Song of Solomon 2:8-13; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”
We like to keep ourselves looking good on the outside, don’t we? We put a lot of effort into it. Yet, today’s word of scripture is about improving how we look on the inside. We are warned by James to avoid being “Like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like” (1:23-24).
The Pharisees were big on looking good, that is, clean, on the outside. they believed that their religious rituals led to their personal perfection, which made them better than everybody else. It was as if being perfect in God’s law made them as perfect as God.
The Pharisees tried so very hard to protect themselves from defilement that they must have met themselves coming and going from one dirty washroom to the next. The problem was that the ways they went about being pure were contaminated with self-designed rules and regulations.
In the midst of all that ceremonial washing, When did they have time for God?
It is so easy to be distracted from God when higher honor is given to human traditions and religious rituals. In their efforts to prove themselves pure, the Pharisees actually poisoned others around them by spreading their own impurity upon the innocent and vulnerable.
James speaks to this truth: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (1:27). The Pharisees would never be in the same room with widows and orphans and the vulnerable for fear of being defiled by them. Every time they chose to wash their own feet instead of the feet of the marginalized of society, they defiled themselves. They defeated themselves.
Never one to miss a teachable moment, Jesus answered the Pharisees’ defilement challenge by naming true defilement. “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile…For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7:15, 21a).
God did not design us to be hopelessly impure. Neither are we designed for perfection. Who wants a world filled with perfect people? God does not care if our hands and faces are dirty. What God cares about is the condition of our hearts. The one thing, above all else, that our God desires, is our hearts, clean and pure, ready to receive and then to share God’s abundant and perfect love for all people. So, how is it possible to share this good news.
We easily understand physical contamination, defilement, impurity in scientific, biological terms. Germs are bad; disinfectant is good. No one would prepare dinner in the bathroom, even though statistics show that the bathroom is often the cleanest room in the house. There is just a huge “ick factor” in the very idea. We all have standards of physical purity.
What, then, are the standards of spiritual purity? What if we felt as much of the “ick factor” about dishing out wounding remarks as we do about the proper ways to prepare our food? “Jesus is proposing that we intentionally build a culture that worries about whether our behavior is feeding grudges or a spiral of violence in the same way—but with considerably more intensity—that most of us were brought up to worry about food practices feeding bacteria” (Dylan’s Lectionary Blog: Proper 17, Year B).
Let’s take this even a step further. Most of us consider that if one impure thing touches a pure thing, then the whole thing is rendered impure. By the way, the five-second rule is really bad for you. I heard it on The Doctors. Let that assumption about purity carry over into how we treat people. Don’t we get caught, like the Pharisees did, in judging others as “less than?”
We are not called to live in such a way. I share with you these words written by Sarah Dylan who has such a brilliant insight to Jesus and his teachings that I dare not paraphrase and risk losing the clarity and truth of which she speaks.
It is possible to live in such a way, to display in our relationships a quality and consistency of love, that something the world writes off as irredeemable is transformed into something bearing witness to God’s power to redeem. If it’s what goes in that makes someone impure, then people need to guard carefully against coming into contact with the wrong sort of person, lest they come into contact with the wrong sort of things. But if what flows out of people in loving relationship with one another radiates purity, then we are freed to live making decisions based on love and not in fear. That I s an incredibly radical, liberating transformative insight—one I’m always trying to take in more deeply.
And there’s one further insight from Jesus’ view of purity that might be more radical still. If purity is something radiated out by how we are in relationships, then we actually NEED other people for a life of holiness. For example, If true purity is about exercising forgiveness, then we NEED to take the risk of staying in relationship with people the world thinks are hopeless to experience God’s holiness. If true purity involves exercising compassion, then suffering in the world isn’t proof that God doesn’t care, but is an opportunity to experience and proclaim just how much and in what ways God does care. If true purity is about relationship, then the challenges facing us as a church of flawed and bickering people are an opportunity to understand God’s grace more deeply and proclaim it more powerfully by insisting that reconciliation be the first, middle and final word. ..That’s Jesus’ teaching in this Sunday’s gospel; that’s the example we have in Jesus’ manner of life, which posed a profound challenge to his Pharisaic brothers much as it challenges the church today.
When we look in the mirror, I pray we do not walk away unaffected by what we see. I pray that we see the full potential of whom God creates us to be. I pray that we become carriers of contagious purity from this moment out, visiting one another with the only goal of how to build up one another in love.
In our God is the strength and power we need to meet every challenge that life presents us. Avoid the “ick factor.” Every time we look in the mirror, let’s strive to spend the rest of the day being as good-looking on the inside as we are on the outside, for God created us beautiful. Amen.
August 30, 2009
First Parish Federated Church of South Berwick, ME
The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor
