{"id":272,"date":"2012-09-12T11:04:17","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T16:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/?p=272"},"modified":"2017-10-26T22:20:32","modified_gmt":"2017-10-27T03:20:32","slug":"sermon-the-superficial-and-the-real-sept-2-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/2012\/09\/12\/sermon-the-superficial-and-the-real-sept-2-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Sermon: The Superficial and the Real Sept. 2, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

Texts: \u00a0James 1:17-27 and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A story is told about a young man who once came to a great spiritual leader and asked him to make him a priest.\u00a0 The spiritual leader stood at the window looking out upon the yard while the candidate for the priesthood was droning on and on about his piety and learning.\u00a0 The petitioner said, \u201cYou see, Abbot, I always go dressed in spotless white, like the sages of old.\u00a0 I never drink any alcoholic beverages, only water ever passes my lips.\u00a0 Also, I live a plain and simple life.\u00a0 I have sharp-edged nails inside my shoes to mortify me.\u00a0 Even in coldest weather, I lie naked in the snow to torment my flesh.\u00a0 Also, daily I receive forty lashes on my bare back to complete my penance.\u201d\u00a0 As the young man spoke, a white donkey was led into the yard and to the water trough.\u00a0 It drank, and then it rolled in the snow, as donkeys sometimes do.\u00a0 \u201cJust look!\u201d cried the abbot.\u00a0 \u201cThat animal, too, is dressed in white.\u00a0 It also drinks nothing but water.\u00a0 It has nails in its shoes and it rolls naked in the snow.\u00a0 Also rest assured, it gets its daily ration of forty lashes from its master.\u00a0 Now, I ask you, is it a saint, or is it an ass!\u201d<\/p>\n

Many people also tend to use superficial means to decide about their relationships with others, whom they will speak to, whom they will meet eye to eye.\u00a0 Generally most of us discover that often the truly interesting people are those we least expect to be so, because we have made superficial judgments about some outward characteristic.<\/p>\n

And it is also true that many people judge religion on superficial grounds, rather than by what really matters. Lots of people wonder why they should come to church when it appears that people are more adept at their lip service to the things that Jesus says matter, or that scripture defines as truly important, than in faithful living every day.\u00a0\u00a0 One of the reasons I love having funerals of church members in the church where they faithfully attended is that it is a testimony of what that church membership meant to them, and of what their faith did for them.<\/p>\n

Outwardly, religion doesn\u2019t have a very good name any more.\u00a0\u00a0 People judge Islam by its worst fanatics.\u00a0 People judge Christianity, as well, by its ways of arrogating all truth to itself, by the way people are battered by selected verses of Scripture, by the way that many Christians live bifurcated lives\u2014washing the outside of the cup, or their hands (as Jesus suggests) but neglecting the weightier matters of justice and mercy and compassion.<\/p>\n

So much of popular religion in America today could be captured in the images provoked by a news item \u00a0I read this morning.\u00a0 It seems that while being hauled to its new home at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe along I-75 north of Cincinnati, a 50 foot tall statue of Jesus\u2014replacing one that was struck by lightning and melted several years ago– got trapped as it was being driven through a McDonalds drive-thru. One outstretched arm of the statue caught on a statue of Ronald McDonald causing it to shift, stand semi-upright and lodge between a drive-thru window and the McDonald Playland.\u00a0 Police said that the statue was too big to be removed even by the \u201cjaws of life.\u201d\u00a0 This image of American religiosity caught between a drive-through window and Ronald McDonald\u00a0 left me laughing all morning.<\/p>\n

In fact, a frequent excuse for NOT being involved in religion is that its adherents are often more concerned with the superficial than the real.\u00a0 If you want an answer to give to someone who uses that little clich\u00e9, as much a fundamentalist claim of the atheist crowd as any fundamentalist believer, you might offer this answer:\u00a0 Because church, religious places of worship, MAY be one of the few places in our society where alternative futures are imagined, where in community we dare to trust our neighbor, and where we are addressed as persons of worth.\u00a0 By devoting time for meditation, you might just find your life being addressed by the holy and directed to new insights for each part of your human journey.\u00a0 Where else is that going to happen?<\/p>\n

Our scripture readings for today refer to issues of ritual purity, and of inward purity.\u00a0 It would be too simple to say that efforts to maintain a kind of ritual purity are superficial.\u00a0\u00a0 They are such only when they become the ends, \u00a0and not the means to a greater end.\u00a0 For example, I have great regard for those who keep kosher or Ramadan, as\u00a0 way of reminding themselves of a special identity, and the calling to love God and love neighbor above all else.<\/p>\n

In the Gospel reading, which some scholars consider the most important of all the texts about ritual purity in the New Testament, Mark recounts a clash between Jesus and the Pharisees about food purity.\u00a0 Why, asked the Pharisees, did Jesus\u2019s disciples eat with \u2018unclean\u2019 hands?\u00a0 Mark includes two parenthetical explanations to his Gentile readers who otherwise might have been clueless.\u00a0 \u201cThe Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Then, in a radical turn, Jesus declares \u201call foods clean.\u00a0\u00a0 Theologian Marcus Borg suggests that Jesus turned the \u201cpurity system\u201d with its \u201csharp social boundaries\u201d on its head, and in its place substituted a radically alternate social vision.\u00a0 The new community that Jesus announced would be characterized by interior compassion for everyone, not external compliance to a purity code, by radical inclusivity rather than by some hierarchical exclusivity, by inward transformation, rather than outward ritual.<\/p>\n

Then, the Epistle of James serves as a counterpoint to the Gospel reading.\u00a0 Whereas Jesus is talking about how \u201cuncleanness\u2019 comes from within,\u201d \u00a0James stesses that good can also come from within a life that has been transformed.\u201d\u00a0 For James, if the \u201cgood\u201d never expresses itself, we ought to wonder whether the transformation has really taken place.<\/p>\n

Prof. Bill Loader, an Australian, a New Testament Professor at Murdoch University, \u00a0says:\u00a0 \u201cTrue holiness is not so much the absence of bad things, as presence of compassion, especially for the most needy in society, represented here typically for the biblical tradition through orphans and widows who were too often left in poverty\u2026.Keeping oneself undirtied from the world is not about avoiding engagement where we get our hands dirty.\u201d\u00a0 Rather, he suggests, \u201cit is about refusing to surrender to the dominant values of society, even when they are called \u2018Christian\u2019.\u00a0 In the context of the Epistle of James, this relates especially to wealth, and to the way we treat people.\u201d<\/p>\n

We shouldn\u2019t let Mark\u2019s seeming degradation of the Pharisee\u2019s mislead us.\u00a0 For the Gentile church, surely the various rituals of Pharisaism seemed to be so much fol-de-rol, and not really important.\u00a0 However, most scholars think now that Jesus had high regard for the Pharisees whose religious system was designed to help persons worship God truly, and release it from the confines of the Temple, and to make it more accessible to all people in their daily lives.\u00a0 With the best of intentions, they applied the law to every aspect of life, and that included being scrupulous about honoring the food they received from God.<\/p>\n

The potential problem with using the law in this way is that you can fall over into depending, not on God, but on one\u2019s own individual ability to channel one\u2019s life into predictable routines and so get control somehow\u2026.of their own lives, of the wild holiness loose in creation. \u00a0\u00a0God gets lost in the very practice of some kinds of religion.\u00a0 People get more involved in keeping to the rules, keeping a prescribed set of beliefs, than in relating to the God who loves and gives worth to every human being.\u00a0 \u00a0The tools are confused for the end product, when they are instead merely methods to help us find what is really real.<\/p>\n

Maybe we aren\u2019t hung up on purity laws and ritual\u2014performing ritual correctly.\u00a0 They aren\u2019t of great matter to us.\u00a0 And I, especially, am prone to telling you repeatedly that believing correctly\u2014all the right things, and doing worship in just the prescribed way\u2014are not what Jesus was about, nor what the aim of the church should be, but rather our focus should be in what results\u2026our relationships and our actions.<\/p>\n

On this Labor Day weekend, however, it might be wise to note how, \u00a0perversely, we have a way of making an idol out of work. \u00a0Martin Luther called James the Epistle of Straw, because he feared that people would come to believe that they were \u201csaved\u201d or \u201cjustified\u201d not by the gift of faith, which is God\u2019s action in our lives, but by our good works that would earn us God\u2019s love.\u00a0 God\u2019s love is a free gift, for Luther, never to be earned.<\/p>\n

What Jesus would say to us, I believe, is that your life isn\u2019t the result of the work you do or do not do, but rather the gracious presence of God in your life, enticing you to wonder, joy, awe, and love.\u00a0 If we get too stuck on religious ritual on the one hand, or on work, say, on the other hand, we may wind up like Anthony Trollope\u2019s Miss Thorne, whose \u201cvirtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.\u201d\u00a0 We have, in Jesus\u2019 words, abandoned the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.\u00a0\u00a0 And what is the commandment of God?\u00a0 Love God with everything you\u2019ve got, with every fiber of your being, with every synapse in your brain, with every beat of your heart.\u00a0 Do that\u2026.and\u00a0 you will love your neighbor, even when they aren\u2019t very likable.<\/p>\n

So, as we prepare for the Fall, perhaps it is time for all of us to think about renewing our covenant with God and taking a good long look at the parts of our lives that we may be using as idols, that we may be worshipping instead of the God who asks to be in relationship with us and for us to be in community with the people of our world.\u00a0 Church is where we get to practice some of what really matters, so that it will carry over and be the energy and imagination that comes out of us in the work that is both gift and calling from the God who loves us.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Have a great Labor Day!\u00a0 May it be a Sabbath of rest for our hearts and minds.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Texts: \u00a0James 1:17-27 and Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 A story is told about a young man who once came to a great spiritual leader and asked him to make him a priest.\u00a0 The spiritual leader stood at the window looking<\/p>\n

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