Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

James engages Jesus's radical challenge to the purity codes of his day — arguing that what defiles a person comes not from outside but from within — and asks what this means for our own patterns of religion and righteousness.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

And so, Heavenly Father, as we come now to reflect on your word, send your Holy Spirit and illuminate it to us so we be transformed into the image of your Son. Amen. Morning everyone. Fascinating passage for us this morning. And uh certainly when I first looked at it, uh it's not what as I opened it up uh for myself during the course of this week, it it's I haven't landed where I expected to. So I I wonder what your first take on this passage is. Let's walk through it slowly. Uh it kind of get to grips with the plain meaning of what's happening, and then see uh what happens after that. We're we're reading this morning in the gospel reading in Mark, a interaction between the Pharisees and the scribes and Jesus. The Pharisees in particular are a highly a group of highly disciplined people who uh that's one of the things they were known for, is their rigor and their um exactitude. And very simply, they want to know why Jesus, why Jesus' followers, some of them aren't following the same wash washing codes that were familiar in that day. You might have noticed in the passage there's a sentence or two that's in parentheses in brackets, and I I I really like it when moments like this happen in the Bible, when uh you have these brackets because it means that the the writer of the gospel, Mark, is giving an aside to his readers, he's sharing something with them that they might not know. He recognizes that not all of his readers were first century Jews, and I can't imagine that Mark knew how many centuries would be spent reading his words, but he knew enough to know that he had to give a bit of extra context. And so we have these sentences in brackets that um Mark turning to the audience and saying, Let me just fill you in on some of the history here. The reminder for us this morning is that when we read the Bible, we're reading a text that was written in a different time and to a different culture by different people, um, to different people than us. And so we need some humility as we come to the text and ask, what does this mean for us today? We need to be sensitive to the moves that we make in taking information from the past and bringing it into the future. Here's a little bit more context for you the ritual of washing hands before food and of cooking vessels was a key part of a highly complex and developed system of purity regulations. These were eventually codified and written down, but for a long time there was just this oral tradition where everyone knew how to behave around food, washing it, the utensils that you used, the way you washed your hands. And the key idea here is that these were purity rituals. Purity was a big deal in the ancient world. How do we know what's pure and what's not? And let me suggest that it continues to be a big deal for us today. I wonder how you feel when you see someone in a public toilet not washing their hands. It makes you feel a bit like there's an itch at the back of your neck. Or have you ever wanted to go to a restaurant and then discovered that they failed their last hygiene certificate and thought, uh, maybe I'll eat somewhere else? Or maybe, and this is going to be very controversial, you had particular feelings about people who weren't uh wearing masks during the pandemic. Now, I'm not making a political statement when I talk about that. And I and if you are tempted to come and talk to me afterwards about why you couldn't wear a mask, that's not the conversation I want to have. But in raising that example, I'm trying to activate in you the sort of emotion that Jesus' first hearers would have felt when the scribes and the Pharisees came to Jesus and said, Your guys aren't following the purity codes, your guys aren't washing properly, you're not using the vessels correctly. This is impure and potentially dangerous. Now, given that, suddenly Jesus' response seems a bit strange, or at least it does to me. He quotes Isaiah the prophet, saying this these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines. Do you see the strangeness now of Jesus' response? People have come to him saying, you might argue now, quite rightly, why are your people not following the purity codes? And he responds by saying, You honor me with your lips, but your hearts are far from me. Purity codes are a very reasonable part of human societies and human cultures. They've existed since the dawn of time, and they're there because they keep us safe and they help us feel safe. That's why purity codes are important. Because we know, for example, if food is treated in an unsafe way, if it isn't kept pure, then when we eat it, we will get sick. There are all sorts of human interactions that, if they're not kept pure somehow, they will lead to sickness in the community, and no one wants to get sick. And so we create these codes. Now, the interesting thing, and this happens across human history, is that these codes don't just stay in the realm of biology and dealing with uh health and sickness and purity and safety in terms of biology, they always extend beyond biology into social and cultural concerns. And so you might hear in our political discourse today around immigration language around purity and around safety. These themes are weaved together in our media because we take an idea that's very legitimate in terms of keeping ourselves by safe biologically, and then we extend them out into culture and society. And Jesus amazingly says that your heart, the orientation of your heart, is more important than your ritual purity. Or to put it another way, he's saying to us, I do not care if you wash your hands after you've been to the toilet. I care about whether your heart is close to me or not. And if you listen to that and think, Jesus, you've got it completely backwards, or you feel a bit sick listening to that, then you're starting to understand the sort of controversial statement that Jesus was making. Now, I don't know what sort of week you've had. I don't know how you've behaved or how people have behaved towards you. I don't know what things you've done or what things have happened to you that might or might not have left you feeling dirty this morning. Dirty in your soul, dirty where no one else but you and God can see. But if that's you this morning, let me be very, very clear. Jesus does not care how dirty you are, he wants you to be close to him, he wants your heart to be with his heart. And so instead of worrying about purity, Jesus starts to talk to us about our hearts. And when he talks about our hearts, he's inviting us to think about the root of our lives, the very center. That Rudos, again, we don't often like talking about this in cathedrals, but the squidgy bit, the emotional bit, the bit at the very center, the decision maker. Saint Augustine says, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. Very famous phrase, but remember what he's talking about. Our hearts are restless. The root of who we are is restless until it finds its root in God. And so the heart of the Christian faith is an invitation to relationship, relationship with the one true God, like a parent to their children, or like a spouse to their lover, like a hen with their chicks, a close and emotional bond. Jesus wants us to go to the root of the matter, the heart of the matter, and he says, Do not worry about the fruit of purity. Although it's not quite true, is it, that he says, don't worry about the fruit of impurity? We read at the end of that passage, Jesus lists a whole set of practices that will defile us. But it's as if in Jesus' mind, those practices, the behaviors, the fruit of your life is secondary to a far more important question. Is your heart close to me? Are you rooted in my life? And so we can think about ourselves and about our spiritual lives as if we were a plant or a vine in a vineyard. And the question for the vine in the vineyard is are you rooted in the soil? Are your roots going deep down in so they can suck up all the nutrients and the water that it needs? And if it is, then the fruit should take care of itself. And if you're wondering what the fruit of purity looks like, it's described in Galatians chapter 5 as this the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are the fruit of a life that is rooted in the God of love and rooted in the God of joy, rooted in the God of peace. But if our focus is on creating some sort of fruit, we're going to be left with a dry, empty, lifeless shell, an empty husk with nothing of the vitality that Jesus describes. So we have the roots of our lives and we have the fruits of our lives. But I'd like to spend some time this morning asking this final question. What then, if any, is the point of ritual in today's church? I'm preaching this sermon in a cathedral, somewhere I choose to worship and choose to come and work. And in a moment, we will celebrate the Eucharist in a very, very ritualistic way, which will actually include the cleaning of vessels and the washing of hands. When I was uh a younger man, I grew up in the evangelical tradition, evangelical charismatic tradition. My brother still worships in a Pentecostal church in Southeast London that uh he and I started going to while we were trying to be rebellious in our teenage years. I often like to say, when we were being rebellious, it didn't occur to us to not go to church. We just chose to go to the church that we knew would annoy our parents. And as a younger man, I think I would have been tempted to read these verses of Jesus and say, get rid of all ritual. Just give me your heart. Give your heart to God, abandon the law, and enter into relationship with Him. There are plenty of Christians who believe that today. So, in light of Jesus' words, how should we reflect on the rituals that we engage with on a weekly basis? Well, let me add a third element to this image that we've been developing of the root and the fruit of the vine. And it's this godly ritual is like the trestle upon which the vine hangs and helps it to grow and gives it shape and uh allows it to flourish into all that it's supposed to be. Godly religion, godly ritual is a set of practices that help your heart grow in affection for God, so that those roots can dig down deep into the life of God, and so that our fruit of our lives can be pure and holy and good the way that God wants. Godly religion, godly ritual is a set of practices that help your heart to grow in affection for God. The trestle does another thing that I think is really important. During the winter seasons of your life, it's the trestle upon which you hang yourself, trusting that these practices can hold you while you don't really feel any nutrients coming from the ground, and your life is not producing any of the fruits that you know that it should. I have the great privilege of praying morning and evening prayer in the Jesus Chapel with my colleagues on an almost daily basis, six days a week, give or take. And there are days when it feels glorious, an incredible privilege to sit in this amazing building, to pray with people that I care for and who care for me, to look at the light shining through the stained glass window, and you feel close to God, and you're interceding for the world, and you're reminding yourselves of scripture, and it is wonderful. And there are times when I can't be bothered, where I don't want to be there. And in those moments, I do not get to text Peter and say, sorry, boss, not really feeling it today, think I'll stay in bed. He would rightly, because he knows where I live, come into the house, drag me out of bed, and sit me in my stall and invite me to pray. There are times when being a Christian is tough. And the trestle, the rituals that we hold on to, hold us in our Christian lives in those winter seasons and in those times when we don't really find the motivation that we need. This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Our roots need to be dug deep down into the life of God. Naturally, without much effort, without much intention, the fruit of Christian life will start to appear. And the trestle holds us and guides us, helps us to be nourished and points us in the right direction. But Jesus' warning to us this morning, I think, might be this: are you so fixated on the trestle that you've forgotten the root and the fruit? Are you so busy maintaining this structure that you're failing to deeply engage in an emotional relationship with the God of the universe? So, in closing, we are in a moment about to share the peace with one another. The peace, I think, is an extraordinary example of a trestle, of a shape, of a behavior, of a way of living that is meant to shape our lives outside of these walls. We live in a society, we listen to media all day long. There are people around the world trying to divide us, trying to separate us, trying to uh oppose uh um race against race and ethnicity against ethnicity. There are warmongerers in our country, in our world at the moment, doing everything they can to break down and divide. And you and I get to share the peace with one another. Would our lives hang on that trestle until we can display the fruit of peace and build a better world? Amen.