“Let us lift up our hearts, not our hands, to God in heaven.”

(Lamentations 3:41)

May I suggest as an appropriate text for our worship together this morning an exhortation and response from the ancient liturgy of the Christian church? It goes like this: “Lift up your hearts,” and the response is: “We lift them up unto the Lord.” Whenever the earliest Christians would gather, their leader would stand and say: “Lift up your hearts.” And the worshippers would respond: “We lift them up unto the Lord.”

This brief couplet has persistently prevailed in the communion service of all liturgical churches through the centuries. In these very same words it appears in the Episcopal service, in the Presbyterian churches of America and Scotland, in the service of the United Church of Canada, in the Roman Catholic mass where it is called the Sursum Corda, and in scores of other Christian communions.

The origin of this fragment of primitive Christian liturgy is very obscure. It is not an exact quotation of any scripture verse, though Lamentations 3:41 is very similar. It is attested by Hippolytus as being in common use in the ancient church as early as the year of our Lord, 215.

Where it comes from, we do not know, but why it has remained at the heart of Christian worship we can easily surmise.

First, there is a theological reason that at the center of worship there should always be the bold exhortation: “Lift up your hearts,” and the congregation’s ready response: “We lift them up unto the Lord.” The only worship that can ever be pleasing and valid in God’s sight must have as its central act the lifting up of the heart to God.

The Hebrew people had a vivid and dramatic manner of expression. Biblical language is full of action idioms — words that move. “To lift up the eyes” in scripture means to turn in expectant trust and earnest, prayerful entreaty to God, as the Psalmist says: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. From whence cometh my help? My help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” “To lift up the hand” is to swear on oath or to bless. “To lift up the head” is to rejoice and be glad, or to be restored to former honor. And “to lift up the heart to God” is to dedicate the whole volitional and emotional being — the real self — to God in grateful trust and loyal obedience.

“According to Hebrew ideas,” said Joseph Parker, “the heart is the seat of the mind and will (and the conscience). When God said, ‘Son, give me thine heart,’ He asked for the whole man, in all his intellectual strength and all his emotional tenderness.” No worship, then, is real worship in Biblical religion, which does not include this fundamental offering of the self — “in lifting up the heart to God.”

How often this is dramatically placarded before us in Mendelssohn’s moving oratoria, “Elijah”. When the parching drought prevails and the suffering people of Israel implore the heavens for a merciful deliverance, the prophet Obadiah proclaims: “Ye people, rend your hearts and not your garments.” Let your repentance be moral, the prophet is insisting, not merely ceremonial. Only from the heart can genuine repentance come. Then with moving melody is sung deep truth of scriptural worship: “If with all your hearts, you truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me, thus saith your God.”

And when in response to Elijah’s prayer, God raises up the dying son of the widow of Zarephath, and she in joy overflowing asks: “What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits to me?” Then both Elijah and the widow join in singing together — symbolizing the agreement of divine revelation and human reason of what God does expect and accept of grateful man for all his benefits: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”

There is this basic theological reason for keeping at the center of all Christian worship the bidding response: “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord.” Without the offering of the highest man has to give — his very heart — there is no genuine worship.

But in addition to the theological reason there is a psychological reason for this ancient couplet in Christian liturgy. The true benefits of worship for the worshipper are dependant on this act of lifting up the heart. Going through the forms, singing the hymns, repeating the prayers, and listening to the sermon won’t lessen the soul tension, give genuine comfort, or bestow peace of mind to the harassed soul. The only way we can get the grace and the power and the comfort God intends we should have from our worship is through lifting up our hearts to God.

Kierkegaard speaks of the soul that is “dispersed in the multifarious — constantly running errands in life — and he will never enter into eternity, for even at the instant when he is closest it, he will suddenly discover that he has forgotten something for which he must go back.” “Purity of heart,” says Kierkegaard, “is to will one thing, and only he can be said to will one thing who truly wills the good” — who lifts up his heart to God alone.

The minister drove along a row of tidy houses — clean, well painted, in the bright sunshine. The energetic people of the city lived in them — the folks who care, care about their homes and their families and their friends — the solid citizens — the backbone of the nation. But to just one of those houses the minister was going, and all was suddenly changed in that house. The father, the wage earner, the means of support and security for the family there, had just died. What would the minister say to them? What could he say? Their world had tumbled in. How dark their future. With heavy heart and uncertain thoughts the minister rang the bell. What could he say to that man’s wife — she who was left and about whom all the congregation had been worrying, fearing that she would break down under the strain of long weeks’ nursing care? But at the door she was bright, radiant. Her first words were: “I’m so grateful, so thankful, that I could stay with him and take care of him right to the last.”

A grateful heart one either has or does not have, and strangely enough, it is not dependant on circumstances. All the world’s divided into two classes of people: those with a debtor complex and those with a creditor complex; those who feel that they are never quite getting what they think should be coming to them; who feel that the grocer, the baker, the candlestick maker are out to get the best of them — who are sure their neighbors are taking advantage of them, their children and friends are neglecting them; and then there is that other joyful group of people who go through life with a debtor complex — who are always singing in the gloom and in the glory the same song, for it comes not from their changing surroundings, but out of their grateful hearts: “O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be.” They feel that life and people and God are always showering more on them than they could ever deserve or repay.

The secret of the difference? Just this, these latter have the debtor complex because they have heard and heeded the old sursum corda of the church: “Lift up your hearts,” and have responded in deed and in truth, “We lift them up to thee, O Lord.” The seal of John Calvin in Geneva was a flaming heart in an open hand — with this motto: “My heart I offer to you, O Lord, prompt and sincere.” All who lift up their hearts in their hands unto God find invariably that the Almighty responds by touching with His divine inspiration that offered heart, causing it to be strangely warmed, yes, even to burn with a light of eternal glory, so that the face of all the world is changed because that one is caught up into the Eternal Love.

But there is a sociological reason, also, that the sursum corda be set at the center of Christian worship. It is this: the only society in which men and women may dwell in security and felicity is one in which all people have lifted up their hearts unto God. We know that our society today is one plagued with rampant lawlessness and violence. Security is the number one priority of our American cities. How are we to achieve it?

Isaiah once was in despair over the sorry condition of his nation’s common life. We read awhile ago his explanation of why he and his fellow citizens suffered injustice, oppression, and insecurity; because, as he put it: “Israel’s rulers are rebels, confederates with thieves; every man of them loves a bribe and itches for a gift: they do not give the orphan his rights and the widows cause never comes before them.”

Isaiah believed that lawlessness among the rulers and leaders of a society resulted inevitably in lawlessness among the common people. But sure salvation would come, Isaiah believed, when all the people, rulers and subjects, repented and returned to their God: “Lifting up their hearts and not merely their hands, unto the Lord.”

Where is the difference in ancient Israel and modern America? Oh, the major shocks and catastrophes our nation has passed through: the seizing of the American hostages in Teheran, the Iranian Revolution and the angry charges of United States connivance through the CIA in the tyrannical injustice and cruelty of the Shah in his rule of his own people; the Watergate shenanigans and trials; the Abscam capers; and now, the Billy Carter-Libyan affair! What disillusioning shocks and surprises have stunned us because we say our leaders have failed us!

At the Republican Convention in Detroit last month, one speaker after another spoke of the deplorable condition of the American economy, with its inflation, its unemployment, its wasteful and often corrupt bureaucracy, and the shambles of our nation’s foreign policy. And most of the speakers blamed all our misery on the Democrats in positions of administrative and legislative power, and urged removing the culpable Democrats before it is too late.

The Democrats begin their convention in New York tomorrow. We know from past experience that their speakers will lower the boom on Republicans in the same manner.

One of the things I am most grateful for during these turbulent times is the assurance of our Christian faith that whatever shocking experience we have passed through, whatever shaken confidences we have suffered, these have not destroyed God’s eternal standards of right and wrong, honesty and integrity — but rather that these eternal values have been revealed in a more awesome setting of judgment, power, and glory.

Some years ago “T” and I took that long bus ride from Geneva to Chamonix to view Mt. Blanc, that highest, most formidable peak in the Alps. We were disappointed, at first, that the day was overcast and Mt. Blanc was hid from our view by a low ceiling. But as evening came on, the skies began to clear a bit, and now and then we could catch a glimpse, high above us, through the scudding clouds, of that jagged, snow-covered peak; and it seemed to us that Mt. Blanc was all the more majestic and unassailable shrouded in the mists.

I have experienced something of that same Chamonix — Mt. Blanc emotion over and over as our nation and our world has suffered one shock after another of moral turpitude and human fallibility. The low visibility and stormy weather of our locked-in, earth-bound condition has served to make all the more awesomely majestic whatever glimpses we have had through our darkened skies of the bright, unbending majesty of God’s truth, honor, integrity, justice, and mercy. Yes, the Almighty is shaking the things that can be shaken in order that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.

For sound, sociological reasons there is urgent need now, today, for Christian people to preserve, at the heart of their common worship, the ancient sursum corda: “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord.” For the only ultimate safeguard any nation or human society can ever have are men and women, leaders and private citizens, who accept privilege as a responsibility, position and wealth as sacred trusts from God — who have lifted up their hearts to God in heaven, and not to the idols of pleasure and power and wealth, but to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the ultimate appeal of religion: “Lift up your hearts to God.” This is God’s warm and earnest entreaty as well as His supreme command. This is our deepest personal need, for He has made us for Himself and our weary hearts are restless until we find our rest in Him. This is the rock-bottom, crucial need of our strained, scared human society now, for no man can trust his brother until he and his brother have given their hearts to God.

But our common worship can only issue the exhortation: “Lift up your hearts.” The response: “We lift them up to Thee, O Lord,” is for each person to make for himself alone. The church cannot compel. God, Himself, will never coerce a single heart. What will be our response? To what and to whom will we lift up our hearts? To vanity, to lust, to self-glory?

“O let us lift up our hearts, not just our hands, to God in the heavens.”