What kind of person are you?
Do you obey the letter of the law no matter what, or do you obey the spirit of the law?
Do you use the letter of the law to hurt other people?
Do you manipulate the letter of the law to help yourself?
This is the question Jesus is dealing with in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus says if you do those two things you are a hypocrite.
There is a traffic circle right next to the church on Ringling Blvd. and Palm Ave.; I am sure you all know it, because it’s the only way to get from our parking lot on Strawberry Hill to church is to cross the street at that traffic circle. I have a question for you: Did you use the cross walks today when you crossed that street? The letter of the law commands that you use the cross walks. If you don’t, you could be ticketed, or worse get hit by a car. The rule to use the cross walk is there for your protection; it is there to give you the right of way, so cars stop.
Let’s say, hypothetically, I always obey the traffic laws and use the cross walks, but the only reason I do so is that I wouldn’t want to be seen breaking the law in public. After all, I am a priest, and I need to set an example. But when no one is looking, I put my elderly parent into a terrible nursing home, where the care is no good, where she is unhappy, and I use the money I have saved in not caring properly for my parent to fund a pet project of mine at church, maybe a softball team. By all appearances I would be a righteous man, but, I would be a terrible son, and totally unrighteous.
This scenario is very similar to what is happening in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus’ disciples begin to eat without properly washing their hands; the pharisees decide that this is totally unacceptable behavior and question Jesus. Their question means more than it says, when they ask, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?”
What they are saying to Jesus is: What kind of an awful teacher are you? These people who you are training don’t even know the basic rules to eat without having dirty hands! It’s obvious to us your reputation for being an incredible teacher, preacher, and miracle worker is a total overstatement.
Jesus’ response to them is wonderful, but unfortunately not included in what we read today. His response is in verses 9-13, which are key! The Pharisees, who were so shocked at the lack of clean hands, were “allowing people to make a vow declaring their goods holy, thereby exempting them from sharing them with their elderly parents.” That is a breach of the fifth commandment to honor your father and mother.
“Jesus attacks not the Pharisees’ religious theory but their inconsistency with that theory in practice: their love for the law had led them (like some modern Christians) to such attention to its legal details that it created loopholes for them to violate the spirit of the law.”
Then, as Jesus explains this confrontation to his disciples, he says to them that what you put into yourself (speaking about food and nothing else) cannot defile you, because anything that goes into the stomach is at some point expelled from the body, but it is what comes out of your heart that defiles you, and he even lists the types of behaviors that come from within each of us, that defile us, and block our relationship with God. Thanks be to God for Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away all those defilements when we turn toward Him and repent of our wrongdoing.
In the epistle from James, we receive good advice for overcoming these defilements. With God’s help, as is our baptismal covenant, we need to do the things James suggests. We can “be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger,” we can “be doers of the word and not hearers only.” James suggests that we bridle our tongues, and care for the disadvantaged, and to keep ourselves unstained from the world.
I am proud to be a part of a church that does a lot of these things. We have numerous people who visit those who cannot be here on Sunday morning, and bring them the sacrament. Our priests all visit the hospitals almost every day to bring the sacrament to those who are sick. Countless dollars from our discretionary funds have been spent to help those in need.
The Church has really turned the practice of sacred money on its head. The congregation gives regularly to this church and this church, in turn, uses some of that money to help fellow parishioners in need, to help those in our community in need, and even to help people far away who are in need. We say within the Eucharist prayer every day here at Redeemer, the language of sacrificial offering to God. The elements themselves in the Eucharist are paid for by the offerings of each of you!
So when you hear the celebrant say “we earnestly desire thy fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving,” or “here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee,” or “We celebrate the memorial of our redemption, O Father, in this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Recalling his death, resurrection, and ascension, we offer you these gifts.” We are offering to God the gifts of our lives so that he may sanctify them and offer them back to us, so that we would go out and do the work he gives us to do, love God and serve God, by caring for His people and His creation.
That is the spirit of God’s law. That all we do, all day long, is an offering to God. When we give all we are, and all we do, to God daily, we live by the spirit of all of God’s laws, and we live a life consecrated to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Christian M. Wood
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
15th Sunday after Pentecost
2 September 2018