I need to tell you guys a funny story about the book I talked about during the children’s sermon (The Blue Ribbon Puppies by Crockett Johnson). As I told the kids, my copy of the book is somewhere at my parents’ house, so I spent probably more time than necessary on Thursday trying to hunt down pictures online. Most of the search results were book sellers, which often have reviews of the book. And this one review I found so funny, I have to share it with you. The review read, “A fine example of a book about promoting self esteem: every puppy deserves an award for some feature that singles him/her out... But it raises the question—when do you tell someone that he (or she) is not the best at something?” [Pause] Friends, this is a book about puppies for four year olds. Is “when do you tell a four year old they are not that great” really the question this story raises for you? I get the concern about inflating kids’ egos, but my godson is four and trust me, he knows he’s not the best at everything. He doesn’t need a book to tell him; the fact that he can’t reach the counter is reminder enough. His great frustration in life is that his big sister can do more stuff then he can do, because she is six and thus taller, faster, stronger, and generally more coordinated. My experience with four-year-olds is they are generally aware of their limitations. It’s only when we get to be a bit older that these concerns about ego really get complicated.
In our Gospel reading for this morning, the disciples were, yet again and I’ll add not for the last time, arguing about which of them was the greatest disciple. Which one was the “blue ribbon puppy,” if you will, of the group. When they got to the house, Jesus asked them, “What were you arguing about?” And of course, crickets, because no one wanted to admit they were arguing about who was the greatest, because ironically everyone knows that arguing about being the greatest is not the greatest behavior. But despite their silence, Jesus knew what they were talking about, and he brought a child up and said “whoever wants to be first must be last… [and] Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” Jesus’ insistence on welcoming children would have been completely upending the social status as children in Jesus’ time were seen as insignificant. Paul wrote in Galatians, “My point is that heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves.” This is a problematic verse in a lot of ways, Paul’s acceptance of slavery is obviously wrong, but you see the place of children in first century society.
The point Jesus was making here was what makes someone the greatest in the kingdom of God is different then what makes someone the greatest in the world. Greatness in the world’s eyes is about power, about wealth, about strength, control, good looks, fast cars, the newest iPhone, whatever, you know the rest. But greatness in God’s eyes is about love, about mutuality, about respect and care and service and giving of ourselves for the sake of others. Like Paul wrote in the beautiful hymn in Philippians, “Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” True greatness in the kingdom of God is defined by humility, service, and most importantly love. And I think as Trinity and St. Peter, as ELCA Lutherans, we get that. After all, wasn’t that what yesterday was all about. We didn’t come together to clean up the Post neighborhood, one of the most overlooked and under-served areas of our community, to show everyone how great we are. We did it because we believe in putting our faith into action, we believe that we truly get to be God’s hands in the world, that the way we give thanks to God for all God has done for us is by loving and serving others.
And that’s great! Don’t get me wrong. But the problem, dear friends, and this is a problem for me as well, is I think we’ve internalized that message of humility a little bit too much. Like the reviewer who was worried about giving four-year-olds over-inflated egos, I think sometimes we equate humility with self-deprivation, and in our concern for not saying too much, we end up not saying anything at all.
This is not our fault. We don’t live in a time where there are a lot of good models for how we talk about Jesus and there are a lot of really bad ones. Example, a couple years ago I met up with a friend in Toledo during Pride weekend. She was working on a campaign for a candidate in the Ohio governor’s race, and after the parade she and I went down to the Pride festival to get some lunch and spend some time together. Outside the festival grounds were the seemingly requisite protesters, spouting those seven Bible verses from Leviticus and Numbers that folk inevitably want to bring up to argue about homosexuality. As we walked by, one of the protesters grabbed my arm, forced a pamphlet in my face and shouted, “do you know what the Bible says about homosexuality?” Normally I ignore protesters, but I was so taken aback by his closeness that I blurted out, “yes I do, I’m a Lutheran pastor.” And here’s where this guy got impressive. Because without missing a beat, he switched from those seven verses on homosexuality to the ones in Timothy about how women should submit. As we walked away I remarked to my friend, “I don’t agree with how he interprets scripture, but that was an impressive show of prooftexting.”
So clearly we know we don’t want to be that guy, effortlessly jumping from condemning one group to another in the name of a god who doesn’t sound much like Jesus. But guess what friends, there is a middle ground. And guess also what, sharing our faith, sharing the love and grace and acceptance we’ve experienced in Christ is a gift people want. Let me let you in on a little secret, sharing the love and grace of Jesus is really what yesterday was about. It was about serving our neighbor, yes, but the obnoxious bright yellow shirts were so that people could know, hey, here is a church that isn’t going to physically accost you with a pamphlet and yell at you. If being yelled at is the only experience of Christianity you’ve ever had, and friends, for a lot of people, especially people of my generation, being yelled at IS the only experience with people of faith they’ve had, if being yelled at, being judged, being cast aside by Christians is your only experience with Christianity, these yellow shirts say, here’s another way. And friends, people want this. They want to know they are precious, they want to know they are loved, they want the kind of connection and hope and unconditional acceptance that we have received in Jesus, that we get as part of a community of believers. I will confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that even as a pastor, inviting people to church isn’t a thing that comes naturally to me, because I don’t want to come off as pushy or judgmental. But in my experience, I’ve never had a person I’ve invited respond angrily to my invitation. I’ve had them decline, but I’ve never had anyone get upset. Even the most adamantly uninterested was appreciative and honored by my invitation. People like to be invited to stuff, even stuff they don’t want to do, as long as it’s a true invitation and not a weird pushy challenge.
Proof. Yesterday we didn’t get the sort of booming crowds we’d been led to expect, so rather than standing around I took a trash bag and a few folk and I walked the neighborhood picking up trash. At first, I just picked up trash and chatted with the people I was with. But I quickly noticed that Kelly Dillman from the police department was talking to every person she passed, and was getting a good response. So I tried it. I said hi to everyone I saw, and if they engaged and asked what I was doing, I told them. We’re doing a neighborhood clean-up. I’m from Trinity Lutheran down the street, Kylee here is from St. Peter Lutheran, and we’re just out picking up some trash. There’s free hot dogs down at the Post plant if you’re interested. Super simple right, but it totally didn’t occur to me until I saw Kelly doing this that people actually wanted to be talked to. And the response I received, one-hundred percent positive. Folk liked knowing that we were here, that we were doing this for them, and that we were doing it in the name of Jesus Christ. But they could not have known that unless I had the courage to tell them. That experience of walking the neighborhood, of chatting with folk, and telling them who we are and why we were there, that for me turned what was a slow day, and maybe could have been seen as a bit of a failure into a roaring success. Because it gave me the ability to tell folk, God loves you, God loves this neighborhood, and God wants for you to thrive. And I got to be a very small part of that thriving.
So friends, I’m going to invite you to do something hard. I want to invite you to tell others about Jesus, to tell others about your faith. To not just welcome, as Jesus told the disciples, but to take the next step and invite, to bring folk along with you, like Jesus did with the child. This is going to be hard, because it means you’re going to have to be a little vulnerable. But what we learn from Jesus is that greatness, true greatness, is about vulnerability, because being in relationship is about vulnerability. Jesus came and put on vulnerable human flesh in order to be in relationship with us. And now that Jesus has ascended into heaven, we are God’s hands, God’s feet in the world. But not just God’s hands and feet, we are also God’s voice. Scary, yep, very scary. But we have the greatest teacher. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, September 24, 2018
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Courage: A Sermon on Mark 7:24-37
I promise we’re going to get to the Gospel reading this morning, but before we do I want to start with James. Because I heard something in a commentary this week that I’d never heard before, and it blew this whole James text right open. So I wanted to share it with you because, wow.
The last verse from the second reading this morning is one of the more well-known lines from James, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” And all you good Lutherans in the room may have been like, hey, wait a minute. Don’t we say that we are saved by grace through faith APART from works”? What does James mean by “can faith save you” and “faith without works is dead”? That sounds like our salvation comes through what we do, which is the opposite of what Lutherans say we believe. If you were wondering about that, let me tell you, you are in good company. Martin Luther himself was not a fan of the Letter of James. He even considered leaving it out of his translation of the New Testament altogether; though in the end he opted to stick it at the end, along with Jude, Hebrew, and Revelations. I’m not as harsh with James as Luther was; there is a lot in there about putting faith into action that I like. But as a good Lutheran, I admit I too have struggled with what James meant when he talked about works.
But I was listening to a podcast this week called Sermon Brainwave, which is three professors from Luther Seminary talking about the texts for the upcoming week. And one of them, I honestly can’t tell if it was Matt Skinner or Rolf Jacobson, I can’t tell their voices apart, but one of them pointed out a translation error in verse fourteen. Per either Matt or Rolf, what the NRSV translated as “can faith save you” is really “can faith save him.” I thought, no way could a translation error that glaring be in here and I’d never heard mention of it. But I pulled out my Greek New Testament, and let’s face it, my Greek dictionary because my Greek is not that good, and there it was, “pistes sosai auton,” auton is the Greek word for “him,” “can faith save him.” Boom, mind blown.
Why does that matter? Listen to that section again with that switch. “What good is it my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” The person being saved by our works isn’t us; it’s the other person, the person in need, the person being affected by our works. This is God’s Work, Our Hands, friends, this I get. And this feels very true to what the Bible says about Jesus. Because when Jesus went out in his ministry, he preached and taught, yes, but preaching and teaching wasn’t all he did. Jesus also healed, he fed, he cast out demons, he restored people to community. Jesus wasn’t just about meeting people’s spiritual needs, he met ALL their needs. Spiritual yes, but also physical, emotional, social.
So let’s get to the Gospel reading for today. And I’m just going to name right off there’s a lot about this read that I don’t understand. I don’t know why Jesus seemed to argue with the Syrophonecian woman, why he made an analogy about her being like a dog. She was not the first Gentile he’d ever come across. Back a few chapters in Mark five, he healed the Geresene man who had a legion of demons, and that man didn’t even ask to be healed, so I have no idea what Jesus’ hesitation might have been in this situation.
But here’s what I do know about this story. What the Syrophonecian woman did took incredible courage. All of the scholars I read talked about the tension that existed in Tyre between the Jews and the Gentiles. And yes Jesus was the one outside of his community, but she was still walking into a house full of outsiders, demanding that she, a woman, be treated as equal to this man and religious leader and teacher. This is courage; this is Rosa Parks not giving up her seat on the bus, or the students at the Woolworth lunch counter, she demanded that her needs be met, that her daughter be healed.
And it should be noted that she did it better than Jesus’ own disciples. Part of the process of being someone’s disciple was about being able to engage the master in conversation, to discuss and even argue with them, because that’s how disciples learn. But Jesus’ disciples are terrible at it, they’re always just like, “we don’t understand.” But this woman, she took what Jesus said and just dished it right back. Jesus said to her, “it’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” To which she takes his own words and flips them on their head, “Yes, but even the dogs eat the children’s crumbs that fall from the table.” Yes, ok, you want to use the dog vs. children metaphor, sure, we can go there. But if you are who you say that you are, a God of abundance, then when you feed the children, the excess will fall. There is not the scarcity you’re claiming, we both know that there is enough, so go ahead and be enough.
And when she did that, when she took Jesus words and flipped them back to him, his response to her was plain, “For saying that.” The Greek is literally, “Because of your words,” “you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”
Friends the good news in this passage is that so strong, so powerful, so overwhelming is God’s love for us, is God’s promise of grace and healing and wholeness that not even God can get in God’s way. I get that sentence doesn’t make any sense, how could God get in God’s way, but I don’t need to understand it to feel the power of that promise. We say that not even death can separate us from God, which means that God is more powerful than death. Well here we hear that God is more powerful than God. I know that makes more sense, but that’s the beauty of God. God is beyond our understanding, beyond our comprehension.
Which means that we, like the Syrophonecian woman, can and should feel empowered to demand what we need. For ourselves and for others. When we see injustice in the world, let the model of the Syrophonecian woman give us courage to act. At its heart, this is a story about racism, about the ethnic and racial tensions that were just as real in Jesus’ time as they are today, and probably felt just as big and hard and intractable. But this woman had the courage to walk right up to Jesus and demand that he help her. And theologian Gerd Thessian points out that the biggest miracle in this story may not be that the woman’s daughter was healed, but that the race barrier that divided Jesus and the woman was overcome.
So that’s the good news. The challenge is that when we are challenged, when we have our mistakes called out, our misunderstandings named, that we respond with the same grace as Jesus, who heard the woman’s argument and healed her daughter. I don’t know about you, I can only speak for me, but I can say in my own experience that when someone calls me out for something hurtful I have said or done, even when their right, in fact especially when they’re right, my tendency is not to admit my mistake and learn from it. No, I am way more likely to dig my heals in, “come on, we both know I didn’t mean it.” Or, “don’t take it so personally.” Or whatever. So the challenge for us as, I’m going to name it a room of not exclusively but definitely mostly middle class white people, will we have the courage to let ourselves be challenged, to let ourselves be changed, to listen when someone says we’ve said something hurtful, to admit we were wrong, and to change?
The answer, from what I’ve seen as the pastor in this place is yes. Yes, Trinity is a community where we try to do that hard work of learning and growing and changing. Do we do it perfectly, no, of course not, we’re people. But we’re trying. The Reconciling in Christ process, the partnership with the Co-op, conversations with the neighborhood, we don’t do these things perfectly, but thus far I’ve never seen us be afraid to try.
So dear friends in Christ, let us let the Syrophonecian woman be a model for us of courage. Let us follow in her example and demand justice where it is needed, from our leaders, from each other, and even from God. Let us have courage to stand up for what is right, not just caring for those in need but changing the systems themselves that cause the need to perpetuate. And when we find that we are the ones who need to change, when we discover that the system that is unjust is a system within ourselves, let us follow in the example of Jesus and have the courage to be changed. Because as big and hard and scary as all this may sound, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, bigger and more powerful than God and God’s love for us. Amen.
The last verse from the second reading this morning is one of the more well-known lines from James, “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” And all you good Lutherans in the room may have been like, hey, wait a minute. Don’t we say that we are saved by grace through faith APART from works”? What does James mean by “can faith save you” and “faith without works is dead”? That sounds like our salvation comes through what we do, which is the opposite of what Lutherans say we believe. If you were wondering about that, let me tell you, you are in good company. Martin Luther himself was not a fan of the Letter of James. He even considered leaving it out of his translation of the New Testament altogether; though in the end he opted to stick it at the end, along with Jude, Hebrew, and Revelations. I’m not as harsh with James as Luther was; there is a lot in there about putting faith into action that I like. But as a good Lutheran, I admit I too have struggled with what James meant when he talked about works.
But I was listening to a podcast this week called Sermon Brainwave, which is three professors from Luther Seminary talking about the texts for the upcoming week. And one of them, I honestly can’t tell if it was Matt Skinner or Rolf Jacobson, I can’t tell their voices apart, but one of them pointed out a translation error in verse fourteen. Per either Matt or Rolf, what the NRSV translated as “can faith save you” is really “can faith save him.” I thought, no way could a translation error that glaring be in here and I’d never heard mention of it. But I pulled out my Greek New Testament, and let’s face it, my Greek dictionary because my Greek is not that good, and there it was, “pistes sosai auton,” auton is the Greek word for “him,” “can faith save him.” Boom, mind blown.
Why does that matter? Listen to that section again with that switch. “What good is it my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” The person being saved by our works isn’t us; it’s the other person, the person in need, the person being affected by our works. This is God’s Work, Our Hands, friends, this I get. And this feels very true to what the Bible says about Jesus. Because when Jesus went out in his ministry, he preached and taught, yes, but preaching and teaching wasn’t all he did. Jesus also healed, he fed, he cast out demons, he restored people to community. Jesus wasn’t just about meeting people’s spiritual needs, he met ALL their needs. Spiritual yes, but also physical, emotional, social.
So let’s get to the Gospel reading for today. And I’m just going to name right off there’s a lot about this read that I don’t understand. I don’t know why Jesus seemed to argue with the Syrophonecian woman, why he made an analogy about her being like a dog. She was not the first Gentile he’d ever come across. Back a few chapters in Mark five, he healed the Geresene man who had a legion of demons, and that man didn’t even ask to be healed, so I have no idea what Jesus’ hesitation might have been in this situation.
But here’s what I do know about this story. What the Syrophonecian woman did took incredible courage. All of the scholars I read talked about the tension that existed in Tyre between the Jews and the Gentiles. And yes Jesus was the one outside of his community, but she was still walking into a house full of outsiders, demanding that she, a woman, be treated as equal to this man and religious leader and teacher. This is courage; this is Rosa Parks not giving up her seat on the bus, or the students at the Woolworth lunch counter, she demanded that her needs be met, that her daughter be healed.
And it should be noted that she did it better than Jesus’ own disciples. Part of the process of being someone’s disciple was about being able to engage the master in conversation, to discuss and even argue with them, because that’s how disciples learn. But Jesus’ disciples are terrible at it, they’re always just like, “we don’t understand.” But this woman, she took what Jesus said and just dished it right back. Jesus said to her, “it’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” To which she takes his own words and flips them on their head, “Yes, but even the dogs eat the children’s crumbs that fall from the table.” Yes, ok, you want to use the dog vs. children metaphor, sure, we can go there. But if you are who you say that you are, a God of abundance, then when you feed the children, the excess will fall. There is not the scarcity you’re claiming, we both know that there is enough, so go ahead and be enough.
And when she did that, when she took Jesus words and flipped them back to him, his response to her was plain, “For saying that.” The Greek is literally, “Because of your words,” “you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”
Friends the good news in this passage is that so strong, so powerful, so overwhelming is God’s love for us, is God’s promise of grace and healing and wholeness that not even God can get in God’s way. I get that sentence doesn’t make any sense, how could God get in God’s way, but I don’t need to understand it to feel the power of that promise. We say that not even death can separate us from God, which means that God is more powerful than death. Well here we hear that God is more powerful than God. I know that makes more sense, but that’s the beauty of God. God is beyond our understanding, beyond our comprehension.
Which means that we, like the Syrophonecian woman, can and should feel empowered to demand what we need. For ourselves and for others. When we see injustice in the world, let the model of the Syrophonecian woman give us courage to act. At its heart, this is a story about racism, about the ethnic and racial tensions that were just as real in Jesus’ time as they are today, and probably felt just as big and hard and intractable. But this woman had the courage to walk right up to Jesus and demand that he help her. And theologian Gerd Thessian points out that the biggest miracle in this story may not be that the woman’s daughter was healed, but that the race barrier that divided Jesus and the woman was overcome.
So that’s the good news. The challenge is that when we are challenged, when we have our mistakes called out, our misunderstandings named, that we respond with the same grace as Jesus, who heard the woman’s argument and healed her daughter. I don’t know about you, I can only speak for me, but I can say in my own experience that when someone calls me out for something hurtful I have said or done, even when their right, in fact especially when they’re right, my tendency is not to admit my mistake and learn from it. No, I am way more likely to dig my heals in, “come on, we both know I didn’t mean it.” Or, “don’t take it so personally.” Or whatever. So the challenge for us as, I’m going to name it a room of not exclusively but definitely mostly middle class white people, will we have the courage to let ourselves be challenged, to let ourselves be changed, to listen when someone says we’ve said something hurtful, to admit we were wrong, and to change?
The answer, from what I’ve seen as the pastor in this place is yes. Yes, Trinity is a community where we try to do that hard work of learning and growing and changing. Do we do it perfectly, no, of course not, we’re people. But we’re trying. The Reconciling in Christ process, the partnership with the Co-op, conversations with the neighborhood, we don’t do these things perfectly, but thus far I’ve never seen us be afraid to try.
So dear friends in Christ, let us let the Syrophonecian woman be a model for us of courage. Let us follow in her example and demand justice where it is needed, from our leaders, from each other, and even from God. Let us have courage to stand up for what is right, not just caring for those in need but changing the systems themselves that cause the need to perpetuate. And when we find that we are the ones who need to change, when we discover that the system that is unjust is a system within ourselves, let us follow in the example of Jesus and have the courage to be changed. Because as big and hard and scary as all this may sound, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, bigger and more powerful than God and God’s love for us. Amen.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Carrots, M&Ms, and Poop: A Sermon on Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Every time I read this passage it reminds of one of the funniest children’s sermon slip-ups I ever saw. This was several years ago, the pastor of my parents’ church brought all the kids up. She brought out a carrot and a handful of M&Ms and asked the kids, “which of these is good for you?” The kids of course dutifully responded, “the carrot.” “And which one do you want to eat?” To which the kids much more excitedly replied, “the M&Ms!” Pastor Marj went on, “when you eat food, where does it go?” The kids thought about it, “into your stomach.” “And then where?” she prompted. A few of the older kids saw where this was going and squirmed. “You poop it out, right?” All the kids eyes got super wide, Pastor Marj just said “Poop!” In church! They stared at her in amazement, fixated, and you could see their brains were working super hard to process what had just happened. Seeing their rapt attention, Pastor Marj went on, talking about how in the Gospel story the Pharisees were really concerned about what people ate. But Jesus said that because food goes in our stomachs and not our hearts, what we eat doesn’t affect who we are. All that matters is what’s in our hearts, how we show love to each other.
“So,” she said, wrapping up her explanation, “what do you guys think of this?” One little boy very cautiously raised his hand. “What you’re saying is when mom tells me I have to eat carrots, I can say that Jesus said I don’t really have to eat carrots, I can just eat M&Ms instead, because it all ends up as poop anyway.” Marj desperately tried to backpedal from this point, but by then it was way past too late, and thus the children’s sermon that will live in infamy where the takeaway was, “It doesn’t matter what your mom says, Jesus says you don’t have to eat your carrots because it all ends up poop in the end.”
While missing the point entirely for the kids, I think Marj’s childrens’ sermon was a brilliant example for the adults about what exactly is going on in this text. Because like the kids missed the whole part about how what really matters is what’s in our heart in favor of getting to eat M&Ms all the time, the Pharisees missed the purpose of their ritual purity laws in favor of enforcing a system that privileged them above others.
But before we get in, let’s talk a little bit about the religious purity laws, where they came from and what purpose they held. The obvious one is of course we know that hand-washing is the absolute best thing you can do to cut down the spread of disease. And in a pre-modern culture with no understanding of germ theory, that the Jews have been doing this for centuries is pretty remarkable. But religious purity laws were about more than just hygiene. These regulations were also a way for the small Jewish minority to set themselves apart from their neighbors, to remember who they were and, more importantly, whose they were. Ancient Israel, remember, was a little, tiny nation sandwiched between the two most powerful empires of the time. They got conquered a lot. And at the time of Jesus, it was a subject of the Roman Empire. These ritual purity laws were ways for the Jews to remember that they were Jews, that they were different from Rome. In Orthodox Jewish communities to this day, ritual hand-washing before a meal includes a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the blessings God has provided. Every time our Orthodox sisters and brothers sit down for a meal, they first remind themselves that everything they have is a gift from God. Far from the legalism we Christians often ascribe to it, the core of the Pharisees argument against Jesus was about whether Jesus’ neglect of religious customs was moving people away from God.
But of course these particular Pharisees concerns were not rooted in concern for the faith of the community, but in their own concern for control. There is no law that can be applied exactly as written to every situation, the world is too complex for that, and the ancient Jewish legal system had space for such complexity. Even within the requirements for ritual washing there was written in different levels of expectation for clergy, who would be at the Temple and thus have easy access to clean water, and the laity who would be out in the world and may not have a water source near them. There were even exceptions for times in which a person may eat without any ritual washing, the law recognizing that food is an essential part of life. The Pharisees complaints about Jesus and his disciples were about trying to impose a one-size-fits-all system on a multitude of people so that anyone who did not fit could be labeled “out,” thus raising the status of those who where “in.” And Jesus just has no patience for that sort of exclusionary behavior.
But before we pat ourselves on the back here about how great we are, with our freedom from these laws and exclusive behavior that so hamstrung the Pharisees, Jesus is throwing down a challenge here. Because let’s face it, the list of evil intentions that come from the heart, “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly,” was pretty extensive! And in the section the lectionary left out, Jesus even used an example in which two equally good laws, the requirement to give of our belongings to God and the requirement to care for aging parents, were in conflict with each other. What do we do when the laws themselves contradict? It would be way easier to simply make sure I wash my hands before every meal then to guard against every single evil intention and contradiction.
As we try to make sense of this text, there are two dangerous pitfalls to avoid. The first is of course that of the Pharisees, that because we are living “good Christian lives,” then everything we do is great. Because if we have any self-awareness at all then we know everything we do is not. Sometimes because we are sinful. We get impatient, or are greedy, or we lie, or whatever number of large and small sins we commit during the course of a lifetime. And other times because the world is super complicated and like the example Jesus himself used with the Pharisees, we have to choose between the better of two bad choices. Being a Christian means we’re saved by grace and we’re free from judgment, but that freedom is not cart blanche to do whatever we want, and to even hint that Jesus setting us free means that is itself folly. I get kind of annoyed with the old pre-Reformation argument that there must be something we have to do to earn forgiveness, because if it was really free then people would just go around murdering and pillaging and it is only the fear of eternal damnation that keeps people in line. I mean, come on now. There’s a name for that logical fallacy that I learned in Philosophy 101, and its called Reductio ad Absurdum, or reduce to absurdity. It would be like me saying that since some bats carry rabies and I cannot guarantee there will never ever be another bat in the church, then we should condemn the whole building. It’s ridiculous.
Which really leads us to the second dangerous pitfall. Which is that we are horrible, corrupt human beings who can never be anything other then sinful and broken. Because if that’s true, again, why try? What Jesus is pushing here is the middle road. A life that says yes, I sin and am broken and make mistakes again and again, and yes, Jesus sets me free from the bondage of sin and death and invites me into new life and relationship with him, and because of both of those things, because I am sinful and because I am made sinless, then I am free to be transformed. That’s the good news. Not that we are set free to be the same, but that we are set free to be changed. Think about all the people who came to Jesus in scripture. With Judas as the one glaring exception, every single person who came to Jesus was transformed, was made better, by the encounter. Not instantaneously. Nicodemus took the whole Gospel of John to figure it out. Peter confessed Jesus as Messiah, then rebuked him and was called Satan, then promised to never leave, then denied him in the courtyard, and then became the head apostle of the entire burgeoning Christian movement, and was regularly put in his place by Paul. This is a process, friends. But it’s a process we get to do not in order to earn God’s love but precisely because we already have it. What is our sacred scripture but a thousands of years account of how committed God is to God's people? It is basically the story of God’s people wandering away, and God bringing them back into the fold again. Over and over again. How no matter what happens, God is with us. Jesus died so there is literally no where we can go, even to death, where God is not with us.
So in conclusion, I’m pretty sure Jesus does think you should eat your carrots. Not because they'll make him love you more but because carrots are good for you. They have lots of vitamins and other good things. And, I also think Jesus is pro hand washing. It’s the best way to prevent the spread of disease. And I’m sure Jesus is also fine if you eat M&Ms occasionally, there's nothing wrong with them. Just maybe not exclusively and in place of carrots. But no matter what you eat, no matter anything, Jesus loves you. And that love will transform you, in fact already has and still is in the process of. Like Nicodemos it can be a slow process. But Jesus is in this with you. Forever, to death and beyond. Amen.
“So,” she said, wrapping up her explanation, “what do you guys think of this?” One little boy very cautiously raised his hand. “What you’re saying is when mom tells me I have to eat carrots, I can say that Jesus said I don’t really have to eat carrots, I can just eat M&Ms instead, because it all ends up as poop anyway.” Marj desperately tried to backpedal from this point, but by then it was way past too late, and thus the children’s sermon that will live in infamy where the takeaway was, “It doesn’t matter what your mom says, Jesus says you don’t have to eat your carrots because it all ends up poop in the end.”
While missing the point entirely for the kids, I think Marj’s childrens’ sermon was a brilliant example for the adults about what exactly is going on in this text. Because like the kids missed the whole part about how what really matters is what’s in our heart in favor of getting to eat M&Ms all the time, the Pharisees missed the purpose of their ritual purity laws in favor of enforcing a system that privileged them above others.
But before we get in, let’s talk a little bit about the religious purity laws, where they came from and what purpose they held. The obvious one is of course we know that hand-washing is the absolute best thing you can do to cut down the spread of disease. And in a pre-modern culture with no understanding of germ theory, that the Jews have been doing this for centuries is pretty remarkable. But religious purity laws were about more than just hygiene. These regulations were also a way for the small Jewish minority to set themselves apart from their neighbors, to remember who they were and, more importantly, whose they were. Ancient Israel, remember, was a little, tiny nation sandwiched between the two most powerful empires of the time. They got conquered a lot. And at the time of Jesus, it was a subject of the Roman Empire. These ritual purity laws were ways for the Jews to remember that they were Jews, that they were different from Rome. In Orthodox Jewish communities to this day, ritual hand-washing before a meal includes a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the blessings God has provided. Every time our Orthodox sisters and brothers sit down for a meal, they first remind themselves that everything they have is a gift from God. Far from the legalism we Christians often ascribe to it, the core of the Pharisees argument against Jesus was about whether Jesus’ neglect of religious customs was moving people away from God.
But of course these particular Pharisees concerns were not rooted in concern for the faith of the community, but in their own concern for control. There is no law that can be applied exactly as written to every situation, the world is too complex for that, and the ancient Jewish legal system had space for such complexity. Even within the requirements for ritual washing there was written in different levels of expectation for clergy, who would be at the Temple and thus have easy access to clean water, and the laity who would be out in the world and may not have a water source near them. There were even exceptions for times in which a person may eat without any ritual washing, the law recognizing that food is an essential part of life. The Pharisees complaints about Jesus and his disciples were about trying to impose a one-size-fits-all system on a multitude of people so that anyone who did not fit could be labeled “out,” thus raising the status of those who where “in.” And Jesus just has no patience for that sort of exclusionary behavior.
But before we pat ourselves on the back here about how great we are, with our freedom from these laws and exclusive behavior that so hamstrung the Pharisees, Jesus is throwing down a challenge here. Because let’s face it, the list of evil intentions that come from the heart, “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly,” was pretty extensive! And in the section the lectionary left out, Jesus even used an example in which two equally good laws, the requirement to give of our belongings to God and the requirement to care for aging parents, were in conflict with each other. What do we do when the laws themselves contradict? It would be way easier to simply make sure I wash my hands before every meal then to guard against every single evil intention and contradiction.
As we try to make sense of this text, there are two dangerous pitfalls to avoid. The first is of course that of the Pharisees, that because we are living “good Christian lives,” then everything we do is great. Because if we have any self-awareness at all then we know everything we do is not. Sometimes because we are sinful. We get impatient, or are greedy, or we lie, or whatever number of large and small sins we commit during the course of a lifetime. And other times because the world is super complicated and like the example Jesus himself used with the Pharisees, we have to choose between the better of two bad choices. Being a Christian means we’re saved by grace and we’re free from judgment, but that freedom is not cart blanche to do whatever we want, and to even hint that Jesus setting us free means that is itself folly. I get kind of annoyed with the old pre-Reformation argument that there must be something we have to do to earn forgiveness, because if it was really free then people would just go around murdering and pillaging and it is only the fear of eternal damnation that keeps people in line. I mean, come on now. There’s a name for that logical fallacy that I learned in Philosophy 101, and its called Reductio ad Absurdum, or reduce to absurdity. It would be like me saying that since some bats carry rabies and I cannot guarantee there will never ever be another bat in the church, then we should condemn the whole building. It’s ridiculous.
Which really leads us to the second dangerous pitfall. Which is that we are horrible, corrupt human beings who can never be anything other then sinful and broken. Because if that’s true, again, why try? What Jesus is pushing here is the middle road. A life that says yes, I sin and am broken and make mistakes again and again, and yes, Jesus sets me free from the bondage of sin and death and invites me into new life and relationship with him, and because of both of those things, because I am sinful and because I am made sinless, then I am free to be transformed. That’s the good news. Not that we are set free to be the same, but that we are set free to be changed. Think about all the people who came to Jesus in scripture. With Judas as the one glaring exception, every single person who came to Jesus was transformed, was made better, by the encounter. Not instantaneously. Nicodemus took the whole Gospel of John to figure it out. Peter confessed Jesus as Messiah, then rebuked him and was called Satan, then promised to never leave, then denied him in the courtyard, and then became the head apostle of the entire burgeoning Christian movement, and was regularly put in his place by Paul. This is a process, friends. But it’s a process we get to do not in order to earn God’s love but precisely because we already have it. What is our sacred scripture but a thousands of years account of how committed God is to God's people? It is basically the story of God’s people wandering away, and God bringing them back into the fold again. Over and over again. How no matter what happens, God is with us. Jesus died so there is literally no where we can go, even to death, where God is not with us.
So in conclusion, I’m pretty sure Jesus does think you should eat your carrots. Not because they'll make him love you more but because carrots are good for you. They have lots of vitamins and other good things. And, I also think Jesus is pro hand washing. It’s the best way to prevent the spread of disease. And I’m sure Jesus is also fine if you eat M&Ms occasionally, there's nothing wrong with them. Just maybe not exclusively and in place of carrots. But no matter what you eat, no matter anything, Jesus loves you. And that love will transform you, in fact already has and still is in the process of. Like Nicodemos it can be a slow process. But Jesus is in this with you. Forever, to death and beyond. Amen.
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