Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 30, 2009

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23)

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, 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 Jesus, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” Jesus said to them, “Isaiah prophesized 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.”

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.”

“For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Many years ago, when I was an intern at a church, a retired pastor, who was a member there, took me under his wing, and he provided me with some very simple yet very profound insights. He would take me to the local soup kitchen, not to serve, not to talk to the directors, not to learn about their programs, but to eat with the people there; to eat, as he put it, “with the bums and the drunks.” Ray had a heart for those he called bums and drunks. He grew up in desperate circumstances on the south side of Chicago; and his own father was addicted to alcohol, and died homeless. Ray was certain that if it had not been for a pastor in his life, who took an interest in him, he would have followed in his dad’s footsteps. “Instead,” as he said, “I got an education and did something useful with my life.”

A great deal of Ray’s life involved working with the addicted, the displaced, and the marginalized. What he wanted from me was that I would learn to see people differently than most, not by knowing about the addicted and the homeless but by knowing them directly, by sitting down and eating together, and by making human contact. Ray wanted me to view people with problems not as problems but as human beings, every bit as much human as me, no matter what their condition.

Drawing on Biblical imagery and his own experience, Ray told me that these are people our society views as unclean. And that way of seeing people, as essentially unclean, is dehumanizing; it’s viewing other people as undesirable or, even worse, as defiling or a dirty stain on the rest of our existence.

Our Gospel text today draws heavily on this very old and common metaphor of clean and unclean. It’s basic to our imagination about human life and the world around us. It’s built right into our language: we speak of people as clean or dirty, pure, defiled. They’re words that not only apply to our physical condition, but we use these words to talk about people’s very lives, as clean, dirty, pure, defiled, filthy, scum, dregs. Every one of us has notions of what clean and unclean are all about. We all have standards for our personal hygiene, below which we would consider someone unclean or unwashed. But I’m not saying that standards of clean and unclean are not important. I don’t care if my mechanic washes his hands before working on my car. But I do care if my dentist does.

Our text today offers a sober warning about the way in which we use hygiene as a metaphor, to make fundamental distinctions among people. Judgments about who is clean and who is unclean are often more dangerous than the uncleanness or defilement people fear. Let me give you a chilling example. I’m going to read to you from the words of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, from his own publication in 1940. And I think you will see how thoughts of clean and unclean can be deadly. It’s an extended quote.

“In the first days after the introduction of the Jewish star, newspaper sales in Berlin went through the roof. Each Jew on the street bought a newspaper to conceal his mark of Cain. As this was banned, one began to see Jews on the streets of the west side of Berlin in the company of non-Jewish foreigners. These Jewish lackeys actually should wear the Jewish star themselves. The excuse they give for their provocative conduct is always the same: the Jews are, after all, human beings, too. We never denied that, just as we never denied the humanity of murderers, child rapists, thieves, and pimps, although we never felt the need to parade down the street with them. Every Jew is a decent Jew, who has found a dumb and ignorant goy who thinks him decent. As if that were a reason to give Jews a kind of honorable escort. What nonsense.

“The Jews gradually are having to depend more and more on themselves, and have recently found a new trick. They knew the good-natured German Michael in us, always ready to shed sentimental tears for the injustice done to them. One suddenly has the impression that the Berlin Jewish population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies. The Jews send out the pitiable. They may confuse some harmless souls for a while, but not us. We know exactly what the situation is.

“For their sake alone, we must win the war. If we lose it, these harmless-looking Jewish chaps would suddenly become raging wolves. They would attack our women and children, and carry out revenge. There are enough examples in history. That is what they did in the Baltic states when Bolshevism marched in, even though neither the people nor their governments had done anything to them. There is no turning our backs in our battle against the Jews—even if we wanted to, which we do not. The Jews must be removed from the community, for they endanger our national unity.”

Now, listen to this:

“That is an elementary principle of racial, national, and social hygiene. They will never give us rest. If they could, they would drive one nation after another into war against us. Who cares about their difficulties, they who only want to force the world to accept their bloody financial domination? The Jews are a parasitic race that feeds like a . . .” — listen — “. . . foul fungus on the cultures of healthy but ignorant people. There is only one effective measure: cut them out.”

We must never forget that these words were so persuasive that a third of all European Jews were murdered, along with others thought to be “filthy,” such as Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, and mentally ill people, all in the name of “social hygiene.”

Our story about Jesus this morning portrays a teacher who understood very well that the way in which we judge other human beings is dicey business. He knew that hate can flourish in the guise of piety and righteousness. And that’s not a Jewish problem, that’s a human problem. Every one of us is capable of this kind of hypocrisy. Once we determine someone is unclean, we absolve ourselves of having to care about them.

Jesus had a different view of purity. He says that, instead of being so worried about outward things, we need to recognize that what defiles comes from within people—pride, greed, envy, lust, and the rest of it. And if you think about it, if our real problems originate from within us and not outside of us, it changes our focus from finding fault with others to looking instead at ourselves. And I think that’s a pretty healthy move, don’t you?

Jesus taught the entire law in a nutshell: “Love God with all that you are, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Or, in other words, “Do unto others what you would have others do unto you.” Well, Jesus wasn’t alone; he wasn’t the only teacher in Israel teaching this way. Jesus lived at roughly the same time as the great rabbi and Pharisee Hillel. And the story is told of Hillel that a person came and demanded that Hillel teach him the whole law while he stood on one foot, and Hillel responded, “What is hateful to you, do not do to others. The rest is commentary.”

Jesus was a Jew who had a beef with some, not all, other Jews about the way they evaluated others in terms of religious standards of purity. Jesus wasn’t against all standards and rules. He was against what sanctified hostility towards one’s neighbor. Let me say that again. He was against what sanctified hostility towards one’s neighbor.

The only prayer we have record of teaching others to pray is the one we call “The Lord’s Prayer.” And I believe that Jesus and his disciples practiced that prayer as a table prayer. It gives us another idea of what Jesus felt purity was all about. The table prayer Jesus taught asks for God to forgive us our sins, as we forgive other people’s sins.

The people who are clean and pure then are clean and pure because they are forgiven and because they forgive, not because of their goodness or their merit. People who are acceptable to God and welcome at the table of fellowship are forgiven forgivers. Forgiven forgivers, that’s what we are; nothing more, no better than that. That’s the deal. That’s purity. Then there is really no other purity than that.