From Within -- Season of Peace

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

September 1, 2024

 

            A television show that Brent and I love to watch is Young Sheldon. This is the prequel to the show The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon Cooper is a young boy of enormous intelligence. He is nine when he starts high school. He graduates from high school in record time, goes to college, also checking with his mother if his bedtime can be changed to 8:30 – since he’ll be in college, and starts graduate school at Cal-Tech at 14. There is no doubt that Sheldon is a certified genius.

            But with his intelligence comes many, many, many quirks, idiosyncrasies, and hyper sensitivities. One of those sensitivities is random human touch. His family, his mother, father, older brother, Georgie, and his twin sister, Missy, eat dinner together every night. And the one thing they do before they eat is pray while holding hands. Sheldon is a germaphobe and will only hold his brother and father’s hands if he’s wearing his mittens. This is not necessarily a bad idea when it comes to his brother, Georgie. For the first couple of seasons, Georgie’s personal hygiene is often called into question. But the point is that Sheldon obsesses about germs he might pick up from other people. But he has a much harder time reflecting on what he might share with other people – whether its germs or insensitivity to someone else’s feelings something else. Most of the time Sheldon only thinks about what the germs that contaminate his hands or make him sick or defile him and not the other way around.

            With this illustration in mind, I chose to look most carefully at Jesus’ words to his disciples at the end of our reading from Mark’s gospel.

            “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.”

            This passage begins with some Pharisees challenging Jesus about his disciples’ flaunting of tradition. The disciples didn’t participate in the ritual cleansing of their hands or their cookware before they ate. At first reading, this sounds horrifying to our 21^st century ears. We know that good hygiene makes a difference. We understand the importance of cleaning our hands and our cookware to avoid spreading germs and disease. You would never use the knife you just cut raw chicken with to then immediately cut up vegetables for the salad. I mean, yuck! Cross-contamination is real people!

But the cleansing the Pharisees were referring to was not so much about hygiene or sanitary practices as it was tradition. It was a ritual of spiritual cleanliness that was a tradition of the elders. To eat something with unclean hands or that wasn’t prepared in properly cleaned pots was to be physically and spiritually defiled. My understanding is that it made a person impure and unclean before God. But Jesus and his disciples turn this tradition on its head, so the Pharisees and scribes question Jesus. 

            Whenever Jesus is challenged, he challenges back. In our passage he quotes scripture, specifically the prophet Isaiah. 

            “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.”

            In other words, Jesus tells the Pharisees and scribes that not only are many of their traditions created by humans and not God, but these same traditions have also become little more than empty ritual. If the tradition of ritual cleansing is supposed to honor God, then it is done in name only. Their hearts are not in it.

And in the part of the story that we are focusing on today, Jesus debunks their understanding of the tradition in the first place. People can ritually purify themselves till the cows come home, but that won’t change this one truth. It is not what goes into us that defiles us.  No food that we eat, no washing ritual that we undergo will make us clean or unclean before God. The source of defilement is not outside of ourselves.  It is within us. It is within our hearts. 

            Matt Skinner, Associate Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, says that this exchange is the most straightforward part of this passage. Jesus tells us in succinct and plain language where evil comes from. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it comes from us. Yes, evil intentions, the whole list that Jesus recites, can come from the people I don’t like, which I have no problem whatsoever believing. Yet they also come from the people I love, which is a little harder to bear. Hardest to accept of all, evil intentions come from me. They come from the heart. They come from your heart, a stranger’s heart, a politician’s heart, a neighbor’s heart, from my heart. They come from within.

            Whether we choose to believe that our heart breeds avarice and murder and hatred, etc., or not, one point is dramatically driven home. Jesus tells the Pharisees and scribes, the crowd around them, and the disciples that evil and evil intentions are not an us versus them proposition. And no amount of hand washing, not amount of tradition, will change that. Jesus calls all who will listen to examine themselves, to examine their heart. We must look inside ourselves for the bad which contaminates us and our world. It’s not just all out there. 

            Yet even though it may sound as if Jesus is condemning the human heart to total depravity, I don’t think he was trying to imply that nothing good comes from the heart. But he was making it clear to the Pharisees and scribes and the disciples and the others around him that they had invested more in tradition than in the actual word of God. They used tradition as a shield against what they believed were outside evil forces. And they used the traditions as a weapon against others. Tradition, which at one time may have brought their hearts closer to God, were now most likely responsible for closing their hearts to God and to God’s people. 

            I also don’t want to imply that Jesus believed all tradition is bad. We have no indication from the text that Jesus himself didn’t adhere to Jewish dietary laws. But following the Law never stood in his way when it came to love – loving God and loving neighbor. 

            Bad things are bred in the human heart – anger, avarice, lust, murder and murderous thoughts, envy, pride, etc. But good comes from the heart too. Hope comes from the heart. Compassion comes from the heart. Forgiveness and joy come from the heart. Love comes from the heart. Tradition and the intentions that began the tradition can and do bring us closer to one another and to God. Think about traditions in your families. Think about traditions around meals or holidays or other celebrations. Those traditions may warm your hearts and fill you with even more love for the people you share with them. But what about traditions that may have outlived themselves? Are there traditions that need to be let go of for new traditions, new ways of being and doing and living, to begin? Maybe some traditions have become exclusive, drawing lines between who is on the inside and who is on the outside? Maybe some traditions create stress and tension that block joy?

            If tradition has this power for good and for bad in our families, think about the power tradition holds in our churches. What are our traditions that open our hearts more to God and to other people? And what traditions do the opposite? Are there traditions or rules that define us and help us to grow in faith? Are there traditions or rules that stunt us spiritually?

            As I was preparing for this sermon, I read a story from a fellow pastor. One Sunday when she finished preaching the sermon, she left the pulpit to stand with the congregation and sing a hymn. During the hymn a man walked down to her. This man was married to a woman who had grown up in that church. He was well-known to the preacher and to the congregation. He had struggled and wrestled for many years with addiction and business setbacks. He could be gruff and difficult. But the preacher also knew that this man had been longing for God for just as long as he had been struggling, but he had been unable to accept God’s grace and love.

            This man came to the preacher during the hymn and said, “I want to be baptized.” He repeated his urgent request. Something within him had changed, and he knew it and he needed to be baptized. The preacher knew it too. The hymn was still being sung. There was no water in the baptismal font. She had not gotten session approval, which is what good, rule-following Presbyterians do. But she saw that the glass of water she kept under the pulpit was still there. Before the hymn was finished, she took the water and poured it into the font. When the singing ended, she called this man over to her and she asked him the questions about his faith, “Do you renounce evil? Do you trust Jesus?” And then she spoke the words of baptism, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

            At its next meeting, the session approved his baptism. The rule was followed, and the tradition continued, but the rule didn’t stand in the way of grace, the tradition didn’t close the door of the heart to love.

            Would I have been willing to do the same? I don’t know. I don’t know. My uncertainty means I need to do some more looking within. Maybe we all do. But I do know that even when what comes from within is less than, even when we let tradition get in our own way, there is always another chance to try again, there is always another opportunity to let love guide us. There is always grace, God’s grace and the grace we are called to show ourselves and one another, and for that we say, “Thanks be to God.”

            Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

            Amen.