(Preached on Sunday, August 30, 2009)
Jesus answered, “Isaiah was right about frauds like you, hit the bull’s-eye in fact: ‘These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their heart isn’t in it.’” -Mark 7:6
Some years ago a pastor was speaking with a couple whose marriage was in serious difficulty. They spoke for some time – it was a painful conversation. Finally, the woman looked at her husband and said in a rather resigned and detached manner: “I have come to the conclusion that I have never been number one in your life.” Her detached composure faltered as she finished her statement. Her husband was stunned by what she said. With great hesitation, he admitted that she had not been number one in every way but, he added quickly, in some ways she was number one. The man seemed bewildered and paralyzed by what was happening – he simply did not know what to do. Sheepishly he said to his wife, “I really do love you.” With that the unhappy meeting ended.
That meeting has become a permanent fixture in the pastor’s memory. He says that it comes back to him often in prayer. The woman is a powerful image for God. A God who speaks in prayer and says: “I have come to the conclusion that I have never been number one in your life.” Wow! How would you respond if God said that in your prayer time?
Relationship to God is what our Gospel reading is all about. Some Pharisees and religious scholars had come down from Jerusalem to check out this new teacher they had been hearing about. They are gathered around, waiting to hear some of his teaching, watching the disciples eating lunch. Evidently tired from their morning’s work, too hungry to much care that their hands and faces were dirty, they immediately sit down to each without washing. The Pharisees seize upon this ceremonial oversight and question Jesus: “Why do your disciples flout the rules, showing up at meals without washing their hands?”
This was not really as trivial and petty a question as it seems to us today. (Although the health care professionals among us, especially with flu concerns, do not take hand washing and sterilizing as a trivial matter at all!) The rules they mention were the traditions and guidelines developed over the centuries to help people understand how to fully live out the laws and commandments of God. How one lived out the laws and commandments of God demonstrated ones love and devotion toward God.
Jesus did not have a problem with the traditions per se. Nor did he have problems with God’s law. In fact, all the gospels tell us that Jesus supported the Law of Moses. What he did not support is our human tendency to pervert God’s will and intention. We do that when we take God’s law, analyze it for what it appears to tell us to do, often in a strictly literal fashion, and then develop rules, rituals, and codes of behavior to follow, and then, make those the focus of our living and our actions, instead of focusing on our relationships: first to God, and then to one another. In so doing we put our lives on autopilot so that we don’t have to think about our actions or behaviors too deeply. Nor do we really have to pay attention to God’s ongoing revelation and to the lives of other people around us. All we need to do is follow the rules, guidelines, traditions.
Why do we do this? Because we desperately want to know that we are acceptable to God. All religion has a tendency to morph into these complex systems of things we have to do in order to establish that we are on God’s side. Sometimes it is about what people eat; other times whether they wash properly or not. When I was a kid, what you wore seemed to matter to God a lot. Other times it seemed that if you knew the right people, then God would love you. Today it appears that God is paying a lot of attention to our language. If we get our language right, then God will love us and we will be on God’s side.
But Jesus’ message is different. It is a message that puts an end to our unending attempts to get God on our side. To all our systems, religious and otherwise, for getting to God, getting on God’s good side, or getting God on our side, Jesus has said, STOP IT! Stop it right now! You don’t have to try to get to God, because God has come to you. You don’t have to get on God’s good side, because in Christ Jesus God has taken your side.
What Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, religious scholars, gathered listeners and his disciples is that we don’t have to work hard to have a relationship with God. God has already done the hard work and taken the first steps to establish a relationship with us. So we don’t have to waste our time and energy worrying about whether we are pure, whether we are good enough, for God. God has already declared us “good enough.” God has already declared us “pure.” It is not what we consume that will defile our lives. It is what comes out of us, from our hearts within that has the possibility of defiling our lives – that is of turning them into something less than beautiful and holy and sacred, as God designed them. After all, our actions and behaviors are evidence of what is truly within our hearts.
So the question really becomes, where are our hearts? Are our hearts turned toward God or away from God? When our hearts are turned toward God, then God’s word, already implanted in our hearts, can have its full effect in our lives. The result is lives being fully transformed by a God who is active in our world, a God who is, day by day, continuing to bless God’s people. It is a lifelong process. Theologian Karl Rahner said that our lifelong hope is to “become” Christians, not “be” Christians, as if such a transformation could happen in an instant. That is what Jesus understood from the prophet Isaiah: “people that make a big show of saying the right thing but their heart isn’t in it. They act like they are worshiping me, but they don’t mean it.”
The way we turn our hearts toward God is by focusing on our relationship with God. Is God number one in our lives? There are billions and trillions of distractions in the world. Not all of them are bad, in fact, most are actually good. They are part of the beauty and glory which God created. They become a problem when they become all consuming of our time, attention, and energy and squeeze God to the sideline of our lives. Then they become a problem because they become god, and we worship them instead of God. When we fully worship God, when our hearts are turned to God, when God is number one in our lives, then all the things in the world God created can actually help us be even more aware of God’s presence and God’s blessings.
Here are a few suggestions to help focus your life on God. First, remember that you are in a relationship with God and just as your friends desire your time and attention, God desires your time and attention. A very wise woman from the 13th century, Mechtild of Magdeburg once said: “God has enough of all good things except one: Of communion with humans God can never have enough.”
Second, be sure to give some time to that relationship each and every day. Not just lip service, but some significant, focused, uninterrupted time. Try taking 30 minutes a day (if that just seems impossible, start with 15 minutes), turn off your cell phone, your computer, and allow the house/office phone to go to voice mail. Spend that time sitting with God in quiet, sitting with a very small portion of scripture, and allow the scripture and the quiet presence of God to soak deep into your being. Don’t really “think” about it so much as mull it over, stew with it, marinate in it, and allow it to transform your heart and mind. Eventually it will transform your behaviors, as well.
Finally, take some time each day to allow the love of God to move out from your heart and be spread to people around you. Some of this will begin to happen as you soak in God’s love and God’s word. God will begin to lead you into loving actions, instead of that nasty list of behaviors Jesus used to illustrate what it is that truly defiles a life. But also, just as soaking in God’s presence and in the scripture can turn our hearts toward God, even so our hearts can be turned more toward God as we share God’s love with others. For remember, as we do that we are also loving the God who resides in their hearts even as God resides in our hearts.
A couple of things we can practice are:
1. To be encouragers of hearts. In our church, families, and relationships, choose today to mindfully encourage and transform moments. Criticism can be as small as “I wish you’d wear this instead of that.” Today, begin listening to how often you criticize; it may surprise you. Then choose instead to be an encourager of hearts. Open and affirming is a lifestyle. Sharing the love of God can also transform our hearts.
2. Remembering that God is a big old softie who won’t stop going to the crushed in spirit and taking them into her own heart, act today a little like God. You know somebody with a broken heart. I know you do. So, this week, be a big old softie yourself. Go visit or call him or her on the phone and say, “I’ve been thinking about you. How are you?” Then listen, hard. Listen, deeply. Listen, without formulating your own thoughts and response to what you are hearing. Distribute hugs and sympathetic noises and tears liberally, as needed. Sometime before the conversation is over, say, “I love you.” This, too, will turn your heart more toward God. It will also, quite probably, help this crushed spirit to notice just how close God is, through your love.
All of this is like a youngster learning to play the piano. The child holds her hands just as she’s been told … she has memorized the piece perfectly. She has hit all the proper notes with deadly accuracy. But at first, quite often, her heart won’t be in it, only her fingers. As such, what she will play is a sort of music, but nothing that will start voices singing or feet tapping. But if she keeps practicing, keeps directing her focus to the music, eventually her heart will be in it as well. Then the music will be glorious. Where are our hearts? Are we only going through the motions of our faith life? Or are we turning our hearts toward God, so that God is number one in our lives, and our lives are being transformed by God’s amazing grace at work within us?