Clean Heart or Clean Hands?

Mark 7:1-8

August 30, 2015

So Jesus is telling us not to wash our hands before we eat.

I guess someone could read this and understand that.

This is not about washing hands necessarily,
But this is about traditions like washing hands.

We love traditions and rituals.

In our families and in our churches.

Worshiping, Communion and Baptism are traditions

human precepts that bring God into our lives.

We have traditions at home that remind us that

we’re part of the family they can be

Eating, praying together, watching TV, vacation spots,

even greetings we use when we see each other

Almost anything we repeat.

Church and home traditions can ground us.

They give us stability and something to return to.

Our Church traditions can help us

understand the constancy

And eternal nature of God.

We do them over and over again,

much the same as people thousands of years ago did.

Confessions help us remember that we

are all sinful and need forgiveness.

Baptism reminds us that we are children of God.

Communion helps us remember a score

of things: God’s love, presence, sacrifice,

abundance… So many things that

it would take too long to say that the

tradition says it for us.

Traditions bind people together

They bind generations together.

They are a great way to worship and remember God.

But the problem with traditions is that you can do them so often,

they can be done without thinking,

and sometimes we forget the meaning behind the tradition,

and then we only remember the tradition.

And sometimes the tradition becomes more important

to people than what the tradition was trying to help us remember.

So then the question becomes  “are we doing the traditions right?” rather than “are we living the life that God wants us to live”.

The Pharisees did this with the rules of the Torah.

The hand washing, the processes with

food and with cleanliness and all the rest.

Now washing before eating is probably a good idea hygienically,

but that wasn’t actually the main idea of it.

It was a ritual.

It was an imitation of the priest who would wash his

hands and feet before going into the temple.

It was there signify our uncleanliness

it stressed our humility and our humanity

before the awesome otherness of God.

But not everyone who did the human tradition

of washing hands remembered their own

humility and uncleanliness.

Like humans tend to do, they started to forget what it meant

it started to lose its real meaning,

and they started to do the opposite of what the

tradition was for and  believe that

they were better than others just for performing the ritual.

eventually, these rules and traditions

overshadowed God’s will.

And to the people, they became God’s will.

Eventually, the religious leaders only took account of

whether these rules and traditions were being followed correctly.

And not only that, they were replacing some of

the basic rules of God with their traditions.

Just like Jesus said, they took the commandment

of “honor your father and mother”

But instead of helping people do that,

the temple was saying that adult children

could declare what they would use to support their parents

“an offering to God” and not have to share it with their parents.

The traditions that were supposed to point to God’s will

and remind people of God’s will and guidance.

But people ended up doing the traditions

and thinking they were done.

They could just do all the traditions right

They could get all the hand washing

and worshipping and sacrificing right

and still do the fornication, theft,

murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness

and everything else that Jesus mentioned.

What Jesus was telling the people that were scolding him

for not doing the traditions right was

that God was more interested in what came

out of us than the traditions that went in us.

Then, you think that would all change with Christianity.

But the Christian church has spent most of its time

doing the same thing, being preoccupied with traditions

rather than God’s will and how we treated one another.

The church spent its first few thousand years

discussing the right way to worship

instead of why we worship,

How we should do communion

and who should be allowed to get to communion

rather than what we should take away from communion.

Who can be baptized and whether we should

sprinkle or dunk or pour rather than

what the waters of baptism can do for us.

The church of Luther’s time was busy

making sure that the rituals of the church were done right

and by the right people, and yet,

the church felt comfortable ripping off

the poor Christians by demanding indulgences from them

to pay for their expensive churches and extravagant lifestyles.

And today, even Lutherans have more discussions in our churches

about the version of the Lord’s Prayer,

the version of the bible to use,

the kind of worship we have

whether or not we should kneel during communion

rather than what God is doing in our lives,

how we are caring for God’s kingdom,

what we should be doing in the world.

And traditions can still get in the way.

our traditions can still become a substitution

for what we’re supposed to be doing.

They can placate us into thinking that we’re

doing all that God wants us to do.

Even the sacraments can do that.

  

I think here of the scene from the end of the

If you share in the tradition of baptism like Michael Corleone,
you're doing it wrong.

God Father movie where it shows the

baptism of Michael Corleone’s nephew,

Michael Corleone is the god father of the child,

and he is asked if he rejects Satan

and the powers of this world, he says yes

and the child is baptized.

But then the scene of the baptism is interspersed with scenes

of the murder of four enemies that Michael Corleone has

killed by his people while the baptism is going on.

Complete disconnect.

Those traditions he practices

should do something, change his heart.

But actually, the ritual is a substitute for real change.

His religion is only about what is going in

and not what is coming out of him.

Now that’s an extreme example,

of what Jesus is talking about, but it’s still true.

Our traditions are meant to show us God.

Our repetition of it should reveal

our true state before God,

and our short comings,

traditions should help us grow

they help God change our hearts.

But our traditions don’t save us.

God’s love and forgiveness saves us.

  

Our theme for the next few weeks is growing.
The season after Pentecost is the green season

and the time that we focus on growing

in love towards one another and in faith in God.

Growing in our faith means

remembering that our traditions are for us, not God.

Growing in faith means

Knowing that God doesn’t want ritually clean hands.

God wants clean and open hearts.

Growing in faith means that our traditions

should often make us uncomfortable

when our actions don’t meet with what they teach.

And Growing in faith means taking a stronger account of

what comes out of us, how we treat others,

how we act in the world,

rather than if we’re enjoying our traditions

or “being fed” as people say now a days.

It sometimes means challenging us

to give up some of our beloved traditions 

in order to understand God’s will for us.

It sometimes means giving up things that we love

in order to help the next generation

hear the word of God in a new way.

Growing means we can still wash our hands,

but realizing that only God can make us clean.