In an anxious season, it’s good to turn our gaze away from all that stokes anxiety and lift up our hearts to God.

That’s what the prophet Jeremiah calls God’s people to do in Lamentations 3.  “Let us lift up our hearts as well as our hands to God in heaven” (v.41).  Jeremiah wrote during a time of national tragedy: the Babylonian conquest and all the imagination-wringing anxiety that came with the loss of nation and temple and king and everything.  Where was God?  Now what?  In reflecting on all that terror and questioning, the prophet reminds the people that God’s “mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (3:22).  And then: “let us lift up our hearts” (3:22, 41).

To lift up our hearts means to train our affections on God.  It’s a refocusing on the God who is and was and is to come (Revelation 1:8).  It’s seeing through to the center point of the Real, to fix our eyes on the throne that anchors the swirling, wobbling universe.  In that way, lifting up our hearts is the primordial act of worship.  This is why Jeremiah pairs lifting up our hearts with lifting up our hands, which is one of the basic biblical postures of worship (Psalm 63:4; 141:2).  Worship begins with loving the “the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:4).  Let us lift up our hearts.

Lifting up our hearts also means lifting up all that we are—wants and wounds, hungers and hurts—as an offering of praise and thanksgiving to God.  Lifting up our hearts is not only looking to God, but bringing to God.  The ancient priests lifted up a portion of the sacrificial animal to God at the altar (Leviticus 7:34).  In Christ the perfect high priest, God’s people lift up their hearts in worship and life.

This is why the most ancient Christian communion prayers begin with a summons to the people. “Lift up your hearts!” calls the leader.  “We lift them up to the Lord!” respond the gathered people.  It’s called the Sursum Corda, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the liturgy.  (Sandra McCracken also happens to have written a beautiful song about it).  By lifting up our hearts, we’re offering our lives and loves to God.  Let us give thanks to the Lord our God!  It is right and just!  I like that.

Tomorrow is a distant, unseen land.

So let us lift up our hearts this day in worship, trusting in God’s goodness and competence as the King of the Universe.

And let us lift up everything we’re carrying in our hearts: our anxieties and hopes and most pressing needs.

Christ is worthy of our hearts.  Christ can hold our hearts.  It is good to lift our hearts to the Lord.