Plain as the Nose on Your Face
1 Samuel 16.1-13
Russ Dean, March 10, 2002
Beyond medical school, Dwayne Randleman studied at the Mayo Clinic and at Emory University Hospital. His skill as a cardio-thoracic surgeon was without question. I was visiting in the hospital where he practiced in Birmingham one Wednesday afternoon, and I ran into him in the hall. “Some day I’m going to take you up on your offer to let me watch you perform surgery,” I said to Dwayne, who was a member of my church.
“I’m on the way right now,” he replied. “Come go with me.”
I had looked forward to this since our first conversation when I had told Dwayne of my lifelong interest in medicine. I wondered anxiously how far away I would be from the operating table, and hoped I would be able to see everything from the observation room window. Then we rounded the corner and stepped into the doctor’s lounge, and he handed me a pair of scrubs and a mask. “Put these on,” he smiled. “I’ll pass you off as a visiting surgeon...”
As we entered the operating room, I was introduced to his team of five, and I took my place with the nurse anesthetist. The patient was a white woman in her mid 40’s. She had been a 2-pack-a-day smoker for many years, as would soon be evident from the color of her lungs. I was standing at her head, and in about five minutes, I was staring at her heart as it thumped away. Dwayne had carved an amazing, bloodless incision down her chest, and with the help of a little stainless steel jigsaw, had bisected her sternum in a matter of seconds.
“The heart weighs between 7 and 15 ounces… and is a little larger than the size of your fist. By the end of a long life, a person's heart may have beat… more than 3.5 billion times. In fact, each day, the average heart beats 100,000 times, pumping about 2,000 gallons (7,571 liters) of blood” (http://www.tmc.edu/thi/anatomy.html).
But without Dwayne’s careful skill, his team of experts, and the hundreds of thousands of hours of research involved in developing a procedure as complicated as open-heart surgery, this patient’s heart would not have pumped much longer. Her pink lungs were covered with black pits of tar, and two of the arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle itself were nearly completely blocked.
The strangest moment of the surgery came before any stitching of arteries began. Dwayne had prepared the team, and on his command, “go on bypass,” the stainless machine on the floor began to whirr, the anesthetist to my right injected an ice-cold saline solution into the heart, and Dwayne clamped off the aorta artery. Now instead of carrying her blood to her body, the blood from the aorta was routed through the large tube, which he had inserted deep into her heart and into the bypass machine. As all of these things happened simultaneously, I watched this woman’s beating heart deflate and fall deadly still. On the monitor above my head the normal sinus rhythm became an eery, green “flatline.”
Over the next hour and a half, I watched in absolute amazement. One of the blockages was bypassed by reconnecting a mammary artery below the blockage. The other was repaired with the vein, which an assisting surgeon had harvested from her left thigh. Dwayne carefully sutured the vein above the blockage with a filament that wasn’t much thicker than a human hair, and then as a nurse lifted her heart forward and to the side and held it still, he stitched the other end of the vein to the backside of the heart, below the blockage.
When the sewing was complete, just as they show it in the textbooks Dwayne unclamped the aorta, the silver machine became silent, another injection was given, and without missing a beat, a new heart inflated and pulsed with life. It was amazing.
When I walked into the room she was sitting up in her bed. I introduced myself, and we enjoyed a brief conversation. She was an attractive woman, and for someone who had gone through what I had watched, just two days before, she looked amazingly well. But as we talked, it was not her face or her figure that I saw. It was something much more important than that. I saw her heart. Flat. And then beating out the rhythm of her life. It was an amazing sight. I hope it is not too melodramatic to suggest that once you have seen someone’s heart – you can never look at them, just from the outside, again.
In our text for today, Samuel, at God’s instruction, has gone to Bethlehem to choose from the son’s of Jesse the one who would become the next king. With one glance at, Eliab, the choice was clear to Samuel. It was, in a manner of speaking, As Plain as the Nose on Your Face. The next King of Israel was standing before him. It only takes the slightest amount of reading between the lines to imagine how well Eliab fit the part: He was Tall. Dark. Handsome. Strong. Well-spoken. Winsome. Polite. You name it, Eliab, the first son of Jesse, had it. But God passed him by. “Rejected him” outright -- along with his next six brothers.
The number seven, when used in scripture, represents perfection, completion. Apparently the story is told to make it perfectly clear that God is completely unimpressed by the externals. This is not only true of physical looks, but is true in a much broader application. In our study of Amos, for example, we have learned that the prophet pronounced judgment on the people for the pride of their worship. “I hate (your feasts). (God says.) I despise your festivals. I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. I will not accept your offerings. I will not listen to the melody of your harps.” (Amos 5)
God does not care that our worship is right (much less our house or our hair) – if our hearts are bent on unimportant matters. Israel’s treasure was its own worldly wealth. Its superior status. Its right religion. It should have treasured the Source “from whom all blessings flow.”
The text suggests that Samuel could not see as God saw. But I want to suggest today that our sight is not our problem Neither our eyesight nor our insight. Our hindsight or our foresight. In the wonderful narrative of the Garden of Eden, the cunning serpent charmed the woman into eating of that forbidden tree, for which the “eyes of both (her and her husband) were opened” (Gen 3.7), and they became like God, “knowing good and evil” (Gen 3.5). To be human in this fallen world is to be like God, that is, made in God’s image, capable of seeing both good and evil. I believe that what was plainly obvious to God is still As Plain as the Nose on Your Face, for you and me today.
You don’t need to be told that we are a people preoccupied with appearances, external matters, things that are, in the grand scheme of things, not very important.. Look at your checkbook, and it will be obvious. Read the headlines. Turn on the evening news. Watch CNN, and it will be plain to you. Americans are eating ourselves to death. Dieting ourselves to death. Smoking and drinking ourselves to death. Working ourselves to death. Divorcing ourselves to death. Shopping and buying and indebting ourselves to death.
We are killing ourselves to death in ways unimagined by other societies, and by people of other times. Most of these deaths come from attention to those things in life which do not bring happiness, peace, fulfillment.
I think that seeing is not our problem. That seeing has never been our problem. For since the beginning, we have known good and evil.
The problem is with the heart.
For biblical writers, the heart is not the center of our emotions. The emotions were seated in the bowels, the lower intestines. If you’ve ever been plagued by a difficult decision or truly heartbroken or torn by grief, you know how right this is. No, the heart, in biblical terms, is the seat of the will. The heart controls our thoughts, our actions, our decisions.
The problem, as I see it, is that in a consumer-saturated society, we have so freely fed our appetites that our sight has come to control our heart, where our heart should control our sight. You see what you want to see. What you will to see. What your heart will let you see.
Jesus said “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6.21). He was wise enough to know that treasure controls the heart, and not the other way around.
So on this Lenten Sunday, as we reflect on our hearts, I ask you not, what do you see? But, what is your treasure? Where is your heart? How much time have you spent this week tending to your heart? How much money have you spent this month clothing and feeding your heart? How much energy have you spent this year considering how to make your heart grow? How to secure your heart for an uncertain future?
Someone once said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” What controls your heart should be as Plain to you as the Nose on Your Face.
But… what might not be so plain to you is what God knows about that heart.
Jesse’s youngest son, David, was chosen by God to lead Israel because, the text suggests, God could see his heart. Later, he is called “a man after God’s own heart.” What an incredible, impressive, intimidating epitaph! Has this ever been said of anyone else? But herein lies the chaff – David, King of Israel, sweet shepherd boy who wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…” wanted much. David was a hero. But David was also an adulterer. A scheming, conniving, liar. And a murderer.
It seems to me that the point must be this: if David was one after God’s own heart – who among you is not?
May it be so. Amen!
PASTORAL PRAYER
Create in me a clean heart, O God
renew a right spirit within me.
O God of David, our sin is ever before us.
We rise and are greeted each new day
by a face in the mirror
whose heart we know all too well…
Create in me a clean heart, O God
renew a right spirit within me.
O God of David, our sin is ever before us.
The private lives of our leaders,
our children’s role models,
our created heroes,
are tabloid headlines
and the topic of our universal judgment…
Create in me a clean heart, O God
renew a right spirit within me.
O God of David, our sin is ever before us,
in systems of our own making that
perpetuate abuse, victimization, cruelty, alienation...
Cause us to see what is plainly visible, O God
and give us courage and confidence to know, today,
that like David, our hearts
which are corrupt
are also kind;
that like David, our hearts,
beating life into this world
are your hearts, too.
Create in me a clean heart, O God
renew a right spirit within me..
Amen!