15th Sunday After Penetcost

James 1:17-27; Mark 7

So the season of the Bread of Life is finally over and now this week we have returned to Gospel of Mark.  We are going to have a very short stopover here before we begin our Season of Women next week where we will study biblical models of women in leadership until the end of November.  But for now today, we are going to stop and take a moment to think about who we are in community together. As the election season heats up, we seem to be struggling more than ever as a nation with how best to live in community and care for our neighbors right now, so maybe now is in fact the perfect time to look to scripture for some help.

And so today we reenter the Gospel of Mark where Jesus has this controversy brewing about this controversy brewing between him and his disciples and the Pharisees and their disciples over how best to follow God’s law and what needed to be done or not in order to do so.

And one of the things that struck me this week as I was thinking about this, especially for those of you who watched the Chosen Bible Study with us last year was picturing how differently Jesus and his disciples lived than the Pharisees.  Thinking about how Jesus and his disciples lived on the road, traveling on foot, carrying few resources, eating what they could find where they could find it as they traveled along.  Living in tents and fetching water from rivers and streams or public wells or wherever they could find it.  And how his disciples, even just the 12, were such a diverse group of people, from such different backgrounds, fishermen and laborers, tax collectors and merchants, from different cities and cultures, with widely varying educational backgrounds.  How they represented a diverse cross section of people from across Judaism probably with very different traditions and customs and expectations.

The Pharisees on the other hand were much more monolithic.  All holding the same strict set of beliefs, the same customs, heck they even all dressed the same for the most part.  And how their relative wealth, stability and privilege allowed them the space to do things exactly the way they wanted.  Which in itself is okay.  But the problem comes when they start to expect everyone to be the same way, to act and think and believe exactly like them.  The Pharisees see their experience as universal and universally applicable so they can’t fathom the richness of God’s people.

And it is important to note that Jesus’s disciples were not actually breaking Mosaic law.  The Torah says nothing about washing your hands and food and dishes and such except in relation to priests preparing to offer sacrifices in the temple.  And none of Jesus’s disciples were priests or even Levites.  It is a prime example of the Jewish tradition of building a fence around the Law.  Enlarging practices to cover more just to be extra sure that no one accidently transgressed the law.  But these practices also tended to exclude people with fewer resources.  In an attempt to protect themselves from potential pollution, the Pharisees often also found themselves also excluding those without the resources and stability necessary to comply with their complex rules.

And this is what is ultimately unacceptable to Jesus and his mission.  Jesus is willing, nay required to take risks to be among the people he wishes to serve.  It is in community that he finds his purpose.  This passage points away from a self-centered individual relationship with God and a focus on the self, towards a focus on how a person lives in community with both God and others in loving mutual relationship.

Just look at the list of vices Jesus says makes a person unclean fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride and folly.  Fundamentally they all come down to selfishness.  To putting yourself and your own desires ahead of the needs of others.  This is what breaks a community.  This is what sours our relationships.  And so the answer to sin is not to pull away further.  To back away and segregate more but to double down on living in community and caring for our neighbor.  This is the real way to fulfill Mosaic law and the real way to follow Jesus’s commands.  Jesus tells us elsewhere in scripture that all of scripture is fulfilled in these two commandments, to Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and to Love your neighbor as yourself.

We can spend a lot of time in energy in this country making sure that we stay away from things and people that we have deemed unclean or bad.  Everything from where we live and go to school, to who we socialize with, to the media we consume has become increasingly siloed into communities of people who look, act and think like us.  And once we enter into these echo chambers, of whatever sort they might be, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the lives of those who are different from us.  But Jesus offers something else, he argues that the route to purity is through love and relationships, not segregation and difference. 

And we see this played out in our reading from the book of James today as well.  Here we also see the transition from self-centered to community focused living.  Verse 19 tells us “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.”  In this time where everyone seems to be getting angrier and less compassionate all the time, what would it look like if we took these words to heart?  When we are met with anger and vitriol, can we listen before we speak, can we be slow to anger?  Can we tame our tongue rather than lashing out? Can we try for kindness and compassion rather than scoring a win?  Because so many people are so afraid and in so much pain right now and I wonder what a difference it would make if we met that pain with love instead of anger.  It certainly won’t be easy and many won’t return the favor, but this is still what Jesus calls us to do.  He calls us to be doers of the word and not merely hearers.  Those who act with compassion and care for those around them.  And I know this would be a fairly radical act in our world today but I think also one that could pay great dividends not only for our own souls, but perhaps for the soul of this nation too.  Amen.