August 30, 2015: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.
One of the things I often hear about religion is that the church is full of hypocrites. “In fact, according to UnChristian, a book based on surveys done by the Barna Research Group, among people with no religious affiliation in the 16 to 29 year-old bracket, 85 percent say one reason they don’t go to church is because Christians are hypocritical…of course, there’s a kind of truth to what they’re claiming. If you’re looking for a group of people who always live up to their highest values and who never say one thing and do another, you’ll need to look elsewhere.” And good luck finding that anywhere.[1]
You see, the church is not perfect. It isn’t, and it never has been. Why? Because we are the church, and human beings, no matter how hard they try, are not going to be perfect. And that’s okay, because perfection is highly overrated. But, as I said, the folks who cast these judgements of hypocrisy against people of faith do have a point – even if I would argue they need to also do a deep introspective look in the mirror before pointing fingers. The thing is, while religious organizations are behind the largest charity and relief efforts globally, including offering aid to the poor, the helpless, the diseased, and the dying, we don’t always live as we should. And it is this that we hear about in the Gospel today.
Jesus is talking about hypcrites too. Those of his own faith – Judaism. I have to say that this is one of my favorite Gospel passages, because Jesus is really saying things we need to hear today. Jesus and his disciples are sort of roughing it – they didn’t bring along their Coleman camp sink, or anti-bacterial wipes. They are hungry, and they begin to eat without washing their hands. Now, personally, I’m thinking seriously folks – not washing your hands before you eat? Really? Jesus, let me introduce you to the concept of soap – a great thing…really helps with, well bacteria? Then again, when you can heal the sick and raise folks from the dead, what the heck – maybe you really don’t need to worry, right? I mean, if Peter gets a tummy ache, Jesus can just lay his hands on him, and all better. Well… this did not go over well with the Pharisees and scribes, the temple authorities and legal beagles.
Now, as much as I side with the Pharisees and scribes on the whole hand washing thing, Jesus isn’t really giving us a…soap opera. As usual, this isn’t about the text, but the sub-text, and there is no mistaking his message here. He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘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.”
He tells them that what defiles is not external to a person, but a thing of the heart. Nothing that goes in your mouth can defile. Apparently Jesus has never eaten from a greasy spoon or fast food chain. But he is right that it is what comes out of ones mouth, bourn from the heart, is what can defile. It is clear Jesus was obviously talking about far more than food. He was casting his own “Hypocrites!” charge against the leaders of the temple. And we know from this passage, and from others, that this was a consistent theme with Jesus and the Jewish authorities. In following so closely the traditions and laws of their faith, they had begun to worship them, hold them up as the work to be done, the rote following of them as the way to walk this life, and a measure of who is worthy.
Now, we may feel kind of smug thinking, well – how could they? Didn’t they see what was more important? Geez, they really were hypocrites. But we often do the same thing today too. As I mentioned in another sermon, there is the old joke about religious institutions like churches, and the experience of trying to change a light bulb. You know… “How many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb?” “Change? Change? My grandfather donated that lightbulb!”
See, it is easy to forget that just about everything we do at church is something that at one point was new, different, a matter of cleanliness, or just necessary to keep things moving. And yet some of these things have, over time, been inscribed with meaning far beyond the original intent, sometimes to a place of sacred cow status. And it is easy for this to happen without there being any intent or awareness. Take the example of the monastery and the cat. Now, there are many versions of this story, but this is the one l like the best.
“The old Zen master lived in utter simplicity in his mountain monastery with a few disciples. One night, a young monk feels a new sensation in his meditation. Something warm, pulsating, loving… and… furry? He looked down onto a cat. The tail flicked against his face again. The cat turned and rubbed his head on his knee, purring loudly. Gently pushing it away, the monk settled back into his meditation. Unruffled, the cat wound himself around the next disciple, to be again pushed away.
No matter how many doors and windows they closed, the cat always found its way into the meditation room. After a month of this feline audacity, the disciples had enough. They put a nice embroidered collar on him and attached it with a long lead to a pillar in the temple. They gave him a silk pillow, and every day they would feed him, stroke him, and play with him. The cat was very content with his new arrangement
A few years later, the old Master died. A young abbot from a different area was installed, and life resumed its peaceful rhythm. The new abbot did notice that a black cat was always tied to the northern pillar of the great temple, surrounded by choice offerings and sitting on an ornate silk pillow. Not wanting to look ignorant, he did not ask anyone about its presence, and assumed that it was a tradition of the monastery. When the cat died, the abbot ordered another black cat to be found to take its place, and installed with full honor.
Over time, all the disciples who had known why the first cat was tied to the pillar also died. The successive generations of monks gradually forgot the utilitarian purpose of tying the cat to the pillar. Yet the tradition lived on and flourished for centuries. The original collar was reverently worshipped as a relic. Books of theological commentaries were written on the spiritual significance of tying a black cat to the northern pillar. Legends of miraculous healings due to the intercession of the holy cat were compiled and studied devotedly. Trinkets and memorabilia were being mass produced. Business had never been better.[2]
We have some of those same cats in our own faith, don’t we. Pews – people left this very church because the back pews were removed to make room for the labyrinth, and in other churches, where there are attempts to remove them to make the space more flexible in use and in worship, outright battles take place. Really? Pews are there solely for the purpose of giving us a place to park our behinds rather than stand, nothing more. The tradition of altar rails was started because in the early church, there were animals and people milling about in a far more open atmosphere, and dogs, being, well, dogs, and not holy cats, had a nose for going where folks thought they should not. The rails prevented them from descrating the altar. Washing of the priests hands before the Eucharist began as a necessity. The gifts brought forward in the offering were meats, cheeses, and other things that generally made the priest’s hands dirty. It had nothing to do with Pilate (not that Pilate ever really washed his hands of his crime – that is pure fantasy). Sanctus bells? We don’t use them here, but they were rung in the middle ages during the elevation and other parts of the Eucharist to signal to all the common folk that something important was happening way up at the altar. Not that they got to have the Eucharist, but hey, at least they could watch. Over time, these and other “cats” of the church became cherished traditions for some, and meaningless rigidity for others. Neither are right or wrong.
Jesus isn’t saying that traditions are not important, or that ritual is meaningless. For some, ancient liturgical rites and traditions, such as we practice here in the Episcopal church, engage us, and for others, it repels. I know growing up Baptist that I yearned for something like the liturgy of the Episcopal Church, but my grandparents, were they still alive, would likely never feel comfortable here. Within our own church, there are those for whom music brings them into the experience of God, for others, it detracts. That’s why we have two services on Sunday morning. Neither is better or “more right” than the other.
The issue isn’t which set of traditions is right, or whether tradition itself is a problem. The issue is when tradition becomes the worshipped, not the thing that aids in worship; and, when following the traditions is the only way we honor God. In other words, that coming to church on Sunday is the only way anyone knows we are Christians. That is what Jesus is talking about.
These disciples were hungry for the food Jesus was giving them – the life giving food and drink of God’s love. How they got that, with clean or dirty hands, in a temple or in the open field, in a chalice of wood or of gold, wasn’t important…just as it isn’t important if you come into this feeding as a Baptist or Roman Catholic, a Unitarian or a Lutheran, or for that matter – through Christianity or Judaism, Islam or Hinduism. What does matter is that you are fed, and once you are fed, that you feed others. Because, as Jesus makes clear, honoring the commandments with only words and not with the heart, is living a hypocritical life.
If we are unsure what that means, the epistle of St. James makes it clear what we are to do:
“You must understand this… let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls… If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God…is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
This Gospel passage is so powerful and important, and for those who have been in my Adult Forum on the Bible and Homosexuality, you know that I use this verse to challenge those who would use beat up gay people while claiming to be Christians. It is they that Jesus would now say “You hypocrites!” It is to them that he would charge: “ ‘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.”
The very idea that anyone in relationship with God through Christ would try to starve a people of that love, rather than honoring God through their love for all of God’s children, is beyond comprehension. Especially when Jesus made clear that we are to not judge, but love one another. But for the most part, those that do this are not the ones at fault. Jesus was upset at the faith leaders, and today it is those same leaders who have led the others down this path of self-righteous bigotry, and it is they, the clergy of our major traditions, that for centuries have held up tradition over compassion, doctrine over love. And it sadly isn’t exclusively around full inclusion of LGBT people.
When I was on the plane heading out for a part of my vacation, I was sitting next to a woman and we got to talking. As people tend to do, we asked one another about what we did for a living, and as generally happens with priests, the subject turned to religion. She and her husband were deeply faithful church goers to a conservative Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania (I flew out of the Allentown Airport). In fact, they both worked in not-for-profits that worked on behalf of today’s “widows and orphans” – she helped victims of human trafficking, and he built a sports league devoted to those who are left on the sidelines – the unwanted. But she was disturbed by something that happened to her. She loved her new church and after a time, spoke to the pastor about getting involved – something every church loves to hear, right? But, when she said she’d like to be a greeter, he said, “Well, we aren’t really ready for that – women as greeters.” I hardly knew what to say. I mean, I have heard of search committees deciding that the best priest for a church must be a young straight man with a family, which is disturbing enough, but not even allowing a woman to hand out church bulletins on Sunday? Oh, what would Jesus say to that one. I bet he’d send Mary Magdalene over to rustle a few feathers.
Good grief! There are refugees in Europe dying in a struggle to find new life, newscasters gunned down on the air, CEOs like Jeff Bezos of Amazon who are making a profit at the expense of their employee’s humanity, women and children exploited all over the world, creation groaning under the weight of our neglect and abuse, and every ‘ism’ one can name permeating society as poverty rises around the globe. Folks, we have serious work to do, and this pettiness, this hypocrisy, must stop, and we need to be like Christ and stand up to it.
If we are to be the body of Christ today, if our faith is to have any meaning, we need to live it, as well as love it. We need to honor the ritual and traditions that bring us into closer relationship with God, allowing others to do the same – even when their choices are not what we would choose for ourselves. We need to live this faith holding to the traditions and rituals that bring us closer to God, that feed us; but not so tightly that it chokes the life out of our faith and that of others, not so rigidly that the traditions themselves become more important than the life we are called to lead. Walk the faith as best you can – feeding God’s love to others – the widows and orphans of our time, and calling out those who would use tradition – that truly human precept, as a doctrinal tool of marginalization. Each of us will fail at times, but in the attempt, we will be living as authentically as possible.
And, when someone charges that religious people are hypocrites, tell them “Jesus thought so too, well, at least about some of them anyway.” Tell them “It’s true – sometimes, we don’t always love God, our neighbor, or ourselves in the way that we should, but we try our best. That is why we have confession in the church every week – Christianity isn’t for perfect people, but people just like you and me.” And you can also tell them that when it comes to hypocrites in the church – “You are welcome anytime, as there is always room for one more.”
Amen.
[Sermons as written may not be as delivered on any given Sunday][1] Homeliticsonline.com
[2] http://www.arcadelamor.org/storytellingmonk/stories/waves/delusion/fool/ritual_cat.htm
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
August 30, 2015
Pentecost 14 – Year B – Track 1
1st Reading – Song of Solomon 2:8-13
Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10
2nd Reading – James 1:17-27
Gospel – Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
