Proper 17B
In the name of God, our light and our truth. Amen.
It’s hard to hear this teaching through the mind of one whose experiences include having survived a pandemic. It’s hard to hear Jesus defending the disciples for not washing their hands before eating or washing the pots or cups or all the other things that were a part of the moral teachings of Judaism in the first century.
The thing is, in the midst of the pandemic, there was no moral judgement attached to people who became sick with COVID. It was an undesirable and too-often tragic thing and something we wouldn’t wish on anyone. But there often was, in the height of the pandemic, moral judgement attached to people who chose not to take basic steps to protect themselves and others against the threats of the virus.
So, hearing this story through the lens of the last four years that we’ve shared, it’s hard not to side with the Pharisees. For us, today, the actions of the disciples seem irresponsible.
We are people of faith who look to the teachings of the Holy Scriptures to shape us into the clearer image of God in the world. But one of the most dangerous things we can do is to impose ourselves and our own experiences on the teachings of 20 centuries ago. It’s a temptation that just about every movement for justice and progress faces. We long for a future that grows beyond the past, so we are tempted to vilify the past. Sure – we can see the errors of the past and the ways that our current understandings have enabled us to grow, but it’s unhelpful to make the past into an enemy. For one, it can’t be changed. But also, we have to assume that they were simply doing what they could with the information they had.
There’s a lot about the cultural understandings of the first century and earlier that would not only be foreign to us today, but that would be absolutely reprehensible. But the task of people of faith like us is not to justify that way of life at the expense of our own, but instead it’s to learn from their wisdom without abandoning our own.
The wisdom of Jesus’ teaching in this story is not that it’s unimportant to wash our hands. The wisdom is that the rule-makers and their rules were not, in and of themselves, arbiters of God’s grace. The love of God is not something we consume. It’s not something that we can conjure through our actions, on demand. Instead, the love of God is something already inside us. It’s part of the original software. It was built in from the beginning. It’s not something we can take in or earn, but it is something we can share. It is something we can show.
It's not what goes into us that can cause problems – it’s what can come out of us that can get in the way of living into our best relationship with God.
And that’s really what it’s all about. It’s been called a lot of things in the history of the faith: righteousness; holiness; the ancient Jewish leaders thought of it in terms of being clean or unclean – but by whatever name we’ve given to it through the years, really what it comes down to is living into our best relationship with God. The tools for that relationship are already there. But our task as people who strive for that relationship is to make it as honest and genuine as it can be – to make it a central part of who we are and how we understand ourselves and our interactions with the world.
That’s sort of what we’re hearing in the Letter of James today. “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” If all we do is hear the word of God – if all we do is passively receive it, we’re missing the point of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. God didn’t come into the world in the person of Jesus to put on a show for us to watch or even admire, but to inspire a truer way of living that would bring us closer to God.
From the first stories of creation the overarching focus of the Bible is of God longing for a deeper and more honest relationship with us. Through every interaction with humanity, God keeps striving to know us and to be known by us. There’s plenty that gets in the way of that in this world, but only one thing that makes it easier. It’s not what we read or what rituals we perform. It’s not learning or even checking off the attendance box at church. Even as much as James calls us to be “doers of the word”, it’s not even our acts of service and kindness that bring us closest to God. Those kinds of things can be tools for reaching the goal, but they’re not the actual relationship.
The only thing that actually makes our relationships with God more honest is stripping down to the center. Finding that most inherent, essential part of yourself that is God’s love, and owning it, and sharing it.
We’re told in Genesis that as God created each thing, God stepped back, and saw it, and proclaimed that it was good. The same thing happened when you were created. God saw you – before the weight of the world was thrown at you, before the distractions and the stress, before your sense of inadequacy took hold, before your questions and your doubts about your own worthiness crept in – God truly saw you and said: It’s good. This thing that I’ve done is good – so good that I’m giving it to the world. So good that I’m claiming it as my own and putting this little piece of me out there for everyone to enjoy.
That is what’s at our core. When we brush away all the rest of the debris and let our truest selves out into the world, that’s what it is. It is a little, tiny piece of the love of God formed into flesh. And that little, tiny piece, is enough to bring light into the world. And that light can help someone else see what’s most true in themselves – it can help them to find their own light. And soon, all of our light shines together and it starts to look a lot like God.
Washing your hands is fine. It’s good, even. But the love of God that lives in you doesn’t depend on that or anything else that we can do. It’s already there inside. It’s already shining in you and it’s already longing to shine even brighter through you.
Like the childhood song taught us, “Let it shine, let it shine,
let it shine.” Amen.
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