The story is told of an atheist who was spending a quiet day fishing. Suddenly, the waters began to ripple and out of them came the Loch Ness monster. With one easy flip, the beast tossed the man and his boat into the air. It opened its massive mouth, ready to swallow them both. Terrified, the man screamed: "God, help me!"

And suddenly, everything stopped. It was as if the pause button on the world’s remote control had been pushed. The man found himself hanging in the air only feet above Nessie’s gaping mouth. And then, right before his very eyes, God appeared. "I thought you didn’t believe in me? " God said to the atheist.

To which the man replied: "Give me a break, God. Until two minutes ago, I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster either."

Of course, as we all know, seeing is believing. For the man in the story, faith in what he could not see was hard to come by. That is different for us. We are people of faith. We worship a God that we have never seen. We pray to a God we have never heard. We trust in a God we have never touched. Such is the nature of faith.

That said, don’t we all still want to see God? Don’t we all want to gaze upon the divine presence, to know without a doubt that our faith has been well placed? I know I do.

Yet what does it take to ultimately see God?

Well, Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God." He says it takes purity of heart to see God. But what does that mean? What does it mean to be "pure in heart?"

One possibility is that it means to be "clean." That is one definition of the word translated "pure." It is what Matthew meant later in his Gospel when he says that they took the body of Jesus and wrapped it in a "pure" or "clean linen cloth." The idea being that something that is "pure" is free of blemish or stain. It is spotless or perfect.

Given that the "heart" was understood to be the seat of one’s will, to be "pure of heart" would be to be innocent of moral failures, even innocent of evil intentions. The pure of heart would be spiritually clean, morally immaculate, ethically spotless. They are those who have

• never been angry with a brother or sister,
• never looked upon another with lust,
• never caused another to sin,
• never made an oath before God,
• never resisted an evildoer,
• never hated an enemy
• nor ever refused to pray for those who have hurt them.

They are pure, clean.

Certainly that could have been what Jesus had in mind. The ancient scholar Chromatius suggested as much. He said that the pure of heart are those who have gotten rid of sin’s filth and have cleansed themselves of all impurity.

But if that is the standard, then who will see God? Who can meet such a high standard? The Apostle Paul rightly noted that all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There is none among us who fit such a bill. None among us who, except by God’s grace, can hope to be so clean.

But maybe that wasn’t what Jesus meant. There is another definition for "pure." It is "unalloyed." An "alloy" is a substance that is a mixture of metals. When something is "unalloyed" it is uncontaminated. For example, pure gold has nothing in it that detracts from it. It is complete.

Douglass Hare has suggested that the "pure in heart" are those who have an unalloyed devotion to God. They are those who are completely dedicated to knowing, loving and serving God. Nothing distracts them from their allegiance to God. It is pure, complete. It is that of which Soren Kierkegaard suggested when he entitled one of his books: Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.

This kind of purity is called for throughout the Scriptures.

After the Israelites had been set free from Egypt, God led them to Mount Sinai. It was there that they would receive the Ten Commandments. Significant is the first commandment. It is a call to a pure heart, to unalloyed devotion to God.

What is that commandment?

"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me."

It is a call to complete devotion.

That call is echoed in the "Shema," the great commandment repeated daily by the Jewish people and affirmed by the teachings of Jesus. "The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." They are to will one thing—devotion to God.

The Psalmist also bespeaks this kind of purity. David prays to God, asking for God to teach him God’s ways and to give him "an undivided heart" with which he can revere God’s name.

Lest you think such a call to complete and absolute devotion is the stuff of the Old Testament, consider Jesus’ warning to those who would follow him. In the Sermon on the Mount he told his disciples that no one can serve two masters. They will inevitably love one and hate the other. Specifically, he said, you cannot serve God and wealth. To do so is to have a mixed faith, an alloyed devotion. Jesus calls for purity of heart.

So does James. In writing to his congregations, he warned them not to be "double-minded and unstable." These he identified as "doubters." And he said they couldn’t receive anything from God. Of course, the opposite would be those of single-minded devotion—those with a pure heart.

Let us not pretend that such devotion is easy. All of us have a lot to distract us from God. We can easily become fixated on our family or children, our jobs or ourselves. Our minds can leap from one problem to another, from today’s crisis to tomorrow’s. We can find ourselves bowing to popular culture or the dictates of the state. Trying to keep one eye on God while the other focuses on the lesser gods that demand our attention can become the habit of our lives. But if it does we risk missing the opportunity to see God. For those that see God are those who are pure of heart, those who have an unalloyed devotion to the God revealed in Christ and worshipped here today.