Aug 30 Proper 17
Parents probably should have been warned about our lectionary readings this week. Let’s face it. Some of the Bible isn’t suitable for children.
But it’s not that racy bit about a lover’s longing for her bounding young stag in the Song of Solomon we should be concerned about. Kids just groan and roll their eyes at that stuff.
No, the dangerous reading was from the gospel of Mark. You see, we learn early how to interpret scripture to the benefit of ourselves and our causes. So any kids who were paying attention will leave church today with some ammunition against their parents’ annoying obsession with hygiene.
Next time Mom says, “It’s time to wash up for dinner,” some pious child will say, “Mother, I would, but Jesus told me not to.” Turns out the Bible never says, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Cleanliness is next to nothing, it seems.
And the most precocious young readers will argue that they should also be relieved of dishwashing duty. They’ll say that certain scholars believe that Jesus’ statement about the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles shouldn’t be taken literally. It was meant to refer to tableware of all kinds. So let’s just stack everything in the sink and call it good.
We learn early and we learn well how to reassure ourselves that God is on our side, interpreting scripture in ways that affirm what we want it to affirm and condemn what and whom we want it to condemn.
So we read scenes like this one in Mark and we get to stop doing the dishes. Or, more likely, we start looking around for people with their priorities mixed up, people who, in our opinion, have abandoned the commandment of God and hold to human tradition. We look for the Pharisees in our world. They’re out there, you know.
Now Pharisee spotting happens to be a favorite pastime of mine. But there’s a problem here. Because to read this story as pointing out the problems of anyone but ourselves we have to ignore its punch line: “Listen to me, all of you, and understand,” Jesus said. “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”
That statement might not seem to directly forbid hunting for Pharisees. But think about it. Jesus says that defilement is an inside-out process, not an outside-in one. So the Pharisee out there really isn’t my problem. His foolish traditions aren’t what defile my life. I’m defiled by what I do. I’m defiled not by what spills out of somebody else’s life and into mine. I’m defiled by what I pass on to others.
Now, to exchange the Pharisaical way of seeing the world for Jesus’s could make a big difference in the way we live. And we don’t have to live in a culture shaped by Jewish holiness codes for this to be so. We may not have religious laws about ritual hand washing, but the fear of defilement is alive and well.
For instance, I happen to be a father, and it’s not hard to instigate an earnest hand-wringing session with other parents about the dangerous world our children are growing up in. And in a way, it’s a sort of defilement that we’re most afraid of. There are images on the internet, drugs in the schools, and sex pretty much everywhere. We see our children as innocent and pure and pray that by some miracle they make it through adolescence without being corrupted or defiled.
Believe me, as a father I see these dangers as real and present. I care about the schools my kids attend and the friends they keep, and I don’t advocate ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ as a healthy approach to parenting. But might I be parenting like a Pharisee, so to speak, if a sort of fear of defilement controls all my decisions?
It’s easy for me to spend all my energy fearing what evil out there might get into my kids. And to watch the American culture wars not only of the last century, but really since our country’s inception, it seems like being Christian has often been about resisting defilement. We fear secular ideas or habits or people. The purity of our faith and our way of life is always vulnerable and in need of vigilant defense.
But what if Jesus’ teaching was actually meant for somebody like me? What if it was meant to help me let go a little of the crippling fear of defilement so I could pay more attention to what was flowing out of my children’s lives? I might have to pay attention to their anger and frustration and envy. But it’s just as true that I should ask things like “What do they love? What makes them happy? What do they have to offer to the world?”
And maybe it’s just me, but it seems like as I pay closer attention to what’s flowing out of my children’s lives rather than fearing so much what might flow in, those frightening sources of defilement lose some of their power.
The parent/child relationship is just one example of how we still might be up against the same challenges as people in Jesus’ day. You don’t need to be a parent to know that there are powerful enterprises that thrive on our fear of defilement. The airwaves are filled with talk radio and television news shows on the right and on the left that count on the fear and indignation of their listeners and viewers.
And it’s worth pointing out that the angry hosts of these shows never ask us to consider what might be flowing out of our own lives. They always insist that our own sane and decent way of life is about to be defiled by… blank. And the name of the group you fill in that blank with just lets you know what channel you’re tuned in to. It’s the Democrats or the Republicans or the Greens or the Muslims or the Christians or the fundamentalists or the liberals. Any group will do as long as it’s a group of them and not us.
But there’s another way of seeing the world. What happens when we start to believe that we can really only be defiled by what flows out of our lives, not what flows in from others? Would we spend so much energy whipping up spite and fear about all those crazies, however you define them, if we did?
This idea is found in a lot more of the New Testament than what we read today. Fundamental to the Christian faith is the simple conviction that we all fail each other and fall into sin. That we all need forgiveness to go on. And that we’re all a little complicit in what’s wrong with our world. Such is the human condition.
And more than anything, perhaps the practice of confessing our own need for forgiveness and willing to do a little better can help us let go of that fear of having our lives defiled by others. Because what we really confess is that Jesus was right. It’s the things we’ve done and the things we’ve left undone, it’s what flows out of us that can defile, not what flows in.
The truth of Jesus’ teaching isn’t hard to see. When I let myself be filled with suspicion and anger and blame, I’m the one who’s being defiled. I become the bitter, fearful, unhappy one, becoming more and more convinced that God feels the same way that I do and what the world needs is just more bitter, fearful people like me.
But the good news is that I can stop my Pharisee hunts and attend to my own heart. It’s not easy. But paying some attention to what’s flowing out of my own heart is a more manageable task than getting the rest of the world to get its act together so I can be happy and whole. Once again, Jesus wasn’t piling up more obligations on us to be perfect. In telling us to stop worrying about defilement so much, he was showing us a better way to live.
It turns out even kids can understand that a house in which unwashed dishes are left in the sink forever isn’t quite the paradise we might have imagined. God made college roommates to teach some of us this truth.
And figuring out how to get out of the way of Jesus’ teaching and make sure it tells us only what we want to hear ends up being an evasion of grace, not judgment. Because spending our time in fear of defilement is no way to live. And a little honest attention to what our own human hearts are producing, to the things that are flowing out of our lives, might be how we start to let that fear go. Amen.