Baccalaureate Sunday
THE SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 • 1 John 5:9-13 • John 17:6-19
Good morning, everyone. If we’ve never met, I’m Michael. I’ve been attending St. Paul’s as far back as I can remember. I joined the choir in 1st grade, and I can confidently say it has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life to grow up in this community. I am honored and grateful for the opportunity to deliver the sermon today. I am going to be using the masculine pronouns for God - I tried switching back and forth and then I just confused myself.
As I looked through today’s readings, I was drawn to a specific point in the First Lesson, where the disciples begin a prayer with the sentence: “Lord, you know everyone’s heart.”
The choice of language in this tiny 5-word sentence is something I find fascinating. It seems like the disciples could’ve easily described God as ‘all-knowing’ for a similar effect. They could’ve prayed, “Lord, you know everything.” Instead, they made the subtle distinction of specifying “everyone’s heart” instead of “everything.” And perhaps this is simply a matter of translation—but either way, I think “knowing everyone’s heart,” is much more intimate than simply “knowing everything.” In my mind, the only people who know my heart are the people I’ve chosen to let into it. They know my heart because of their firsthand experience with it—random strangers in a coffee shop aren’t going to say they know my heart, or at least I hope they won’t. But God knowing my heart implies God’s own experience with it, just like the people I've loved and who’ve loved me back. Those people, many of whom I know through St. Paul’s, have helped forge my heart into what it is through their love and joy. They truly have been gifts from God, and if they really have shaped my heart as I believe they have, then it's fair to say God has shaped my heart through them. Following this logic, it would make perfect sense that God knows my heart—God not only created it originally, but has been shaping it along the way.
God’s knowledge of my heart brings me hope, because I can easily recall times where I felt deeply confused about who I was, as though I didn’t know my own heart. Trusting that God knows it steadies that turbulent confusion, and reduces any loneliness that confusion may bring.
In the past couple of years, I’ve experienced many complicated situations and complex emotions, where I felt confused and alone—or looking back, perhaps I just felt misunderstood. Often, what I wanted in those situations was simply to be understood. That longing, that sense of isolation—might’ve dissipated if I could more firmly trust that God understands.
I experienced something along these lines just a couple weeks ago. I took a six-week road trip up the East Coast, by myself. (If we are going to talk about complex emotions, we could probably ask my parents how they felt about that trip.) Despite the trip being an overall rewarding experience for which I am very grateful, there was a time or two in particular where I felt seriously homesick. This was a new kind of homesick for me—to be in a place I had never been before, where I didn’t know a single soul around. At some points I really enjoyed that—for example, choosing to explore randomly on an impulse. Like driving out to a desert in Maine that ended up not being real. But other times, not so much. My feelings of homesickness were complicated by the fact that I was the one who put myself there. The trip was my idea, and I was the one who decided to go through with it. In a way, I almost felt guilty for feeling homesick, which made it confusing.
But God knows my heart, probably better than I do. And God knows each contradicting duality that can overwhelm it, which lightens the weight of those complex emotions by taking the burden of loneliness away.
Yet I wonder—what does God see when He looks at my heart? Does God see what I hope He sees? Does God see what I hope He doesn’t? Does God know things about my heart that I don’t?
So, what do I know about my heart? It seems to like cookies and milk. Music and driving with the windows down on summer nights seem to make it really happy. But I know—and more importantly, I feel that God knows it too—that my relationships are what really gives joy to my heart. I am sure God can see the overwhelming impact my family and friends have made on my heart. Today, I know God can see my deep love for the St. Paul’s community—the friends, mentors, and memories I have here that have shaped my life and my heart in ways I can’t describe. And if I tried to, I am positive this sermon would end with me in tears and everybody checking their watches. And today being Mother’s Day, I know God can also see the joyous and steadfast pillar of wisdom that is my mom, along with her friends, a group of second mothers who have each helped raise me in their own wonderful ways.
This is all to say—more than anything, my heart is both fulfilled and shaped by my connections to my loved ones. We see this idea in today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus prays intently for the disciples, evidence of both the connections they share with each other and the connections they all share with God. Jesus prays for the disciples in a way that shows his deep love for them, and asks God to take care of them. In many readings, we see how the disciples are loved by Jesus, and how this shapes them. But here, we get a glimpse of how Jesus has been shaped by the disciples—which reminds us that the love between them is reciprocated. We see the profound and intimate relationship between them when Jesus prays: “I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.”
Originally, I focused this sermon towards advice, towards the idea of giving words to each other, in the context of this connection between God, Jesus, and the disciples. In the Gospel, Jesus says, “for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you.” I interpreted one layer of this as saying: our connections can be strengthened by the words we give to each other.
But focusing only on words didn’t quite work. It felt like something was missing, and I quickly found myself writing about the heart instead of words.
Our words can, and do, fall short; but our hearts don’t. For each other, sometimes that’s not enough—it can be hard to trust someone’s heart, so instead we need words to soothe and reassure us. But for God, maybe just the heart is enough.
If God knows our hearts so well, then I would bet our hearts—without their worldly burdens—know God too, perhaps better than our minds can intellectualize. This could be a place where our words fall short, but our hearts don’t.
I wonder if God’s knowledge is an arrow of light, extending to our hearts and minds, where we have the opportunity to reflect this light of knowledge back towards God. When I read that God knows everyone’s heart, my first impulse is to interpret this as a sign of impending judgment. But maybe it’s simpler than that—perhaps God knows our hearts, just to make it easier for us to know Him. Maybe God moves closer to us, so there is less distance to cover when we choose to move closer to God.
We shorten that distance when we engage with ourselves and our own faiths, when we engage in a faith community—or even just when we enjoy something our hearts love doing. Like dunking a big warm cookie in a cold glass of milk. For me, St. Paul’s shortens that distance each and every time I set foot within these walls. From my beautiful friendships here that I hope continue for the rest of my life—to the invaluable guidance and boundless laughter I have received from so many, especially Jack Cleghorn and Curtis Moneymaker—to the purpose that comes with finding a place in something bigger than yourself—I am so grateful.
© 2024 Michael Lynch, Graduating Senior
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas