Even if your eyesight is worse than mine, for the next couple weeks you’ll be seeing hearts everywhere you look. You’ll see candy boxes shaped like hearts. You’ll see candy shaped like hearts. You’ll see a seemingly unceasing flow of ads adorned with hearts flowing across whatever screen has your focus at the moment.

Why? Because Valentine’s Day is coming. The attendant advertising reinforces the cliched notions that our emotions are centered in our hearts and that love instinctively and effortlessly flows from every human heart. So, if we just see enough hearts (and buy enough candy and greeting cards), love will fill the earth and we’ll live happily after.

Okay …

There’s a reason Valentine’s Day isn’t found on the liturgical calendar of the Christian Church: The Bible sees the human heart as representing something far beyond Hallmark and Whitmans sentimentality. Scripture speaks of the heart as the core of a person’s being. The Bible describes the heart as the seat of human thinking, willing, and feeling. (Yes, the Bible recognizes the value and validity of rightly ordered affections.) Even more important, the Bible speaks about the heart as the place where our character is shaped and where our response to God is formed. As we’ll see below, our heart is the source of our speech.

But first, it’s been 33 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an article titled Defining Deviancy Down.[1] Moynihan, a Democrat and devout Catholic, taught at Harvard, served four U.S. presidents, and served four terms as a senator from New York. In this seminal essay, he observed that “deviancy – measured as increases in crime, broken homes, and mental illness – reached levels unimagined by earlier generations. … Actions once considered deviant from acceptable standards became, almost immaculately, within bounds.”2 His article was incisive and prophetic.

Given his chosen topics, Moynihan didn’t discuss an area where cultural decline is especially evident today – our speech. Last year, Virginia elected an Attorney General who insisted he was serious about killing a political opponent and his children.3 This year, a candidate for Ohio Attorney General is telling everyone who will listen how he plans to kill President Trump.4 

When did causing children to die in their mother’s arms, just to change the opinion of a political opponent, become “within bounds?” How long have we been sliding down a slippery slope to have reached a place where planning the execution of a sitting president becomes an acceptable plank in a political platform? Is there anything anyone can do to reverse the trend?

To be sure, some have tried. But coarse discourse can’t be smoothed over by increasing the ranks and authority of the Speech Police. Throughout history, coordinated efforts to eliminate free speech have failed everywhere they’ve been tried. And they always will. That’s because speech doesn’t start with our tongues. Rather, it begins in our hearts. Jesus said, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:34).

The way to change speech is to change hearts. So, perhaps the Church might want to take another look at all the hearts that will circulating in the run-up to Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day is indeed a cultural custom. But I wonder: Could the Church co-opt the date but change the custom? What would happen if, in the coming years, God’s people were to use Valentine’s Days intentionally to examine the words we’ve spoken or written – edifying and unedifying – in the past 12 months. What might change if we gathered together, or sat silently alone, examined our hearts, and thought about all the words we might use in the year ahead?

What differences might such explorations of our own hearts make in each of our lives, in the life of this church, this community, this country?

[1] The American Scholar, vol. 62, 1993, pp. 17-30.

2 Kevin Warsh, Defining Deviancy,  https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/warsh20090616a.htm.

3 https://jayjonestexts.com/.

4 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/backlash-erupts-after-ohio-democratic-ag-candidate-posts-about-killing-trump.

Were there angels in heaven who kept records of such things, I suspect most of us one day would be amazed to learn how often we thought, yet how little we knew, about time.

Please don’t take that as a criticism. The concept of time has long perplexed poets, painters, philosophers, physicists, and those of us who persistently look up at a wall or down at our wrist (or our phone) to learn what time it is. It might seem that attempts to learn what time it is presuppose that someone, somewhere, has determined what time is. But that presupposition is optimistic.

Most of us have a deeply intuitive sense not only that time exists, but that it matters. Even if we can’t precisely define it, we continually experience it. And many individuals, coming from many different starting points, have tried to express their perceptions about time.

Poets, going at least as far back as William Shakespeare, eloquently survey the effects of time on human beings. Often, but certainly not always, poets portray time as an enemy. The best-known painting of the Surrealist Salvador Dali, formally titled The Persistence of Memory, is more popularly known as Melting Clocks. Years after finishing the painting, Dali addressed the wide range of meanings ascribed to the work by saying even he didn’t know what it meant.

Then there are physicists and philosophers who don’t believe there’s any such thing as time. Some modern physicists use Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to argue that in space-time, concepts such as past, present, and future are meaningless. A century earlier, the philosopher Immanuel Kant had argued that temporal order is found only in an individual’s mind and that time does not objectively exist.

The Bible takes a different approach. Although both Hebrew and Greek have several words properly translated “time,” Scripture doesn’t speculate about time’s nature. Instead of arguing for its existence or listing its qualities, the Bible simply assumes that time exists. My broad summary of the biblical view of time is that it’s something like a cosmic canvas across which God’s specific acts in the redemption of his people are sequentially unfurled.

Time is God’s creation and it remains under his direction. As such, not only is time real (contra some philosophers and physicists), time is also very good (contra some poets and painters). According to the Bible, human history, and our individual histories, are moving toward a God-established goal. Time is a gift of God that helps us track our progress. We can look back at the places where we’ve wandered off the path. We can also look ahead to get at least a glimpse of the glory God already has prepared for us.        

The advent of a new calendar year is often used by individuals and organizations as an opportunity to look back and to look ahead. Both can be rewarding exercises. As Christians, we can look back and see specific points where we’ve grown in our faith. We can also gain clarity about opportunities for future growth. But, as Christians, I think our greatest joy comes from looking ahead. For there we see a God “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). And there we see our Savior, Jesus Christ, who “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

Happy New Year.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved the music of the Christmas season. From Linus and Lucy Can Rock to You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch and from Frosty the Snowman to Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, music from the animated specials of my childhood still brings a smile to my face.

Through the years, I have added an appreciation of more substantial works, including Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria and George Friedrich Handel’s Messiah. Although they were written about 300 years ago, both are still widely performed when Christmas time is here, eloquent evidence of music’s ability to convey profound truths to human souls.

And I never tire of playing or singing Christmas carols. My favorite is Angels We Have Heard on High. The melody comes from a traditional French piece, “The Angels in Our Countryside.” “Traditional” is one way musicians say, “We have no idea who wrote this tune.”

The author of the 10 original verses is equally unknown. We do know that in 1860, these verses were translated into English by James Chadwick, a Roman Catholic bishop from England. I was surprised when I learned that it was not until 1966, when the American composer Austin Lovelace was preparing to include it in a new United Methodist hymnal, that this centuries-old carol was first given the title “Angels We Have Heard on High.”

One of my earliest musical memories is learning to sing this carol for my home church’s Christmas pageant. This annual event was the standard small church bathrobe drama, complete with shepherds and angels, wise men and a plastic baby Jesus. But with each tableau, the Junior Choir sang a verse or two from an appropriate carol. When we got to Angels We Have Heard on High, I was asked to sing the alto line for the refrain.

That was a revelation.

As the carol’s refrain began, the sopranos held their note for several beats while the altos sang shorter notes below them. Then we held a long tone while the sopranos kept changing notes above us. I was hooked. It would be years before I learned that the technical term for that musical procedure is “polyphony,” literally, “many voices.” It took me even longer to recognize that this compositional technique provides an ideal way to set the text of the carol’s refrain, which is taken from Luke 2:13-14:

          And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

                  “Glory to God in the highest,

and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

By definition, a multitude of angels would include many voices. Using what a former pastor called my “sanctified imagination,” I can imagine that the voices of the heavenly host ranged from low to high, each with its own distinctive timbre. And while I can’t imagine what that heavenly choir sounded like when they praised God from the sky, I’m sure that what the shepherds heard was glorious and that it glorified God in the highest.

As together we begin this new Christian year, journeying through Advent to Christmas with the music of the season ringing in our years, let me encourage you to listen a bit more carefully to the carols you’ll hear and sing. For even though we know them all by heart, if we pay a little more attention to both the words and the music, we just may find our souls refreshed in unexpected ways.

Gloria in excelsis Deo.