Our Hands are Dirty

 Mark 7: 1-8

August 29, 2021

 

One year, when I was about 20, my aunt

put a whole lot of effort into making

Thanksgiving perfect.

She worked with my grandmother

to make the whole dinner just like it used to be.

We had the usual Turkey and the trimmings,

and in our Italian tradition,

she made a huge lasagna and a pot of sausages.

 

She took her wedding china out and

my grandmother crocheted beaded napkin

holders for the cloth napkins,

There was some kind of turkey flowered centerpiece on the table.

It looked like a Norman Rockwell picture

except with a lasagna.

Everything was perfect.

 

That is until my family actually

showed up to eat.

 

You see, the reason that my aunt was going

through so much effort was

that there were multitudes of family problems.

My uncle had stopped talking to my grandmother,

even though they lived in the same house.

 

My parents and my other Grandmother

had just moved from Texas to California.

My parents were staying with my Aunt and Uncle,

my Grandmother and two cousins

 

 My other grandmother and I were staying

at my sister and brother in law,

my grandmother had the bed and I was sleeping on the floor.

And the rents were so high in California,

it was looking like we might be there for a while.

Everyone was pretty cranky with everyone else.

 

But, the biggest stressor:

My aunt and uncle were getting a divorce.

My uncle had told my father –

my aunt’s brother – but my aunt didn’t know

that my father knew and since my father knew,

my mother knew, and since my mother knew

I knew, but they didn’t want to tell the kids

or either of my grandmothers about it.

We all seemed to know,

but no one was talking about it.

The place was tense.

 

So my aunt determined if we had a

wonderful family dinner like we did

in the good old days, that would

make everything better.

SO she made everything just perfect

and invited other relatives and friends over.

Whatever was going on we were going to have a

“traditional” Thanksgiving.

 

It didn’t work.

Because at one point

there was an argument, my uncle ended up leaving the house

and my aunt ended up hyperventilating into a paper bag.

We didn’t even get to the dessert.

 

Now I’m sure everyone else here

has only had wonderful, picturesque, holiday experiences.

I’m sure none of your holidays

has ever been tense or unpleasant.

But maybe you can imagine what mine

was like, or at least what my aunt was up to.

 

What my aunt was trying to do was

to cover up the hurt and the pain,

the tension and the distrust

and the bad behavior in my family

with some “traditions”

and a good looking table.

 

She reasoned that if we did

all the right things as far as

appearance was concerned,

if we performed the traditions

that would make up for everything.

 

In hindsight you could tell that this

was not going to work, but

the reasoning is not too ridiculous

 

This has been exactly the reasoning for those

who have worshipped God throughout the ages.

 

Since before the Israelites got the

Ten Commandments, we all have reasoned that if we

go through the right motions,

if we comply with the task of tradition,

if we do what our ancestors did,

that will fix anything that is wrong.

Somehow, that will make everything clean again.

 

It’s better to look good than to actually be good.

  

The Pharisees did this with the rules of the Torah.

The hand washing, the processes with

food and with cleanliness and all the rest.

 

Now washing before eating is obviously a good idea hygienically,

but that wasn’t why they wanted Jesus to do it.

It was a ritual.

And in itself, it was a good ritual.

It was an imitation of the priest who would wash his  

hands and feet before going into the temple.

 

It meant to signify our uncleanliness,

it stressed our humility and our humanity

before the awesome otherness of God.

 

But not everyone who did the human tradition

of washing hands remembered their own

humility and uncleanliness.

Like humans tend to do, they started to do it mindlessly

it started to lose its real meaning,

and they started to believe that

they were better than others just for performing the ritual.

 

These rules were not bad in themselves.

They brought the worship of God into

the Jewish people’s everyday life.

They reminded the people that God

was involved in all they did.

These actions would keep the people

mindful to follow God’s will in their lives.

  

But eventually, these rules and traditions

overshadowed God’s will.

And to the people, they became God’s will.

Eventually, the religious leaders only took account of

whether these rules and traditions were being followed correctly.

 

Instead of asking

·         Were the widows and the orphans being cared for?

·         Were the hungry being fed?

·         Were the people being treated fairly with justice?

·         Was God’s will being done in their community.

 

They only looked to see:

·         Were people washing their hands at the right time?

·         were all the sacrifices being done properly?

·         Was the Sabbath being kept perfectly?

 

Jesus was not amused.

He told them that this kind of thinking was dumb.

It’s not what goes in it’s what comes out of us.

 

So then, you think that would all change with Christianity.

But the Christian church in the early and

Middle ages almost instantly repeated this same cycle.

They focused on

·         doing worship exactly the right way,

·         wearing the right liturgical clothes

·         on praying the right prayers the right amount of times

 

Again, this stuff was supposed to remind them

of God’s will and God’s desire for the world.

But again, the religious leaders only looked to see

if the new rules were being done properly,

And if someone had the time to do it,

they were deemed them worthy,

and if not they were bound for hell.

Again, the rules took the place of God’s will.

 

 Then came Martin Luther. And Martin Luther was not amused.

He told everyone that their works wouldn’t save them,

only God’s grace.

 

So you think that as Lutherans, we would have this problem solved.

Think again.

 

We still do the same things today.

Now we have individually made up our own traditions and rules.

For Lutherans, we want to make sure things were just the same

as when grandpa was worshipping here,

and we always resort to everyone having proper doctrine and theology

we have elevated that to God’s will for us.

 

And there are plenty of other new rules

and traditions for us and for other modern Christians.

·         Do we worship the right way?

·         Do we sing the right hymns?

·         Do we have the perfect doctrine and understanding of theology?

 

When we use these things to remind us

about God’s will, they are great things.

But yet again as in history, we have

made these traditions into the will of God.

The church is like my aunt at that Thanksgiving dinner.

We think that if we get the table right and the candles

right and the lasagna tastes right,

then we can fool everyone in to believing

that everything is really okay.

  

In today’s gospel story,

Jesus comes to tell the Pharisees, and us that the jig is up.

God has not been fooled for one minute

by the table settings, and the smiling faces, and the hand washings.

 

And those of us who have been doing

the traditions well and hiding behind them

should not think that we are any

better than the ones who have not.

 

God doesn’t just want to see the

glitz and the glamour and the show,

The beaded napkin holders and the good china.

God wants to reach us,

right down in the pit of our souls,

God wants to love us, and heal us and transform us.

 

God wants us to be asking:

·         Are the poor and rejected being cared for?

·         Are the hungry being fed?

·         Are the people being treated fairly with justice?

·         Is God’s will being done in our community.

Not whether our religious traditions are being followed

to the tea, not whether we perform the rituals correctly.

 

If we think that we can be made

well by our own ability to follow the rituals

and  re-inact the traditions,

then why did we need Jesus?

 

 Jesus tells us that God knows about the evil that

roams around in our hearts.

Adultery, theft, avarice, envy, slander, pride, folly.

Jesus knows that we are broken and sinful

Jesus knows what the fancy table setting

and the Thanksgiving food is actually hiding.

Jesus is not fooled by it.

But Jesus still comes to eat with us anyway.

 

Jesus knows that our hands are dirty.

All the rituals in the world will not make them any cleaner.

But it doesn’t matter.

We always come to God with dirty hands

our own washing does nothing.

It is only the love of God that makes them clean.