Do the Word
8-30-15 (Proper 17/Ordinary 22 B, Semi-Continuous)
James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
How many times each day would you say that you wash your hands? How many pumps of hand sanitizer do you rub into your skin? How often do you walk around the house, rubbing things down with an anti-bacterial wipe? More and more these days, it seems like we’re obsessed with being clean. Sometimes, it seems like we’re living in a society of germophobes. But how many of you, if someone in your family came to dinner without washing their hands, would consider that person wholly unclean and eject them from your house so that you and your whole family didn’t become unclean in the process, and then take two turtledoves to your local church, then sacrifice them as an atonement for the person not washing their hands? How many of you set up a tent outside of the city limits of Vandalia for 24 hours after you’ve changed a dirty diaper, or discover that those socks in your gym bag have gotten musty and mildewed after not being washed last time?
We like to think our society has come a long way from what it looked like in the first century, but when we read this passage from Mark, we see that some things stay surprisingly the same, particularly when it comes to our traditions. Cue the music from Fiddler on the Roof…
As Jesus and the disciples are gathering together for a meal, some Pharisees who have gathered around him and his disciples notice that the group does not go through the ritual process that Mark describes of “thoroughly washing” before their meal. So, naturally, they’re confused - perhaps upset. They challenge Jesus - “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” Why would this man, who some think is the long-awaited Messiah, not follow the laws that are so important to the daily life of any Israelite?
Jesus’ response to the Pharisees is just as curious - he calls the pharisees “hypocrites,” and uses them as a fulfillment of Isaiah’s condemnation of those who honor God with their lips, but whose hearts are far from God. Jesus takes this conversation to a much deeper level that the Pharisees weren’t prepared for. For the Pharisees, this was all about the tradition of hand washing; for Jesus, it’s much more than that. Jesus makes a slamming indictment of the pharisees - “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” Jesus’ sees through the minor details and digs to the issue that lies at the heart of the matter. The Pharisees have put such an emphasis on the “tradition of the Elders” and the way of life that it has shaped that they have literally devoted their entire lives to working out the ways by which a person can live so that they were following every letter of the law. These men had made it their life’s goal to determine just what, exactly, entailed things like “work” on the Sabbath, as well as the many other nuances of Jewish law: precise methods of how and when a person should wash - whether they needed to wash just their hands or their entire body in ritual fashion. But in putting their focus on the details of the law, Jesus sees that they have taken their attention away from the one who has given it to them.
Jesus’ statements aren’t meant to vilify or demonize the Pharisees, or to completely downplay the importance of some traditions - the Pharisees believed that what they were doing was the most faithful way that they could live out their faith. And I don’t know of anyone who would deny that there is an importance to washing your hands. But at the same time, Jesus is absolutely right to question the Pharisees’ motivations behind practicing their faith in the way they did. The law passed down from Moses was a good thing, meant to guide and shape the people of Israel so that they could be a shining light to the rest of the world - it was designed to protect them in their wandering through the wilderness and therefore to mark them as a holy people when they entered the Promised Land, but it had been taken and turned into something completely other than what it was meant to be. Rather than letting the law be something that pointed to the relationship that the people of Israel had with God, the law was something that “had to be followed.” More than that, it had to be strictly enforced by the religious authorities, lest the ancient traditions and holy ways of the people of Israel were betrayed, abandoned and destroyed.
And perhaps this sounds all the more familiar to us today as we look around at the conversations, debates, and flat-out arguments that plague us at the coffee shop among our friends - replace the Pharisee’s phrase of “Tradition of the Elders” with “American Values” or “Christian Values,” or even “Christian American Values” and perhaps the thoughts and feelings of the Pharisees start to sound identical to those we keep hearing over and over again on the news, the radio, in the papers, and on the internet. I’ve found myself in amazement these last few weeks to hear and see some of the statements, not just from the news and politicians, but from friends and colleagues who so readily agree with those voices as they claim to preach “Christian, American, Biblical values” and yet speak a message that more often than not is nothing but fear and hostility toward the foreigner and the other, neglect toward the poor, the orphan, and the widow, and disdain for those very people to whom Christ himself ministered the most. We’ve become Pharisees, ourselves, putting the idols of our faith and tradition that we have created for ourselves over and above the very calling that we are given to follow as members of the body of Christ.
More than ever, we need to hear James’ words of encouragement to the church - his imperative that we practice a living faith, an active one that is one of doing, of living out the experience we have of God. We aren’t just being given a set of rules to follow, rituals to perform, and motions to go through - we’re being given a way of life lived in relationship with God. James tells his congregation that through the “word of truth,” we were enabled to become a kind of “first fruits” of God’s creatures. We are to be the ones who demonstrate the transformative power of Jesus Christ by being transformed ourselves.
It’s easy to be confronted with God’s word, to look into the mirror and see ourselves for who we are, and to be shown by God what we are meant to be - what’s hard is for us to actually let that confrontation take us out beyond the walls of the church and to let the word affect us to the point that we “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save our souls.” We’re comfortable coming to church on Sundays, hearing the word proclaimed and worshipping God together, but God calls us to greater things that take us beyond hearing the word, beyond gathering together. God isn’t highly invested in the externals of things - wash your hands, don’t wash your hands. Just as often as I heard “wash your hands from my mother,” I heard “God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt” from friends who were practitioners of the “5 second rule.” God isn’t the kind of God who “sweats the small stuff,” at least as far as the cosmetic and human side of our relationship with God. Contemporary or classical, rap or gospel, tie or t-shirt, God isn’t going to split hairs about the way we worship. God doesn’t have a political party, nor does God differentiate between the 1% or the 99 as far as who God chooses to be in relationship with. God is far more interested in what is inside the person. We can be employee of the month or humanitarian of the year, but if our heart is in the wrong place, it’s all meaningless. If we come to church, hear God speak to us through God’s word, and then just go back to our “normal” lives, our faith has no worth. When we gather together for worship, when we gather at this table and share in Christ's body and blood, it is so that we may be sent back out into the world. We gather ourselves as the other, the foreign, unclean sinner that God has nevertheless welcomed to the table through the sheer grace of Christ.
God has given us an immense gift in that God doesn’t just want to be in relationship with us, but that God has invited us, through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, to be participants in what God is doing in this world, right here and now. Us! You and me. Dirty and unkempt as we are, God has invited us - will we answer His call? Will we follow in faith? Or do we bury our head in the sand and hide behind the comfort of tradition and law, missing the deeper truth that those things point ever toward? May God give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and the Wisdom to know the difference. To God be the Glory. Amen.
James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Do the Word
How many times each day would you say that you wash your hands? How many pumps of hand sanitizer do you rub into your skin? How often do you walk around the house, rubbing things down with an anti-bacterial wipe? More and more these days, it seems like we’re obsessed with being clean. Sometimes, it seems like we’re living in a society of germophobes. But how many of you, if someone in your family came to dinner without washing their hands, would consider that person wholly unclean and eject them from your house so that you and your whole family didn’t become unclean in the process, and then take two turtledoves to your local church, then sacrifice them as an atonement for the person not washing their hands? How many of you set up a tent outside of the city limits of Vandalia for 24 hours after you’ve changed a dirty diaper, or discover that those socks in your gym bag have gotten musty and mildewed after not being washed last time?
We like to think our society has come a long way from what it looked like in the first century, but when we read this passage from Mark, we see that some things stay surprisingly the same, particularly when it comes to our traditions. Cue the music from Fiddler on the Roof…
As Jesus and the disciples are gathering together for a meal, some Pharisees who have gathered around him and his disciples notice that the group does not go through the ritual process that Mark describes of “thoroughly washing” before their meal. So, naturally, they’re confused - perhaps upset. They challenge Jesus - “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” Why would this man, who some think is the long-awaited Messiah, not follow the laws that are so important to the daily life of any Israelite?
Jesus’ response to the Pharisees is just as curious - he calls the pharisees “hypocrites,” and uses them as a fulfillment of Isaiah’s condemnation of those who honor God with their lips, but whose hearts are far from God. Jesus takes this conversation to a much deeper level that the Pharisees weren’t prepared for. For the Pharisees, this was all about the tradition of hand washing; for Jesus, it’s much more than that. Jesus makes a slamming indictment of the pharisees - “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” Jesus’ sees through the minor details and digs to the issue that lies at the heart of the matter. The Pharisees have put such an emphasis on the “tradition of the Elders” and the way of life that it has shaped that they have literally devoted their entire lives to working out the ways by which a person can live so that they were following every letter of the law. These men had made it their life’s goal to determine just what, exactly, entailed things like “work” on the Sabbath, as well as the many other nuances of Jewish law: precise methods of how and when a person should wash - whether they needed to wash just their hands or their entire body in ritual fashion. But in putting their focus on the details of the law, Jesus sees that they have taken their attention away from the one who has given it to them.
Jesus’ statements aren’t meant to vilify or demonize the Pharisees, or to completely downplay the importance of some traditions - the Pharisees believed that what they were doing was the most faithful way that they could live out their faith. And I don’t know of anyone who would deny that there is an importance to washing your hands. But at the same time, Jesus is absolutely right to question the Pharisees’ motivations behind practicing their faith in the way they did. The law passed down from Moses was a good thing, meant to guide and shape the people of Israel so that they could be a shining light to the rest of the world - it was designed to protect them in their wandering through the wilderness and therefore to mark them as a holy people when they entered the Promised Land, but it had been taken and turned into something completely other than what it was meant to be. Rather than letting the law be something that pointed to the relationship that the people of Israel had with God, the law was something that “had to be followed.” More than that, it had to be strictly enforced by the religious authorities, lest the ancient traditions and holy ways of the people of Israel were betrayed, abandoned and destroyed.
And perhaps this sounds all the more familiar to us today as we look around at the conversations, debates, and flat-out arguments that plague us at the coffee shop among our friends - replace the Pharisee’s phrase of “Tradition of the Elders” with “American Values” or “Christian Values,” or even “Christian American Values” and perhaps the thoughts and feelings of the Pharisees start to sound identical to those we keep hearing over and over again on the news, the radio, in the papers, and on the internet. I’ve found myself in amazement these last few weeks to hear and see some of the statements, not just from the news and politicians, but from friends and colleagues who so readily agree with those voices as they claim to preach “Christian, American, Biblical values” and yet speak a message that more often than not is nothing but fear and hostility toward the foreigner and the other, neglect toward the poor, the orphan, and the widow, and disdain for those very people to whom Christ himself ministered the most. We’ve become Pharisees, ourselves, putting the idols of our faith and tradition that we have created for ourselves over and above the very calling that we are given to follow as members of the body of Christ.
More than ever, we need to hear James’ words of encouragement to the church - his imperative that we practice a living faith, an active one that is one of doing, of living out the experience we have of God. We aren’t just being given a set of rules to follow, rituals to perform, and motions to go through - we’re being given a way of life lived in relationship with God. James tells his congregation that through the “word of truth,” we were enabled to become a kind of “first fruits” of God’s creatures. We are to be the ones who demonstrate the transformative power of Jesus Christ by being transformed ourselves.
It’s easy to be confronted with God’s word, to look into the mirror and see ourselves for who we are, and to be shown by God what we are meant to be - what’s hard is for us to actually let that confrontation take us out beyond the walls of the church and to let the word affect us to the point that we “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save our souls.” We’re comfortable coming to church on Sundays, hearing the word proclaimed and worshipping God together, but God calls us to greater things that take us beyond hearing the word, beyond gathering together. God isn’t highly invested in the externals of things - wash your hands, don’t wash your hands. Just as often as I heard “wash your hands from my mother,” I heard “God made dirt, and dirt don’t hurt” from friends who were practitioners of the “5 second rule.” God isn’t the kind of God who “sweats the small stuff,” at least as far as the cosmetic and human side of our relationship with God. Contemporary or classical, rap or gospel, tie or t-shirt, God isn’t going to split hairs about the way we worship. God doesn’t have a political party, nor does God differentiate between the 1% or the 99 as far as who God chooses to be in relationship with. God is far more interested in what is inside the person. We can be employee of the month or humanitarian of the year, but if our heart is in the wrong place, it’s all meaningless. If we come to church, hear God speak to us through God’s word, and then just go back to our “normal” lives, our faith has no worth. When we gather together for worship, when we gather at this table and share in Christ's body and blood, it is so that we may be sent back out into the world. We gather ourselves as the other, the foreign, unclean sinner that God has nevertheless welcomed to the table through the sheer grace of Christ.
God has given us an immense gift in that God doesn’t just want to be in relationship with us, but that God has invited us, through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, to be participants in what God is doing in this world, right here and now. Us! You and me. Dirty and unkempt as we are, God has invited us - will we answer His call? Will we follow in faith? Or do we bury our head in the sand and hide behind the comfort of tradition and law, missing the deeper truth that those things point ever toward? May God give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and the Wisdom to know the difference. To God be the Glory. Amen.
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