Worshipping God with Unclean Hands

OK, kids, my first message this morning is for you.  Did you hear that Gospel lesson that we just read?  The one about the Pharisees complaining to Jesus that about his disciples eating food with unclean hands?  The first thing I want to say is - this is not a lesson on how it is OK to eat with dirty hands.  I don't want you going home and saying to your folks, "I don't have to wash my hands because Jesus said it was OK to have dirty hands."  Uh-uh.  Not the message for today.

The message for today is - having dirty hands is the best kind of unclean to have.  But that's not the same thing as saying, "Hey, I'm going to eat my sandwich with dirty hands."  Jesus wants you to be healthy.  And he wants you to listen to your mom.

So, what is going on in this gospel story?  It's a little hard for us to get into because the world it comes out of is so far gone.  The Pharisees who were sitting there watching Jesus' disciples eat were not worried about germs; they were trying to get Jesus caught up in a controversy over legalism.

I've been watching the political campaign and I see some of the same things going on.  There's a kind of "gotcha" game and the sad part is that the political campaigns think that you and I are dull enough to go along with it.  You know, every ad takes some little phrase from a candidate, takes it out of context, and then blows it up so that the candidate looks as bad as they can possibly look.  As if Romney really believes that poor people are not important.  Or as if Obama really believes that business owners didn't build anything.  [Some of you are probably shaking your head right now and saying, "O, no.  He really believes that."  But don't do that.  We're smarter than that.  Don't let the ads tell you what to believe.]

But we'll have plenty of time for politics this fall.  What I'm trying to get at here is that the Pharisees were playing a game in which they were trying to catch Jesus out for not towing their line.  The rules they were worried about were the ones they had outlined.  They had taken the old Mosaic laws and particularly the laws about what made something clean or unclean and they had turned them into straitjackets.  It wasn't about germs - they didn't know about germs then.  It was about doing the right thing in the right way.

Mark outlines all of their concerns in this passage.  They were trying to maintain the traditions of their elders.  You had to wash your hands in a particular way.  You had to ritually wash food from the market.  You had to ritually wash the pottery you ate from and the pitchers you drank from and the copper kettles you cooked with and even the dinner couches where you sat down to eat.  A taco stand would have sent these guys right over the edge.

But they know that Jesus is a radical kind of guy.  They know his disciples are doing things differently.  So they know they're going to catch them and when they see the disciples eating without washing exactly the way they washed, they say to Jesus, "Aha!  You're not upholding the traditions of the elders."  And beyond that what they're saying is, "You're not one of us.  You don't believe like we believe.  You are a threat.  You are not a good Jew.  Let's see your birth certificate."

That's when Jesus turns it around on them.  And he goes back to Isaiah the prophet, to the scriptures that he shared with the Pharisees.  And he quotes a verse (Isaiah 29:13) that says, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me."  What he's saying is - you have made worship and obedience an external act.  But if you only do the act and your heart is not close to God then you have made religion all about you instead of about God.

He spells it out to the disciples later after he tells the crowd a parable.  He says, "Listen.  Nothing is outside of a person going in can make then unclean.  It's what comes out a person that is unclean.  And then later, with the disciples, he gets graphic.  He talks about what comes out of a person and goes into the sewer.  You want to talk unclean - that's unclean.  But you know this is not really about food and digestion.  Jesus is after something more.  And what he wants is not just your diet.  Jesus wants your heart.

Not too long ago I ran across a great book called All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.  OK, OK, yes, they are philosophers, but their book was really interesting.  They set out to read through all the Western classics of literature from the Odyssey to Moby Dick and to look at how our understanding of who we are as human beings changes through those works.  They spend some time with Jesus and they say that one of the most important things about Jesus was that he created the notion that we have an inner life.  We might want to say that there are other important things about Jesus, but stay with them here.

It's not that people before Jesus didn't have inner thoughts and desires.  It's just that they didn't think they were all that important.  As the authors point out, of the Ten Commandments only one has to do with an internal act - the command against coveting.   The rest were external - take care of your parents, observe the sabbath, don't commit murder, don't commit adultery - things you could see.

Jesus turns all of that inside out - or outside in.  He says, "Where do you think murder comes from?  It's not just something that happens out there.  It begins in your heart.  Adultery begins in your heart.  Theft begins in your heart.  And what is it that Jesus wants?  Not just your good behavior, but your heart.  Dreyfus and Kelly say, "Jesus thus brings the purity of one's desires from the margins of the Hebrew sense of what counts as a worthy life to the center of his Christian sensibility."*  The purity of our desires.

That's just what he tells the disciples.  If you are so caught up in washing the dishes that you can't see what's going on between you and God in your heart, you're doing it wrong.
So hear what he's saying.  Jesus says, "It's not about the externals.  You have an inner life.  And that inner life is messed up.  It's disordered.  It's like a wild, overgrown garden.  And for you to get it under control, you've got to give it over to God."

But listen to what Jesus is not saying here.  He is not saying that the externals don't matter.  He's not saying that our actions don't matter.  What he's saying is that obedience to God is the first step.

Now that's not a popular thing to say in our culture.  We don't like that word obedience.  We don't like the notion that we have to give ourselves over to an authority.  Because we have seen enough flawed authority figures to know how that can be abused.  Obedience is a slavemaster's word.  Obedience is a soviet politburo word.  Obedience is something you send dogs to school for.  Obedience feels unAmerican.

But here's the sad truth.  Sin has made such a mess of things that the only way to find freedom is through obedience.  The only way you are going to discover who you are and what the world ought to be is to give up yourself to God.

Because the world doesn't know.  The world will tell you that you are a bundle of desires and subconscious motivations and that you might as well just give them free rein because they're there and we're free.  But what if you are meant for something more?  What if there is something greater waiting for you if you tend the garden of your soul?  What if God means for you to do more than you're doing?

That's where James comes in, because James knows that dirty hands are part of what the Christian life is all about.  James was writing to the early Christian community and he could already see the divide happening.  There were hearers and there were doers and the hearers were falling into a trap.  They believed that because they heard the Word...because they trusted Jesus...because they had made that movement toward God...they were done.

But James says, no.  If that's how you act it's just like somebody looking into a mirror and then walking away and forgetting what they look like.  Hearing without doing is a great way to lose your identity as a Christian.

Doers look into the law, the things that God has given us to get our inner life in order, and they know who they are.  And they will live out of that.  They will watch their tongue for harmful language.  They will care for orphans and widows - those who are living on the edge.  And they will keep themselves unstained by the world.  Not because they live above it, but because they know that the world is not sufficient to tell them who they are.

This week I was on a mission trip with some of our members down in North Carolina.  We were repairing a roof that had been damaged by Hurricane Irene last year.  And I learned a lot.  I learned that construction workers are worth every penny they are paid.  Watching Will Brown and Jack Smith and Glenn Ballon - the Beast - on the roof doing their thing was inspiring.  And they taught me just enough to eventually get me up on the roof, too.  And that's why I've got abrasions all over me.  It was hot, dirty work but very satisfying.  Especially when the family came to dinner with us on Wednesday night and thanked us for taking care of a roof that had been leaking for a year.

We stayed at an old school that now houses a lot of county offices in Hyde County.  But the gym and cafeteria had been taken over the United Methodist Church and it was also inspiring to see the cross and flame up on the side of the wall there.  We are there in Hyde County.  We are the only relief agency that is still there.  And we are there because we are worshipping God with our dirty hands - living out the gospel one roof at a time.

If we make a numbers game out of this or say that if we do so many roofs it will get us to heaven - we're back in the company of the Pharisees.  But if our hearts guide our hands - if God is moving within us - Jesus is here.  Thanks be to God.

*Hubert Dreyfus & Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, Free Press: New York, 2011, electronic version, p. 534.