It comes from within ... (Today's Sermon)

September 3rd 2006

I have to confess to beginning this with a sense of awe … Over the summer I have watched a huge variety of wild life and stood in awe of the eagles and ravens flying overhead and the whales and seals playing in the bay … last week on the drive back, the kids and I took a detour through the Columbia Icefields where I stood in awe of the glacier on which we stood, albeit for only a moment.

But more then that, over the summer I connected with people and places within the Church, and had time to reflect on what it means to be the church, what it means to be in ministry within the church and here among this community, and I even took the time to listen to what came out of the General Council meeting in Thunder Bay – and I came to realize through that combination of awe and reflection, what enormous potential and possibility we as a Church, a community and a people have.

This has been my summer of rekindling with in me the passion for Ministry within the Church, the passion for life, and a passion for what it is we struggle to do and be each day … The time of leave has been good … it has been healthy … it has been okay.

And so, as I approached these texts today and read their words, my sense of awe continued to deepen …

On first glance, we have four very different readings … readings that are disconnected. But if they were truly disconnected, they wouldn’t be found together in the Scriptures at all …

And so, we begin with the love poetry of the Song of Solomon, a text scholars and theologians have struggled with over the centuries. They’ve tried to justify it’s presence in the Bible by saying – “it’s a metaphor for our relationship with God …” I remember teaching Sunday School in my University days and getting the kids in my class reading this text in the Good News version of the Bible as well as more of Song of Solomon. The boys – largely 12 to 15 year old boys were thrilled, and dare I say, titillated by the words they read … It was not a metaphor of their relationship with God … to them it was a form of exciting smut … or atleast one mother saw it that way and complained to the Minister and the Board …

The outcome was one of the wise men of my home congregation said – “the kid is reading the Bible, what’s the problem??”

But such is the issue facing theologians and scholars. How do we approach and use this text, a text that is clearly erotic in intent. It is a stretch to say that it is a metaphor for our relationship with God. It is plain and simple love poetry. It is the words spoken between two people who are deeply in love … The words are erotic in the fullest sense of that word. Romantic, passionate, fiery …

In this text … in life … we can not escape the simple reality, that in life it is love that gives us our meaning and our depth … it is love that connects us beyond ourselves.
Through love we connect to our families … our partners … and our creator. Love is what under girds our lives and our faith …

In the Church, and in religious institutions, we use texts like the Song of Solomon to focus our energies and our beings on the love that lies between ourselves and our God. We speak of how to live our lives of faith by being loving … we talk about faith using terms like love … we seek to transform the world by using love.

And so, it is love that is central and important to our faith .. One could even say, our faith is an expression and manifestation of love …

It is with this in mind that we then approach the text from Mark. In this text people are complaining to Jesus because his followers, good Jews all of them, are not following the Kosher and dietery laws. They are not washing their hands appropriately before meals.

This is not a case of them NOT washing their hands. They were washing their hands, but they were not making themselves clean … Confused? Don’t be … There is a difference.

In the mid-80’s, when I traveled to Israel with a group of University of Toronto, I was privileged to go to the Muslim Shrine at the Dome of the Rock (that’s the Golden Domed structure that dominates the sky line of Jerusalem). Amir one of our fellow students took his pilgrimage during our time in Jerusalem. He went to the compound and let us stay with him as he went through the very elaborate ritual washing demanded of him to set foot inside the Mosque for worship in this Holy place.

It is hard to describe but it involved a set number of handfuls of water, circling in the proper direction over the body part the right number of times, and not coming into contact with the “dirty” water … Before setting out that morning, Amir had showered for an hour in our shared dorm room, much to the chagrin of the four others who shared the room with him, so he wasn’t “dirty” but he wasn’t clean in the ritualistic sense. And that is what needed to be rectified. Before he bowed in Allah’s presence Amir needed to be clean …

And it was that kind of washing the critics were complaining about to Jesus – your disciples are dirty. Not filthy, but ritually unclean. While I was traveling in BC I was struck how, in EVERY public washroom I went into there was a plethora of signs all saying – “Washing hands with soap and water greatly diminishes the risk of spreading diseases like Colds, Flu and SARS … I’ve been horrified reading the statistics on how many people don’t wash their hands properly in such places, or at all … but that’s another issue. (an important one – but another issue) The disciples were hygienically clean – they just weren’t ritualistically clean … And that was the problem for those who came to Jesus complaining …

“So, what do you do??” They press him, and Jesus launched into a theological explanation … What sullies us in the eyes of God is not what we eat … it is not what comes from outside and goes IN … what renders us unclean before God is what comes from within ... behaviours, attitudes, actions, thoughts … those are the things that would separate us from God and render us broken, or at least feeling that way …

This is a powerful statement to be made in a world where religious practice is heavily protected and guided by ritual. You’ve sinned – there’s a ritual in response to that. You’ve experienced a loss – there’s a ritual in response to that. You’ve lost your temper, beaten your kids, ripped off a neighbour, whatever it was – there is a ritual to cleanse you and set you free.

And then this Jesus guy stands up and says – “the rituals will not protect you, unless the healing and wholeness comes from within … if you are feeling separate from God the rituals will not change that … IT IS what lies within that will address that …”

Jesus clearly says to the people of his day – the religious authorities and his critics: “What pollutes us, does not come from without … it comes from within … So, move beyond the ritual … move beyond the structure of the faith … let the spirit within pour out … and transform, not only yourself, but the world as well …”

And then we turn to the words from the Epistle of James. Words that were written or at the very least, inspired by James the brother of Jesus. James was one of those closest to Jesus, and his teachings flow naturally from the words of Jesus himself. As one of those who had listened closely at Jesus’ knee James offers wonderful words of inspiration to those who have been filled with the awe of faith and who have charged out into the world excited and enlivened only to hit the harsh reality of the world and find themselves struggling …

Building on the foundational idea that what separates us from God comes from outside of ourselves, James offers encouragement by saying: “be quick to listen, slow to speak and slower to anger” (that’s a really good one …) “be doers of the word, not merely hearers …”, “pure religion is caring for orphans and widows in their distress,” and “if any of you think yourselves religious and do not bridle the tongue, you deceive yourselves …”

At first glance they seem to be common sense solutions to the challenges we face in our lives and in our world … and even with a second or third glance, much of James seems to be simple common sense solutions … and the reason for that is simple – They ARE simple common sense solutions, because James is taking the wisdom offered by Jesus and saying – “this is NOT hard people … this is easy …” It’s like the rabbinic tale – “that which is hurtful, you simply do not do …”. In this case it is live your faith … listen more then you speak … curb your tongue – bite it when necessary and be patient …

It’s not really that hard … James wants his readers – us … to stand steeped in the sense of awe that comes with living and moving in the world, and the sense of awe that comes from considering God and the cosmos and so on … the sense of awe that leads us to faith and to love …

James wants us to stand in that sense of awe and to move forward into the world sharing that awe – that faith – and sharing the love that it inspires within us …

James doesn’t see the need for the rituals and the formulas of faith … what separates us from
each other is not washed away by watching what we eat and ensuring we are ritualistically clean … what separates us from each other and from God is what comes from within, and that can be dealt with – not through the rituals – not through the formulas of right belief … it is dealt with by throwing ourselves into the place where awe and love fill our thoughts and where we feel profoundly and intimately connected to the cosmos and to God and to each other …

It is that place where the words of the Song of Solomon arise … it is from that place that Jesus sits down and dines with those who are ritually unclean … it is from that place that the Psalmist considers the splendour of the world and sings … it is from that place that James takes a look around and says simply – “live your faith … share your love … transform the world …” It’s that simple … that basic … that easy …

When we stand in awe, and are awash in love … anything is indeed possible, and THAT my friends, is what we are called to do and be …

May it be so … thanks be to God …
Let us pray …