Sermon for 13th Sunday after Pentecost
Lectionary 22 Proper 17B
August 30, 2009
Texts:  Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Psalm 15; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

What is religion?

Or better yet, what is religion not?

Think briefly about what religion means to you.

You can find all kinds of definitions:

The Oxford English dictionary:
A belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power,
especially a personal God or gods

Wikipedia (dare I even admit I consult this on-line source):
An organized approach to human spirituality
Which usually encompasses narratives, symbols,
Beliefs and practices,
Often with a supernatural or transcendent quality.......

To an increasingly large number of people in our society
Religion is just a collection of superstitious
And old-fashioned beliefs,
That do not bear up to modern rational thinking.

And there are a set of people
For whom religion means poison.

They stress the horrors perpetrated
Through human sinning in the name of God.

One of these is Christopher Hitchens
Who has written “God is Not Great”.
He places emphasis on the inhuman cruelty
Of the Crusades, the Thirty Years War,
And more recent slaughters
Such as those in northern Ireland, Uganda and Croatia.  

In the name of religion,
Human sinners, or so-called believers,
Who are convinced that they have an inside track to God
Isolate outsiders
Or forcibly cause conversions to their beliefs.
Yet, as we hear over and over again in the Hebrew and Christians Scriptures,
Harm done in God’s name is not God’s Will

In James’ letter, which we heard this morning,
Religion is not associated with insiders and outsiders,
But with listening, caring and staying unstained. 

According to James,
Real religion is to listen before you speak
To reach out to the homeless
And to those who are unlovable
And to stay away from corruption. 

Insiders and outsiders are created
When human beings take it upon themselves
To embellish God’s Law
With human rules, traditions and expectations.

Some of these traditions may in themselves be harmless
And may even have good aspects
But they often have the effect of separating people into camps.

In the case of our Gospel reading from Mark today.
Jesus encountered a case of two camps:
Those who followed or those who ignored certain purity laws. 

The strictly religious Pharisees
Criticized Jesus’ disciples
Because they did not wash their hands before eating. 

The failure to carry out this tradition,
Isolated the disciples as outsiders,
And subjected them to scorn and criticism.

The Pharisees asked Jesus,
“Why do your disciples disobey the rules?”
Or in other words,
“Why aren’t they like us?”

Jesus’ response was to call the Pharisee to task
For behaving as hypocrites,
Stressing human traditions,
But ignoring God’s law of love.

Jesus referred them back to the Hebrew Scriptures,
To the book of Isaiah,
Recalling that the prophet
Had reprimanded people who, on the surface, seemed religious,
But whose hearts were far from God.

Jesus was telling the Pharisees that, in the name of religion,
They would be better off examining the inside of their hearts,
Than the surface of their hands. 

Ritual hand washing is not a part of our religious tradition,
So some of what is going on
In this interchange between Jesus and the Pharisees
Is lost on us.

With our modern sensitivities about germs,
We might even feel sympathetic to the Pharisees
Who didn’t want to sit at a dining room table
With people who had not washed their hands.

But in trying to understand what is going on,
We need to look at Jesus’ concern
That the Pharisees had stressed human traditions
To the exclusion of God’s call for mercy,
Or as James puts it,
They seem to have forgotten
That religion in God’s eyes is all about
A care for the poor, the outsiders and the unloved,

As we hear Jesus’ words from Isaiah,
We have to ask ourselves,
“Where in our own church community
Might we have forgotten what is important in our religious faith?”

Are there times
When human rituals and traditions
Have taken precedence over caring for people?

Are there times when we have separated people
Into insiders and outsiders,
Based on their approach to worship or church practices.

Have we ever heard ourselves say?
We don’t do x, y or z here,
Because that’s too..... and you can fill in the blanks. 

And are there times
When we are convinced
That our interpretation of the Bible is so correct,
That anyone who sees it differently
Couldn’t possibly be Christian.

I think it may be easier for us to see the Pharisees’
Sin of exclusion based on purity rituals,
Than it is for us to see ourselves sinning
By categorizing people as insiders and outsiders,
And by mistaking human traditions for those ordained by God.

In Jesus’ time, how did the people learn
The difference between human tradition and God’s Law?

For starters they had their Scriptures,
What we today call the “Old Testament”.

In the book of Deuteronomy, which we read this morning,
God tells us that we are to neither add to
Nor subtract from the Law. 

In other words,
Don’t get creative
And detail the Law in such a way
That you are only one who can keep it.

In a sense the command to leave the Law alone is very freeing,
Because it means that we don’t have to play God.

The people who surrounded Jesus
Also had Jesus’ own behavior as a role model. 

In his time, Jesus went about teaching, preaching and healing.
The people around him were graced by hearing his Word
And seeing him demonstrate mercy.

In the Gospel of Mark,
We have heard repeatedly how Jesus had compassion for the people.
Even when he was tired,
Jesus taught the crowds
And healed the people who were dragged to see him.

Repeatedly Jesus crossed the boundaries
Between the insiders and the outsiders.
He ate with tax collectors and sinners.
He touched the unclean,
And he sat a well with a Samaritan woman of ill repute.
Jesus demonstrated that he would not let human traditions
Keep him from acting with the mercy that God commands.

In our own time, we still have the witness of Jesus’ words and actions.

However, prayerfully, we have to extrapolate from Jesus’ stories,
Involving situations in a culture 2000 years ago,
To comparable ones in our own time.

We have to figure out what
Our equivalents of ritual hand washing are,
The things that cause us to separate ourselves from others,
Creating insiders and outsiders.

How do we know what God wants us to do,
And what we have put in place with mere human practice?

James tells us that every perfect gift is from above,
From the Father of Lights.

God gives us the gift
Of the Law of Love,
Which helps us to understand what is important—
Loving God and our neighbor.

God gives us the gift of Christ,
Who shows us the way to mercy.

And God also gives us the gift of grace through Jesus Christ.
Because we are loved by God,
Through grace we are made able to love others.

If we are doing something
In God’s name that causes us to harm another,
Then we are most likely acting according human traditions
And not with God’s mercy. 

In our greater Church,
Right now we have a situation
Where we can respond by drawing lines in the sand,
Much as the Pharisees did,
Or we can respond as James counsels
With listening, care and mercy.

As our church wrestles with the results
Of decisions made at our Churchwide Assembly regarding human sexuality,
We can respond by asserting our own “right” position,
Or we can respond by holy listening,
Respecting each other’s faithful interpretations of Scripture,
And feeling for each other as we respond to the outcome. 

Our delegates voted and called upon us
To commit ourselves to bear one another’s burdens,
To love our neighbor,
And to respect the bound conscience
And faithful Scriptural interpretations of others,
As we seek to understand and live with the implications of these decisions. 

Like the Pharisees, the seriously religious people and scholars of their time,
We have many ways in which we,
Who consider ourselves to be religious,
Can create insiders and outsiders. 

We can raise our voices
Asserting our own position
And drowning out any opposition.

Or we can hear God’s a recorded in James’ Epistle,
Where we are counseled to welcome the implanted Word,
To be quick to listen,
Slow to speak,
And slow to anger.

In Christ Jesus,
God has implanted the Word in us.

If we are too quick to speak,
We will drown out the sounds of that implanted Word
And it will have no chance to grow in us.

Christ, the implanted Word
Is the gift that enables us to bring our hearts close to God,
And to act with mercy and compassion.

I pray that those around us
Would be able to see by our actions
That religion is indeed
A bridling of the tongues,
An acting with the hearts,
And a breaking down of the barriers
Between insiders and outsiders. 
Amen