Dunbar United Church of Christ - May 30, 2010

I. I’ve been growing my avocado plant for about two years. The first two or three months it was just a seed that I stuck a few toothpicks in and put it over the lip of a jar filled with water, and nothing happened. Then Sandy Kops said the skin around the seed needed to be removed, so I did that and in a week or two a shoot started growing from the center of the seed. For the next year or so I just kept the jar filled with water. It grew some leaves but they started falling off, so I planted it in dirt I got from the yard, but the plant stopped growing and the leaves started drying at the tips. Finally I bought a bag of potting soil with plant food and repotted it. In a week it started growing again and the leaves stopped turning brown.

II. This is important for me because there’s more going on here than just an avocado plant. This plant is a metaphor of the human heart. Not the material heart, but the spiritual heart, the place in us that holds our emotions. The Bible says all the good and evil we do starts from our heart.

Once, a group of religious authorities asked Jesus: “Why don’t you or your disciples wash your hands before you eat?” Jesus said, “What we put in our mouths isn’t what makes us dirty -- it’s the stuff that comes out of the mouth that kills us!” The disciples didn’t know what Jesus meant, so they asked him: “What do you mean?” Jesus said, “Are you still so dull? Don’t you know that what goes in the mouth goes into the stomach and then out the body. But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these are what make us dirty. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, lies, slander. These are what make a person dirty.”

III. We need to be careful with what we put in our heart, because what we put in comes out in our behavior: from rage to kindness. Anger comes from the heart, and what happens when you keep feeding the anger? A firecracker becomes an atomic bomb.

So watch what you feed your heart. If our heart is a seed, then reading the gospels and meditating all day long on what Jesus said and did is like planting our heart in soil that produces fruits of kindness, mercy and healing -- the same fruits Jesus produced.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to my avocado plant. It might make it. But as for my heart -- as for all of our hearts -- the best care we can give them is to stay focused on Jesus. Jesus is the miracle-gro for the heart.