The Good News Proclaimed
Preached by the Reverend Doctor Durrell Watkins at the
Sunshine Cathedral on Sunday, August 30, 2009.
OK. Today’s reading demonstrates why Mark’s gospel is so captivating for
me. Mark is no slave to tradition. Mark will not bow to any idol, not even
those that are presented as fundamentals of the faith. Mark trusts his
intellect and his intuition and his experience. He doesn’t need outward
trappings, rituals, and symbols to validate his spirituality. That doesn’t
mean there isn’t a place for ritual and symbol, but that place, at least for
Mark, is way below his own thinking and his own personal journey.
You know, I enjoy pageantry, and I believe that ritual helps messages sink
into our deeper minds. I don’t wear this robe because its magical, or even
because I like long flowing garments (well, that’s not the only reason). I
wear it as a symbol that this hour is special and we are gathering in this
hour to create sacred space. It is sacred… not because of candles or furniture
or robes or any other symbol… it’s sacred because we who are loved by God
gather together to celebrate and share that love. The robe is one of the
calling cards to bring us together… beyond that, it’s just fabric.
But by living the church calendar, by worshiping regularly, by listening to
a cycle of readings each year that presents a great deal of the bible to us,
we are learning to live our faith. The tradition carries us in those moments
when we don’t seem to have the wherewithal to carry ourselves. I’m pretty low
church, at times even iconoclastic, but I still enjoy and even depend on the
rhythms and cycles of seasons and liturgy. I believe in the gathering together
of the faithful so that we can discover that we are more together than we are
apart, and so that we can share our strength when someone else is feeling a
little low.
The rituals of worship however, are for us. They are tools that are meant
to empower us, to lift us up, to give us hope and bring us together. Once we
worship the symbol instead of the infinite Reality to which the symbol tries
to point, once we worship the ritual instead of the ultimate Reality the
ritual means to help us contact, then we have committed the mistake of
idolatry and we have become prisoners of the tradition instead of contributors
to the tradition.
Mark doesn’t want us to fall into that trap. In today’s Gospel reading Mark
shows some religious leaders chastising Jesus because his disciples aren’t
following the rules. The religious tradition is very clear about what can and
can’t be eaten and how food is to be prepared and how the one eating is to
prepare himself or herself. But Jesus thinks that people are more important
than traditions, even traditions that wind up in scripture.
Jesus and his followers are always in trouble for healing on the Sabbath,
which is considered work, which is a no-no according to the rules (and the
keepers of the rules, who also wind up being the keepers of power strangely
enough, are quick to quote chapter and verse to show that their interpretation
of the rules is correct and must be followed without question). But Jesus
heals on the Sabbath anyway.
When his disciples are hungry, they gather food on the Sabbath… now that is
definitely work. But would God want them to go hungry because of what the
calendar says? If today we are hungry and today there is food, guess what…
today is the time to get some food regardless of what the calendar says. It
just makes sense. So, Jesus’ people would gather food on the Sabbath rather
than starving on the Sabbath. People mattered more to Jesus than the
fundamentals that served to keep some in power and others in line.
Almost 20 years before Mark is writing, St. Paul makes the same point about
circumcision. People who grew up in Jewish families had their male children
circumcised. People who grew up in Gentile homes did not usually practice
circumcision. But there are scriptures that insist on male circumcision as a
sign of God’s covenant with the people. So, the self-appointed religious hall
monitors wanted all Gentiles who were interested in joining the Jesus movement
to first convert to Judaism which for men would have included getting
circumcised. The Apostle Paul said, “really? They can’t support us, be part of
us, unless they hurt themselves to satisfy a cultural norm?” Paul insisted
that circumcision was not necessary to be a Christ-follower.
Several years after Mark is writing, Luke tells a story about St. Peter
having a dream. In the dream God was telling him to eat food that the bible
says is unclean. The Levitical texts forbid the eating of pork and shellfish,
among other tasty treats. In Peter’s dream he sees every animal that he knows
anything about. And he hears God saying, “slaughter these animals and eat.”
But Peter is stunned. He says, “Never! Some of these animals are unclean. I
wouldn’t think of eating them.”
Later, Peter is called to the house of a centurion, a Gentile who had
become interested in the Hebrew understanding of God but who had not converted
to the faith. And Peter goes to that centurion’s house because he finally
understands what the dream was about. He tells the centurion, “It is unlawful
in our tradition for a Jewish person to associate with a Gentile, but God has
shown me that I should not consider any person unclean.”
What Paul, and Mark, and Luke are all doing is disagreeing with the
scriptures they have inherited. They know the verses. They also know that
those verses might not have been meant for all people and for all time. They
know that more than tradition and institutional interpretations, they might
need to consider their particular location and circumstances and use their
power of reason when making decisions. Rather than valuing rules more than
relationships, rather than valuing law more than love, they might have to
actually argue with their tradition and even reinterpret it or contribute
something brand new to it, or even just disagree with it entirely.
We love scripture, but we mustn’t worship it.
Now someone will say, “but isn’t the bible the word of God?” We might call it
the word of God, but the word of God is not God. Nor is it the final word of
God. Guess what? God is still speaking, and God is speaking to and through us.
God speaks through art, and through poetry, and through friendships, and
through nature, and through the words that other religions call scripture. The
bible is the word of God but not the final word. And, the bible is not only
the word of God, it is also the word to God. It is a human attempt to
understand God, to share God, to access God’s grace and to praise God’s
goodness.
It is the word of God because it is the word about God. It is the dialogue
of a people discussing God in the various ways they understood God. It isn’t
God dictating a message to us; it is people like us figuring out their
relationship to God. They give us the legacy of their search to empower us to
do our own search. We may even come to different conclusions than they did…
and then our story becomes part of THE story that is the word of God.
Finally, let me say that the word of God is not a single word. There is the
descriptive word and the prescriptive word. There is the word describing how
things were, and the word prescribing how things out to be. When we read,
“slaves obey your masters” or “wives submit to your husbands” we are reading
how the world was; not how it ought to be. When we read, “Love your neighbor
as yourself” and “do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” we are
reading how things aren’t always, but definitely how they should be and can
be. We must rightly divide the word, so that we discern between the
descriptive word and the prescriptive word. People often use the descriptive
word to promote the evils of the past, instead of embracing the prescriptive
word that can heal those past mistakes and usher in God’s kin-dom of love,
justice, and inclusion here and now.
That’s what Mark and Paul and Luke all have the nerve to demonstrate. They
are showing us we need not be slaves to the opinions, prejudices or
understandings of the past. We can honor the scriptures, but one way we honor
them is to not reduce them to a rule book, a list of do’s and don’ts, or a
justification for our every petty prejudice. Our job isn’t to worship the
bible, but to know it so that we can use it wisely for personal empowerment
and liberation. God forbid that we ever use it as a tool of oppression again
and God forbid that we ever allow it to be used as a tool of oppression
against us.
That’s why we hear Jesus saying today, “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. For it is from within, from the
human heart, that evil intentions come…”
Yes you can quote a bible verse, and quote it accurately, saying we should
wash a certain way, or not eat a certain kind of food, or do certain things on
a certain day of the week… but why are you quoting those verses? To shame us?
To control us? To limit us? That’s not God! God is loving and life-giving and
wants us to experience unfettered joy. What we eat, who we date, where we
worship… these things aren’t what matter to God. We are what matter to God.
God isn’t the moralizing, perfectionist super-ego wanting us to feel guilty
for not following the party line. God is Eternity, the Source of all Life,
perfect and endless Love, the giver of every good gift, the Web of Existence,
the Whole of which we are each a part, the All-in-all.
Not having a certain ritual or symbol isn’t what limits us… our thoughts
and attitudes are what limit us. And God wants our thoughts and attitudes to
be joyous, life-giving, positive. Because that’s what God is; and that’s what
we are meant to be.
This is the Good News! Amen.