2 September 2012

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time series B
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23; James 1:17-27
2 September 2012


We are a people possessed with the idea of being clean.
I say, “the idea,” because whether or not our homes, our offices, our garages and cars truly reflect that cleanliness or not, that isn’t the point.
What is the point, is how much time and effort and money we spend on that idea, that ideal of being clean.
We obsess over cleanliness. Just take a walk through any store and you’ll see an amazing number of products devoted to keeping clean.
But especially … there’s such an emphasis on hand washing … a good thing, to be sure, because we’ve all heard about or read about the diseases, from the common cold to hepatitis, that have been caused because someone didn’t wash their hands. So every public rest room has signs and warnings about “washing your hands;” many of them with touchless faucets and fixtures, automatic hand driers and paper towel dispensers, to assure us of surgical cleanliness as we leave the rest room.
So, with all our cultural emphasis on keeping ourselves clean … we should well understand, even sympathize with the Pharisees and scribes, those religious leaders of Jesus’ time, who are protesting in today’s Gospel reading.
After all, they were just trying to maintain some cleanliness in a place and time where flies and animal waste and open sewers … and the inevitable sickness and death which accompanied them … were part of everyday life. They were just trying to obey some good cultural rules, keep things clean, keep them undefiled … weren’t they?
But then ... along comes Jesus, and his disciples don’t wash up like they’re supposed to.
And there’s a scene. Well, why shouldn’t there be, we say, our sensibilities offended by Jesus and his disciples seeming lack of good common sense?
But Jesus isn’t encouraging filth or disease … he doesn’t stand in favor of dirty hands, or dirty pots and pans. I’m sure Jesus’ hands were as clean as those of the Pharisees, and that his dishes were scrubbed as well as anyone else’s.
No … what Jesus is doing here, by not making a big deal about whether some of his disciples washed up before eating … is making a point … that, just because a person looks clean on the outside, doesn’t have anything to do with how clean they are on the inside … which is where God looks at us.
The Pharisees and scribes may have been clean on the outside, but on the inside they were filthy … all their political wheedling, their machinations over protecting their turf, their little system of religion and religiosity which had them at the center of life, and pushed God, and what God wanted, to the edge … all that stuff made them “defiled” in God’s eyes..
That’s what Jesus means when he says, You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.
Which commandment is that? Just the great one, of course … the one which sums up all the others … the one, in two parts, which Jesus discusses with another scribe a little later on in Mark’s Gospel … Mark 12.28 and following:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.

The Pharisees and scribes, in their pursuit of a “clean” little system of self-justification and self-preservation … they had pushed God to the edge of their lives, and ignored their neighbors … the poor, the widowed and orphaned, the hungry, those who really needed their help.
Jesus came to earth and saw that the religion of his time was a sham … existing not for the worship and praise of God and service to others … but instead, to serve the religious. And so when Jesus, as he does here, shows these religious leaders what they’re really all about … making the faith into their own little rule bound club, drawing lines as to who’s in and who’s out … well, Jesus’ truth shows them for what they really were … sinners in need of a savior.
But we shouldn’t be too hard on those Pharisees and scribes.
For we also live in a time and place in which
those who are viewed to be the most religious are those who keep themselves and their lives as outwardly clean as possible … saying all the right things, keeping strictly to all the correct doctrine, being very public about their faith, displaying righteous indignation about moral causes and so on ….
… while at the same time, actively working against that commandment of God … not “loving the Lord our God” with our whole being because we are not “loving our neighbor as ourselves” … not, as Martin Luther explained the commandment so well, “helping our neighbor in all of life’s needs,” but instead, separating ourselves from our neighbor.
Separating … whether it’s in the gossip and back-turning that happens over someone who doesn’t live their lives like us, or can’t afford to dress like us, or drive the same car as us, or live in as nice a house as us.
Or, on a wider scale … not helping, ignoring, even actively working against the “least among us,” the poor, the elderly, youth, the strangers among us …
… treating the world God has made with contempt, not being good stewards of all that God has given to us but abusing the air and water, using more than our share of God’s creation while others barely have enough …
…claiming we are people of grace, mercy and peace, but in whose definition? Ours, or God’s? We might live and sleep in safety and comfort but do we truly care about our neighbors? Down the block, across the county, in our nation, around the world?
No, in all these ways, we set ourselves at the center of our existence … say, we’re the good ones, the holy ones, the clean ones … and they .. those who are not us … aren’t … they are defiled and dirty … and so we shove God and our neighbor to the edge of our lives. Just like those Pharisees and scribes … as our reading from James puts it so well … when we live like them, we are not doers of God’s Word, but ‘merely hearers who deceive themselves.’
Yet, what Jesus is saying here, is that our outward cleanliness isn’t what matters to God. True cleanliness comes from the inside … and he is the only one who can make us that kind of clean.
A cleanliness that comes only through … repentance.
Repentance … God, calling to us through Jesus the Son, to come and say what we are … not squeaky clean and holy … but falling far, far short of God’s desire, God’s will for our lives. Each and every one of us … as we confess, ‘our sins, too heavy to carry, too real to hide, too deep to undo.’
Repentance … God, calling us through Jesus the Son, to be bathed daily in the waters of our baptism … to receive the cleanliness that God gives to and for us … and raising us up to live a new life …
… a life where we go out and work in what the world considers “dirty” but what God deems essential to our true cleanliness… loving our neighbor as ourselves … no longer avoiding, but standing alongside and working with and for those whom the world despises … the poor, the outcast, the rejected, those who are different from us … showing them the love of God through Jesus Christ in our own words and our own work, however and whenever we’re able.
Maybe in a simple word of welcome to a stranger. Maybe in working to overcome suspicions and fears in our community. Maybe in doing without something new and giving the difference away to someone who needs our help. Maybe in taking an unpopular stand because it is the right thing to do.
We go out, not just outwardly cleansed with scrubbed hands, but inwardly cleansed with flowing streams of living water, soaked in the forgiveness of our Savior, sent out to be Jesus’ hands and feet, sent out to do his work …
… our footprints, the sign that we go forth in his name walking wet, forgiven sinners who share Christ’s Word not in judgment and condemnation but in hopeful proclamation, bringing God’s Word and Presence of grace, forgiveness, peace and new life into a world dying to hear, to feel, to receive it …
… sent out to be “doers of the Word,” to get “dirty” in serving our neighbor, helping them in all their needs in this life .. and in that, we will be blessed witnesses to the world of that cleansing, forgiveness and new life to come … in Jesus’ name.
Amen.