Clean

Scripture:       Isaiah 1:1, 10-18  James 1:1-27     Mark 7:1-23

 Any Peanuts fans in the house?  You may remember the character Pig Pen, who walked around in his own self-generated cloud of dust.  I don’t think we actually ever found out what the guy’s real name was; he was just known as Pig Pen.  Occasionally he would try to clean up, usually to impress one of the female characters, but the dust would inevitably find its way back to him somehow….he referred to himself once as a dust magnet.  He would also occasionally say that the dust that covered him was the dust of ancient civilizations…who knows, the dust that covered him could have been the dust that King Solomon or Genghis Khan had walked on.   For the most part, Pig Pen himself didn’t seem unduly troubled by his dirty appearance….as we’d say nowadays, being covered in dust was just how he rolled.

In our reading from Mark’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are, in effect, accused of being PigPen’s crusty cousins.   Immediately before today’s reading, we’re told “When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. ⁵⁴When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, ⁵⁵and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. ⁵⁶And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the market-places, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.”

In our reading, we’re told that the Pharisees and some scribes from Jerusalem were in the crowd, and as Jesus is healing people, a cry of outrage is heard:  “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands.”    While everyone else was focused on healing, on miracles, on God’s activity in their midst, the scribes and Pharisees were focused on disciples with dirty hands.  Apparently in the midst of all the healing Jesus was doing, they saw some of his disciples having grabbed a quick bite of lunch without first washing their hands, and felt it was an appropriate time for a public service announcement on the life-or-death importance of handwashing.  They felt it was sufficiently important that they interrupted Jesus so that no further healings would take place until this urgent matter of dirty-handed disciples was resolved.

I should pause a moment to talk about the “tradition of the elders” that is mentioned by the scribes and Pharisees.  The Pharisees were passionate about obeying the law of God.  For many Christians, reading particularly what Paul has to say about the law, we think of law as a heavy burden, but for observant Jews even today, the law is not a burden, but an amazing, beautiful gift from God himself – in Jewish worship, when the scroll of the law is taken from the Ark, it is brought out, and the people dance around with it and even kiss it.   However, the law was given at a certain time and place in history.  Inevitably, over the years, situations came up in life which are not directly addressed by the law as found in those scrolls.  Over years and centuries, the rabbis made their own interpretations, based on the law, which were passed on by word of mouth.  What’s more, because the Pharisees were very zealous about keeping the law, they created their traditions in such as way as to put what they called “a hedge around the law” – that is, to prevent people even from getting close to breaking the law.  It’s as if we’re driving in a 55 mile an hour zone, and in order to avoid accidentally speeding up to 56 miles an hour, we drive 45 miles an hour instead just to be safe….and then, as religious leaders, feel entitled to forbid anyone else from driving over 45 miles an hour.  By Jewish tradition, not only the written law but also the interpretation of the law, or the tradition of the elders, were given by God to Moses; though the oral tradition was written down later.

Because of their zeal for this tradition of the elders, this oral tradition of interpretation, this hedge around the law, the unwashed hands of the disciples greatly upset the scribes and Pharisees, and they made their concerns known.  However, they are doing this – focusing on dirty hands – while Jesus is miraculously healing people and changing their lives for the better. So the scribes and Pharisees come off looking not only like spoilsports, but quite frankly like idiots, and Jesus lets them have it:  “⁶He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; ⁷ in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” ⁸You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’  And then Jesus lays into them some more about their tradition of interpretation, citing one tradition that allows believers to get out of helping their parents by declaring their property as dedicated to God – even though it stayed with them and they were still using it.  This human tradition allowed people to evade God’s clear commandment to honor father and mother by caring for them.

Jesus then turns away from the scribes and Pharisees to the crowd, and says, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: ¹⁵there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.’  ^* When they’re away from the crowds, they ask Jesus to explain what he said, and Jesus does so:  food eaten, with or without clean hands, just goes into the stomach and out into the drain; it doesn’t touch the heart.  Mark adds a parenthetical note: “Thus Jesus declared all foods clean” – that is, Jesus set aside the kosher laws distinguishing between clean and unclean animals for food, etc.  Jesus goes on to say, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. ²¹For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, ²²adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. ²³All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’

Now, I want to be very clear, especially to any children present, that washing our hands is important.  Washing our hands is important in order to avoid getting sick, and to avoid passing our germs on to others.  And certainly, when we eat fruit, we want to wash it off, in order to remove any pesticides that may have been sprayed.  Washing our hands is important for our physical health, and the physical health of those around us.  Washing our hands has not the slightest thing to do, however, with our value as a human being, with God’s love toward us, with the quality of our Christian discipleship , with our eternal destiny.  Washing our hands won’t make us good people, and not washing our hands won’t make us bad people. God will not send us to hell because we forgot to wash our hands.  On the other hand, later on in the Gospel, we know that Pilate washed his hands, but it did not remove his guilt.

It may seem that this passage does not apply to us all that much.  After all, unless you work in a healthcare setting where regular handwashing is crucially important, none of us are likely to encounter the handwashing police in our daily lives.  But I think we’re all prone to make mental judgments of others based on their outward appearance, including whether they are well-scrubbed or not.  And these can have real consequences for ministry and our Christian witness to others, especially if their condition might impact us.  Do I want to give a ride to someone who doesn’t bathe regularly, either from lack of regular access to facilities or for other reasons, when in order to avoid nausea I may have to drive with the windows rolled all the way down even in a blizzard?   Do I want to visit someone’s home when they may have a problem with fleas or bedbugs, and by going in I may risk taking some home with me?  And God help me, there have been times when I’ve been invited in to sit down, and I’ve stood out on the porch saying, “that’s ok, no need for me to come in, I can pray for you from out here on the porch, I’m good.”  I can remember one time when such concerns really got in the way of ministry.  A number of years ago, one of our sister congregations at C and Indiana in Kensington had a homeless ministry; they were sheltering homeless people inside the church.  The neighbors were complaining about homeless people gathering there every night, and the city threatened to shut them down.  A bunch of UCC and other clergy organized to support our sister congregation, and we even held a press conference – we were on the news, though I strategically positioned myself behind one of the larger clergy so I wasn’t all that visible…what can I say, I’m camera shy.  But then part of the plan was for different clergy to lead worship and sleep at the church overnight – to show that the church was not only housing the homeless, but leading worship with them, supposedly 24/7, which was protected activity under the law…the plan was that if someone from the city were to come at 3 a.m. to shut the place down, the clergy were supposed to jump up and start leading worship, which would have protected against a shutdown – to do this on a rotation until the city backed off, which they eventually did.  I signed up for a shift.  And I really struggled with myself, because I knew the church had bedbugs, and other clergy who had stayed there had gotten bitten.  But I prayed and gritted my teeth, showed up, led worship, and spent a very uncomfortable night on the floor there – there were chairs and sofas there, but I knew they’d be infested, so I wasn’t going anywhere near them – and yes, I got bitten by bedbugs too.  But I went through my clothes very carefully and was fortunate not to take any home, my three bedbug bites healed fairly quickly, and life went on.

It is what comes out of a person, Jesus said, not what goes into a person, that defiles.  Being a PigPen does not make us a bad person – and in the Peanuts comic strips, PigPen was actually a fairly nice guy. However, if our heart is not right with God, no amount of handwashing will change that.  It’s a bit like the experience we all likely had at some time or another, to encounter someone who really looks good on the outside – great smile, great looks, great clothes, great gift of gab – but as we get to know them better, we find out they are bitter and selfish and hateful and vengeful – that is to say, they’re really ugly on the inside. It’s like watching someone with an impressive appearance open their mouth and seeing a toad hop out, or when they open their mouth, they projectile vomit sewage…it’s a shock, and it’s a real turnoff. ..and this is where the words in our reading from the letter of James about bridling the tongue come in.  And by contrast, I’m sure we’ve all met people who are nothing to look at, who may wear shabby clothes, who may not meet our standards of cleanliness, but have a caring, generous spirit, and we say they are beautiful on the inside.  Physical beauty will fade over time; it’s inner beauty that lasts.  It’s inner beauty that God sees.

The Pharisees used the word “clean” in one way – to refer to outward cleanliness, and Jesus used the word “clean” in another – to refer to one’s inward condition.  I’d invite us to think what the word “clean” means in our culture.  Of course, we use it, as the Pharisees did, around issues of washing and removing dirt.  It can also be used to describe a joke that doesn’t include sexual innuendo – a clean joke.  It’s also used in the context of drug addiction – if someone’s not using, we say they’re clean.  And on cop shows, if they search somebody and find no contraband, it’s said that “they’re clean”.  In the recent remake of the movie Poltergeist, a celebrity exorcist was famous, at the end of his successful exorcisms, for saying, “This house is clean.” All of these aspects – being free from addictions, being free from violent impulses, being free from being controlled by evil – these are all aspects of Jesus is talking about.  “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me,” the Psalmist wrote.  This is the sense in which Jesus used the word “clean”.  

  

Our reading from the letter of James, the brother of Jesus who became head of the church in Jerusalem, gives us a picture of persons with clean hearts and right spirits look like, and he takes Jesus’ words a bit further – as Jesus does himself elsewhere in the Gospels.  You see, in today’s Gospel reading, Jesus’ words on inner cleanliness are put in terms of avoiding evil intentions, in terms of not thinking and doing bad things.  But James’ letter tells us, not only about what we should not think and do, but about what we should think and especially what we should do.  When we think of religious observance, we think of going to church, or in other traditions about not eating meat on Friday or giving something up for Lent.  And during Jesus’ day, that’s how people thought of religion – in terms of attending worship and making sacrifices.  But James has a different take on religion, on what he would call pure religion or clean religion:  “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”  James also tells his readers, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” – doing and not just hearing is a theme that comes up often in his letter.  He compares the word of God to a mirror which we can use to look at ourselves.  Those who hear the word but don’t do it are like those who glance at themselves in the mirror and say, “I’m good”, and walk away…their understanding of the word makes them self-satisfied, even if in truth their lives give God very little satisfaction.  But if we truly look at ourselves carefully in the mirror provided by God’s word, we will be motivated to action.  But these words come with a promise:  “But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act —they will be blessed in their doing.”  May God cleanse our hearts and minds from all evil, and may we be blessed in all that we say and do, and may all we say and do be a blessing to others.  Amen.