Paraphrasing Proverbs 4, Symeon the New Theologian, made the following claim,

“Our holy fathers have renounced all other spiritual work and concentrated wholly on this one doing, that is, on guarding the heart.” ~ Symeon the “New” Theologian

What he said over 1000 years ago remains just as true today. Our human hearts are the driving force of our lives. They are also susceptible to all kinds of pain and can generate all kinds of trouble. Prayer, gratitude, and repentance are essential components in guarding our hearts.

St. Augustine famously said,

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.     

God has made us this way. The human heart matters, and God will work with and through it. How might God work within us when our hearts are angry, hurt, or vengeful?

For the Love of Links (FTLOL) is a collection of gems from interwebs. The content is sometimes funny, haha, and sometimes funny, odd. Hopefully, it is all edifying. Enjoy!

N.T. Wright is an expert on the resurrection of Jesus. In this article from Time Magazine he shows us why Jesus resurrection is not some benign fact from the past but a reality we live in, especially in the world of political discourse. — The Link Between the Resurrection and Elections

… and he’s probably right. He is a social psychologist and the author of several insightful books including The Righteous Mind and his most recent one The Anxious Generation which is getting lots of press. This clip says a lot and it is a great reminder that, for the Christian, repentance is a gift.

Terry Mattingly has also covered Haidt’s work recently. His substack provides a deeper dive into Haidt’s arguments about phone use and the social lives of young people. It’s not a fun read but a good one. — Smartphone Standoff

It will come as no surprise that I find silence difficult. Maybe you do to. John Gehring shares about his visit to a monastery in Virginia. God is always speaking but our ears are filled with all kinds of noise. Maybe Gehring can inspire me yet. — What I Learned Being Silent with Monks

The animated series King of the Hill got many things right. This episode is one of them: Reborn to be Wild. You can watch the entire episode or fast forward to the good stuff at 20:59.

In it, Hank Hill tries to provide spiritual guidance to his son, hoping to forge a faith for the long haul. In this episode, you can hear Hank say, “. . . you’re not making Christianity any better you’re just making rock and roll worse.”

Last week, we began our long march into and through Ordinary Time. We’ve passed through the main seasons of the Church year. Now what? Chad Bird, a wonderful Bible teacher, describes how now, in Ordinary Time, we are freed up to the surprise of God’s grace in unexpected places. — Fading into Ordinary, Ragtag Christianity after Pentecost

If you are an avid baseball fan you know the name, Angel Hernandez. He’s considered the worst umpire in Major League baseball. You don’t need to know much about baseball to understand, the sighs of the announcers are enough.

BEMA Podcast - great, semi-rabbinic reflections on all of Scripture. Great stuff, too many episodes to choose from.

“Unbelievable” Podcast - everything sounds better in the King’s English, including this podcast that explores all kinds of issues from a Christian perspective.

Justin Brierly’s “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God” - I commend this podcast to everyone. Brierly explores the decline of the New Atheism and the new rise of spirituality, which includes for many a return to Christian faith.

The Bible Project - has too many videos to choose from but they are all good. Is there a book of the Bible you are wondering about? Nahum? Zephaniah? III John? BP has what you need to get quickly and clearly oriented. Check them out!

And of course, Wheatland’s website, where you can find daily Scripture readings, a link to our FB page for Saturday worship, and, of course a link to WM’s Substack.

It was a common refrain among youth ministers. It was simple and easy to memorize. It directly addressed the swirling chaos of teenage emotions. All we needed to do was “guard our hearts.” It came from the bible, too.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. – Proverbs 4:23 NIV

Whether it’s teens in the 1980s, medieval Christians, or monks in the Egyptian desert, the advice remains the same: Guard the heart. The emotional turmoil of youth goes underground, morphing into the quiet emotional chaos of adulthood. The stress of survival in a world spinning out of control multiplies it. The advice seems too basic, but it is essential. Guard your heart.

Thanks for reading The Wheatland Mission ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It wasn’t a new idea when Symeon the New Theologian proposed it a thousand years ago. Symeon was a monk and spiritual writer from Constantinople. His words sound eerily similar to contemporary youth workers, but they were drawn from the earliest Christians and the Book of Proverbs.

Our holy fathers have renounced all other spiritual work and concentrated wholly on this one doing, that is, on guarding the heart.

The “heart” can refer to many things. It is that part of us that is emotionally sensitive and sometimes volatile. It can refer to our seat of thought and emotion. In a way, it is our inner person, our deepest self. Dallas Willard says that the heart is the center of executive function. It is that part of us responsible for decisions. It is our heart that gets us to do anything. It is the will.

It means all of these and probably more. That is why Symeon’s guidance is so important. We don’t only guard our hearts from external harm. We guard it from itself. Symeon and the Proverbs tell us to guard our hearts because if our hearts are twisted, so will the rest of our lives be — from the heart flows the springs of life.

Guarding our hearts includes listening to them. Our hearts provide essential information about ourselves and the people around us. They sometimes warn us and sometimes condemn us. So, watch where your heart takes you. Listen closely to what it says, and remember that the heart is not infallible—none of us are. So we listen to our hearts but don’t necessarily obey them.

Spiritual maturity and emotional maturity are discrete parts of the Christian life. They overlap and go hand in hand. To grow in one is to grow in the other. Self-awareness, as opposed to self-consciousness, is our ability to pay attention to our reactions. Growing in self-awareness is synonymous with guarding the heart.

To guard our hearts is to pay attention to ourselves and to God. And this is another reason why Symeon so emphasized this practice. To guard one’s heart is to make oneself available in prayer. It is not just an initial step in our spiritual growth but a continuous one. The full quote from Symeon reads,

Our holy fathers have renounced all other spiritual work and concentrated wholly on this one doing, that is, on guarding the heart, convinced that, through this practice, they would easily attain every other virtue, whereas without it not a single virtue can be firmly established.

Any growth, whether spiritual or emotional, is short-lived without self-awareness. It’s lost if we do not guard our hearts. Virtue, spiritual growth, and emotional maturity all hinge on the kind of self-awareness Symeon describes. Youth ministers, medieval Christians, and monks in the desert all agree: Guard the heart.

One way to guard our hearts is to pay attention to our reactions. Evaluate for yourself: What things rob your peace? What things disturb you? What makes you angry, afraid, or depressed? To guard the heart, we must ask these kinds of questions. Let’s all pray that God will help us hear what our hearts are saying and respond appropriately, with wisdom and depth.

Finally, in this process, we do well to learn from another voice from the distant past. You may want to begin praying this prayer from Teresa of Avila:

Let nothing disturb thee,
nothing affright thee;
all things are passing,
God never changeth!
Patient endurance attaineth to all things;
who God possesseth
in nothing is wanting;
alone God sufficeth.

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. - from Celtic Daily Prayer and the Northumbria Community

Thanks for reading The Wheatland Mission ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

A.W. Tozer said, “What comes to our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” - Knowledge of the Holy, pg. 1.

God is all-powerful and unchanging. He knows everything. God is a lot of things (understatement of the century). But what if the first thing that came to our minds about God was his relationship as Father, Son, and Spirit? What if our first thought about God was God’s mutual love that is shared, and has always been shared, between the members of the Trinity?

May the mutual love and self-giving between Father, Son, and Spirit inspire us to greater love and service. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Amen.

This week’s FTLOL is Trinity heavy. You can read about Rublev’s icon, hear Malcolm Guite’s poem for Trinity Sunday, and see the Bible Project guys attempt to describe the Trinity. There’s some non-Trinity stuff too, like Wheatland’s first Connections game. Good luck!

Andrei Rublev’s icon, The Hospitality of Abraham, is a common sight at Wheatland. Tomorrow is Trinity Saturday, so we will have it displayed. Gratefully, we have it out regularly to remind us that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The great spiritual writer Henri Nouwen was deeply moved by the icon. In this post you’ll see some comments from friends of Henri’s who share their experience of Henri and his childlike love of Rublev’s icon. It’s a great read - “Lord, that I might see”: Henri Nouwen’s Eye for Icons

Last year the icon was moved to a church in Moscow on Putin’s orders. You can see photographs of the original icon in Christ the Savior Cathedral, it’s new home. Wikipedia does a good job covering the history and influence of the Old Testament Trinity.

This is an interpretation of Rublev’s icon from the Ukrainian artist Ivanka Demchuk. You can see this and many other interpretations of older icons at her site.

Here is a interesting analysis of the protests happening on college campuses today. The author compares the ways in which modern protests are similar, yet very different, from those of MLK and other civil rights leaders from the 60s. — Modern Protest Culture is Crippled by Internet Brain

If you are familiar with the NYT Connections game this will look really familiar. For those of you are not familiar, this game requires that you group the terms in groups of four. When the correct four are put together, the category that they share is revealed.

Have fun! — Wheatland’s Connection Game #1

A few weeks ago I included the brief post by Bishop Todd Hunter entitled, “A Christian America? Be Careful What You Wish For.” Here is the second part of that post. He asks important questions on how followers of Jesus in the 21st Century can be good neighbors in tough times. - A Christian America? Pt. 2

You can also see his regular posting at The Gospel of the Kingdom.

Nice attempt. They do well but they owe a tip o’ the hat to Edwin Abbot’s Flatland.

I would listen to Malcolm Guite read the phonebook. By some kind of holy luck, we have him reading his poem for Trinity Sunday. Listen because of his voice, listen again because of the words.

This is the version of “What We Pray” written shortly after the author discovered the footnote button in Substack. He went overboard and begs your indulgence.

God has a lot of names, all of them from the Bible. For example, Elohim1 is translated into English as “God.” Then there is YHWH,2 that mysterious name revealed to Moses, translated into English as “LORD.” One must pay attention to the capital letters. When our Bibles say, “Lord,” in small caps, it translates from a different Hebrew word, Adonai.3

Don’t forget “El Shaddai,”4, a name Amy Grant made popular in her song from the 1980s. There is “El Elyon,”5 “Jehovah-Jireh,”6 “Jehovah-Rapha,”7 and “Jehovah-Tsidkenu.”8 And many more, including a mysterious one translated, “The Fear of Isaac.”9 There’s a nice study Bible called the Names of God Study Bible10 that transliterates many Hebrew names for God. And we shouldn’t forget that God is called Abba11 in the New Testament.

Jesus has many names, too. Immanuel,12 means “God is with us.” There is “Morning Star,”13 “Lamb of God,”14 and “Alpha and Omega.”15 Jesus also has a title familiar to all of us, Christos,16 which means “Anointed One.”

And we dare not forget the Holy Spirit. Pneuma17 is the Greek word most often used for the Spirit. In John 14:26, the Spirit is called by an unusual Greek name, Paraclete. This one word is translated as “Advocate,” “Comforter,” “Counselor,” “Helper,” and “Friend,” just to name a few. Each version of the name reveals something important about who the Holy Spirit is.

I encourage you to dig into these names. Each one reveals something unique about the God we worship. While we are at it, let’s also pay attention to a more common name for God. We proclaim this name several times during our worship service when we say,

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Trinity Sunday is this week. We celebrate it the first week after Pentecost, but we speak of and speak to the Trinity multiple times every week. Each time we gather for worship. Three persons, three names, yet we pray to one God. Even though this formula has three names, it is, in a sense, one name.

When we conclude our prayers with this phrase, we remind ourselves that we speak to God, who initiates relationship. To call God Father is to assume that he has a child. To call God Son is to assume that there is a parent. The language of Father and Son is more about relationship than gender.

We call God Father, or Abba, because Jesus did. He invited us to do so when he taught us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” In doing this, Jesus invites us to participate in his relationship with God the Father. Because Jesus calls God Abba, so can we. So should we.

It’s not just a tagline or a convenient way to move to another part of our worship. It is the deepest cry of the human heart responding to the God of the Universe.

So, as we close our prayers or conclude our Psalm reading (which is a prayer unto itself), we may rejoice that we are participating in the very relationship that the Son has with the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. Trinity is God in relationship and through the work of Jesus, and empowered by the Spirit, we are drawn up into the fellowship that God is.

So why would we hesitate to pray in the Triune (three part) name of God.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

Genesis 1:1 and about 2500 other places in the Old Testament.

Its big reveal is in Exodus 6:2, but it is used earlier throughout Genesis.

Genesis 15:2

Genesis 17:1

Genesis 14:17-22

Genesis 22:14

Exodus 15:22-27

Jeremiah 23:6

Genesis 31:42

Thanks, Buffy, for this recommendation! You can find it on Amazon.

Galatians 4:6, Romans 8:15

Matthew 1:23

Revelation 22:16

John 1:29

Revelation 1:8

Matthew 16:16

Think of pneumatic tools that are powered by compressed air.

Pentecost is the day we celebrate the gift of God’s Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church. Jesus tells us this even before it happened.

When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. - John 15

John’s Gospel reminds us that the Holy Spirit sounds like Jesus. As we seek the Kingdom of God, let’s remind ourselves that God’s Spirit will not lead us in any way that does not sound, look, or smell like Jesus.

For the Love of Links (FTLOL) is a collection of articles, podcasts, clips, and other media from the Internet. Some of it is edifying, some of it is random, and all of it is worth checking out. It is worth, at minimum, 120 seconds of your time.

The answer is: maybe, most probably. It’s been one year since Tim Keller died. His is a name to remember and a reminder that God still makes saints. He pastored Redeemer Church in New York City for over 30 years. He made his mark through a humble, faithful presence in the place God had called him to. This is a kind tribute to one of God’s many imperfect servants. - Tim Keller: New York’s Pastor

Thanks for reading The Wheatland Mission ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

You may have seen some of the “Our Church Speaks” images in your social media feeds. Ben Lansing is an artist who paints beautiful images of saints combined with some of their most notable words. His work is inspired by the calendar of the Saints in the Book of Common Prayer. He has a book coming out later this year. In the meantime, I encourage you to peruse the various saints Lansing has painted. You can even buy prints! - Our Church Speaks

Alan Noble is a writer and a professor in Oklahoma. He also has a podcast entitled, “On Getting Out of Bed.” With the help of several guests he reflects on mental health, the struggles we all face, and the reality of help in unlikely places.

He also recently published a book by the same name. In it, he claims that “getting out of bed is an act of worship.” - On Getting out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

Clearly, this is not AI’s brightest moment. First Things responds to how a chatbot named “Father Justin” made some tremendous mistakes in guiding those who sought his wisdom - The Defrocking of Father AI

… is our own Karen Barlett. Here’s one of her latest blog posts on “Holding Space.” Take it in. This is great coaching on how to care of one another.

Chinese Christians escaping persecution are being tested. Are they the real deal, or are they claiming religious persecution simply for the sake of escaping their country of origin? On a few occasions, the West Wing portrayed the Christian faith well. This is one of those moments - “Shibboleth.” (In honor of Pentecost.)

Thanks for reading The Wheatland Mission ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

In The Book of Common Prayer there is a section called “Prayers and Thanksgivings.” In it you will find 81 different prayers. Some are prayers for help, and others are expressions of gratitude. You can find a prayer to pray before you eat, vote, or plant your crops. There are prayers for rain, for the gift of children, for the aged, and for the future of the human race. You can find prayers for monastics, for those who live alone, and for those who fight addiction. There is even a prayer for people who influence public opinion!

These prayers aren’t magic incantations. But they are magical. The magic is the presence of God’s Spirit praying these prayers within us. The Spirit prays for us when our words escape us. (Rom 8) Maybe you have occasionally noticed that you don't have the words when you sit down to pray. When this happens, the 81 Prayers of the BCP are a great resource.

Thanks for reading The Wheatland Mission ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Here is #59. The roots of this prayer come from Isaiah 30:15.

A Prayer of Quiet Confidence

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Holy Spirit is the member of the Trinity who dwells in the background, giving honor to God the Father and the Son. But in the prayers of the church, we see the Spirit represented. How often, on a Saturday night, do you hear the words, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit?” The Spirit is present in nearly every collect we pray, in our communion liturgy, and our weekly benediction from II Corinthians 13:13.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all. Amen.

This Saturday is Pentecost. It commemorates the descent of God’s Holy Spirit shortly after Christ’s ascension. You can read the story in Acts 2. However, the Spirit has always been present. In Genesis 1, we read about the “wind/breath/Spirit of God hovering over the waters.” The Spirit is present and active in Creation. And the Spirit of God has never stopped. We read of the Spirit in the Old Testament and the Gospels as well. In truth, the Spirit has always been with us but is now available to us in a new way. God’s Spirit is given to us.

As we celebrate the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, I want to encourage you to experiment. Ask the Spirit to speak. As you read Scripture, worship with fellow Wheatlanders, wait in the pickup line at school or at a stop light, simply ask. Rather than waiting for an audible voice, listen to what God’s Spirit may be saying deep inside.

I use the word experiment, because it may take time for us to discern the voice of the Spirit. The ears of our hearts need to be trained. It may take some time for us to distinguish God’s prompting from our own voice. And, if you need help, I can think of no better words to pray than those prayed by Samuel on the advice of his mentor Eli, “Speak, LORD. For your servant is listening.” (I Sam 3)

And, if you need assistance in speaking to God, there are 81 prayers waiting to guide and support you on this journey of listening to God’s Spirit.

Almighty and most merciful God, grant that, by the indwelling of thy Holy Spirit we may be enlightened and strengthened for thy service; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Thanks for reading The Wheatland Mission ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It is an easy story to miss. Nestled between Easter and Pentecost, the Ascension of Christ is a critical event in Christ's life and an important commemoration for the Church that often goes unnoticed. Christ’s physical body disappears from sight in preparation for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

Christ goes away in order to come near. Christ ascends in order that the Spirit might descend. His absence becomes a deeper kind of presence. Rowan Williams has put it this way,

This is what Ascension Day is like. It is the moment when Jesus “goes away”, stops being an object we concentrate on in itself, and yet becomes more deeply and permanently present: “I am with you always, to the end of time.” He is with us as the light we see by; we see the world in a new way because we see it through him, see it with his eyes.

In the Ascension, we discover that Jesus is no longer the light we are blinded by. He is the light we see by. May God’s Spirit empower us to see the world and one another by the light of the risen and ascended Christ.