Sermon September 3, 2006

Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm45:1-2,7-10; James 1:17-27; Mark7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 “Lift up your hearts” the celebrant at Eucharist invites the people. They stand. “We lift them to the Lord.” …One of the ritual actions of our Sunday worship that echoes Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel reading. He reminds the Pharisees and us that it’s not so much what comes into a person’s body as what is within in the human heart that is important. For Jews of Jesus’ day and for Mark’s community the heart was not the source of mushy valentiney kind of emotion—but was the moral center of a person. Your moral ground is your heart. When we stand, lifting our hearts to the Lord we are making a statement. Mark depicts the opponents of Jesus’ as kind of caricatures. Mark’s Pharisees have declared themselves the authorities when it comes to interpreting the law and telling others how to follow it. They criticize Jesus and his disciples for not following the law and for eating food from the market with hands that had not been washed. Gentle Jesus meek and mild, he is NOT. He lashes out at them and quotes Isaiah accusing them of following the letter of the law but in their hearts being far from God. He calls them hypocrites a word that referred to actors on a stage who assume an identity that is not their own and who act to gain the approval of the audience. This is strong stuff—and hypocrites is a word we Christians hear about ourselves a lot. At least if you talk to non-church goers that’s how we are so often criticized—as hypocrites. Pretending to be something we are not. Jesus directs his critic’s attention away from their external actions to an examination of their own interior selves. To their hearts—to their evil intentions. Those he says are what really defile a person, not the failure to carry out some ritual act. Now of course you and I belong to a tradition that puts a lot of emphasis on ritual—we are among the most ritualistic of Christians. We come here week in and week out and pretty much do the same things every Sunday. We stand, we sit, we kneel, we sing, we pray, we give thanks, we bow, we scrape, we, some of us, genuflect, we, some of us, make the sign of the cross, the priest washes his or her hands before celebrating communion, we pass the peace, we lift up the cup and the bread toward the roof (where we are sure heaven is), and then toward the people, we eat the wafer and drink the wine, we clean the dishes and put the leftovers away very carefully, we go out the door into the world. All ritual. Do we do these things to earn God’s favor? or what? What is the relationship between these ritual actions and our hearts? Is it possible to come here every Sunday, do these things, and leave this place and commit fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride and folly? You bet! Are we a people who can get all up tight like these caricature Pharisees did about the letter of the Law and doing things the way we’ve always done it? You bet! Some of you may remember what it was like to revise our prayerbook, or move the altar out from the wall, or have the priest face the congregation during the Eucharist, not to mention women priests. . . . Or, just consider moving these pews to a new configuration, consider a jazz mass at 8 o’clock (AM), consider extemporaneous prayer, consider the acolyte draping the lavabo towel (the what??) over his left arm instead of his right arm, consider acolytes in flip flops. AAAAAAKKKK! What’s essential? Is there only one way to express reverence? Would we rather focus on these matters than the state of our hearts? Your heart? My heart? You bet! As usual, Jesus has a point. Think for a moment about ritual. How it expresses our hearts deepest convictions, how it helps to form our hearts, how it sustains us and bores us, and reminds us, in ways we hardly notice, that there is a God who is stable and loving, and there is a divine order. It’s like teaching your child manners. So what’s the big deal if the little boy eats with his mouth open, macaroni spilling out—or so what if the family never eats a meal together. Or why care if the little girl forgets to say thank you. If she forgets often enough she may forget she has anything to be thankful about. She may begin to think instead that she is deserving—she may develop a sense of privilege. She may. At our best, our ritual actions spring from the posture of our hearts. Toward one another and toward God. Hence we bow sometimes, kneel sometimes, stand sometimes, praise sometimes, bewail our manifold sins sometimes, ask for forgiveness from God and each other, the priest washes her hands symbolically reminding us perhaps of our baptism, perhaps of the fact that no matter how much of a hypocrite the priest is, when she celebrates communion she’s been washed and the people receiving the communion can count on God to do the washing and to be present no matter the state of the priest’s heart (or which arm the lavabo towel is on). The Law—obedience to the Torah—was and is not about hygiene and it is not about earning favor with God. It is about offering a witness to this world of ours—this tired and often chaotic world of ours—that there is a loving God who is dependable. There is order. Ritual action is about defining who you are and to whom your allegiance is. At our best our rituals help form our hearts into the hearts they were born to be. Our rituals and the very ritual of our coming together every week to turn intentionally to God to say thank you-- these help change us from hypocrites to persons of integrity. As the letter of James points out “every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above coming down from the Father of lights”—who never changes. That loving abundance is the gift first given—opening our hearts to receive it is a key to becoming Jesus-people, folks who cannot NOT respond in love to God and to our neighbors. I read the other day that Albert Schweitzer, turned away from his highly accomplished career as a philosopher, musician and theologian to become a doctor in heart of Africa in the early years of the 20th century.* He wrote: ”For years I have been giving of myself in words,” but now, he wanted to walk the talk and live a more authentic life. Or, as he put it, “My life is my argument.” . . . .”be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves,” as James puts it. And the truth is that we long to grow up into Christ so that our words and actions, our hearts and our rituals, may be congruent—authentic and real. We aren’t there yet, we’re all hypocrites “playing a role that isn’t entirely ours yet.” Some of us perhaps come here to persuade God that we are worthy. To earn heavenly credits. And, yes, it’s possible to do the rituals, speak the words, eat the bread and drink the wine and forget why we do them. An autopsy might find our hearts shrunken and our arteries clogged. A police report or our own family members might find our that actions speak louder than our words. But we come here because we’ve been invited to the feast given by the God of abundance. We come here indeed to lift up our hearts. And, we come to subject ourselves to the ritual acts, trusting that saying thank you, praising God, passing the peace, asking for forgiveness, eating the bread and drinking the wine will indeed soften our hearts and unclutch our hands and gentle our spirits. And, in the world outside we practice other ritual actions: we practice loving and serving, caring for widows and orphans, forgiving our friends and enemies, standing with the poor and working for justice and healing. We do so NOT to earn our salvation or God’s approval. We do so in response to God’s abundant love, and as we do so, we open ourselves to the flow of God’s transforming grace until we too can say, ”My life is my argument.” * Stephen Bauman, Simple Truths: On Values, Civility, and Our Common Good, Abingdon Press: Nashville,TN,2006, p. 83