Mark
7:1-16 - The Tradition of the Elders
Now
when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered
around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled
hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do
not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition
of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash
it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of
cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him,
‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but
eat with defiled hands?’ He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you
hypocrites, as it is written,
“This people honours 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.’
Then
he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in
order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, “Honour your father and your
mother”; and, “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” But
you say that if anyone tells father or mother, “Whatever support you might have
had from me is Corban” (that is, an offering to God)— then you no longer permit
doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through
your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.’
Then
he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and
understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but
the things that come out are what defile.’
Stumbling Blocks to Faith, Ritual: Gate or Prison ~ By Rev. Connie Frierson
Does
your faith have a leading edge? I
started thinking about sharp and dull because I am about to host a thanksgiving
gathering for the singles group at my home. So I will have to carve a turkey for about 30 people in my
home. I need a sharp knife. No one
wants turkey that has been bludgeoned into pieces. Heck if I really mangle it I
would be better off just using my fingers. Pulled turkey is not the same, as
beautifully carved turkey but it would do ok. Maybe we should just throw the
whole ritual of Thanksgiving out.
How about we just hunch around the stove tearing off bits with our hands
and scooping up gobs of mash potatoes with our fingers? The great symbol of plenty, the carved
turkey, part of our thanksgiving ritual can just go hang. Throw out the old
ideas. Go with what is easiest. We could reduce the holiday to the lowest
common denominator. Heck, let’s reduce every holiday to it’s lowest common
denominator.
Or
maybe instead of this rant I just need to get the knife sharpened. Guess what? Our faith is in need of sharpening. Because if our faith
isn’t sharp it will fail us when we need it. God won’t fail us but our awareness and vision can be dull.
Faith that is as dull as a butter knife faith isn’t useful. We need a faith
that can cut through the tough things in life. So how do we do this? How do we
get a faith that works? One of the ways is to sharpen our religious practices.
We need to make our rituals have an edge that touches our hearts and grows our
spirit.
We
sharpen our faith by sharing together in practices that have meaning and
reality to them. When we practice something with transcendent meaning long
enough it becomes ritual. And
ritual can be sharp or it can be deadly dull. A ritual can be an invigorating dip into God’s reality or it
can be tepid bath water. Ritual, religious practice, is meant to wake us up. Ritual
is supposed to be like a glorious sun rising that makes us jump out of bed and
live. But too often ritual is a
routine, humdrum alarm clock and we hit the snooze button and drift back to our
spiritual sleep. How we practice worship is meant to be a gate that helps us
pass through the concrete and ordinary and see God’s presence in everything. But too often we see ritual as a prison
that stifles real God experience.
When
I talk about ritual what am I referring to? Think with me about what we do that is a ritual: The Sacraments
of Communion and Baptism, Markers of life transitions, like Marriage and
Funerals and Confirmation, Ordination of clergy and elders and teachers,
Commissioning of mission trips, Chants, Prayer of Humility, Healing prayer, the
laying on of hands, Seasons of our year; Advent, Christmas, Ash Wednesday,
Lent, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost, Daily devotions,
lighting of candles, colors of the season, surrounding ourselves with
symbols. It’s all ritual, all
symbol. It all has the potential to enrich our lives or be meaningless drivel.
In
our scripture passage today you have one of hundreds of instances where Jesus
shows us how we get ritual wrong.
Here the Pharisee’s turned the small rule into and idol, a false god and
ignored the great transcendent purpose. Lord knows I am all for hand
washing. Jesus was for hand
washing. But when the small rule gets in the way of truly having a clean life and
loving heart then it has to be put in its proper place. This is one instance but there are
others. For example in Mark 3, a man comes to Jesus on the Sabbath with a
withered arm. Jesus heals him and restores him. The Pharisees criticized Jesus
for healing on the Sabbath. Jesus embodies the real purpose of Sabbath to
restore. But the small rule is all the Pharisee’s see. Jesus draws the anger of
the religious establishment. So much so that the Pharisees went away and
started planning his death. In Luke 18, Jesus tells the story of the Pharisee
and the tax collector. The Pharisee stands ceremonially in the temple and
recites all the religious obligations he has fulfilled. But the tax collector
stands in the back. He cannot even raise his eyes to heaven but he offers real
confession and humility. In the end
the tax collector is the one who leaves the temple with a right relationship
with God. Rigid adherents to the letter of the law imprisoned the Pharisee’s
minds. What Jesus wanted was for the law and the tradition to open them up to
spiritual reality.
So
the question is, “Is Jesus anti-ritual, anti-symbol?” Of course not. Jesus was a Jew! He worshiped in the synagogue. He read scripture in the
temple. He feasted on feast days. He traveled to Jerusalem, even as Luke writes,
as a boy to celebrate Passover. Jesus was baptized. Jesus preached with symbol
after concrete symbol to open us up to the way God is. Like this. The Kingdom of God is like a woman searching for a lost
coin, the kingdom of God is like a seed’s sown in the rocks and the road and
the weeds and the field and the good earth. God’s love is like the shepherd
that forsakes everything to find the lost lamb or like the father overjoyed at
the return of the prodigal son. Jesus was all about using the real stuff of our
life to show the spiritual reality. Jesus understood our need, indeed our
craving, to have the ordinary stuff of our life lifted up and reveal the
profound.
We
are physical beings. We spend our
days inside these bodies, moving around through space, eating and drinking and
searching for a love, creating families and making a living. God has used
ritual from the beginning to get us to see the sacred in the world while we do
all those work-a-day thing. We are
beings who need ritual to open us up to spiritual reality. A good religious practice
is like this. Here is some living
water. It is the best, the
sweetest most life giving water in the universe. Drink this and you can live your life aware of God in
everything. Great let’s get
some. But you don’t have a cup.
You are stumped. You can try to cup your hands around it but it leaks out
pretty fast. You end up with a puddle, not a drink that can satisfy your
soul. God is gracious enough to
let us have some sips of this water just by standing out in the rain with our
mouths open. This is like the
wonderful sense of God we get when we see something beautiful in nature. We are in awe and we stand in that rain
of holiness with our mouths open.
But then we have to wait for it to rain again. Ritual can hold the holy long enough for us to get a good
long drink. But we can’t turn the cup into the holy thing. The holy is just
what the cup is holding. We also can’t look at the cup, find a chip not to our
liking and toss the cup away. We
seem to always be tipping from one end of the extreme to the other. We either throw the cup away or we
worship the cup.
Religious
practices, rituals, have some important jobs to do. It allows us to put the transcendent into a form we can more
easily grasp. Rituals say what we are doing, what we are promising and how we
are noticing God in the world. Ritual slows us down and makes us pay attention
so we can savor and deepen what God is doing. Rituals usually involve some silence to allow and encourage
deep contemplation or appreciation or praise or gratitude. Ritual is personally
meaningful but also interpersonal.
We do communion, baptism, marriages and funerals, Christmas and Easter
together. It helps to bind us together in a shared experience. We become
witnesses to God in our own lives and in each other’s lives. Rituals help us to
mark and emphasis and celebrate important transitions. If something is changing that change
needs to be honored, recognized and blessed.
So
how do we open ourselves up to the best practices and avoid the bland routine
dullness? First value our
religious practice enough to give it proper time and attention. Slow down. Savor the symbol and the meaning. But the most important step is to always ask the question, “What
is God hoping to show me in this?”
Everything we do in ritual in the church is meant to be a gesture that points
to God. Look God is here! Pay attention God’s spirit is present,
here!
When
we practice a sacrament and a rite well, with attention to God’s spirit it will
be both familiar and new. When I experience communion it is dearly
familiar but often with a different emphasis each time. Sometimes I am struck by the God’s love
in inviting me to this table. Sometimes I experience the pang of knowing that
Jesus suffered. Sometimes I sense God calling me to grow into someone who
offers a life for others.
Sometimes I am struck by the unity of all the dear faces that share this
holy meal with me. Sometime I am
just struck by the wonderful smell of that homemade bread. There are a hundred
other shadings of meaning and transformation God can use to speak to each of
us.
Our
religious practice is meant to open us up to God. They aren’t meant to be a
prison for our mind. They are meant to open us up not only when we do the
ritual but also when we walk from here into our everyday life. So don’t just stand around in the in
the rain with your mouth open. Though that is great every now and then. But
open your mind, heart and spirit to experience God’s presence routinely,
regularly and with a wide-awake intention.
Amen.
