Here is tomorrow’s sermon.

Mark 8:27-38

 

Introduction
Among the new religions and churches you can find today is The
First Church Of Jesus Christ, Elvis. Their catchphrase is, “For unto you is
born this day in the city of Memphis
a Presley, which is Elvis the King.” Their picture of Elvis is rather Catholic:
the sacred heart is beating in his chest.

If you feel more Protestant, you could opt for The First Presleytarian
Church Of Elvis The Divine. And their picture of Elvis makes the recent
furore over Madonna singing suspended from a cross in Russia look
tame: Elvis is hanging on a cross made to look like a guitar.

Should you wish to be more political, you can join The Church Of The
Militant Elvis Party, who put up candidates in by-elections.

Why do I tell you this? Because this week, Elvis has
inspired my thinking for the sermon.

Now I’d better explain that before you either charge me with
heresy or ask some friendly doctors to section me. I’ve been reading a book
called ‘Velvet
Elvis’ by Rob Bell of Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan. The ‘Velvet
Elvis’ is a piece of art that Rob Bell owns. He makes the point that the artist
would be crazy if he said that his interpretation of Elvis were the final one
and that no-one else need waste their time painting him. So it is with the
Christian faith. We have the historic faith but we are forever ‘repainting’ it,
interpreting it for our day and circumstances.

And it’s his angle on Jesus’ time with his disciples at Caesarea Philippi. I want to
bounce off some of his insights to explore this key passage on discipleship.

1. Location
Well, the saga of our grumpy neighbour continues. He has
carried out his threat to complain to the Methodist circuit about us. They have
denied any responsibility by them or us for the oil spillage on his sacred
drive, but are paying up out of good neighbourliness. Meanwhile Mr Misery still
hasn’t sold his house after three months. We have found on the Internet someone
with his name who could well fit his description who is an auctioneer. And
wouldn’t that be an irony if it’s true? The auctioneer can’t sell his house!

And the mantra about property sales is of course the one
encapsulated in the title of the TV programme: ‘Location, Location,
Location’. A journey to Caesarea Philippi is the location for this
confession of faith [verse 27]. Here is where Jesus leads his disciples, and
Simon Peter in particular, to confess what their faith in him is.

Straight away we notice a difference. If you are Anglican by
background you are used to saying the Creed in worship on a Sunday morning. You
make the classic confession of faith in Jesus Christ during Christian worship
in a building dedicated to him.

But Jesus invites a confession of faith in him that is
located in the world. This is not just something for the Sabbath. It is
something for every day. Confessing faith in Jesus is not something we do in
the privacy of our own churches, so to speak, in our fortresses with the
drawbridge up. We confess him in the world. And if you think I’m making a
fanciful point out of the location issue, note the verse where the reading
ends:

‘Those who are ashamed of me and of my
words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also
be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’
[verse 38]

We confess Jesus in the world, in the midst of an
‘adulterous and sinful generation’. And that’s just why Caesarea Philippi is
important. Historically it was a place dedicated to worship of the god Pan. And
Pan being a half-man, half-goat figure, worship included some pretty decadent
practices with goats. There was also a cliff there with a giant crack that
became known as The Gates Of Hell, because people believed it was the place
where evil spirits would come to and go from the earth [Bell, p 132].

Jesus is not calling us to hide. He is calling us to the
risky occupation of confessing our faith in him right in the heart of a
depraved society. For us it is a culture that does not hold the marriage bed
pure but increasingly wants to normalise sexual perversions and sexualise small
children. It is a culture where drug
taking is respectable in social and sporting circles: everywhere but in
law. It is a world that believes not in self-denial but in the healing powers
of retail therapy. It is a society where many would rather sue than forgive,
and where violence rather than peace-making is used to decide disputes.

We are called to confess our faith in Jesus in our ‘Caesarea
Philippi’. We are called as his church not to be a private club that exists for
our own benefit but a counter-cultural group, who witness to the only One who
can heal the deep wounds of this world.

2. Person
In a past circuit we once decided to have a whole day where
the circuit ministers and circuit stewards went away and told each other their
stories of faith. It was meant to be the spiritual version of a team-building
exercise. The stories were highly varied, as you would expect – God works
uniquely in each of our lives. Some spoke of great things God had done in their
lives, some spoke of their struggles, some spoke of both.

But one person’s story saddened me greatly. A story of
wrongs done to this person that left all sorts of bitterness. And at the end all
this person said was that they had their beliefs. Bitterness and no Jesus. One
of life’s great tragedies.

In the story from Mark’s Gospel Jesus makes confession of
faith a personal thing. By that I don’t mean private. I mean that we confess
faith in a Person – Jesus himself. His opening question is, ‘Who do people say
that I am?’ [verse 27] And he refines that to, ‘But who do you say that I am?’
[verse 29]

The confession of faith is in Jesus – in who he is. Unlike
the person on the team-building day true Christian spirituality cannot avoid
the centrality of the Person of Jesus. And neither can we.

It’s easy even in church life to focus on almost anything
but Jesus. We concentrate on the mechanics and maintenance of keeping the
institution going. And somewhere Jesus gets forgotten. Methodists have got to a
point of finding it so hard to speak of him that Conference commissioned a
report and study course entitled Time
To Talk Of God to help address this problem.

The tragic irony is that we too are in a culture where
people can give their answers to the question of who Jesus is. Just as the
disciples heard people say ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still
others, one of the prophets.’ [verse 28] so there can still be found genuine
interest in Jesus today. They may not give the answers we believe are right
about him. They may see him as no more than a spiritual teacher or guru; they
may well see him as one option among many in the supermarket of faith, to be mixed with
other options.

But the opportunities to confess Jesus in this world are
there, if we take them aright. John Drane
explains
(pp 41-89) that people who are no longer ‘religious’ in the traditional or
conventional sense still find ways to be spiritual. They try to make everyday
life sacred, so when someone dies you find roadside shrines, as
happened locally when on 3^rd September a twenty-one-year-old
biker died after colliding into a lamp post on Victoria Road South. For others, adopting
a healthy disciplined lifestyle is effectively their spirituality. From the
health club to Body Shop, it’s there. The discipline that believers have
traditionally imposed upon themselves is now about looking after one’s body or
the earth. And for another group it’s a high-energy enthusiastic approach that
looks for mystical, non-rational experiences as the key to life.

Now if that is our world (alongside the somewhat hostile
description I gave in the first point) then it is a challenging but hopeful
place in which to confess Jesus. Biblical faith is not about dividing between
the sacred and the secular: as has been well said, ‘The only thing that is
secular is sin.’ Rather, with the Psalmist we affirm that ‘The earth is the
Lord’s and everything in it’ (Psalm 24:1). We follow a Jesus who gave most of
his teaching outside the synagogue in the world and who as the ascended Lord is
present throughout creation.

Likewise, we know the value of spiritual discipline. Jesus
himself encouraged it in the Sermon on the Mount – he never in Matthew 6 said
‘If you pray’, ‘If you give’ or ‘If you fast’, he said ‘When …’ A vicar called Steve Hollinghurst sets up
stalls called ‘Regenerate’ at Mind, Body And Spirit festivals. He explains that
they are exploring spirituality from the Christian tradition and gives talks on
‘Discovering Meditation With The Christian Mystics’ [article
here]. And there is certainly the strong tradition of deep spiritual
experience in following Jesus. In the Methodist tradition it goes all the way
back to John Wesley’s conversion experience, feeling his heart ‘strangely
warmed’ and his later insistence that if you are converted you will in some way
experience God.

We must certainly acknowledge the faults of the Christian
Church that have led people to reject us as a place to find worthwhile
spiritual experience, but what if we approached people humbly (even
repentantly?) with our confession of Christ?

3. Failure
We confess our faith in Jesus the Messiah in the world. And
that’s the point Peter gets too, as well. ‘You are the Messiah,’ he says at
Caesarea Philippi [verse 29].

But there’s always a shock with Jesus. On other occasions in
Mark’s Gospel when people have recognised who he is, he has told them to be
quiet. That’s surprising or shocking enough. But now we see why. Peter – let
alone others – cannot accept Jesus’ description of his messianic mission. Not
military victory but betrayal, suffering and death. Then resurrection.

However we may explain Peter’s reaction – that it doesn’t
fit his ideas of who the Messiah is, or that he just doesn’t want to see a dear
friend suffer – Jesus’ gentle pastoral retort of ‘Get behind me Satan!’ is
followed by the explanation, ‘For you are setting your mind not on divine
things but on human things!’ [verse 33]

Now I’ve already said in my first point that confessing
faith in Jesus in our ‘Caesarea Philippi’ will lead us to conflict – and by
implication, into suffering. So I’m not at this point going to concentrate on
what Jesus says about denying ourselves, taking up the cross and following him.
I simply want to concentrate on Peter’s mistake and Jesus’ correction of him.

Now as I said, Jesus was hardly the model of pastoral
sensitivity in correcting Peter: I don’t think I’ve ever said, ‘Get behind me,
Satan!’ to a church member. I may have thought it, but I’ve never said it!
Although I came close last weekend when someone kept telling our little girl to
sit down in – of all things – an all-age service!

Peter needs the correction, and if you’re of a sensitive
disposition you could say it’s harsh. But – he doesn’t dispense with his
services. There is no hint with Jesus of, ‘You’ve made such a complete mess of
things, Peter, that there’s no way I can continue to have you as a disciple.’
Rather, the dressing-down Jesus gives him is precisely so that he can continue as a disciple. It’s
discipline for the sake of spiritual growth.

So for those of us who think, I’ve made such a hash of my
Christian life that I don’t see how God can possibly use me, it may be that we
receive some divine discipline. But the discipline of Christ is not some kind
of locking us up and throwing away the key as some Christians seem to fear,
it’s Jesus saying, ‘I love you so much that I need to bring you back on track.’
Is this not what we do with our own children? And how much more is it what God
does with us?

And it gives us freedom to fail. Some of us need permission
to fail. We’re too scared to try things unless there is a guarantee of success.
We are perfectionists and nothing is allowed to go wrong. If it does, we can’t
live with our consciences and we hold back from trying again.

But Peter is the disciple who fails in his confession, yet
Jesus by his correction picks him up and sets him back on the road.

There are some who think Peter himself expressly wanted
other Christians to know this. There is an ancient tradition, coming from
someone called Papias, that when Mark wrote his Gospel he based a lot of it on
the reminiscences of Peter. And if that’s the case, then Peter certainly didn’t
paint himself in a flattering light.

One of the most liberating things I’ve ever read about
ministry was the comment of an American pastor. He said he’d rather try ten
things in a church and have nine of them fail in order to discover the one
thing that stuck. I guess it’s the old adage that it’s easier to steer a moving
car than a stationary one. In other biblical terms it’s about not hiding your
talent in the ground. Take a risk! God is a God of grace and new beginnings. He
will correct us if we are open. [It could have much to say to us here at St Augustine’s as we hold
our ‘vision meeting’ after this service.]

Our confession of faith can be – usually is! – an imperfect
one. We may have human things more in mind than divine things. But put it in
the hands of Christ and be open to what he wants to do with it. He knows far
better than we do that we are not simply ‘human beings’, we are also ‘human
becomings’. As Paul says in Philippians 1, God who began a good work in us will
complete it.

Technorati Tags: Elvis+Presley, church, Velvet+Elvis, Rob+Bell, Caesarea+Philippi, Jesus+Christ, discipleship, confession, faith, Methodist, Time+To+Talk+Of+God, John+Drane, spirituality, Body+Shop, Steve+Hollinghurst

Well, no more postings on this blog offering invitations to join the private beta testing of eBible, because it is now public and out of beta. If you haven’t had a look yet, surf by and see what you think.

Technorati Tags: eBible

Well, no more postings on this blog offering invitations to join the private beta testing of eBible, because it is now public and out of beta. If you haven’t had a look yet, surf by and see what you think.

Technorati Tags: eBible

Fourteen years as a minister and this morning is the first time I’ll have ever taken a primary school assembly!. Here are a couple of resources: this is a free site sponsored by SPCK, and Assemblies Online from Damaris requires a subscription.

Technorati Tags: school+assemblies

I found this article in the Christian Century courtesy of Maggi Dawn. It tells the story of six American Protestant theologians who have converted to Rome, to a large extent in frustration at liberal Protestantism. Maggi asks whether going Catholic is the answer, and for me it would not. But the metaphor ‘living in the ruins’ comes from one of the theologians who for a long time felt that however disgruntled he was in Anglicanism, his call was like that of Nehemiah in Jerusalem. This all assumes that God has led you there to be part of the rebuilding.

Anyone who knows me well is aware that I manage to exist in Methodism by being somewhat on the margins, even though it is the tradition in which I grew up. But my postgrad work in ecclesiology (and my long term interest in that doctrine) means that while I can probably find points of disagreement in all the traditions. The only one I entirely agree with is the Church Of Dave – and even that has adjusted its convictions at times!

Nevertheless, many of us do face the issues of ‘living in the ruins’. Like Nehemiah we need to know the call of God. Nothing else will sustain us. Earlier this year when he was still President of the Methodist Conference Tom Stuckey said he believed there was a new Pentecost coming for Methodism. It is precisely that kind of word many of us need to hear. And we probably need to hear it not only from people we trust but ‘for ourselves’. Coming as I do from the evangelical-charismatic part of the Church, I have been in the midst of a wider Christian culture that has been expecting ‘revival’ ever since the mid-1990s.

It’s that waiting without revival that led me to ponder the Old Testament texts that help Israel to live ‘in exile’ and see them as critical. But I’ve found them more useful for general Christian witness in the world than for survival (let alone thriving) in a denomination in which I find very little spiritual sustenance. Maybe I’m just not praying and listening well.

In some way linked to this, my main church at Broomfield will this coming weekend be having a Family Friendly Church Weekend with Mike Bossingham. This will be extremely important in deciding whether we rebuild, not in a material sense but spiritually and relationally. The odd prayer for us would be very welcome.

Technorati Tags: Christian+Century, Maggi+Dawn, ecclesiology, church

Here is tomorrow’s sermon.

Mark 7:1-23

Introduction
If you want to know the cause of the water shortage, I have the answer. It’s not July’s heat wave of not-so-blessèd memory. It’s not global warming.

It’s our daughter. No, at three and a half she isn’t old enough yet to be booking the bathroom for endless baths, showers and personal pampering. But ever since she learned to take herself to the toilet she has developed a fascination with washing her hands. Debbie says she has her first Obsessive Compulsive Disorder! If we’re not careful, the tap would drain our water tank and she likes to use enough soap to bathe an elephant.

And we have a Gospel story today about washing hands. But we would be very much mistaken if we thought this was a story about personal hygiene. It’s about ritual washing. It’s about Jesus having no regard for an oral tradition that had developed in Judaism to fill in the missing gaps where the laws given to Moses didn’t cover every eventuality:

‘In areas where the Law was silent the tradition was vocal, drawing the conclusions felt to be implicit in the mandates of the written code. The result was a vast legal complex … [that] was regarded as binding upon all Israel.’
[William Lane, The Gospel According To Mark, p245]

For disregarding this tradition, Jesus was in trouble. For undermining it, he was regarded as a threat. For rejecting the tradition – well, he was spiritually seditious.

So our story is one of conflict. But how might a dispute between Jesus and the God Police have anything to say to us? Let’s follow the story and see.

1. Charge
In mid-June Debbie and I were elated when our next door neighbours put up their house for sale. We have been progressively less elated every time we come back up the drive and still see the sign saying ‘For sale’ rather than ‘Sold’.

We were even less happy four weeks ago when the husband came knocking on our door. He had noticed oil marks on his precious drive when he came home from work that afternoon. They weren’t there when he left in the morning, he said. It must be our fault. How could he sell his house when we were making the place look like a council estate?

We knew it wasn’t us, but last week he complained to the circuit about us. He also told the circuit (not us) that he didn’t like the fact that we take our black wheelie bin out on Sunday night, not early on Monday morning. He has taken to moving it off the edge of the drive onto the pavement – in clear contravention of council instructions and in our opinion causing a dangerous obstruction for the elderly people who walk along our road to and from their residential home.

Perhaps he thought that a bunch of Christians would roll over meekly. If he thought that, he was wrong. We have rejected his allegations and our superintendent minister has supported our stance.

Well, Jesus didn’t roll over easily at the accusations thrown at him. He is challenged for his disciples’ failure to follow an oral tradition that was essential to the convictions of the Pharisees [ibid, p 247]. And as far as Jesus is concerned, they are hypocrites. You don’t roll over for hypocrites. If your obsession is with keeping up appearances by outwardly following tradition but don’t match that with a heart that is close to God [verse 6] then don’t expect Jesus to be quiet.

And the parallels are there in church life. How easy is it for us to major on minors and neglect what is of prime importance, namely our relationship with God (from which everything of worth flows)? Think about some of the contentious issues Christians sometimes argue about and you being to wonder whether Jesus might not have a few words for us. I think back with pain to my first appointment and remember some of the things that made me unpopular in certain circles:

I was told that only the minister was ever allowed to stand behind the communion rail (although this rule used to be miraculously suspended for the flower arrangers). There was a militant insistence that you didn’t kneel at the communion rail until everybody else was there – despite the fact that the church building was cramped and it took not so much communion stewards, more like traffic police to manage the flow of people returning to their pews and those going forward. You weren’t allowed to put nails in a wooden cross on Good Friday. You couldn’t pick hymns from anything other than Hymns And Psalms.  And you certainly couldn’t suggest ripping out the pews and making a worship area more flexible.

None of these objections, in my opinion, had anything to do with Gospel imperatives. But they had everything to do with promoting style over substance. Never once did any of those who raised their loud protests against me want to know more about prayer or about sharing their faith.

It’s altogether too easy to put on an impressive outward show. We can fool not just those around us, but we tell the lies so often that we end up deceiving even ourselves. But we cannot fool God. One day sooner or later we discover that the Jesus whom we assume endorses our religious activities in fact our most fervent opponent.

So let us ask searching questions about our priorities. Are they about nurturing the heart towards God and sharing God’s heart for a broken world? Or are they about maintaining structures and putting on a good show? Only one of these approaches will give pleasure to God.

2. Counter-Charge
Jesus goes on the offensive: ‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition,’ he says (verse 8). Not only that, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!’ (verse 9). In the battle between human tradition and God’s commandments, God loses, says Jesus. And yet you claim you are his most faithful followers and representatives!

To prove his point, Jesus goes on to adduce a shocking case. The Ten Commandments say we should honour our parents. A particular expression of that is when they are elderly and infirm. Yet some in Jesus’ day diverted some money that would have helped their parents by dishonestly dedicating it to religious work.

So do we use our traditions to negate the commands of God, as Jesus charged the Pharisees? I know my father thought that, and once got in trouble with a superintendent minister for suggesting that Methodism placed more emphasis on ‘CPD’ [the Constitutional Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church – our nearest equivalent to Anglican canon law]. Dad thought we had little moral superiority over the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned! Certainly at college we faced an exam in CPD but not in biblical or doctrinal matters. And Methodism can certainly get hung up on matters that are natural consequences of the Gospel at times. It was popular to say at college, ‘You can doubt the Virgin Birth, you can doubt the Resurrection, but God help you if you doubt infant baptism or feminism’.

But more seriously, do we invent traditions and practices in order to avoid the Gospel and commands of God? I don’t know that we’re always so blatantly devious as to invent a tradition like ‘Corban’ (verse 11), which sounds like a religious tax dodge. But I think we put other things in place so that we miss the imperative of the Gospel.

What do I mean? Well sometimes it’s about the expectations, atmosphere and culture of a congregation. The old criticism that churches can be little more than religious clubs is a serious allegation and it has a lot of truth behind it. We make for a lopsided church that is all about care for one another but has little active focus upon the world – except for the enthusiasts. I’ve heard it said that we shouldn’t concentrate on people outside the faith if it offends the faithful. Yet we have spent decades concentrating on the faithful and where has it got us?

We so fill our time with social activities that the ‘club’ epithet is altogether too well-deserved. We hide in perpetual business meetings. Or we duplicate within the church things that are done perfectly well outside but we prefer to go for the church version and stay in our little castle, behind the moat and with the drawbridge up. In all these ways and more we create a culture – our traditions – that helps us negate the commands of God.

All these reasons and more are why I called a year ago for a simpler structure for church. What we basically need in church life for the sake of the Gospel is fairly simple stuff. We gather on Sundays for worship and inspiration. We meet in small groups for worship, pastoral care, learning about the faith and mission. We hold such other meetings as are necessary for business and oversight. Beyond that there isn’t a lot we need. Most stuff beyond these bare necessities is extraneous and serves either deliberately or unwittingly to keep us away from the mission of God.

I believe Jesus calls us to a tough choice between the unhealthy traditional culture that strangles the spiritual life like a weed and a simpler, more radically prioritised vision of church that is set free to share in God’s mission and be faithful to the Gospel. Which way will we go?

3. True Defilement
Sometimes you can’t allow yourself just to be caught up in a perpetual argument. Not long ago I was being regularly attacked on the Internet by a militant atheist. For a while I answered his points, but eventually it became clear that an ongoing debate was going to be fruitless, because his attitude was arrogant and he had little desire to listen.

And it strikes me it’s a bit like that with Jesus in this story. He has his spat with the scribes and Pharisees, but after having answered their charge and countered with his own allegations, he turns away. In verse 14 he stops talking to them and starts addressing the crowd. Rather than being bogged down in a tedious argument, he uses the disagreement to make a teaching point to those who are listening and watching. In a way, he’s giving an answer to the scribes and Pharisees if only they would listen, too.

And his point is basic and stark: true spiritual defilement isn’t about failing to wash your hands in the same way that a priest would, nor is it about clean and unclean food. At best those are but outward signs of the inner state. And it’s the heart that matters. For there is the evidence of whether we follow the commandments of God.

‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, 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 defile a person.’
[verses 20-23]

Material purity isn’t the issue: moral purity is. It’s right through the Scriptures, yet it doesn’t seem to have been obvious to any of Jesus’ hearers – religious professionals, general crowd or his own disciples. You can keep all the religious rules you like and look good in the eyes of those who find such things impressive. But none of those rituals on their own will cleanse the pollution of the heart. And straightening out inner corruption is a much higher priority than how we wash our hands or what food we eat.

Or in our terms, you might say that living a winsome, holy life is the priority, rather than worrying about the rules of our denomination or putting on a good religious show that impresses only the shallow.

And it isn’t just about the big issues. Yes, we are to abstain from violence. We are to keep the marriage bed pure – Jesus’ prohibitions against both fornication and adultery mean he upholds a sexual ethic that maintains fidelity within the marriage covenant and celibacy outside.

But he also includes the everyday matters like ‘envy, slander, pride [and] folly’. And maybe these are the ones where our witness is most regularly compromised. In envy we look altogether too much like our consumerist world. In slander, we speak with sly digs, character assassinations and tawdry gossip that make us like small-scale versions of the gutter press. In pride and folly we forget our need of grace and that our boasting should only ever be of Christ.

The snag for me in the reading is that Jesus doesn’t propose an answer. That comes elsewhere in his teaching and in the writings of Paul, John and others. And it’s the usual basic Christian stuff about confession, repentance and co-operating with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

But maybe Mark ends the story here deliberately to challenge us. The radical message of Jesus is that the ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ approach that makes us look like real-life Hyacinth Buckets is neither funny nor sad. It’s an outrage against the Gospel. He is challenging us to prioritise on the call to holiness and the mission of God.

Too much of our society today is all about surface and little about substance. What hope is there if we go down that road? Our world needs a radical, courageous and deep challenge from those of us who claim to be the disciples of Jesus to go below the surface and address the heart.

We need spiritual heart surgery, and so does our world.

Technorati Tags: tradition, Gospel, holiness, church, Jesus

Here is tomorrow’s sermon.

Mark 7:1-23

Introduction
If you want to know the cause of the water shortage, I have the answer. It’s not July’s heat wave of not-so-blessèd memory. It’s not global warming.

It’s our daughter. No, at three and a half she isn’t old enough yet to be booking the bathroom for endless baths, showers and personal pampering. But ever since she learned to take herself to the toilet she has developed a fascination with washing her hands. Debbie says she has her first Obsessive Compulsive Disorder! If we’re not careful, the tap would drain our water tank and she likes to use enough soap to bathe an elephant.

And we have a Gospel story today about washing hands. But we would be very much mistaken if we thought this was a story about personal hygiene. It’s about ritual washing. It’s about Jesus having no regard for an oral tradition that had developed in Judaism to fill in the missing gaps where the laws given to Moses didn’t cover every eventuality:

‘In areas where the Law was silent the tradition was vocal, drawing the conclusions felt to be implicit in the mandates of the written code. The result was a vast legal complex … [that] was regarded as binding upon all Israel.’
[William Lane, The Gospel According To Mark, p245]

For disregarding this tradition, Jesus was in trouble. For undermining it, he was regarded as a threat. For rejecting the tradition – well, he was spiritually seditious.

So our story is one of conflict. But how might a dispute between Jesus and the God Police have anything to say to us? Let’s follow the story and see.

1. Charge
In mid-June Debbie and I were elated when our next door neighbours put up their house for sale. We have been progressively less elated every time we come back up the drive and still see the sign saying ‘For sale’ rather than ‘Sold’.

We were even less happy four weeks ago when the husband came knocking on our door. He had noticed oil marks on his precious drive when he came home from work that afternoon. They weren’t there when he left in the morning, he said. It must be our fault. How could he sell his house when we were making the place look like a council estate?

We knew it wasn’t us, but last week he complained to the circuit about us. He also told the circuit (not us) that he didn’t like the fact that we take our black wheelie bin out on Sunday night, not early on Monday morning. He has taken to moving it off the edge of the drive onto the pavement – in clear contravention of council instructions and in our opinion causing a dangerous obstruction for the elderly people who walk along our road to and from their residential home.

Perhaps he thought that a bunch of Christians would roll over meekly. If he thought that, he was wrong. We have rejected his allegations and our superintendent minister has supported our stance.

Well, Jesus didn’t roll over easily at the accusations thrown at him. He is challenged for his disciples’ failure to follow an oral tradition that was essential to the convictions of the Pharisees [ibid, p 247]. And as far as Jesus is concerned, they are hypocrites. You don’t roll over for hypocrites. If your obsession is with keeping up appearances by outwardly following tradition but don’t match that with a heart that is close to God [verse 6] then don’t expect Jesus to be quiet.

And the parallels are there in church life. How easy is it for us to major on minors and neglect what is of prime importance, namely our relationship with God (from which everything of worth flows)? Think about some of the contentious issues Christians sometimes argue about and you being to wonder whether Jesus might not have a few words for us. I think back with pain to my first appointment and remember some of the things that made me unpopular in certain circles:

I was told that only the minister was ever allowed to stand behind the communion rail (although this rule used to be miraculously suspended for the flower arrangers). There was a militant insistence that you didn’t kneel at the communion rail until everybody else was there – despite the fact that the church building was cramped and it took not so much communion stewards, more like traffic police to manage the flow of people returning to their pews and those going forward. You weren’t allowed to put nails in a wooden cross on Good Friday. You couldn’t pick hymns from anything other than Hymns And Psalms.  And you certainly couldn’t suggest ripping out the pews and making a worship area more flexible.

None of these objections, in my opinion, had anything to do with Gospel imperatives. But they had everything to do with promoting style over substance. Never once did any of those who raised their loud protests against me want to know more about prayer or about sharing their faith.

It’s altogether too easy to put on an impressive outward show. We can fool not just those around us, but we tell the lies so often that we end up deceiving even ourselves. But we cannot fool God. One day sooner or later we discover that the Jesus whom we assume endorses our religious activities in fact our most fervent opponent.

So let us ask searching questions about our priorities. Are they about nurturing the heart towards God and sharing God’s heart for a broken world? Or are they about maintaining structures and putting on a good show? Only one of these approaches will give pleasure to God.

2. Counter-Charge
Jesus goes on the offensive: ‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition,’ he says (verse 8). Not only that, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!’ (verse 9). In the battle between human tradition and God’s commandments, God loses, says Jesus. And yet you claim you are his most faithful followers and representatives!

To prove his point, Jesus goes on to adduce a shocking case. The Ten Commandments say we should honour our parents. A particular expression of that is when they are elderly and infirm. Yet some in Jesus’ day diverted some money that would have helped their parents by dishonestly dedicating it to religious work.

So do we use our traditions to negate the commands of God, as Jesus charged the Pharisees? I know my father thought that, and once got in trouble with a superintendent minister for suggesting that Methodism placed more emphasis on ‘CPD’ [the Constitutional Practice and Discipline of the Methodist Church – our nearest equivalent to Anglican canon law]. Dad thought we had little moral superiority over the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned! Certainly at college we faced an exam in CPD but not in biblical or doctrinal matters. And Methodism can certainly get hung up on matters that are natural consequences of the Gospel at times. It was popular to say at college, ‘You can doubt the Virgin Birth, you can doubt the Resurrection, but God help you if you doubt infant baptism or feminism’.

But more seriously, do we invent traditions and practices in order to avoid the Gospel and commands of God? I don’t know that we’re always so blatantly devious as to invent a tradition like ‘Corban’ (verse 11), which sounds like a religious tax dodge. But I think we put other things in place so that we miss the imperative of the Gospel.

What do I mean? Well sometimes it’s about the expectations, atmosphere and culture of a congregation. The old criticism that churches can be little more than religious clubs is a serious allegation and it has a lot of truth behind it. We make for a lopsided church that is all about care for one another but has little active focus upon the world – except for the enthusiasts. I’ve heard it said that we shouldn’t concentrate on people outside the faith if it offends the faithful. Yet we have spent decades concentrating on the faithful and where has it got us?

We so fill our time with social activities that the ‘club’ epithet is altogether too well-deserved. We hide in perpetual business meetings. Or we duplicate within the church things that are done perfectly well outside but we prefer to go for the church version and stay in our little castle, behind the moat and with the drawbridge up. In all these ways and more we create a culture – our traditions – that helps us negate the commands of God.

All these reasons and more are why I called a year ago for a simpler structure for church. What we basically need in church life for the sake of the Gospel is fairly simple stuff. We gather on Sundays for worship and inspiration. We meet in small groups for worship, pastoral care, learning about the faith and mission. We hold such other meetings as are necessary for business and oversight. Beyond that there isn’t a lot we need. Most stuff beyond these bare necessities is extraneous and serves either deliberately or unwittingly to keep us away from the mission of God.

I believe Jesus calls us to a tough choice between the unhealthy traditional culture that strangles the spiritual life like a weed and a simpler, more radically prioritised vision of church that is set free to share in God’s mission and be faithful to the Gospel. Which way will we go?

3. True Defilement
Sometimes you can’t allow yourself just to be caught up in a perpetual argument. Not long ago I was being regularly attacked on the Internet by a militant atheist. For a while I answered his points, but eventually it became clear that an ongoing debate was going to be fruitless, because his attitude was arrogant and he had little desire to listen.

And it strikes me it’s a bit like that with Jesus in this story. He has his spat with the scribes and Pharisees, but after having answered their charge and countered with his own allegations, he turns away. In verse 14 he stops talking to them and starts addressing the crowd. Rather than being bogged down in a tedious argument, he uses the disagreement to make a teaching point to those who are listening and watching. In a way, he’s giving an answer to the scribes and Pharisees if only they would listen, too.

And his point is basic and stark: true spiritual defilement isn’t about failing to wash your hands in the same way that a priest would, nor is it about clean and unclean food. At best those are but outward signs of the inner state. And it’s the heart that matters. For there is the evidence of whether we follow the commandments of God.

‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, 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 defile a person.’
[verses 20-23]

Material purity isn’t the issue: moral purity is. It’s right through the Scriptures, yet it doesn’t seem to have been obvious to any of Jesus’ hearers – religious professionals, general crowd or his own disciples. You can keep all the religious rules you like and look good in the eyes of those who find such things impressive. But none of those rituals on their own will cleanse the pollution of the heart. And straightening out inner corruption is a much higher priority than how we wash our hands or what food we eat.

Or in our terms, you might say that living a winsome, holy life is the priority, rather than worrying about the rules of our denomination or putting on a good religious show that impresses only the shallow.

And it isn’t just about the big issues. Yes, we are to abstain from violence. We are to keep the marriage bed pure – Jesus’ prohibitions against both fornication and adultery mean he upholds a sexual ethic that maintains fidelity within the marriage covenant and celibacy outside.

But he also includes the everyday matters like ‘envy, slander, pride [and] folly’. And maybe these are the ones where our witness is most regularly compromised. In envy we look altogether too much like our consumerist world. In slander, we speak with sly digs, character assassinations and tawdry gossip that make us like small-scale versions of the gutter press. In pride and folly we forget our need of grace and that our boasting should only ever be of Christ.

The snag for me in the reading is that Jesus doesn’t propose an answer. That comes elsewhere in his teaching and in the writings of Paul, John and others. And it’s the usual basic Christian stuff about confession, repentance and co-operating with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

But maybe Mark ends the story here deliberately to challenge us. The radical message of Jesus is that the ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ approach that makes us look like real-life Hyacinth Buckets is neither funny nor sad. It’s an outrage against the Gospel. He is challenging us to prioritise on the call to holiness and the mission of God.

Too much of our society today is all about surface and little about substance. What hope is there if we go down that road? Our world needs a radical, courageous and deep challenge from those of us who claim to be the disciples of Jesus to go below the surface and address the heart.

We need spiritual heart surgery, and so does our world.

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