struggle of sin weighing down heavily upon you right now.

Maybe the Christian life feels like an impossibility, even a restriction.

Maybe you can relate to the person described by Pope Leo XIII who, faced with Jesus, whose everything, feels like they have nothing to offer.

Well, to you, I just echoes Leo's own words.

He points out that you do have something to offer.

Jesus is asking for one thing from you, My son, give me thy heart.

This invitation to give your heart to Christ, the love of the sacred heart, is an ongoing invitation throughout our journeys of sanctity.

This call of the sacred heart isn't for sin to be ignored or covered over, but to allow our hearts to be transformed through love.

And so if you want to know more about this journey of salvation, how it works, well, I can trust the Biblical answer to that question compared to the false teaching of once saved, always saved right here.

So this June, I pray you come to know the love of Jesus in a powerful new way you haven't before, and that you respond to his invitation by giving him the great gift of your heart.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.