Pentecost 14B 30 August 2015
Well, I guess first I should probably introduce myself. I’ve met a lot of you, but I have a feeling a
few of you are thinking, who is this person?
Well, I’m Jonathan and I’m the new vicar here at Emmanuel. That just basically means that I’m in an
internship as part of my journey to, hopefully, be ordained as a pastor after
this. And I’m really excited to be here. A few other things about me; I also work at the Center’s for Disease
Control and am doing my seminary studies through Luther Seminary in St Paul,
Minnesota. But, the more important thing
to know about me is my family. My wife,
Elizabeth, and I have been married for over 10 years and have been together for
about 15 years. We have one son, TJ, who
is 2 and is visiting my parents this weekend.
Rounding out the family in Atlanta is Chris, my mother-in-law. So my family is very important to me.
And I’m sure that like many of you, after we got married, we
made certain that our household had rules.
You talked about things you do and things you never do. It helps keep order. It helps create an environment where
everybody can live together in harmony.
So rules, in and of themselves, are not bad. They help set a stage where people can live
together.
And the setting for today’s gospel reading is a discussion
about rules. More specifically, it’s a
discussion between Jesus and the Pharisees about Jewish law about what is
required of members of the faith. The
religious rulers of the day are questioning why Jesus is not following the
customs of the time which dictated certain requirements regarding washing
before meals. Now let’s be clear that
the requirements that the Pharisees articulate have no biblical basis. There is nowhere in the Torah where these
rules are written. They truly are customs
that have grown out of traditions and over time have become requirements so
that whether or not a person does or does not perform them is now a basis for
assessing how truly Jewish they are.
Jesus first responds by essentially calling the Pharisee’s out
on creating these laws. He let’s them
know that in their actions they are only paying lip service to God’s laws while
adhering to the laws of man, to the traditions of the elders.
So when confronted with the accusations that he is subverting
the law and is in some way making himself an outsider, Jesus expands the
conversation to talk about what it is that truly pollutes a person, whether it
is something that enters a person from the outside, in which case ritual
washing would be a benefit, or if the root of evil actually comes from within a
person.
And Jesus’s response to the Pharisee’s is somewhat
surprising, because he tells them that evil comes from within, that, in effect,
we are, when left to our own devices, truly sinful being; what we produce is
sin. We are to blame for the things in
this world that separate us from each other and that separate us from God. We create the systems that hurt each other
and deny each other our rights. We
create hunger, fear, injustice and oppression.
We can’t cast that off onto some supernatural force because
it’s our own sinfulness that creates the evil we find in this world.
Jesus tells us that we are the originators of evil, but it’s
also important to remember that we are also all victims of this evil too. We have all in some way been hurt by the
systems and the rules that have been put into place. We have all been made to feel less than
human, we have all been excluded from participation in the greater
society. We may be the creators of the
laws that exclude and oppress, but we are also the victims.
The Pharisees are operating as if there is something that
they can do to keep this evil out of their body but then Jesus turns their
world around by telling them that there is nothing that can be done to keep it
out because the evil they are seeking to avoid in fact originates within them, this
evil originates in us and there is nothing that we can do to prevent being
stained with sin.
And it’s important to recognize that Jesus is not rejecting
law in a general sense in this text.
Jesus is rejecting the law of man.
Jesus is holding strong to the laws of God, to the laws given in the
Torah. And don’t misunderstand, the
Pharissee’s weren’t seeking to do bad, these practices are the result of
hundred’s of years of interpretation of the Torah to try and help folks live
out and apply God’s laws; but because of our nature, they, and we, end up
corrupting it so that instead of following a set of laws intended to bring
humanity together and to direct all of our focus to God. We end up creating divisions, excluding our
brothers and sisters. Telling one group
that they are not worthy.
And it’s not a problem that was unique to that period in
history. We haven’t overcome this. The church has a bad history of misusing
God’s revealed Word in the Bible to hurt people, to exclude people, to justify
evil things being done. It’s why the
church was able to justify slavery and to stay quiet during the jim crow era. It’s why the church turned a blind eye to
apartheid for so long and why it ignores the apartheid situation in modern day
Palestine. And it’s also how
congregations and people today continue to exclude the LGBT community and to
treat our brothers and sisters like they have done something wrong by living as
God created them. We have created these
barriers to entry. We have misused the
law to punish people.
But God’s laws are very different than human rules. Human rules are about punishment, but God’s
laws are about relationship. God’s laws
lead us to loving God and to loving our neighbor. We create barriers and push people away, but
God breaks barriers. This is what Jesus
was doing, he was breaking down the barriers that the Pharisee’s and the
traditions of the elders had erected so that he and the disciple’s could eat
with the people the elite’s had deemed unworthy. And what does it mean to keep God’s law
except to show love and compassion to all those in need.
God’s laws aren’t designed to push people away, but God’s
laws are designed to call people to God, to show God’s mercy and grace to a
world so in need of it. How do we know
this? Look at the Deuteronomy text for
today. God’s law draws the outsider in,
it produces justice, God’s law shows compassion. God law is not just welcoming, God’s law is
actively inviting people into a relationship with God. God’s law was given so that people would
recognize their need for God. And in
recognizing that, we begin to recognize what God has been and continues to do
for us each and every day.
We love a barrier breaking God who through Christ seeks to
unify all of creation. God’s love is not
set aside for a certain few, but God actively reaches out to those we have
pushed aside and calls out to them. God
stand with those that our barrier creating laws pushed aside. Because of that we can find God where people
are fighting to end to racism, sexism and we can find God where people are
fighting to end homophobia. Because God
is a welcoming and loving God and God calls and empowers us to be welcoming and
loving towards each other.
God’s heart is open to us and we are empowered by the spirit
to open our hearts to others because exclusion is unsustainable. A closed heart is at some point going to stop
beating.
So a couple of weeks ago, Pastor William shared with us this
vision he had of the future for Emmanuel and it was a vision of the parking lot
overflowing and of cars parked on the grass and of our building filled with
people of all types and from all different backgrounds standing united as we worship
together. And the text today just made
think about that because that is what happens when those barriers we have
created start to fall. When we become doers
of God’s word, not just hearers of it, to borrow from the James text for
today. When we show love and compassion
to the people we may have previously pushed aside.
So what if… What if
Emmanuel became known in the community for being a place of inclusion. A place where people were not just welcomed,
but a place where people felt invited to be a part of this community. What if we were known as community that was
filled with people of all colours, all political stripes, all sexualities? What if we reflected the beautiful diversity
of God’s creation?
Because God is a barrier breaking God, we are called to be a
barrier breaking church.
As a final point, it’s interesting that Jesus and the
Pharisees are talking about purification and a perceived need for continued
washing in order to be made clean. And I
say it’s interesting because there is, ultimately, some truth in the underlying
thoughts of the Pharisees. But rather
than being a ritual washing that we do, we are reminded that in our baptism,
God has broken down the barriers of sin and death and raised us as new
creature’s in Christ and in that ‘daily baptism’ the Luther describes, God
continually breaks down that barrier of sin that tries to separate us from God
so that we might be freed to love and serve God and our neighbor. And it’s because God has torn down those
barriers that we might tear down the barriers that separate us from each other
in order to experience God’s love as one unified body of Christ. And because of that, we can truly say, thanks
be to God. Amen.
