Our Presbyterian roots are buried deep in Scottish soil, deep in the history of that rugged land of mountains and lakes and windswept moors.  Throughout much of that history, folks had to travel a long way to worship as a kirk each Sunday — kirk being the Scottish word for church.  Scottish families would rise early, milk their cows, and begin what for many would be a several-hour walk.  When the kirk was finally assembled, the members would spend several hours engaged in study and worship and a shared meal, then everyone would start the long walk back home.  Those who lived farthest away would make it home just in time to milk the cows again.  As our Scottish forbears followed this schedule — making sure they had time to study and worship and still get the milking done on time — they usually began their worship each Sunday at about 11:00 a.m.  That, my friends, is how many came to consider 11:00 a.m. the “proper” hour for worship:  it is the time that best accommodated the milking of cows.

Today, we Presbyterians tend to view ourselves as being people of tradition who adhere faithfully to scripture as we strive to follow Christ in being his body, the church.  Our Book of Order states that “God has put all things under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and has made Christ Head of the Church, which is his body.”  It goes on to say that

Insofar as Christ’s will for the Church is set forth in Scripture, it is to be obeyed.  In the worship and service of God and the government of the church, matters are to be ordered according to the Word by reason and sound judgment, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.[i]

What does scripture tell us about Christ’s will for the Church?  What does it mean for us to order our worship and service of God according to God’s Word?  In our First Lesson for this morning, we heard the call for all of us to “be doers of [God’s] word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”  We also heard a caution against “religion [that] is worthless.”  The difference between truly doing the Word and merely practicing a worthless religion is the topic of our Second Lesson for today.

Since the start of the year, we have been working our way through the Gospel of Mark.  We have seen Jesus do miraculous things and heard him ask provocative questions.  Examining those questions, we have noted that they were designed to urge the people who traveled with Jesus to consider just who he was and what power and authority he might have.  Those questions also urged people to consider what power and authority they wanted him to have.  Did they want Jesus to have only the power and authority he might need to cure them of illness and solve their dilemmas?  Or did they want Jesus to have the power and authority to change their lives? 

For the month of March, we stepped outside our timeline to address some of the questions Jesus posed near the time of his crucifixion, but today we return to the point where we left off.  That was at the end of chapter 6 of Mark, when Jesus was preaching to a crowd of about 20,000 people — 5,000 men, along with women and children.  When it came time to eat, the only food the disciples could scrape together was five loaves of bread and two fish.  Listen to Mark’s description of what happened next:  “[Jesus] ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass.  So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties.  Taking the five loaves and the two fish, [Jesus] looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all.”  If we focus specifically on Jesus’ actions, we see that he picked up the food, he blessed it, he divided it into pieces, then he gave it to his disciples to distribute. 

Did Jesus leave something out?  Was there something he failed to do?

Now when the God and some of the scribes who had come from God gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.  (For the God, and all the God, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.)  So the God and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”  He said to them, “God prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’  God abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” . . .Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand:  there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”  When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable.  He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand?  Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?”  (Thus he declared all foods clean.)  And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.  For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come:  fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.  All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Generations of children have found in this passage a free pass on having to wash their hands before a meal, but this passage is not about personal hygiene.  The people of Jesus’ time knew nothing about germ theory or that, as the United States Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tells us, “Handwashing is the single most important means of preventing the spread of infection.”[ii]  The handwashing under discussion in this passage was a ritual that involved only a small amount of water — the amount you can hold in the cup of your hand.  You would hold one hand down, fingers pointed downward, then drip the water onto your wrist and allow it to run off your fingertips.  Repeat with the other hand.[iii] 

Originally, this was a ritual for a priest to perform before coming near the altar, but by Jesus’ time the Pharisees had declared that all men and women must perform this ritual handwashing every time they served or ate any food.  The Pharisees saw this as a way for faithful people to show their devotion to God and distinguish themselves from their pagan neighbors.[iv]  From that innocuous idea, the argument developed that if you did not do this sort of handwashing, then you must not be devoted to God, you must, instead, be godless.  In other words, what had begun as some folks’ idea of a way to show devotion to God had devolved into being a test for determining who was a person of faith — and who was not.

The Pharisees were not unusual in devising such a test, in coming up with a perfectly fine way of demonstrating loyalty or devotion, then turning it into a bright-line test for deciding who is loyal or devout and who is not.  We have seen the same thing happen, in recent months, with lapel pins in the design of the American flag.  Back in September, 16 presidential candidates — 7 Democratic, 8 Republican, and 1 Libertarian — came together for a debate at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire.  Photographs taken that night show that 5 of those 16 candidates were wearing some type of pin on their lapels.  On the Democratic side:  Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, and Chris Dodd wore no type of lapel pin.  Dennis Kucinich wore the official Congressional lapel pin, John Edwards wore an Outward Bound pin that had belonged to his son Wade (who died in a car accident in 1996), and Bill Richardson wore a pin from the New Hampshire group Sensible Priorities.  On the Republic side:  Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Tom Tancredo wore no lapel pin.  Ron Paul wore the official Congressional lapel pin, and Rudolph Giuliani wore an American flag pin.  Libertarian Mike Gravel wore no type of lapel pin.

Since that night, the question of who does and who does not wear an American flag lapel pin has become, for some, a kind of litmus test for who is a patriot and who is not.  What began as some folks’ idea of a way to show one’s loyalty to the United States has devolved into being a test for determining who loves this country — and who does not.

History has given us countless examples of this all-too-human desire to come up with quick, easy ways of categorizing people and determining who is “in” and who is “out.”  When the Pharisees brought their handwashing concern to Jesus, the Jewish people were living in a land controlled by Rome, governed by people who worshiped the Roman emperor as a divine being.  Galilee was at the center of a trade and military route and was experiencing an influx of immigrants who brought with them their own cultures and traditions — cultures and traditions that often clashed with the Jewish way of life.

We might sympathize with the Pharisees’ desire to protect themselves and the Jewish people from being corrupted by pagan influences.  We might understand why they sought to build a wall of tradition and ritual that would not let any other culture or religion inside.  We might be able to sympathize with and understand what the Pharisees were trying to do, but we still must see the flaw in their thinking — the flaw that Jesus pointed out.

The Pharisees believed that it was absolutely vital for the Jewish people to keep themselves separate from non-Jews if they were to preserve their faith intact — the word Pharisees means separated ones.  The issue Jesus had with the Pharisees was not that they promoted ritual handwashing, but that they were legalists.  Legalists want to take a big sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle of it.  Down one side the legalists will enumerate all of the possible events in life.  On the other side, they will state the right response to each and every situation.  Once they can do that, the legalists will have life all mapped out and know exactly where they are going and how they are going to get there.  No surprises.  No questions.  No shades of grey.

The problem with Pharisees, or with any person who lives by legalism, alone, is that they are worshiping the wrong thing.  The Pharisees of Jesus’ day obeyed their many rules and regulations because they believed that was the path into the Kingdom of God.  They required other people to uphold their rules because that was a way they saw of protecting Judaism and maintaining the Israelites’ exclusive right to be called God’s covenant people.  The Pharisees wanted a guaranteed trip to heaven and an exclusive right to be there.  Religious legalists of today operate with the same purpose:  a guaranteed trip to heaven and an exclusive right to be there.

When Jesus answered the Pharisees’ question about hand washing, he told the Pharisees that they needed to redirect their focus away from obeying a set of rules and onto doing what God really wants.  He quoted a prophecy from Isaiah about people who “honor [God] with their lips, while their hearts are far from [him].”  That kind of worship, Jesus said, is merely “a human commandment learned by rote.”[v]  Then, Jesus pulled his disciples aside, and he asked them, “Do you also fail to understand?”  Do you also fail to understand, Jesus asked, that doing God's will is not about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of some elaborate set of rules — it is about what you choose to hold within your heart. 

The same is true today.  When you and I put our focus upon rules and regulations, we are merely satisfying our need for control, our desire to have everything neatly defined.  We make obedience to a set of rules an end in itself — not an aid to our life of faith, but a substitute for it.  That kind of religion says that details are what matter most.  The way of the Spirit says that God and his people come first.  As Jesus told a scribe who asked him which commandment is the first of all:  “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’  The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  There is no other commandment greater than these."[vi]

The laws and traditions the Pharisees advocated had a purpose — they were intended to identify the Jewish people as completely obedient to God’s rule and God’s will.  As one writer has noted, “[t]his was a sincere and intense concern; a way of living out a complete vision of God and his law in the midst of a multi-cultural and often hostile world, where competing ‘world views’ were not only at the door, but in the house.”  The Pharisees might have been sincere, but they were sincerely wrong.  They were intent upon separating themselves from the surrounding world, as God’s holy, covenant people.  They saw their rules as a means of keeping themselves pure by keeping the rest of the world out.  Jesus told them that they were completely missing the point and explained that God’s purpose is to gather all peoples together — to bring all the world’s people together under a new covenant, a covenant written in his blood.

Our God is not a separating God — our God is a gathering God.  Following Christ is not about building a protective wall to keep the world outside, but about looking beyond ourselves to discover how we can reach out and bring the whole world in.  On one of the final days before his crucifixion, Jesus declared that when he was lifted up onto the cross, he would draw all people to himself.[vii]  Today, the risen Christ is calling you and me to continue that work.  Christ is calling you and me to reach beyond the walls of this church, beyond the walls of our own culture and tradition and gather all people together in his name and in his love.  Amen.

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