September 3, 2006
The Ven. Richard I. Cluett
Proper 17 ~ Deuteronomy 4:1-2,6-9,21-23 Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23
It was Groucho Marx who said when he was refused entrance into a club on Long Island, “I don’t want to belong to a club that would accept someone like me.”
Who’s in? Who’s out? On what basis are they in or out? Who decides?
It’s an age-old game. It’s been around as long as humans have been walking upright, maybe longer. Whenever more than one is gathered together there is an opportunity to play the game. Shall we let them into our circle or shall we not?
Are they the right kind to be in our circle? Do they walk like we do? Talk like we do? Eat what we do? Wear what we do? Like the same things we do? Act like we do? Believe what we do?
What are the signs that they are enough like us to be with us, to be one of us? What are the rules they have to follow to be one of us?
So here we have today two lessons that have to do with the rules and signs of identity and belonging. Moses is preaching a sermon about the importance of Torah, following the Law, the commandments.
Remember that Israel is on the banks of the Jordan River, on the verge of Jordan, ready to enter the long-promised land, and as a gift, as a gift, God gives them, through Moses, a way to live in this new place that will enable them to claim the promise, claim their destiny, claim their heritage, live out their identity as the people of the Lord God Jehovah.
God does not lay upon them a burden of the Law, but rather the gift of what they need to establish their identity as God’s people. By this, they will know that they are God’s people. By this they will show others that they are God’s people.
Not rules to confine, not laws to conform, but a way to live, to establish and claim their identity.
How will they know, how will others know who they are and whose they are? …By how they live.
But, my oh my, how they and we have perverted that gift of life and identity! By the time of Jesus, the Scribes and Pharisees have made the law to be a heavy yoke to be borne around the necks of the children of God. Someone counted 613 commandments in the five books of Moses (the Torah).
These laws encompassed nearly every aspect of human life — birth, death, sex, gender, health, economics, jurisprudence, social relations, hygiene, marriage, behavior, and ethnicity. And the Gentiles were automatically considered impure.
Purity had become more important than prayer; ritual more important than reconciliation; conformity more important than compassion. Rules defined righteousness.
to impose and police the rules, to decide who was pure and who was impure, who was righteous and who was unrighteous, who was a good Jew and who was not a good Jew, and indeed who because of their behavior was not a Jew at all, because they had by their behavior removed themselves outside the circle of the chosen people of God.
As I said earlier, the game has been played ever since and is played to this day. Garrison Keillor speaks of his own Lutheran ancestors coming to this country and to the harsh winters of the northern mid-west. He says his forbearers left their homeland and came “seeking greater restrictions.”
The Anglican Communion today is in the full game-mode of deciding who is in and who is out, who is conforming and who is not. Are you Anglican enough, traditional enough, evangelical enough, scriptural enough, liberal enough, catholic enough, orthodox enough, pure enough?
And so the stage is set for the confrontation between Jesus and the Pharisees. The law has become, not the gift of a way of life, but instead has become the yoke of oppression and the means of exclusion.
And Jesus says, “Enough!” Do not lay upon this, my people the burden of the laws. Let them live their lives out of their love for God and God’s ways.
The first verse of Psalm 15 poses the question, “Lord, who may dwell in your tabernacle and who may abide on your holy hill?” The Pharisees would say, “only those who have completed all the ritual acts of purity.” But through the psalmist God replies in verse 2, “Whoever leads a blameless life and does what is right, who speaks the truth from his heart.”
From his heart, Jesus touched and healed a man with leprosy, a woman with a hemorrhage, the dead body of his friend Lazarus -- violations of every purity law. Jesus the Jew ignored the Sabbath laws relating to diet and activity. He consorted with sinners, and immediately after this week's story he healed two Gentiles.
Marcus Borg wrote that “the new community that Jesus announced is characterized by interior compassion for everyone, 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 the Leviticus injunction to ‘be holy, for I am holy’ (Lev. 19:2), Jesus deliberately substituted the call to "be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36).”
I want to belong to that community. I want my life to be a sign of that understanding. I want my heart to follow that path. I want to base my life on that truth. I want to live my life that according to that rule. I want to spend my time on those things. I want to bet my life on that God. I want to follow that way, the way of Jesus.
How about you?
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