CLICK HERE for a worship video for September 1
Sermon for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost – September 1, 2024
James 1:17-27, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
As we come to September and get closer to autumn, you can bet that cold and flu season is just around the corner. In fact, we’re getting reports from our kids that on college campuses it is already well underway. One of our sons and our niece have both started off the school year at Washington State University with nasty bugs.
There are some preventative measures you can take to avoid getting sick. You can take vitamin C. You can get a flu shot, which sometimes kind of helps. You can avoid sick people, being especially careful to not use their fork or their toothbrush, which you probably shouldn’t do anyway. And, of course, you should wash your hands – frequently and thoroughly. These are all good preventative measures to avoid catching something.
The Pharisees in our gospel reading for today practiced some preventative measures of their own. But they weren’t worried about catching a cold or the flu. The Pharisees weren’t concerned about becoming physically sick. Instead, they were concerned about becoming spiritually sick.
The Pharisees, along with most devout Jews, established a whole set of religious practices they put in place to preserve their spiritual health. They developed a whole set of rules above and beyond God’s commandments which they thought would help them avoid getting spiritually sick. They were to keep themselves separate from others who had questionable moral or spiritual health. They wouldn’t eat anything from the market unless it was ritually washed and dedicated to God. The utensils and pots and pans they used were similarly “purified” through ritual washing. And, of course, they washed their hands. This wasn’t to get rid of germs – they didn’t even know about germs! This was about ritual purity, not hygiene. All of this was in place to keep them from becoming spiritually sick. These practices had become well-established and widely practiced among the Jewish people as a sort of preventative measure against the sickness of sin.
So imagine their shock when they saw some of Jesus’ disciples digging into their meal without going through these proper rituals first! This was the spiritual equivalent of having someone sneeze on your plate or cough in your face! The Pharisees approached Jesus about this. They asked him: “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” How could they be so careless? They wanted an explanation.
Jesus never does directly answer their question. Instead of explaining why his disciples don’t do the ritual hand washing, he instead uses their question as an opportunity to challenge their assumptions about spiritual health.
First, Jesus points out that these Pharisees aren’t as spiritually healthy as they think they are! “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition!” Jesus says, turning the tables on them. A few verses from this section are dropped, so we don’t hear the exact charge in our reading for today, but in the omitted verses Jesus accuses them of breaking the fourth commandment. He accuses them of using some of the traditions of the elders as a religious loophole to avoid taking care of their parents, violating the commandment to honor your father and mother. These Pharisees are bragging about being as healthy as a horse and pointing a disgusted finger at others while they have chicken pox all over their faces! And so Jesus rightly calls them hypocrites.
Jesus then goes on to challenge their assumptions even more. You see, these Pharisees seem to believe that sin is something you catch from others. They seem to think that you get it by being around others who have it. But Jesus tells them that it’s more complicated than that. “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile,” Jesus says. Sin isn’t something you catch! It isn’t something floating around outside of you that you breathe in. Instead, it already resides in every human heart. “It is from within,” Jesus says, “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 are what defile a person.”
These Pharisees were always on the lookout for ways they might be spiritually infected by others. They pointed at Jesus’ disciples as being contagious, and all the while that bug was already there within their own hearts. They thought sin was a virus, but Jesus teaches them that it is genetic.
What does this mean for us?
Sometimes we do need to be careful about the air we breathe. Sometimes as Christians we do need to separate ourselves from certain people or situations or environments. Just as addicts often need a whole new friend group in order to stay clean and sober, sinners need to be careful about the company we keep and the circles we move in and the media we consume so as not to make our spiritual sickness worse. There are things we do need to stay away from, things we need to avoid, things we need to wash our hands of completely so as not to exacerbate our symptoms. We are called again and again in scripture – even in the New Testament – to be holy, to be godly, to be careful about how we live. Our second reading for today concludes with a call to keep ourselves “unstained by the world.”
But at the same time, we need to remember that sin and evil aren’t just “out there.” They aren’t just floating around outside of us. It isn’t only found in other people, those people we avoid, those people we judge. It’s already right here in our hearts.
As the great Soviet dissident and writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn once wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but right through every human heart.” This sounds to me a lot like what Jesus said to the Pharisees, and what he’s saying to us today. There are things we can and should do to limit our exposure to that which would lead us astray, to be sure. But we cannot escape what is already in our hearts.
So what are we to do? What do we do with these hearts of ours that Jesus says are already infected with sin and evil? What are we to do with this gospel reading?
I’m privy to a lot of medical situations people endure. People often come to me with prayer requests when they are undergoing medical testing or struggling with frustrating symptoms. There often comes a point when they finally get a correct diagnosis. And when that correct diagnosis comes, even if it isn’t great, there is usually a great sense of relief. “At least now we know,” people say. I know a kid who wasn’t gaining weight like he should. He had tummy troubles and potty issues. He went years with these symptoms before finally getting correctly diagnosed with Celiac disease. This isn’t fun to have, but it was also a relief to know what the real problem was. “At least now we know,” his mother said. Once you know what the problem is, you can start thinking about what is going to make you better. Getting a correct diagnosis was the first step in getting his life back.
Our gospel reading is notably deficient in actual gospel – that is, there is nothing that is explicitly and obviously good news in it. But the beginning of the good news is there in the accurate diagnosis of our spiritual sickness. Spiritually speaking, we all have a genetic heart condition. This isn’t the gospel, but it is the beginning of the good news, because now at least we know! Now we know what we’re dealing with. Now we know the truth about ourselves. Now we know the real problem.
Now we know that our problem is more than skin deep, and so we need something more than hand sanitizer or a topical lotion. Now we know that our illness is more than viral, and so we know that all the preventative measures in the world will not ultimately save us. Now we know the full truth about our condition, and so now we are in a position to receive the only thing that can make us well.
Why could the disciples eat with unwashed hands? Because they were eating with Jesus, whose grace meant that they were already clean. Why didn’t they need those spiritual preventative measures? Because they were with Jesus, who had come to make them well through his saving love.
This same Jesus comes to us today. He makes us clean by his word of forgiveness, where he sanitizes us anew by his grace. He comes in the cleansing Word and water which are poured over a new brother in Christ today who is receiving the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Jesus comes to us in his Holy Supper to give us a blood transfusion as we literally receive him – in, with, and under the bread and wine – that he would literally enter into the veins that lead directly to our hearts.
Today, through Word and Sacrament, our Lord Jesus is creating new hearts in us. By his presence here with us today, we are made clean. By the grace he pours out for us, we are made well. He is the cure for our sin-sick hearts, and as we receive him today, we get our lives back – today and forever.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church