August 30, 2015

Wilf Holt

Ordinary Sunday 22     Mark 7:1-23

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Many years ago I sat on the knee (metaphorically speaking) of a bishop. Our parish had gathered to discuss an issue that was contentious and threatening and our bishop opened the proceedings with some advice on how we might approach the topic before us. In thinking about and discussing this issue we were urged to draw from the resources that had – traditionally – stood our church in good stead. He went on to describe the merits of a three legged seat or stool – the legs of which could be seen to represent Scripture, Reason and Tradition. – for it was by those three legs that the church had maintained itself in steadiness throughout the years and was able to manage its ecclesiastical conundrums and difficulties.

Relying on all three legs in balance we were encouraged to draw from each those things that which would assist us in reaching a decision. We all nodded and made him himing sort of noises.

I must say that at the time it all made good sense – I remember being impressed with the wisdom of this analogy. Ah – but I was young then.

Well today we don't have time to delve into a lot of scripture and I'm far to canny and unqualified to resort to pure reason – so its the third leg today – tradition. For Marks reading does seem to focus on Tradition – the word is mentioned 6 time in the reading and alluded to often - certainly in the first few verses.

I like to think that in many respects I'm a reasonably traditional sort of fellow and in other respects not so traditional. I do however enjoy many of the rituals of Christmas and Easter, our family has many small traditions that help bind us together and I'm often surprised when something we have done on a regular basis is repeated at the request of our children with the words "well we traditionally do such and such in this circumstance or time of the year". As I've said – these things help us as a family to be a family – we welcome new members to the family by often invoking small rituals at birthdays and celebrations of one sort or another and we seem to have a number of unwritten rules that ease difficult situations or by which we can give support to those of our family that need it.

I'm sure you all have family traditions that achieve similar things. We of course have our own traditions here at St Mats – Puppe bakes our bread for communion, we continuously develop new liturgies, we offer great music – we use smoke for our major celebrations – the list goes on.

Off course not all tradition can be seen in such a benign way.

I'm reminded of a story about a relieving minister at a small church. When it came time for the words of institution, he stood behind the altar, spoke the words, raised up the wafer and chalice, and then invited everyone to the table. No one moved .The whole congregation sat still and silent. Finally, someone came forward and whispered in his ear.

Immediately the minister went back to the altar, lifted high the wafer, broke it in two and then invited everyone to the table again. The congregation gave an audible sigh of relief and Communion proceeded. They couldn't take communion until the bread was broken. That was the tradition and well – it just wasn't right to come forward without the action.

Despite all the words – both explicit and implied – 'given for you' "come gods people" none of the congregation heard them – none could heed the call until the wafer was broken.

In this instance the congregation subdued the ancient intent of the action replacing it with a new tradition that had assumed a sacred status obscuring the original meaning and ritual.

Its tradition that Mark now writes about in our Gospel today. The tradition of the elders as practiced by the Pharisees and some of the scribes.

This tradition comprised a comprehensive and complex holiness code and laws that regulated personal and community life for all Jewish people. By one count there are over 600 mizvot or "commandments" in the Torah.

The purity laws of Leviticus specify in detail – clean and unclean foods, purity rituals after childbirth or a menstrual cycle, regulations for skin infections and contaminated clothing or furniture, prohibitions against contact with a human corpse, agricultural guidelines about planting seeds and mating animals, and decrees about lawful sexual relationships, keeping the sabbath, forsaking idols, and even tattoos.

These laws encompassed nearly every aspect of being human­ birth, death, sex, gender, health, economics, jurisprudence, social relations, hygiene, marriage, behavior, and matters of ethnicity – Gentiles were definitely· not pure.

Some of these purity laws encoded simple common sense or moral ideals that make sense today, such as prohibitions against incest. Others regulated hygiene and sanitation.

Still others sought to maintain Israel as a unique identity that differentiated itself from pagan nations.

Ultimately, the purity laws and holiness code ritualized an exhortation from God: "Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy".

When scripture asks, "Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary?" the "proper" response is that only people who are ritually clean may approach a holy God. At the center of the purity system, both literally and symbolically, stood the Temple, where one performed rites of purification.

Its debatable just how much or how little ordinary first-century Jews concerned themselves with maintaining ritual purity, but the Pharisees whom we have heard so much about in Marks Gospel certainly did.

We have recently heard how they repeatedly confronted Jesus because of his flagrant disregard for ritual purity. Jesus the Jew touched a leper, his disciples did not fast, he ignored sabbath laws, he touched a woman with a discharge and handled a corpse, and immediately after this week's story he heals two Gentiles.

In our Gospel reading this week, Mark recounts a clash between Jesus and the Pharisees about food purity. Why, asked the Pharisees, did Jesus's disciples eat with "unclean" hands? A direct challenge to Jesus drawn squarely from the traditions of the day with the central accusation in this clash being that the Pharisees considered Jesus and his followers as ritually unclean sinners.

Here Mark clearly places the pharisees as the central opponents of Jesus because they were the central opponents of the church late in the first century when the gospel was written. With the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, the principal opponents of the pharisees, the Temple-based Sadducees, were destroyed. At the time of Jesus (c. AD 30), two-thirds of the ruling council, the Sanhedrin, were Sadducees, and only one-third were pharisees. After AD 70, the Sanhedrin was entirely composed of Pharisees.

Mark certainly gives the pharisees a bad press yet its hard to imagine that all pharisees were blind to what Jesus had to say. We know that the pharisees saw themselves as a reformist group. They were mainly lay people, not priests, and they believed that the faith of Israel ought to be something lived in the daily life of every Jew, not merely something observed by the priests in Jerusalem.

Everything belonged to God, and the Torah touched on all matters of life. Keeping Torah was a way of living continually in God's care, and acknowledging God's presence every where and in every thing. Hard to point the finger when there.

Unfortunately given the human propensity for justifying ourselves and for scape-goating others, the holiness code and purity laws lent themselves to a spiritual stratification or hierarchy between the ritually "clean" who considered themselves to be close to God, and the "unclean" who were shunned as impure sinners who were far from God. Instead of expressing the holiness of God, ritual purity became a means of excluding people considered dirty, polluted, or contaminated.

Jesus did not by into the argument at all – he quotes Isaiah – "you abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition" and in doing so rescinded any distinction of ritual purity as a measure of spiritual status.

In Marcus Borg's view, Jesus turned the purity system with its "sharp social boundaries" on its head, and in its place substituted a radically alternate social vision. The new community that Jesus announced would be characterized by interior compassion for all, not external compliance to a purity code, by radical inclusivity rather than by hierarchical exclusivity, and by inward transformation rather than outward ritual. In place of "be holy, for I am holy", says Borg, Jesus deliberately substituted the call to "be merciful, just as your Father is merciful".

The old tradition is supplanted by a new one.

No one is excluded – not Roman collaborators, or lepers, not prostitutes, nor the possessed. No one can now be excluded by who or what they are.

Well what went wrong?

Well I guess we need to answer that question by looking at ourselves.

Who today might we regard as "outcasts", who might we regard as impure, unclean, dirty, or contaminated.

Are the "who: those who are mentally ill, are they people who have married three or four times, extremely wealthy executives, beneficiaries, people who hold conservative political views, or maybe people who sell sex on our streets?

What boundaries do we build to keep ourselves, our institutions and our communities clean.

On the other hand how do we embrace both holiness and compassion, instead of choosing one or the other? Or how do we remove the boundaries we have built to keep ourselves our institutions and our communities separate.

How could we participate in what Borg calls a "community shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and politics of compassion."

Not easy!

Perhaps the last words of today's gospel give us a clue.

The spirit of the Pharisees Judaism intended that the external rituals or traditions would keep the inward heart focused on the central message of the Torah. The goal was to keep a people mindful of their duty to God and neighbor whilst immersed in the details of daily life.

Jesus knew that even the best intentions can become corrupted. They can become substitutes for devotion to God while our hearts are occupied with thoughts that promote our own agendas and ignore others. We can ''honor God with our lips," while our "hearts are far from God".

A clean body by itself is not enough. Cleanliness may be next to godliness but it makes a poor substitute! We need to have pure hearts before we can have pure words. Our inner health will determine our status with God – not the traditions and rituals we adopt. Our relationship to god is not determined by what we eat but by what we do.

And so back to the Bishops seat. The three legs – Scripture, Reason and Tradition. A stool of course is made up of more than its legs. It needs a seat to hold everything together.

And if one of the characteristic of Progressive Christianity is its willingness to question tradition, (and by that definition I guess Jesus is probably the proto progressive) then I can imagine the seat holding that questioning secure.

If that questioning applied to the three legs becomes the norm - the new tradition then I'm quite comfortable (if you can excuse the pun) with the analogy.

Despite how uncomfortable at times that tradition might be. Amen.