Know It and Show It – sermon on August 30, 2015
James 1: 17-27 Whatever is good and perfect is a gift coming down to us from God, who created all the lights in the heavens. God never changes or casts a shifting shadow. She chose to give birth to us by giving us her true word. And we, out of all creation, became her prized possession. Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires. So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls. But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. For if you listen to the word and don’t obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror. You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it. If you claim to be religious but don’t control your tongue, you are fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless. Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Creator means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.
Mark 7: 1-15, 20-23 One day some Pharisees and teachers of religious law arrived from Jerusalem to see Jesus. They noticed that some of his disciples failed to follow the Jewish ritual of hand washing before eating. The Jews, especially the Pharisees, do not eat until they have poured water over their cupped hands, as required by their ancient traditions. Similarly, they don’t eat anything from the market until they immerse their hands in water. This is but one of many traditions they have clung to—such as their ceremonial washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles. So the Pharisees and teachers of religious law asked him, “Why don’t your disciples follow our age-old tradition? They eat without first performing the hand-washing ceremony.”
Jesus replied, “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, for he wrote, ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.’ For you ignore God’s law and substitute your own tradition.”
Then he said, “You skillfully sidestep God’s law in order to hold on to your own tradition. For instance, Moses gave you this law from God: ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and ‘Anyone who speaks disrespectfully of father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say it is all right for people to say to their parents, ‘Sorry, I can’t help you. For I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you.’ In this way, you let them disregard their needy parents. And so you cancel the word of God in order to hand down your own tradition. And this is only one example among many others.”
Then Jesus called to the crowd to come and hear. “All of you listen,” he said, “and try to understand. It’s not what goes into your body that defiles you; you are defiled by what comes from your heart. It is what comes from inside that defiles you. For from within, out of a person’s heart, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, lustful desires, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these vile things come from within; they are what defile you.”
Sermon: Know It and Show It by Reverend Doreen Oughton
I want to start today with a question – one that is not rhetorical. I would really like you to think about it and respond, if not aloud, at least to yourself, or maybe to your neighbor. How do you show that you are a person of faith?… Before I became a minister, going to church was one way; reading the bible and participating in bible study was another. Giving was an important expression of faith – to my church and to causes I thought would help heal the world. Giving of my time, also, serving on church committees. And sometimes I wore a cross. But there were things that I thought would show that I was a person of faith that I was uncomfortable doing – like praying in public. Even saying grace at home was something I rarely did. Sometimes I talked about Jesus, but only if I was really sure that the person I was talking to was also Christian. I had given up rituals of my childhood faith, like crossing myself, or kneeling / genuflecting
In our scripture passages this morning, both the letter from James and the Gospel of Mark, people are debating or giving advice about how one demonstrates faith. For the Pharisees and religious scholars from Jerusalem, ritual washing is very important, and the reading tells us what’s involved.
Has anyone ever heard the terms “high church” and “low church?” What do you think they mean? The terms have to do with worship procedures, specifically, the use of ritual, liturgy, and accoutrements in worship. Leaders of a High Church congregation place a “high” emphasis on ceremony, vestments, and sacraments. Leaders of a Low Church congregation place a “low” emphasis on such things and follow a freer worship style. “High church” worship services are characterized by liturgical readings and rituals, their clergy wear special clothing, and they follow a calendar of annual religious observances. Low church worship is characterized by more congregational involvement, and a relatively unstructured program. Which do you think we are? And what about the worship of the Pharisees? And of course we are not even talking about worship here, just eating. But for the Pharisees, one’s whole life was to be devoted to God, everything one does ought to be an act of worship. That was the way they sought to reform the Jewish faith. They set themselves apart from the Sadducees, who held that worship could only happen in the Temple, and only certain holy people had access to the inner most rooms, closest to God. The Pharisees believed that everyone could be holy, not just the priestly elite. They took seriously God’s commandment in Leviticus, “Be holy, for I your God am holy.” And so cleansing rituals were established, things to do to purify oneself before coming before God. You’ve heard about some of the rituals of 1st century Hebrews – washing hands and cups and pitchers. What are some of the cleansing rituals you have seen, heard about, or engaged in?….(confession, kneeling, ashes, holy water, prostration).
Now if you are a devout person of a faith that holds these things to be important, you do them, right? A visitor or guest is obvious because they don’t know the rituals. You can tell who is religious, right? So these Pharisees and scholars have come all the way from Jerusalem to check out this guy Jesus they’ve heard about, the one healing and casting out demons, declaring people forgiven, preaching a powerful word of God. And they see that the people closest to him, his disciples, don’t even do the basic rituals of faith. I wonder why that was, why they didn’t wash their hands. They were all Jewish. Had they not been very observant Jews? Did they not know the rituals? Or was it a conscious choice, like my decision to stop genuflecting and crossing myself? Anyway, the guys from Jerusalem call Jesus out on it – “Hey, how religious can you be? How much authority can your word have when your own followers don’t observe the rituals of holiness?” But Jesus turns the tables on them, separates out tradition from scripture, accusing them of getting lost on in their efforts to be holy – focusing on the finger instead of what the finger was pointing to. Their human ideas about what would bring them closer to God actually got in the way of living truly holy lives. They ended up using these standards to judge others, to declare certain children of God to be unclean, unworthy, contaminated.
Before we get down on ritual and tradition, notice that the Pharisees did not accuse Jesus of ignoring the tradition, just some of his followers. Jesus, apparently, washed his hands. And I am not surprised. He was very much a devout Jew – he knew scripture and traditions, and my guess is that the traditional rituals did help him stay connected to his Abba. They were used as intended, to make everything an act of worship. But Jesus never held that those who did not observe them were unholy, unclean or unworthy. In fact, Jesus tweaked the commandment from the book of Leviticus. Rather than focusing on God’s command to “be holy for I your God am Holy”, Jesus hears and preaches and lives a commandment to “be merciful, just as your God is merciful.”
After calling out the Pharisees on their hypocrisy, Jesus gathers the crowd around him. He tells them that they cannot become contaminated from the outside. There is nothing outside of them (and us) that can get in them and make them unclean. Now this is good news, right? You don’t have to worry about what food you eat, what people you associate with, what job you do. None of that will diminish you in the eyes of God. None of that stands as a barrier between you and God. But what he says next, well, I don’t know how good that news is. He does not say that since we cannot be contaminated by things outside ourselves, we are therefore clean and pure and holy. No, he says we are indeed defiled, defiled by what comes out of our hearts. From our hearts come our evil thoughts, our greed, rage, pride, lust, envy, deceit. They come from our hearts and reveal our uncleanliness, our unholiness. And there ends the passage, and, as far as we know, this particular speech to the crowd. He leaves them, and us, on this note – a note of unholy hearts. We can go to church, wash our hands, genuflect, prostrate ourselves, douse ourselves in holy water, chant, crawl on our knees before the stations of the cross, and still we have these unholy hearts. Where is the good news in that?
Fear not, dear friends, fear not, for indeed there is good news. Remember the commandment that Jesus hears, preach and lives – “be merciful, just as your God is merciful.” Our God is merciful. Jesus is merciful and we are loved even with these hearts. I don’t even know if God would consider our hearts unholy. Yes, they contain unholy things – thoughts and drives that, if allowed to rule our lives, would keep us from the abundant life God wishes us to have. But they also contain, as James says in his letter, a word of God planted there by God, a word with the power to save our souls. That Word can drive out the uncleanliness from our hearts. That Word is a tool of resistance to those forces.
James likens listening to the Word without obeying to glancing at yourself in the mirror. This imagery resonated with me, and linked the letter to the gospel passage about our unclean hearts. How many of us dwell with the Word while looking in a mirror rather than looking out a window? When we hear the list of defilements of the heart, do we think of other people they apply to, or do we look into our own hearts? If our primary use of scripture is to judge other people then I think we are missing the point. Look within, look within. Let the light and love and truth of Jesus that is planted in every heart take root and grow. Turn to it, turn to scripture, turn to people you see who live out their faith with mercy and compassion and use it all to resist those unclean things that try to come out of your heart. I don’t know how they got there. Perhaps it wasn’t your fault – they helped you survive, they protected you, strengthened you. But they are not serving you now, or even if they are, you can be sure there is another way, a better way, and you are not left on your own to find it. Jesus was really clear that he will not shun anyone, no matter how others might judge them as unclean. So you can bring your whole heart to him, trusting in his mercy, trusting in his love. Maybe that is how you show you are a person of faith. Jesus has already redeemed you. Your heart just needs to catch up. May it be so.
