Scripture: Mark 7:1-23
I’m doing something today that I haven’t done very often in the past at Sojourners and don’t promise to do any more often in the future: preach on the lectionary scripture for the day.
Frankly, I’m surprising myself a little bit by doing this. Not so much by choosing to preach on a lectionary scripture, which I do do from time to time, but by the fact that I’ve chosen this particular lectionary scripture to preach on. I often check out the lectionary scriptures for a given Sunday. Especially if I haven’t really settled in my mind on a preaching topic for some Sunday and I’m sort of casting about for a focus, or sometimes even if I know what I want to say and I’m just looking for a scripture to go with it, I’ll check out the lectionary scriptures just in case. More than once it has turned out that the lectionary scripture for the week does actually provide an interesting perspective on what I’m already thinking about. Sometimes it has suggested themes that I think are worth thinking about. But frequently I will turn to the lectionary scriptures and after reading them, my reaction will be…mmm, I don’t think so.
In the case of this morning’s reading from the gospel of Mark, I have to say that I think normally this passage would fall into that last category, where after reading it I would say…I don’t think so. It’s certainly not among my loved scriptures, the ones that mean the most to me, or even among those that I sort of like for some reason. It’s a scripture that is honestly not very inspiring to me and, on first reading, not even all that interesting. In fact it’s one of those scriptures where I sort of feel like I have to read the footnotes to get it (who are the Pharisees again? what does Corban mean again?) and where even more I feel like you probably needed to be there to really understand what’s going on and what’s being said. You can sort of get the gist of what Jesus is saying—maybe—but it seems like there are probably also some nuances that have been lost over the course of 2000 years.
Finally there is a sort of anti-Jewish flavor to the passage, where Jesus seems to have no respect at all for the Jewish dietary laws, even though he was himself Jewish, and although it’s not as bad here as it is other places in the gospels it always disturbs me a little and I feel like I would need to comment on it if I preach on this passage and unless I’m up for preaching specifically on that topic, in which case there are better examples than this one—if I’m not going to preach specifically on that topic this seems like a distraction. In spite of all this, however, for whatever reason, I didn’t look at this passage and say to myself, “I don’t think so.” And so here I am preaching on a passage that describes a confrontation Jesus had with some fellow Jews known as Pharisees about food and about washing your hands before dinner.
Well, maybe it wasn’t all about diet or hygiene exactly. One thing it was about apparently—and this isn’t hard to figure out since Jesus says it explicitly—is trying to distinguish what the difference is between human customs and the fashions of the day versus what is the will of God or what is right or true or good regardless of circumstance. Jesus puts it this way: after the Pharisees have challenged him regarding the fact that Jesus and his disciples do not observe the ritual laws that require the washing of hands and food and dinnerware and so forth, he responds that Isaiah was right when he said, speaking for God, “This people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines; you abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” In other words all the ritual rules that apparently were so important to the Pharisees are just things that human beings have made up, not really something God commands or even cares a whole lot about.
I can relate to that; I suspect we all can. There are lots of things about religion that just are not all that important—how you dress, what kind of music is used to express faith or praise God, if any, how often and in what way you celebrate communion, whether you use screens and projectors, whether you preach on the lectionary—lots of things, scores, hundreds of things about the way people do church or practice religion that we all know in the end just really aren’t all that important, that are much more matters of custom, preference, and convenience, not so much matters of love and justice, mercy and meaning.
That seems pretty straightforward…or is it? Let me use another contemporary example that’s important to me as it is to many at Sojourners: the issue of how the church deals with sexual orientation. One of the arguments I hear people make who hold different beliefs than I do on this subject is that those who argue for greater acceptance and fairness for sexual minorities are merely following the latest fashion of opinion and that there is a right and wrong here that doesn’t change and that is set down in the Bible and that we should not abandon the commandment of God (to use the phrase Jesus quoted from Isaiah) in favor of a purely human outlook on the matter. Of course I could point out that in this very passage Jesus offers a fairly comprehensive list of things that come from the inside that he says are what truly defile a person—fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly—that list covers a lot of ground and it does not include homosexuality. Nevertheless, I know there are some people who think they have to defend the unchanging truths of God against what they see as one of the ways in which modern society is heading in the wrong direction.
I, on the other hand, understand the unchanging truths of God much more in terms of God’s love overflowing to all people, every person a beloved child of God, all people being made in the image of God, God present in every person (something of God in every person, as the Quakers would say). I tend to view negative attitudes toward homosexuality not as commanded by scripture or God but to be the result of what we are taught by other humans and what is sanctioned by society, and negative policies toward lgbt people to be a matter of social mores and traditions (as in the notion of so-called “traditional” marriage).
The reason church fights over homosexuality are perhaps especially bitter, it seems to me, is that it is not a conflict among various people with differing opinions on some given subject. It is a conflict that is seen by most everyone involved as having to do with the truths of God as opposed to human opinions, prejudices and preferences. I confess that I look on it that way. This is a matter that for me touches the heart of my faith, where treating this concern as somehow incidental or unimportant would feel to me like a betrayal of my faith.
But while I feel strongly about it and don’t think that it is just a matter of my opinion vs. someone else’s opinion, I also do recognize that people who feel quite differently from me also see this as a matter that is central to their faith and not a passing fashion of the day. It occurs to me that if you look at the passionate nature of this debate especially in the church, you can understand why it was that Jesus and the Pharisees were so often at such odds. Homosexuality, so far as we know, was not part of the debate. But whatever was, whether it was food or dietary laws or anything else, what was at stake was precisely what was to be held at the heart of the faith, in their case the Jewish faith, in our case the Christian faith.
It’s true that Jesus seems to be pretty clear in this scripture that he knows how to distinguish between what is rooted in the will and nature of God and what is rooted merely in always changing human notions of “what seems good at the time”. But that doesn’t mean that I think the scripture encourages me to make such distinctions quickly and easily. One of the things I’ve been suggesting in the example of the current church debates over homosexuality is that what is God’s truth and what is a mere human custom or tradition or opinion seems to depend a lot on which side of an issue you are on. It’s a pretty subjective thing. We tend to identify our own positions with God’s truth and the opinions of others, the mistaken opinions of others, as things humans have made up on their own. So we should be reluctant to skip casually from the scripture to making the same kind of judgment Jesus does: identifying the truths of God and then condemning other opinions as either wrong or trivial.
We should be reluctant to do that. Very reluctant…but willing. That of course is the other part of what I have been trying to say: that no matter how humanly susceptible we are to getting mixed up over what thoughts are Godly and what thoughts are merely human, there are times when such distinctions are necessary, whatever the dangers. There are times when it simply is not good enough to recognize that everyone has their own perspective and has a right to their own perspective. There are times when an easy going tolerance for a variety of opinions is not what’s called for. There are times when we are called to discern as best we can what our core values are, what the core values of our faith are and to speak them and to act upon them. I hear this scripture calling me to be appropriately unsure of myself, willing to question myself, wanting to avoid the arrogance that too often accompanies faith. I also hear the scripture calling me in some cases, on some matters, at some times to be courageous in speaking and acting on behalf of what I believe to be true and hold to be important.
Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees, in this instance and in many others, was of course not about whether one should keep kosher regulations or not, not really. It was about what we ought to get angry about. It was about what things we are willing to risk something for. It was about what we lose sleep over. The scripture calls me to do my best to avoid the arrogance of faith. It also calls me to be willing to risk the arrogance of faith for those things that I believe lie at the heart of faith. It calls me to be in constant discernment, never to think that I have it settled, all figured out, but to be in constant discernment about what I believe to be at the core of being a Christian—or a human being for that matter. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 30, 2009