+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

FOR MOST OF THE SUMMER we’ve been working our way through Mark’s gospel, and we’ve seen Jesus stalked by larger and larger crowds clamoring for miracles and looking for signs.  Simultaneously, the tension between Jesus and the authorities has been growing.  Now, in chapter 7, some Pharisees and teachers of the law have traveled something like sixty miles from Jerusalem to Galilee to confront Jesus, and the controversy that erupts between Jesus and these men gives us some insight into (1) The true state of our hearts; (2) our inability to fix our hearts; and (3) what Jesus has done about it for us.

At the center of this dispute between Jesus and the religious authorities were the Mosaic laws about ritual purity, and one of the reasons there were any cleanliness laws at all was so that sinful humanity could stand to be in the presence of God.  When people in the 21^st century think about God at all, we think about God as being everywhere, being omnipresent, but in a sort of vague and ephemeral way.  For the Israelites, however, there was actually a place where God chose to set up house and live in a very particular way.  In today’s OT reading, Moses asks “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him?”  (Deut. 4:6-7a (NIV)).  This proximity was a blessing, but it posed a problem:  If they were to live that close to God, they had to be clean.  Read the rest of the book of Deuteronomy and you’ll find a whole system of rules about which foods you could eat and which were taboo, what you could and couldn’t touch, all of which were to keep the Israelites ritually pure so they could bear the weight of God’s presence.

1.        Can a dispute over Jewish cleanliness laws tell us anything about the condition of our own hearts?  It tells us more than at first glance.  Notice what Jesus didn’t do in Mark’s story – he disagreed with the authorities about what makes a person unclean, but he didn’t dispute the fact we are, in fact, unclean.  If we are honest with ourselves, we instinctively know that we can’t measure up, we’re not quite clean, and we can’t stand the unmitigated presence of God.  Now, we may object that this is an outdated way of thinking that doesn’t apply to sophisticated 21^st century Washingtonians, but I suggest that the feeling is more pervasive than we think even now.  You don’t even have to go back and read Faulkner or Kafka to pick up on it; just listen to the radio for 15 minutes, and you’ll probably hear a song about being stained, broken, somehow bent.  Or listen to the voices of our poets.  In The Age of Anxiety, poet W. H. Auden writes:

                All that exists
matters to man; he minds what happens
And feels he is at fault, a fallen soul
With power to place, to explain every
What in his world but why he is neither
God nor good, this guilt his insoluble
Final fact, infusing his private
Nexus of needs, his noted aims with
Incomprehensible comprehensive dread
At not being what he knows that before
This world was he was willed to become.[i]

Auden’s saying:  In our heart of hearts, we know that we are not what we were meant to be.  The opening pages of Genesis ring with the memory that we were created to walk in perfect fellowship with God and enjoy his presence which is life and being itself.  But if we are honest, we know.  We know we are no longer able to bear the weight of God’s glory on our ephemeral frames.  Like Moses, we are not able to look upon God’s face and live to tell the tale. 

2.        Not only are our hearts unclean, there doesn’t appear to be anything we can do about it by ourselves, although the Pharisees certainly tried.  Behind the practice of hand-washing that the religious leaders were up in arms about is Numbers 18:8-13, which said the priests had to be ceremonially clean before eating the remnants of the sacrifices from the temple, but the elders expanded the rule later to require any Israelite to ceremonially wash before any meal.[ii]  The “tradition of the elders” was a whole body of case law that grew up around the ceremonial law and acted as a “fence” to keep people back from violating the Torah.  What was so shocking about Jesus’ disciples eating without washing wasn’t that they were breaking a commandment, one of God’s Big Ten, but they were jumping a fence the elders had erected to keep people from even getting close to breaking real commandments.  The Pharisees and Scribes were examples of what Calvin would call “drawing close to God in order to flee.”  Jesus called the Pharisees hupocrito, “hypocrites,” which meant one who pretends to be what he is not.  By keeping all the cleanliness laws, the Pharisees were able to pretend to be righteous and draw close to God, when in reality they honored God with their lips but not with their hearts. 

The deceptive thing about these fences is that they lull us into thinking that if we can just stay inside of them, then we’re OK and maybe our hearts really aren’t unclean after all.  They distract us from what’s really wrong, something out of our control, and focus our attention on something we naively think we can fix.

Let me give you an example from my own religious history:  I spent a lot of years in a Baptist church before becoming an Episcopalian, and one church I attended had its members sign a covenant and pledge we would not drink alcohol.  Now, as best I can tell, this pledge had at least two direct consequences:  (1) Some bright, entrepreneurial mind decided to open a liquor store off the main thoroughfare so the more observant Baptists could frequent it out of the public view; and (2) those of us who kept to our side of the fence – and I did for a while, believe it or not – became so distracted with our outward, superficial religious observance that we slowly became blind to our real sickness of heart.  We were textbook examples of what another preacher said in preaching on this passage:  We tried to fix ourselves by “working from the outside in.”  If we didn’t defile ourselves from the outside, we wouldn’t really be defiled on the inside. If we didn’t put garbage in, we wouldn’t get garbage out.  But Jesus said that won’t work.

One more example:  When Renee’ and I joined the Episcopal Church, we came in through what was, to us, a very “high Anglo-Catholic parish.”  We’d never seen incense before, we didn’t know when to bow or cross ourselves, and the hymns were certainly too hard for us to sing – but I loved it.  I thought to myself:  “This is how worship is supposed to be!  Maybe if I can just learn how to do this right, then I’ll have God’s approval, and maybe, just maybe, those nagging sins I’ve been carrying around my whole life will just fall away.”  I did get better at the art of worship, and then we came here, and I was blown away.  I thought, again, “This is really the way it’s done – If I can just learn to say the mass, figure out how to maneuver around the altar without falling down or to swing the thurible without setting the whole place afire, then I’d earn some favor with God, right?”  Wrong.  One of the many lessons I’ve learned in our year with you is that liturgy can be a fence, too.  Beautiful, transcendent, glorious, rapturous liturgy has many merits, but one thing it won’t do by itself is miraculously make my heart clean.  Even if I can say every word of the Prayer of Humble Access with just the right inflection, I’m still not worthy to gather up the crumbs under the table. 

3.        So if we instinctively know that all is not right with our hearts, but despite our best efforts we can’t fix them, then that must mean we need new hearts.  We don’t need improving; we need recreation.  C. S. Lewis said Jesus didn’t come to “improve” us, to help us stay on the right side of arbitrary and relatively superficial fences; he came to “redeem” us and make us new.  In Mere Christianity, he writes: 

Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine.  God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.  It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.”[iii]

Working outside-in doesn’t make us new creatures; often it just makes us critics and Pharisees, people who are petty and precious about whatever we deem the “important” components of a “Christian” lifestyle.  Worse, it distracts us from our real need, which isn’t to know when to wash our hands and exactly how much water to use, but to admit that all the water in the world isn’t enough.  It takes blood for us to be able to stand before God.  But precious blood we are offered, and the best of all possible news is that God can, is, will recreate us as new men and women who can bear the full weight of his glory.  Finally we’ll have God’s approval, not because we successfully cleaned up our own hearts, but because of Christ. 

As we prepare for Holy Eucharist, I want our ears to ring with Lewis’ words, not mine.  In “The Weight of Glory,” he writes:

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected.  The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God.  To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the Divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son – it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain.  But so it is.[iv]

So it is.

+   In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.